Trope-a-Day: Memory Gambit

Memory Gambit: This is the stock in trade of the ISS and of most intelligence organizations that have the technology to do it. People who don’t know the plan can’t give away the plan. Besides, eliminating the knowledge from your brain is pretty much the only way to fool an alethiometer, although even then, it’s hardly foolproof.

(Usually the memories are kept stored so that you can restore them later.)

One particular form, of course, is what happens when you retire from the Fifth Directorate or from particularly sensitive positions in the other Directorates – they keep all your classified memories, and replace them with a plausible fabricated alternate life story of what you were doing all that time that matches up with everything that happens to have made it into the public record…