I played a game once where I put my HVT next to the Armory entrance and used it to protect my Malignos from mines, chain rifles, and light shotguns. It was amazing.
There are, in the end, three levels of "sepsitor": First, and the most lengthly, is ye olde brainwash. Pick a dude (or dudette), isolate and take whatever time it needs to make their worldview change with techniques more or less refined. Propaganda might fall in this cathegory too. Second, we can assume that the EI is able to grab a cube and edit the mind within (don't necessarily "inside the cube", but copying the mind inside to a server in which dissect and reassemble the psyche). Essentially, a reverse-engineer of the captured mind, inevitable after being able to digitize a human mind. I think Aleph might be able to to this too, and might be related to how Posthumans are integrated as part of the AI. Third, and this is the EI exclusive, battlefield sepsitor: turn the targets in an area into subservient zombies without will of their own. As for Ko Dali, if I remember right of the old N2 Paradiso Campaign, she remained behind in a suicide move to let the rest of her unit to escape with the prize, so she could have sufferd what I numbered #2 or #3. As for the "CA Tohaa", it is explicitely mentioned somewhere that when they were conquered by the dreaded CA, the only thing that changed in their lives was that the dirigents of their planets were no longer Tohaa but the CA and some Tohaa appointed as bureucrats, making a lot of people angry with their old government by considering they had been lied to and their friends and family had died protecting not the Tohaa Civilization, but the Tohaa leaders and their status... which can be ingame propaganda, of course, but it's the only data we have on thar part, I think.
But there are multiple levels of brainwashing. Torture/Propaganda/Manchurian Candidate, Editing the Cube, and then the Sepsitor. Old-school Brainwashing takes at least 3 days, but usually much longer for greatest effectiveness. Don't ask me why I know that. Editing the Cube takes a few hours, since you are trying to avoid breaking the mind. Imagine being able to remove traumatic memories (the ones causing PTSD) as easily as deleting lines referencing an event in a story. The battlefield Sepsitor is able to do that instantly, at the cost of destroying the existing personality. It's really only useful on the battlefield, since it doesn't give the CA non-combat workers or anything but a zombie. I strongly suspect that Ko Dali and Bit were subject to Cube Editing. Bit was influenced via propaganda first, leading her to defect, and then as part of her 'debriefing' her personality was slightly rewritten. Ko Dali got her personality rewritten after she was captured.
There are no canonical examples, granted, but it does follow that if you can digitize a human consciousness, you can edit the digital data.
That's something that's basically the status of hearsay and suspicion within the setting. Nomads claim ALEPH does it, people might suspect the EI does it, but since Sepsitor technology is so incomprehensible as to be considered almost magical who knows.
I don't have a good grasp on lore so maybe what I'm about to write is a complete bullshit, but I was under impression that Infinity setup texts specifically pointed out that Cubes are some sort of "quantum data storage device" which are non-trivial to tamper with, being mostly black boxes even in the eyes of most data specialists working with them. It's not completely implausible because modern neural networks (which is closest to Cube contents we have in RL) are kinda like that - we can make them, we can train them, but an actual "database" is usually a complete b**ch to read or interpret for the most part. Without launching them and observing network's output, that is. An Infinity analog would be performing a "resurrection" (virtual or into physical l-host) of a personality in order to ask directly what your subject knows. At least that's something that got stuck in my mind for some reason. Maybe I've just heard wrong. In that's true though, I can see why it is written this way - such statement helps to answer many "what if's" which could de-humanize entire setting in our eyes if we focus on rampant copying and editing of cubes and completely kill last excuses why the process of bringing personalities back is even seen as "resurrection" or attaining immortality in-universe (as if nobody saw "6th Day", at least).
Mind you, I included ye olde brainwash as what humans have. Considering it is possible to run a mind in a powerful enough computer in Infinity, with no body, running said brainwash over copies until the process is refined for a given individual is more than credible (and the EI has enough capabilities to do a hundred or a thousand attemps in paralell, then apply the best route to the final product... And I think Aleph could do that too, even in less simultaneous numbers) Even so, it is mentioned somewhere you can plug a Cube and run it without a body (requiring specific computers, of which Aleph has, for example). So you can run accelerated time brainwash (or not, but very detailed brainwash anyway) and convert "old school" without needing to "decompile" Angus.exe and change values and see what sticks. Considering you can make copies, you can certainly make a hundred paralell attempts to brainwash one Angus.exe... and once you collate the data and see what works best, apply to the final Angus.exe you want to turn and then send him to work as a CA Agent. We (players) know tohaa can run a copy of a cube without a body because of the debriefing to the Tohaa Diplomatic in one of the Dire Foes backstories, since she was reporting by sending cubes to her government. Certainly, Aleph needs to alter people to turn them into Posthumans, and has a lot of experience in the human mind by generating things like Recreations or "unique, human-like" myrmidons. I'm not claiming Aleph can "decompile" a person and rewrite core values, however, but I find hard to believe the Sepsitor works in battle but the EI has no other refined version that can be applied with more time and produce a loyal agent. Even if the Sepsitor were to be a found technology (or even extracted from a Tzechi, we know they had some sort of virus-like mind control from the Paradiso Campaign in N2, with the Triumvirate Vs human colonists with no Cube), I think impossible an intelligence like the EI had not devoted lots of time and resources to understand it.
It still does the job: severely alter the subject's perception of reality and their values to better match the purposes of the one performing the procedure. Or put differently; a murder committed by blunt trauma from a rock is still murder, it is not the sophistication of the tool or the murderer that determines if it is murder or not, it's the intent and the result that does.
Sure, but as per the fluff they're created by just stimulating the subject's reward centers, it's not a complex reorganization of personality like what happened with Ko Dali.
