Thought of any more Being-related questions of your own during the hiatus? Ask them here!
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Q. Is the Beings’ short memory perhaps related to the lifespan of their masters? It seems like changing one’s personality and desires every few decades would be detrimental to one’s memory.
A. Exactly right.
Beings don’t have infinite memory, any more than they have infinite…anything-else. They have the best their creators could give them, but it’s limited.
When a Being gets a new Master, their views and emotions change to line up with what that Master wants — so they start losing their sense of feeling about the previous Master. (The current state of Patrick is an exception.) The old memories lose their sense of emotional connection, and, as a result, start to fade.
This usually happens long before they would be overloading their physical memory capacity. A Being who’s been with the same Master for 50 years will have no trouble remembering how they met, but a Being who has had 5 Masters in the same timespan will only remember the first one vaguely, if at all.
Fun fact: a Master could counteract this process, by ordering their Being, “Retain a clear memory of Thing X.” That would safeguard Thing X from the natural fading process, until the next Master came along. So a Being has the capacity to remember something for thousands of years!…if it has an unbroken line of Masters ordering it to hold on to the memory.
Q. Could a Being be irreparably damaged (in any way that affects their functionality) through multiple forced erasures of their masters’ names from their Contracts?
A. It would not be irreparably damaging…just hella traumatizing. The more traumatized they are, the harder it is for them to function, and the longer it takes to recover.
Thank you. This makes perfect sense.