Leon was of course not informed of what exactly it was that he was looking for. He is to write down, longhand, a full description of what he can perceive of the interaction between his boss and any other people she interacts with. On a separate piece of paper he is to write YES if she does in fact interact with at least one person and NO otherwise. On a separate piece of paper he is to write the number of people she interacts with. On a separate piece of paper, if it turns out that Quinn has interacted with exactly one person, he is to write another description of what he can perceive in the video, on a rewatch, looking at specifically that person, from the start of this section of the recording (fifteen minutes prior to Marie Quinn's arrival) to its end (fifteen minutes after). Then, he is to try to reconstruct the contents of each piece of paper immediately after having finished the rewatch, from memory. Then, he is to wait five minutes, and to that again.

This sounds boring as hell but substantially less scary than whatever his colleagues deal with on a daily basis so he'll suck it up.

He hits play, starting this first watch the moment Quinn arrives at the grocery store.

She grabs an empty basket and starts walking down an aisle, seemingly with the purpose of actually getting something. She seems to have some trouble finding whatever it is she wants to buy, and starts looking around for someone who could maybe help her find whatever it is.

Here's a guy. He's pretty tall and he gets the pineapple juice down for somebody short, so probably he's amenable to an approach about where the tamarind paste or whatever is.

Quinn meanders towards Skip and, after a moment's hesitation, asks him something. The footage does not have audio, so Leon can't catch what she's asking.

He taps his chin thoughtfully and then ventures an answer!

She looks down in a direction then turns back to him and asks something else.

Nod nod.

She smiles at him, says something that is probably a thank you and a goodbye with a small wave.

A wave, a pleasantry, and then he puts OJ in his cart.

She goes down an aisle, pick something up, puts it in her basket, changes her mind, takes it back out, and leaves.

Okay, so she did interact with exactly one person, and it happened like so, yes? Does anything stop him from writing these facts down as they happen while he watches the video?

Nope.

Cool, cool.

Now to start watching from fifteen minutes prior to Quinn arriving and look for that guy or whenever he arrives if he's not there yet then.

He shows up, he gets a cart, he starts making young-adult-on-a-budget-with-a-lot-of-roommates grocery selections.

So it's... just some guy?

Well, Leon's task here isn't to question what's happening, it's to write stuff down. He will write stuff down.

The guy does not impair him in the (continuous) derivation of notes from video. He puts chicken nuggets in the cart, and ice cream, and frozen peas, and a big bag of shredded cheddar.

Does he interact with anyone else? What does he do after talking to Quinn?

He gets the short lady the pinepple juice!

After Quinn he gets the OJ, and then moves on to the next aisle and consults his grocery list and grabs toilet paper.

Will he be gone by fifteen minutes after interacting with Quinn, or will he still be there?

He finishes up in that time! He takes his cart to the checkout aisle like a totally normal person and gets checked out and pays by card. He loads the bags into a little red wagon locked up at the bike rack outside, and walks off with it.

Alright. Leon will keep watching the video in case the guy shows back up, and then after that's done he'll try to write everything he just wrote from memory to the best of his ability. The mnestics should help him remember exact words better than a normal person would be able to but he's not on a high enough dose to get perfect recall and the anomaly already beat this dose directly when interacting with Quinn.

There were... definitely people in the grocery store. They bought groceries. Somebody got pineapple juice?

Wait, he was... supposed to... ok he was supposed to describe what he saw in the section with Quinn specifically. What did he see?

She was in a grocery store which had a pretty unremarkable grocery store population. She pulled a product, and then put it back and left the store.

Right. Okay. That happened, yeah, he remembers that.

But he was here to study an anomaly. He needed to know, specifically, if she interacted with at least one person, and how many people if so. Did she?

Maybe. How hard does he want to try to figure that out?

Uhhh. He just needs to figure out what he wrote on the piece of paper? Did he write YES or NO?

He wrote YES, probably. Seems like the sort of thing he'd do under the circumstances.

Al...right.

How about the number? Did he write a number greater than zero on the third piece of paper?

Is he going to try to figure out if there was a person, or is he trying to do something like remember the physical experience of drawing out the numeral?

Physical experience.

He drew a 1.

Alright! And what'd he write on the fourth piece of paper?

Probably it was something in line with the assignment? Unless he slacked off, is that the sort of thing he might do?

