Great Race’s memory-erasure policy

The Great Race’s memory-erasure policy was the post-exchange practice of using mechanical hypnosis to purge returning alien minds of what they had learned while captive in the Great Race’s age. It sought to prevent dangerous knowledge from passing into the future, yet could not always erase every trace; fragmentary recollections and the rare survival of forbidden hints made the policy both a safeguard and an imperfect boundary between eras.

Purpose and Method

When an alien captive mind was returned to its own body in the future, the Great Race subjected it to an intricate process of mechanical hypnosis. The aim was to remove the knowledge it had gained during its time in the Great Race’s age. The intervention was tied to the consequences of transmitting large quantities of knowledge across time: a few clear cases of such transmission had caused disasters, and were expected to cause others at known future times.

The policy did not describe the exchange itself, but governed what could remain with a mind after its return. Its logic was preventative: rather than allow a captive to carry a substantial record of the Great Race’s world into its own era, the Great Race attempted to sever that knowledge from the returning mind.

What Returning Minds Remembered

The purge was extensive but not absolute. A returning mind reached its own age with only the faintest and most fragmentary visions of what had happened since the first exchange. In most cases, eradicated memories left a blank stretching back to the moment of displacement, though that blank was shadowed by dreams rather than wholly empty.

Memory varied among individuals. Some recalled more than others, and, on rare occasions, fragments joined together sufficiently to offer later ages hints of the forbidden past. The policy therefore limited the transmission of knowledge without guaranteeing complete ignorance: what survived was usually scattered and incomplete, but could still acquire significance beyond the individual who remembered it.

Historical and Cultural Traces

According to old myths, two cases of unusually clear transmission largely accounted for what humankind knew about the Great Race. The claim makes the species’ later reputation depend not on a broad, reliable record but on exceptional breaches in the intended erasure. The surviving evidence from the Great Race’s distant world was correspondingly sparse: ruins of great stones in remote places and beneath the sea, and portions of the frightful Pnakotic Manuscripts.

The remaining fragments could also persist as secret tradition. There may never have been a time when groups or cults did not privately cherish hints of the forbidden past. The Necronomicon suggested that a cult among human beings sometimes aided minds voyaging down the aeons from the days of the Great Race. In this way, an effort to contain knowledge across time left behind neither a complete history nor a clean silence, but an uncertain residue of visions, texts, ruins, and guarded belief.