011: N-2187

ENTRY 011: N-2187

Biological memory is plastic, mutable; ordinary retention and recall colored by emotional connotations, physical routing, cellular damage. Electronic memory is static, barring electron shift, but can be remixed, replayed, edited and altered like a music or video file. Memory artists sample and merge memory as XP recordings, turning random events into art, adding narrative to the formless chaos of life, to be played back, experienced, and remembered by others. Beyond XP there are a million memory hacks going back to the ars memoria and beyond, tricks and tips and disciplines for better storage, recall, and examination—to find the patterns in memories, the events recorded by the brain but not noticed by the conscious mind, all the hard precursors to buying eidetic memory off the shelf.

Somewhere between perfect recall and XP editing lay the realm of memory drugs—recreational or professional nanodrugs and narcoalgorithms designed to enhance not just recall or retention but control. Every hit forms a unique experience, as the user is allowed to interact with their own memories, reliving and re-experiencing how things were. Early memory drugs tended to leave echoes, false memories, and cumulative biological damage or mapping disorders that resulted in psychological change, amnesia, and hallucinatory episodes, but the programmers have worked most of that out now.

N-2187 is a memory drug with both professional and recreation use, generally acceptable in most habitats as it is rarely habit-forming. Sometimes called “4D” or “Chronotap,” N-2187 began life as a set of experimental conversion subroutines for transferring biological memories directly into XP; the drug reconstructs memories of the last 48 hours of subjective time as a temporary four-dimensional construct that users can interact in as if their life as if they were living it again—fast forward, rewind, loop; zoom in and enhance.

Mechanics

Type	Application	Duration	Addiction Modifier	Addiction Type	Cost
Nano	Inj, O	4 hours	+12	Mental	Low

N-2187 provides characters an opportunity to review and re-examine the past 48 hours; allowing them to retake Perception Tests without the normal -20 penalty for distraction—while this will not change the outcome of events or expose any information that the character’s senses were incapable of picking up, it might allow the character to go over a scene and discover something that they missed, like a physical tic that indicates an NPC is bluffing or some scrap of evidence that had evaded their attention.

N-2187 is also available as a nanoalgorithm.

Seeds

• A third-party patch to extend the duration of N-2187 has gotten out on the mesh, and now users are becoming trapped in memory loops, reliving the same day over and over. A reward is offered for anybody that can crack the N-2187 programming and offer a solution.
• Joh Yveng was a splicer and memory drug addict, but he was also the only witness to a crime that may have been committed by a hypercorp—until his cortical stack and most of his internal organs mysteriously exploded. Still, there is the last dose of N-2187 circulating through what’s left of his cyberbrain—if the player characters are game, they can relive Joh Yveng’s last couple of days and maybe get the evidence they need.