Nope. He wouldn't have been hired for this position if he'd been the kind to slack off. He was meant to describe what happened to the person Quinn talked to from the moment they arrived at to the moment they left the grocery store.

Then probably he did that and it's all written right there if he really needs to know.

Yeah but he needs to know from memory. So, what does he remember writing on the paper?

It took up multiple lines. There was something about pineapple juice.

He writes the words "pineapple juice" miserably on the piece of paper and tries to recall more. There was a person, yes...?

He... probably didn't write all that about the... floor tiles...? Yeah, there was somebody.

Okay! Did that person enter the building or were they already in the building when the video started fifteen minutes prior to Quinn's arrival?

Logically, it is one of those and not both or neither.

Okay but which.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

He puts his pen down and sets the five minute timer and tries not to think about the problem at all.

Five minutes elapse and then the timer goes off.

Okay! Did he write YES on the second piece of paper.

Construed solely as a piece of paper and not as meaningfully representative of anything?

Well logically he wrote YES if and only if he perceived his boss interacting with a person—

He has no idea what he wrote on the second piece of paper. Well, like, it probably wasn't "MARMALADE". But it could have been whatever made sense at the time.

He grits his teeth and reminds himself that his colleagues deal with this stuff—actually with stuff worse than this—every day. His boss takes the mnestic he's on right now twice a day, and has for the past decade. He should not complain.

...he recalls something his instructor told him on his first day. He remembers this because the man had the same initials as him. Simon Lee was his name. He said that an Antimemetics Division agent is as good on their first day as they're ever going to be. And he was hired by the Antimemetics Division, so he must be good enough.

He grits his teeth and tries to think through what physical motions his wrist and hand went through when writing on the second piece of paper.

There were definitely several letters. Two or three of them, probably. Some curved lines some straight lines.

But which.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What number did he write on the third piece of paper. The meaning of the number is immaterial. It is just a number. It either had curved lines or it didn't. If it didn't, it must've been 1 or 4 or 7 (his 7 is all angular). Probably. If it wasn't 11.

He didn't have to pick up his pen.

Okay so that rules out 4 and 5 and 7 and all numbers greater than 9.

Was it a 0 or a 1? Or some other number less than 10?

He just ruled out all numbers greater than 9 so it was, presumably, a number of 9 or less, if mathematics itself is intact and he wrote a number (and he is the sort of person who would've written a number, instead of not writing something or putting "marmalade".)

...let's reason backwards about this. It must be either 0 or 1. If it were 2 or more, or if Quinn had talked to anyone other than a single individual, then... probably... he would just be remembering one number less than what he initially wrote. Right? Probably. He's also got a separate notebook into which he's been writing his thoughts whenever he can't do his task (all Antimemetics Division agents have notebooks), so he writes that down there, too. Maybe his reasoning is suspect. And maybe he's wrong about what this anomaly does and it would just be throwing errors to fuck with him—no, that doesn't fit. He thinks. So, either 0 or 1.

Assuming that reasoning is correct, which relies on this anomaly working the way he feels like it must work rather than knowing for sure, but assuming that reasoning is correct, then either Quinn talked to a person, or she talked to something that wasn't a person, or she didn't talk to anyone.

Would he have done anything differently in those three situations? ...no, because that'd have broken protocol. Unless it looked like some kind of danger that could reach him through the video footage, in which case he'd have called in an emergency. And yet here he is, not having called in an emergency, so that bounds how terrified he must've been.

He can't remember the movement of his hands in detail, but he can remember that he didn't lift his pen from the paper to write the number, so it's not completely erasing itself from his consciousness and leaving no evidence. It's just... carving out a very specific exception.

Well. The point of this experiment is not, actually, so that Leon knows what's up. It's to determine the nature of this anomaly. And he's determining it alright. He definitely cannot remember what he actually wrote. So he will Do His Best and then stop.

Quinn herself is not watching the experiment, even though she wants to. She's already been exposed to the anomaly, for one, and for two, this might expose her more to it, and it would contaminate experimental data. Not to mention that, if it's dangerous, she wants fewer, not more, infection vectors. Plus, she's really very busy.

And there are more steps to the experimental protocol.

A second operative needs to read the first paper and transcribe its contents to a second piece of paper. Can they do that?

