"Be they foe or friend, Elf or orc, Maia or Vala, or any other being in all the reaches of the universe, no threat, no law, no love, no risk, and no other consideration shall protect from Feanaro, or from Feanaro's kin, anyone who claims, takes, keeps, or attempts to destroy a Silmaril. Death we will deal him until the universe's end. So swear we all and to the Everlasting Darkness damn us if in this deed we fail."

"...well that sounds like a really terrible idea. How long do you think it would take to do the find-the-oath-in-the-chip thing?"

"Do you know how much data a brain is? It's possible that it's, I don't know, apparent in some way - it'd be apparent if I ran the mind and perturbed it with oath-invoking scenarios, but that's not great - and if it's not immediately apparent I could look at it for years. You could give me an immediately pre-oath and immediately post-oath Maitimo's brain state and I could check for discrepancies and go from there?"

"Do you know exactly when he swore it?"

"Down to the day, not down to the hour or minute."

"Mmmmaybe I can do it naively."

He tries it. He gets two chips. "This one's pre, this one's post."

And he looks at them.

"The risk if I fail is that the oath's still binding but I erase it from his memory or something, and then as soon as he's told about it it's in full force, or even worse he swears something that competes with it and then we have to kill him..."

"...I don't want to erase that much of his not-being-captured life, I really don't want that. If you erase it from his memory and then we tell him it happened that should obviate the worse failure modes and he seems sensible enough to be caught up on what's happened before immediately reswearing it or something if it's not in force."

"Understood. I'd just rather have any Maitimo with his whole head than one I've been playing in when I don't know what I'm doing. Can I compare these two brain states to, like, a collection of a few thousand to train the computer on what typical brain state variation is, can I have brain states before and after a different oath..."

"Yeah." Chips, so many chips, god this is creepy.

"It's going to be chewing on that for a few hours," he says after a few minutes. He's shaking slightly. "If you have in mind anyone else who could do instead, I'm listening."

"I've unfortunately not been paying much attention to that level of affairs, I don't know who'd suit. Maitimo with up to date memories at least already knew."

"I don't suppose you can just pull the relevant three months for him to watch and catch up on, or anything like that."

"It has not been sounding to me like you have the sophistication to turn chip data into video. I could give him some of my notes, but that's not gonna be the same."

"I don't have the sophistication to turn chip data into anything, all I have is read/write and machine learning which at least in Valinor was not nearly good enough to deploy to problems like peoples' heads."

"Yeah, I don't think I can do that format conversion either."

He sighs. 

"We also may have gotten Mandos' attention. If he notices that there are live instances running around of minds in his halls..."

"...yeah, that probably should have occurred to me. He would have noticed the first one, though, this won't be qualitatively new."

"I think we don't awaken in Mandos if the chip's still intact. That's why I asked her first if she remembered it, though that's not definitive proof. If you're killed but the chip's intact you can just take it to Lorien and get a new body for it, it's more like a serious injury. This may be qualitatively new."

"Her remembering it would depend on Mandos sending as well as receiving data."

"Yeah. And no one remembers Mandos, when they're reembodied. Hopefully if he's stirred to come out and scold us he'll also, ah, notice the Enemy." - "you could check whether someone goes to Mandos if their chip's intact by checking for the instance of Finwe in Mandos."

"I'm not sure that'll be definitive. Presumably Finwë was in fact backed up in Mandos, and I might be able to produce a chip of him from that version whether or not he's conscious there."

"Right.

We could ask someone what Maitimo'd likeliest want, but I'm worried the answer is 'back with Oath intact'."

"...We could just do that. It's the closest outcome to 'not captured in the first place'."

"I don't feel good about trying to find and erase the Oath without damaging his head. That might be the best we can do. I suppose if they do go on a Silmaril rampage you can kill them and then maybe we'll have a better understanding of oaths or at least an advance directive."