Chained World - The Fall of the House of Kuno: Breaking the 'Wild Child' [Episode 228158]

”The procedure known as ‘Adjustment’ in the Nihon Empire is supposedly an exact science, with much talk of ‘storing’ and ‘back-up memories’, with the impression that it is a clean, flawless, practice of switching a person from one mode to another, with a complete restoration of a person’s being at the end of period of imposed Adjustment.
This is a fiction....Adjustment isn’t putting a new set of behaviors on top of older ones like putting a fresh new label on top of them, and peeling them off when done...or pouring old water back into a glass from a storage cistern...Adjustment is a process of controlled sensory deprivation, chemical memory suppression and selective amnesia, electroconvulsive operant conditioning, and directed stimulus meant to make a person’s normal psychological reactions less preferable to the new behaviors being overpoweringly forced through the person’s perceptions. Adjustment is little more than neutralizing a person’s conscious mental defenses, hitting their pain and fear centers, then burying the memories of the torture under subsequent stimulation of pleasure in association with the desired behavioral structures. An advanced stick-and-carrot behavioral modification process that can do real damage to the subject’s memory structures, especially when those memories encourage behavior contrary to the desired ‘product’.
The ‘backups’ that they like to boast about are little more than predetermined stimulus codes assigned to each processee, meant to suppress the later imposed behaviors in turn when the process is reversed, though the same procedures are used, only this time to encourage what remains of the original persona reactions, combined with a few vague hints of how the person USED to react to given situations. These codes can be as simple as ‘you will like rice cakes again’ or ‘you are annoyed by loud noises’, and, if the Adjustors have done enough homework on their victim, may include more specific personal data, like ‘you liked fishing for eels with your Uncle Tako every summer”. This is combined with the subliminal encouragement to form ‘phantom’ memories on the part of the Adjustee...In time the Adjustee fleshes out these hints with their own imaginations, and they take on the appearance of true, exact, memories, similar to the ‘recalled’ or ‘repressed’ memory phenomenon documented in the United States. Often, any discrepancies in an Adjustee’s recollection are simply glossed over, usually by the relief of being free again. However, the damage remains.
The end result is a hit-or-miss process of breaking and re-breaking a psyche, and trusting in the mind’s ability to heal its mental scars and bury the hurt in the subconsciousness. The ‘exact and humane mental sciences’ of the Empire’s Adjustors are little more than torture, combined with crude efforts to stitch up the butchery afterwards. In Nihon society, the aftereffects are masked by societal pressure and the doctrine of conforming to social expectations.
We will now turn to case studies of Nihon Adjustees liberated in American territories to see examples of both the true extent of mental damage and the success of various rehabilitation regimens...”
----Doctor Trace Lily, Lecture, -Advanced Psychology 401: Slave Adjustment and Rehabilitation-, Yale University, New Haven, United States of America.

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As Doctor Henkoi gathered up the paperwork to go head on down to the reserved procedure room, two attendants wheeled a gurney into the room, and over next to the semiconscious redhead wavering at her seat, at the kotatsu. Her limp body was lifted up onto the stretcher and the girl laid out on her back, then wheeled back out.
As they rolled down the hall, the two nurses began unbuttoning Ranma’s shirt and pulling off her pants, the removed clothing tossed aside and bagged for disposal. Her pig tail was undone, and her crimson locks spilled around her head on the gurney. Ranma was unable to protest her growing state of undress, her eyes rolling behind half-closed eyelids as she watched the ceiling lights pass overhead.
By the time they’d reached the procedure wing, the girl had been stripped completely naked. She was barely responsive as she was rolled into an antiseptic processing room and wheeled under the lights. With practiced efficiency, the masked and gowned technicians descended on her, swabbing down the nude, semiconscious, girl with alcohol wipes, then moving her over off the gurney to be strapped down supine and spread-eagled on an articulated couch. Immediately the surgical-masked technicians went to work deftly and efficiently tightening restraints around her arms and legs, and a cervical collar around her neck. Bio-monitors and electrodes were pasted onto her body, wired attachments stuck to her breasts and sex, a catheter run into her bladder. IVs were run into her arms and saline drips started, her head locked into a stereoscopic rig, large headphones clamped over her ears, and a fine hair-net of electrodes pulled over her scalp. Eye drops were put in her eyes, just before a pair of heavy goggles was lowered over them. A hollow mouth guard went between her teeth; a cart of gas cylinders and associated hoses rolled up beside her for an entubation.
A gowned Doctor Henkoi entered the adjacent control room, nodding to her team and to Doctor Zaku, who would be handling other parts of the Adjusting. She checked the readouts from the biomonitors and smiled her satisfaction at the state of the patient. Preparations were complete; they could now proceed with neural mapping to find the best combination of stimuli to use to break down the slave’s psyche and build it back up again.
An electric hum started, and Ranma felt the table rise and tilt under her, just as a technician started an injection into one of the IVs, and another placed a mask over her face. Her world began to go fuzzy, and the last of Ranma’s consciousness slipped away.

At two PM, Ranko Tendo lost consciousness as she was inducted under anesthesia and Adjustment began.