I was re-reading Corp Guide and came across this tidbit.
Though former Director Huang has been arrested (and possibly is deceased), his team of scientists—commonly held to be responsible for the Arcology Shutdown—is rumored to be working on more emergent tech- nologies similar to what was witnessed at the Renraku Arcology in Seattle. This time it is believed they are working on tech that can capture, transfer, and store biological memories.
> Downloading into human brains is how Deus escaped in the first place. It was only a matter of time before Renraku seized upon how the AI did it and patented the process.
> FastJack
It reminded me of this.
They cache data away in pockets of external storage memory, offline and online, and it has become such a routine with most technomancers that they have even taken to backing up their natural memories and experiences in external memory, where it can be preserved against the ravages of time, not to mention indexed, scanned, and searched easily.
It's never been a stated ability or given rules, but this seems likely. I know simsense doesn't record memories, only experiences, though it does seem to be able to record thoughts as well. However, Personafix has been able to insert and memories for about fifteen years in-game, and is to my knowledge functionally how Deus implanted its (I hate referring to them as he or she, especially when Deus' icon was Yggdrasil, the World Tree) code into the Network nodes.
But it's interesting to note because in order to recompile itself, all of those nodes needed to have that data extracted from their long-term memory and uploaded into the Matrix. The same thing Quicksilver effectively did with Imago, and what many people believe JackBNimble was doing after it was unlocked, and what, in many cases, e-ghosts basically are the result of. Who knows what all of those memories and emotions have done to alter the nature of the Matrix, which is after all a massive consensual metaphor, the collective unconscious brought to life.
