Set some time in the future, when people are able to have a chip implanted in their brains, which will faithfully record everything they experience. When they die, their relatives can have this memory reduced to a two-hour long highlights edition. A skilled group of people called Cutters are given the job of editing all those memories, leaving out the bad and including the good. Our hero is one such cutter, who has to edit the memories of a man who may have sexually abused his own daughter. At the same time, there is a growing resistance movement to the whole chip-memory system, which sets the stage for conflict.
The theme is complex because it is almost an unusual fictitious practice of cutting people's memories (especially those that are negative) and retaining complex ones.
