Item from Divergent by Veronica Roth
The Bureau's reset button — a serum that erases memory completely, used to wipe populations clean when experiments go wrong and start them over as blank slates.
Memory serum is the Bureau's ultimate tool of control. When a faction experiment destabilizes beyond repair — when the wars get too destructive, when the system breaks down — the Bureau's contingency plan is to aerosolize memory serum over the entire city. Everyone forgets. Their identities, their relationships, their faction loyalties, their history. Reset to zero. The Bureau then reconstructs the faction system and starts the experiment again. They've done this before. Chicago's residents don't know it, but their civilization has been erased and rebuilt at least once. The faction system might be older than anyone remembers, or it might be newer than anyone thinks — no one inside the fence can know. In Allegiant, Tris releases the memory serum inside the Bureau compound instead, wiping the Bureau's staff and destroying the infrastructure that maintained the experiment. She turned the Bureau's weapon against its creators. Peter voluntarily takes it to erase the person he's become — the only honest thing he's ever done.
A pale, iridescent liquid that can be administered by injection for individual use or deployed as an aerosol for mass distribution. In its aerosolized form, it disperses as a fine mist with a faintly sweet smell. Victims don't realize what's happening until their memories are already dissolving.
Also known as: Memory Serum, The Reset