Yeah, they can do that. It's all right there.

Now can they write, on a separate piece of paper, from memory, what was written on that first piece?

They start losing it at that step. They may retain more or fewer tidbits depending on how they're thinking about it.

Is the knowledge that the anomaly may or may not have been a guy the only knowledge that is lost, or is any other knowledge also gone? Is it also gone if it's stored in digital media? How about audio media? Can a sentient AI do better at retaining- actually never mind on that last one, C-levels are not approving that for a small harmless anomaly that hasn't done anything, they just always want to know whether AI can deal with stuff or not.

Media is happy to hold whatever is put into it unchanged. Different people lose different amounts of stuff but more the more they beat their heads against it; "somebody got pineapple juice" is relatively easy to retain, so probably whoever got pineapple juice is not their anomaly?

But they do retain knowledge that they are all working on the same anomaly and there is only one anomaly (even if the anomaly might be zero or more guys)? Can they discuss the anomaly while watching the video? How much does discussing the anomaly while watching the video help? And how about over multiple watches?

If they've got the video on they are fully able to talk about it and how it is the thing they are all working on! If anybody takes a bathroom break or checks their phone or doodles a cat in a margin they might come back not quite clear on any of this. Retention does not improve at all with repetition, it might actually get worse as they exhaust more angles that might have let them see the negative space.

There are different people who are supposed to hold different amounts of negative space, and they're not all working together. They're professionals, here.

Eventually, a report is submitted. The report states that, while reading the report, it will be possible and not at all difficult to reason about its contents, but the moment you are distracted from them you will forget the most important details. They have jargon for this kind of situation; it's not the first time they've run into it, although it's the first time one has been so resistant to normal doses of mnestics. They expect a class X would beat this but would be overkill; either a higher dose of the W they've been on or a stronger subtype of it would probably suffice. They deem the anomaly probably safe, but it should be taken in for investigation of possible other effects.

The report is read and analysed. Quinn had short-term amnestics ready in case she decided she'd need them, as the report suggested that those would be enough to wipe most of the cumulative effect of interaction with the anomaly.

...so. It looks to all appearances to be Some Guy. They've pulled up more surveillance and managed to figure out where this guy lives. There is a very thorough report of his current living conditions, but finding anything about his history is proving a lot more difficult.

And she could maybe just ask.

Sunshine is nervous about this, but she's the one in charge, here, not it, and she reassures it that she will not feed it any memories about This Guy.

Does it need to be her? No, it doesn't. But she's got the slack, the Antimemetics Division is the largest individual division in the Organization, and she's curious. She is still, at heart, a field op.

So, since she's going to forget about this guy once she's done with her plan and preparations, she writes herself a plan for what to do that she can just follow: go to this address, play this recording, then do what the recording says.

She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, then reads the next report on her stack.

...she forgot something. She was in the middle of a train of thought and she forgot what it was.

But she's also got her left thumb between her middle and ring fingers, which is her own signal for when she shouldn't worry about that feeling for the next half hour. So she's not going to worry about that feeling for the next hour, read the report, send followup emails, and read the next report.

...the next report isn't a report. It's instructions to herself. It says that she should go to a specific address and then listen to a recording on her mobile phone.

She presses the button on her desk phone to talk to her secretary. "Did I tell you a pass code?"

"Yes, ma'am. The passcode is Moonbeam."

"Thank you."

The instructions are probably real. She'll leave a note here saying where she's gone to for Ives, she'll get two operatives whose faces and names she will not be told to drive her to the address and serve as body guards, and she will go to the address.

A young woman opens the door! "Hey - you don't look like a plumber, are you a plumber -"

"Ah, no, I'm afraid not." The recording is playing into her earbuds. "I'm looking for this man?" She has a picture. It's not a grainy picture from security footage; it's a close-up picture of him smiling outside the house while talking to someone, which was taken by one of those very good Organization cameras with good enough resolution and an angle that makes it look like it could be an Instagram picture.

"Not familiar, sorry - you maybe want Annika, that looks like it could be Annika he's talking to?"

No, they won't remember him. "Is she around? Or maybe I could just look around for him? I found his wallet in his seat after class earlier and asked around and some people told me he hung out here sometimes." She has a wallet here with a realistic fake ID with Skip's face on it.

