This crawl request and yesterday’s ADIRA revelations tell me, not without some amusement, that the only correct thing about my post theorizing that Adira is a black hole in your brain… was the title.
I do agree with @hexnuts that the G6-wide search for ADIRA must have been checking people’s colloids for any awareness of it, but I think that ended up creating a different memory hole than the one they used for neural mining and Roshan De Silva (which would bring the total memory hole count up to three).
If ADIRA was being edited from people’s minds in the same way as neural mining and Roshan, why was it the only term “ticked as active for all data mined and stored by G6” in the 2045 leak? Wouldn’t the other two be listed there as well? The Adira article does mention that the investigation into the leak “uncovered a partial list of key words and phrases that were active in G6’s search engines” (emphasis mine). It could be that the other G6-wide search terms couldn’t be recovered, or that there was no indication that more existed besides the one for ADIRA.
The next question then is: how would Zhupao know what to look for if no one was yet aware of ADIRA? As far as I can tell, Connie Muren and Spencer Hagen were, initially at least, the only two people in the know. Compare that to neural mining, which definitely created a mass awareness when it was publicly revealed in November 2040. As claimed by Dr. Borges in his interview with Hasashi Desai, that awareness then made the concept easier to neurometrically locate in people’s minds:
The same applies to Roshan, whose captured article implies that he was a public figure at some point. He appeared on national streams as a visible part of the Sri Lankan government as of 2038, and at speaking events when touring countries to promote the adoption of G6 in 2041. If someone (or he himself) threw him in the memory hole, the neurometric models would know what to look for.
Yet neither neural mining nor Roshan created the same void mentioned in the Sassback thread, which was so singular and specific to ADIRA that some people were able to suss out that it was a five-letter word.
What I think happened is that Zhupao threw ADIRA into the memory hole before anyone knew what it was. That would mean people’s minds were being probed every night for a semantic concept that wasn’t there. Maybe that inadvertently created the overpowering “mental periphery” that Friedegger described, like some kind of neurologically mediated Streisand effect where the conspicuous absence of something calls attention to itself.
I say Zhupao was responsible, but I like to think it was Spencer Hagen specifically who jumped the (finger) gun and shot himself in the foot. He must have been constantly obsessing over ADIRA, his thoughts consumed day after day, so it would be delicious irony for him to have ensured that everyone else shared his fate.