I've seen the idea bounced around that cubes can be interrogated, probably based on a series of books I won't name here. If Cube rezzing is uncommon/rare, why would anyone send troops into the field with cubes?
Most definitely, assuming that like most cyberpunk 'verses with the concept of consciousness backup and restoring, a person can be loaded into cyberspace from their cube an run in a simulation, cube-interrogation would be much more 'effective' and utterly horrifying (go watch altered carbon for an example), here's a couple I can reel off, I'm sure that more depraved minds could come up with even worse things: Timespan: In meatspace, you have a limited amount of time, not so in cyberspace, torture that lasts 10 minutes real-world could be going on for years if you booted the cubes up in a time-compressed simulation Fragility: You only have 1 shot to break the victim without killing them in meatspace, no so in cyberspace, victim dies, just spin him up again and have another go, similarly, you can use torture techniques that would kill a physical human, and you can use them over and over and over Creativity: When you control the simulation, you can create horrors far beyond what is possible in meatspace, and you can refine them and tinker with them to create the perfect torture for the victim Resources: Don't need no secret room in a hotel floor with no button on the elevator, don't need a shipping container in some disused dockyard in a shady city, just need a computer of sufficient power, best to keep it air-gapped so it can't be found/infiltrated via maya/arachne/etc, and is much much easier to get rid of should you get rumbled than a meatspace equivalent torture chamber.
To ensure that if the recovered soldiers will be resleeved without any time gaps in their memory. It was mentioned that Diomedes has such gaps and it causes him some psychological problems. To make sure that any debriefing will be as complete as possible. After all, if you recover your soldiers' Cubes then you can ask them what exactly happened. For the psychological factor; there's a difference between knowing that if the mission goes FUBAR you'll be restored from backup, and knowing that you'll get restored from your Cube with all memories intact. That being said I can see black ops operators removing their Cubes before mission.
And all of these lend themselves to Phillip K Dick style 'The people debriefing you are not in fact your people reality is a lie etc etc.' There seem to be cube backups (Dire Foes 4, Uprising) but that doesn't stop the information in the wild- err, 'attached to a greasy smear in the wild' unless they have some sort of anti-tamper device. Which obviously can't in any way stop 'resleeved' interrogation. It'd just be very expensive.
From a deniability stand point it makes perfect sense, backup and remove the cube then brief the operatives, conduct the mission, reinstall the cube. Depending on the read and write capabilities of the cube, you could even cover the mission with false memories so that only the organic memory would remain, or potentially not even that. There are situations where you'd want a record of the mission though, even if it's a deniable operation, for example an information retrieval or recon, or even just something that you absolutely need to confirm regardless of legality...
I also imagine that if a cube's stored data is a digital format they could possibly be parsed for relevent informations one way or another rather than taking the time and effort to drag the consciousness inside into some VR to mess with them, not to mention that in this case you potentially face the same problems as you do with physical torture: they'll tell anything for it to stop, or may be otherwise conditioned to resist that kind of probing. Buuuut the data might also be encrypted. Though on the other hand, for instance, ALEPH would probably have some ways to just go through it (that's the advantage when you have virtually infinite processing power)
With Aleph and its units' Cube 2.0 providing constant communication and backup I had a vision of OSS being the ultimate plausible deniability sectorial. In case of mission going south all operatives simply vanish from their lhosts, possibly triggering security protocols that turn cyberbrains into inert mass without any data. All that is left is a bunch of empty hi-tech lhosts or robotic bodies, probably without serial numbers or with ones providing multiple false leads. No local Cube backup, no one to interrogate, nothing.
That remind me of the end of season 1 of Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Maybe the OSS Lhosts are also rigged to self destruct just enough as to be unrecognizable. Also, if you look, Posthuman proxies don't have cubes.
Sure, but if I were interested in interrogating a prisoner and had the means to create whatever environment I wanted for the cube in order to interrogate them, then it would make no difference to me if they had no cube when I captured them. I would back up their personality onto my interrogation cube device as the first stage of the process, using the same type of tech that cube installation entails. The only defence against it would be something that irreversibly prevents the use of cube technology or some kind of self-destruct mechanism, either of which would make a military career an unpopular choice I'd imagine!
The Fiday character does it... well, he has no cube to begin with, doing some pre-mission backup at the home base (Diomedes does *have* a cube, what makes him suffer is that for some reason, if he dies in the mission he won't know what went wrong, and he's a perfectionist. It's not the "lack" what tortures him, it's not learning drom the mistake!). As for black ops, a small charge on the cube can do wonders. Eclipse Phase has a pretty expensive implant, a "neutrino farcaster", that essentially triggers a pulsar in the head of the user (killing the user and vaporizing the cube), coded in a way that transmits the contents of said cube in a heavily encripted way (needless to say, they cost more than regular bodies). Don't remind me I can't rerroll failed tests on them... or why the hell do they have Remote Presence as part of Jumper, if they can only use Courage from that (unless the Sophotect is eligible, since she is both an engineer and medic... I've been waiting nearly a year for a CB response for that one). The book is somewhat less graphic and gory-er than the show. Kovac's interrogation inside the Wei Clinic in the book is far more disturbing on several levels than simple pain overload... and *his* way of interrogating a corp-man in the 2nd book is way more hard: place him in accelerated VR and wait... let him go mad from boredom. Ten minutes for several weeks or so, being unable to even sleep, no bathroom needs, no food, no water, nothing changes...
You wouldn't need anything particularly drastic. Nanotech-based suicide protocols, making you die quickly and painlessly would solve the problem (read Honorverse for inspiration). Essentially hi-tech version of cyanide pill.
All Aleph "troops" (read: Aspects) have a directive to activate a "suicide organ" that generates an enzyme that eats the cube and the brain... in case they lose comms with mommy, since that points to CA involvement being possible, and a backdoor being exploited.
I have to imagine that all these practices come with incredibly strict penalties. Obviously that won't completely stop them from happening completely, but they're there. It makes me wonder about additional practices too... Cube exchanges that mirror prisoner exchanges, follow-up operations to recover cubes, or reprisal strikes for atrocities committed against cubes, etc. Lots of good potential there.
VR simulation is explicitly possible, it's a required part of the resurrection process (getting the individual used to the fact that they died and some things have changed while they've been gone...) Which means VR torture is possible. Fuck you, Takeshi Kovacs. I will note that it is also a standing thing to return Cubes to their nation of origin, among the Human Sphere.
Sure. But is there anything preventing them from making a backup copy of, say, Fusilier Angus season 12 before handing it over?
The meth in both that had her exes transplanted into snakes, or the guy in a later book that implants them into native animal carnivores for their "fight club". There's no end of ways to f*** you over in those books. Do not piss off the folks who have the means to do it to you. Real death would be a blessing.
