Story: Bank Switching

[ The following is a work of fiction, written in August 2024 by a living being. ]

Around the mid-2050s as understanding of the human brain accelerated, a new form of corporate espionage began to take shape, known as bank switching. Somewhat similar to the early days of computing where to get around memory limitations systems would switch (or ‘bank’) between alternate areas of physical memory, the process involved reading and processing a person’s dream on the fly and connecting various memory centers of the brain together, paging between thoughts and concepts until the information desired could be extracted.

The process worked like this: An agent would infiltrate a subjects’s home while they were asleep, usually a CEO/CTO or someone involved with security. A sleeping agent would be administered nasally or intravenously, depending on the situation, to ensure the target did not wake during the procedure. A pMRI (portable MRI) machine would be placed around the head of the subject and begin scanning continuously, the vast amounts of data being generated being relayed over the internet to be processed into imagery in real-time by an army of server racks, often in another country. The agent would then use a device called a neural bridge to begin connecting various areas of the brain to the subconscious brain, causing those memories to be displayed in the subject’s current dream. It would often take multiple attempts to locate the data required, even with modern brain mapping and memory extraction techniques. Eventually, the agent would hopefully bank into the correct area of memory and get the information they want to display. This could be a password, an email address, internal company documents, or even incriminating evidence that could be used as blackmail. The data would get stored remotely for further off-site processing, and the agent would leave.

The experience for the subject would be incredibly disorienting. Dreams can be strange and abstract at the best of times. Reports from victims of forced memory extraction reported vivid flashes of light and painful sensations in their dream states, as their dream states were hijacked and rewired while in progress. What may have begun as a pleasant dream would quickly turn into a nightmarish sequence of disjointed images, sounds, and concepts, akin to a psychedelic trip gone wrong. In essence, this is exactly what was happening.

Vulnerable people would soon begin to receive training once word of this illicit practice began to seep out. Training involved being able to recognize when a bank switching attack was in progress and resist efforts to force out memories by attempting to wake up or forcing new connections to load up unrelated or garbage data. To this day such attacks still remain commonplace, especially in less developed areas of the world. The technology remains prohibitively expensive, requiring extensive expertise with the human brain, and a server farm capable of processing the sheer volume of data being generated in real-time by the visual and auditory centers of the brain. It is assumed that most major states possess this technology and put it to some use. Human right campaigners continue to protest and investigate these cases, and hold governments and corporations accountable.