Now here's something Quinn doesn't do that often: she's going to feed this young woman's memories to Sunshine. Specifically, the memory this woman is forming, in real time, of Quinn's apparent age. Instead, the woman's brain will generate its own guess of how old Quinn must be/look, based on the surrounding context of someone coming to a group house full of students saying they found another student's ID after class.

It's a hostile move, to be sure, but the Antimemetics Division isn't in the business of being known to exist, and even if Quinn didn't do anything at all this interaction would fade from memory almost as easily as interactions with that anomaly do. It's a hazard of the job. The only way Quinn is married is because her husband has a natural genetic resistance to antimemetic effects, allowing him to remember her every day.

Anyway. Here's a nice young student looking for her classmate.

"He doesn't live here. Does his license maybe have his address on it?"

"Yeah, but he wasn't there, it was his roommate who said he was often around here. I didn't catch her name, though. Can you ask around if anyone's seen him? If not, I'll just leave the wallet with his roommate on my way back, I don't have any classes with him again until Friday."

"What's his name?"

"Skip." She hopes the report or her past self have a good reason why she's not questioning this.

"HEY THE HOUSE DOES ANYBODY KNOW A GUY NAMED SKIP?"

There's some hollered "NO"s and one "YOU COULD HAVE JUST ASKED ON DISCORD" and:

"Who wants to know?"

Bingo. "Skip? It's Marie! I found your wallet with your driver's license!" she calls, as loudly as he did.

Reasonable odds this backfires, but it's fine if it does. She found her guy, and she can just stalk the place discreetly until he leaves.

"I don't have a driver's license!" he says.

"...then someone's playing a really elaborate prank on you!"

Front Door Answering Girl has wandered off and Skip takes her place at the door, wary and puzzled. "What kind of prank might that be?"

Cool, wandered off is good. She can lower her voice. "Hello, Skip, it's a pleasure to meet you. I believe people have a hard time remembering you. Assuming you're not hostile and not doing this on purpose and would like to know more about it, I can tell you more about it, either right now or I can leave you a phone number you can call if you want to think on it."

Her recording included an instruction not to feed her Sunshine any memories of Skip, and probably Skip's own memories are similarly off-limits, so his brain is free to retain the memory that she's not in fact a student.

"Why the fuck would I do this on purpose," he exclaims, though not very loudly.

"Usually because you're getting something out of it, but it doesn't really look like you are." 

"I would rather pay taxes like a normal person! Can you fix me? Are there more of me, what's wrong with me -"

"While your effects may cover people retaining information about you, it's still probably not a good idea for us to talk about it here. But to answer those questions, I don't know if I can fix you, and I don't know if there are more exactly like you—you may have guessed that it's not exactly easy to keep track of people like you, if they exist. But everyone who works with this kind of thing works for me, so if there's a way for you to get fixed, we're probably your best shot. Come with me? We can talk more in the car." She smiles. "And no, we're not going to run nefarious government experiments on you; we might want to hire you."

Appearances can be deceiving, and Quinn is keeping the possibility that this is an elaborate ruse in mind, but if she takes it at face value, this is a kid. This is just a kid who got dealt a rotten hand by forces even she barely understands. Which means that he is exactly the kind of person she and the Organization exist to protect.

"Can we go for a walk first? You won't lose me if you're actively talking to me unless you zone out and I am not zero worried about the nefarious government experiments."

"Yeah, sure, we can. I'm not from around these parts, you wanna show me around?"

"Sure."

He closes the door behind him and steps out. "You look slightly familiar."

"We ran into each other in the grocery store the other day. It's how I found you, by sheer dumb luck."

"...how'd you find where I live from that? And my name?"

"Once we had the security footage of the grocery store we could run automated algorithms to locate you in other footage from various other nearby stores and the occasional porch, and from that it was easy to triangulate your general area. As for your name, you used your Amazon paycard to pay for your groceries that day."

"...who do you even work for?"

"Have you ever run into this fictional wiki online called the SCP Foundation?"

He makes a face. "I've seen it. I don't like that kind of thing."

"We don't call ourselves the Foundation. We're the Unknown Organization. We label the anomalies we run into with the letter U rather than the acronym SCP. And our institutional moral compass is pointed in a much better direction. But the SCP Wiki itself is an Unknown, U-3171. We originally thought it was an internal leak, but it seems to simply have come to existence as a memetic entity that mirrors our system and database. Most entries on the SCP Wiki are not, actually, real, but some are, and despite our best efforts we have not been able to take the wiki or those entries down."

