With the publication of his /Traveller/ novel, /Agent of the Imperium/, Mr
Miller shows that the Imperium has a higher TL in the mental sciences - or
that certain technologies relating thereto are actually possible at lower
tech levels - than we perhaps thought.

We now have clear textev for saying that in the early centuries of the
Imperium, the technology existed to record [human] minds (albeit
destructively) and to write such a recorded mind onto any [human] brain, at
least temporarily. More, we can say that this is "generally" known, as
anyone who has ever knowingly dealt with an Agent of the Imperium can
readily reach that conclusion.

Given that the general tech level of the Imperium has increased in the
not-quite-a-millennium since the earliest scenes of the novel, a number of
similar technologies become plausibly available:

Consider James White's /Sector General/ series of stories, in which the
doctors at Sector Twelve Multispecies General Hospital can all "carry"
similar mind recordings of doctors of other species. The principal
difference between the /Sector General/ (SG, henceforth) version of the
technology and the /Agent of the Imperium/ (AotI, henceforth) version is
that the SG version does not overwrite/blot out, even temporarily, the
"host's" own knowledge and personality. Thus, we can plausibly create a
planetary version of Sector General on any polyspecific world.

Or, consider H. Beam Piper's /Paratime/ series, of which the best-known
story is probably /Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen/. When working "out-time",
paratimers acquire the knowledge needed to function within an out-time
society (such as language and cultural /mores/, and some skills) through
'hypno-mech'. With proper 'hypno-mech', and possibly some stealthy
observation, a paratimer can 'pass' well enough to fool an out-timer into
thinking that the paratimer was what Orson Scott Card called "Utlänning",
in the Hierarchy of Foreignness from the "Enderverse". Piper's Hypno-mech
model is far more impersonal than the SG or AotI models - but does that
make it any less plausible? Piper never provides any details about his
'hypno-mech', so one could plausibly guess that it is in part similar to
...

... "Training", from Crawford Kilian's /Chronoplane Wars/ series. Training
(always written with an initial capital, even midsentence) allows the
Trainable person to acquire and process information at extremely high
speeds (equivalent of thousands of WPM), with near-eidetic retention.

If you allow Training in your /Traveller/ universe, you can use it as a
basis for having a Mnemonic Service (see Isaac Asimov's novella "Sucker
Bait"); the brief portrayals of the capabilities of Trainables in the
Chronoplane Wars strongly suggest the ability to gather and correlate
information to at least the same extent that Asimov used
Asperger's-Syndrome-like tendencies to explain Mark Annuncio's abilities
that made him so valuable to a Service whose job was to find those obscure
correlations that actually _meant_ something, and report them. And Kilian's
Trainables don't need keepers like Dr Sheffield.

Taking another tack, we can recall Jack Chalker's /Four Lords of the
Diamond/ tetralogy, specifically #2, /Cerberus: A Wolf in the Fold/. In
this story, it was possible for people to swap minds between bodies, and
there was a subtext that the most favored would, when they got old, get new
young bodies. We also saw that minds could be swapped into android bodies,
effectively giving the favored mind immortality. While this was done with
an artificial organism in /Cerberus/, the technology from /Agent/, or
future developments of it, would seem to allow the same thing. Is this a
Dark Secret of the Imperium?

The other side of the technology raises some questions, as well: In
/Agent/, the host's memories and personality were suppressed for the
duration of the Agent's presence. If this is a separable aspect of the
technology, and you also have Training (which is stated that could Train
ethics and loyalty, though Kilian's government made such illegal) and/or
hypno-mech, you have the possibility of turning colonization missions into
straitjacketed societies like that of Safehold in the eponymous series by
David Weber. One could quite possibly give oneself nightmares about what
the Solomani Party could do with it...

Comments/Discussion?

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