Humanity, in its endless flight towards comfort and perfection, continued to innovate in the realm of artificial intelligence. Decent AI, it was hoped, would offer yet another way to offload mental effort onto an external system.
It came to pass that attempts to write an entire personality onto a silicon wafer emerged alongside the advancement of AI, creating the possibility of a so-called multi-mind. A person with a multi-mind had a number of brain implants, each of which housed an electronic intelligence, a ‘mini-mind’. One of these was a duplicate of the body’s original mind, a sort of mini-me, a mirror to bounce ideas and conversation off. The others were simpler, conceived as useful personal assistants, and they came to be treated as something akin to butlers. They were distinct, if limited, personalities that could be communicated with, and which could be sent ‘away’ (becoming uncommunicative and apart, psychologically, from the parent brain) to perform some arduous task, perhaps a mental one, before bringing the results back for assimilation into the main brain.
As people became used to this way of working, new techniques developed which built upon the intended use. People could ‘hide’ memories away in a mini-mind, for example to keep the traces of a book separated from the memory, allowing it to be re-read as if for the first time. Later, the original and new memories could be melded again, giving the owner the ancient benefit of having read the book twice. Thus novelty could be increased without the expense of losing knowledge.
But human weakness being what it is, the mini-me brains were soon used as permanent storage, to help forget painful memories, people and events. But this left people more vulnerable to repeated set-backs which had once been overcome through painful experience. Such an event occurred in 203_, and the emergence of the phenomena known as the Blinding.