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The Swipe

The Swipe was a chip which was inserted by WICKED into each subject's brain before the Trials began. It wiped their memory and allowed WICKED to control over the subject's actions. Examples of this was when Gally threw a knife at Thomas, Chuck jumping in the way of the knife (both in The Maze Runner), and Teresa's difficulty to speak and hugging Thomas in the shack when she met him again in The Scorch Trials. They also provided Thomas, Teresa, Aris, and presumably Rachel access to WICKED's telepathy network, which allowed them to communicate telepathically.

At the start of The Death Cure, WICKED offered to remove the subjects' Swipes. Thomas, Newt, and Minho were the only three subjects who didn't allow WICKED to remove their Swipes, partly afraid of the past and partly afraid of what WICKED would do to their brains. Eventually they realized that they need to have the Swipes removed so WICKED could no longer control their actions (thus, they intended to only remove the part that WICKED allowed to control them), so Brenda and Jorge took them to see Hans, an ex-WICKED scientist. When he went to set up his machine, however, WICKED's control over Thomas kicked in. While trying to kill his friends, Thomas remembered that WICKED had implanted a fail-safe device inside his brain to prevent the control-chip's removal. After Thomas had a brief struggle with WICKED over the control of his brain (because WICKED wasn't close enough for full control), he picked up a knife and attempted to kill Hans. He did because he thought the fail-safe would make him kill whoever was trying to remove that fail-safety device inside head. It took the other four to finally get him on the bed and drugged so Hans could remove the Swipe.

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