Killing Your (I Mean "My") Darlings

I have had an idea for a book for at least eight years. I don't know where the idea came from but I really love it. The problem is that it's not really an idea for a book as it's an idea for a character, or even a plot point. It's basically a power that a character has, and I really like it. And I have beat my head against this thing for eight years and it has never worked.

I'm just going to tell you what the idea is, because maybe by spitting it out it'll get out of my brain and I can get past it:

It's a person who has an implant in their brain, put there by the US government, that gives them facial recognition software and access to the NSA's databases. So, all this character has to do is look at your face and they know everything that the NSA knows: your bank balance, your credit score, your GPA, the security codes to your safe, your PIN number, your text messages. AND, because this is a spy software, it automatically searches for the most salacious information possible: if you're having an affair and it's in your texts, then this character will immediately latch onto that. Gambling debts? Yes. Outstanding warrants? Yep.

And I have tried to make this idea into a book so many times.

I've tried typical Robison Wells stuff, like YA science fiction: the character doesn't know that they have this in their head until BAM, it shows up one day. I've tried that one at least three different times, three different plots, all the same idea.

I've tried an adult thriller where it's kind of a super spy situation.

The farthest I ever got with it made the character an amnesiac who thought that she was schizophrenic because of all the things she saw, and then, upon learning the nature of her power, she used it to dismantle capitalism. Kind of a superpowered Mr. Robot.

But I am DONE with that idea (I say with some degree of tentativeness). I figure that the best way to get me to move on from revisiting this idea, which is not going ANYWHERE, is to blurt it out here and say: this is my dumb idea and I'm not going to use it anymore for anything.

I have a different idea I've been playing with. I don't know what I'm going to do with it: it's a setting, but I don't even know what genre the book would be. Science fiction, certainly, but plot? YA or Adult? I don't know.

Anyway, bleh.