‘The point is, such technologies have existed in the past. And after a couple of decades of occupation, the Squeem, presumably with human collaborators, were able to come up with a suitable treatment . . .’
‘This is what they offered us,’ Hume was saying. ‘An engineered virus that would spread through mankind, across the Earth. Eventually carriers would infect the off-planet populations too. It wouldn’t be comfortable. You would have a nightmare, reliving the trauma one last time. But that would make the memory labile again for a short time. And so it could be treated.’
‘They would delete the memory of the freezing, of this vast crime,’ the inquisitor said. ‘From everybody’s heads.’
‘That was the idea. There would have to be a subsidiary activity of removing traces of the event from various records, but there weren’t too many marine biologists at the height of the occupation. It wouldn’t be difficult. Everybody would come out of it believing the oceans had always been depleted of life, maybe since the global eco-crashes of the second and third millennia. They’d think the damaged coastlines and scoured river valleys they observed had always been that way, or maybe they were damaged in the war.
-Xeelee: Endurance, "Remembrance"