"If I read more of it would there be one about me?"

"There could be. We monitor new additions to the site in real time, and ones marked with the antimemetics tag get flagged with priority, but at least as of this morning it hadn't made it to your file."

"That's creepy. Antimemetics is the thing where people skip over me?"

"Yes. Ideas that hide themselves, and especially ideas that hide the hiding. For example—

"There's an entity, officially U-4987, but my husband and I call it Sunshine, because when it's hungry it manifests as a spot of light in the corner of my vision. It bonded to me over a decade ago, though I don't remember how. I've tamed it, because we don't have a way to contain it otherwise. It needs to eat memories to survive, but we have an understanding, and it only eats the memories I feed it. That day you and I met in the grocery store, I only walked in to have a short conversation with someone that I'd feed Sunshine. My conversation with you was meant to be that. I later reconstructed that Sunshine lost its memory of you just like I would have, and when it realised that it became distressed and consumed a different memory of mine, one I could notice was gone. That's how I realized something strange had happened that day."

"...is something eating people's memories of me??"

"I don't know. It's a possibility. Or it could be natural to you.

"There used to be a species of megafauna native to Polynesia that could not be normally directly perceived, though it is now believed to be extinct. As far as we know, its antimemetic properties were an inherent biological fact about them. Some humans also have an inherent genetic resistance to antimemetic effects. It maybe should not be surprising that some humans might have antimemetic properties themselves. But I was surprised anyway."

"It doesn't seem like an advantage. Especially for, like, when I was a baby, but I have a normal amount of not remembering that."

"Which points to the possibility that it really could be something that attached to you, or to your genes, sort of like a parasite. It might not be possible to get rid of it even if it turns out to be that, though. I don't want to get your hopes up too high."

"Could you get rid of yours if you wanted to?"

"No. We looked into it. We think it might die when I do, but it's more likely it will find a new host. We have contingencies for that."

"Why would you want to hire me? My thing isn't really useful."

"It could be. If you can remember yourself, you might have some natural resistance to antimemetic effects that extends beyond yourself, and that would be useful. And..."

"The Antimemetics Division is all trained to deal with antimemetic effects on a regular basis. Which means that, if nothing else, we have ways to bridge some of the gap in remembering you, even if we can't do it completely. I think it would do you good to have people who can have continuity of knowing you."

"It'd be cool if people could remember me," he allows. "But like - okay, my power isn't totally useless. But I'm not invisible. When I used it to get away with stuff as a kid it still sucked getting caught. I don't want a job that's like that all the time."

"Oh, we probably wouldn't deploy you against normal humans. We almost never deal with them. But memories of you were indigestible to Sunshine, so you might be able to similarly stump other antimemetic entities. It might also be possible to use your antimemetic properties as part of campaigns to eradicate memetic viruses, stopping their spread by associating them with you. 

"We won't know what, if anything, is possible, until we try."

"Oh.

"I bet you guys pay a lot better than the warehouse."

She laughs. "Oh, yeah. We do."

Then she turns more serious. "Usually at this point I'd be warning you about the main side effect of working for the Division, but..." She spreads her hands. "You've lived with a worse version of it your whole life."

"I mean, I could imagine it getting worse?"

"Yeah, but it doesn't, not just from working with us. If and when you're ready to deal with anything more dangerous, you'll be warned of the dangers then and you won't be assigned to any missions whose risks you don't consent to." She can imagine a world where she's so strapped for resources she might want to force all hands on deck, but as things stand, they have enough people working on that they need worked on that they don't need to be that desperate. "But a normal person who works for us will face a weaker version of the antimemetic effects that affects you. People have a hard time remembering us or anything about us, and my boss needs to be on a regular dose of mnestics to even know that the Division exists."

"What is... doing that?"

"We believe it's a compound effect. All of us are working with things that want to be forgotten all of the time, and although we're reminding ourselves of our own existence every day if someone forgets something it tends to stay forgotten. We don't think there's something actively doing it, otherwise a single dose of our weakest mnestics—that's 'mnestics' with a silent 'm', like in 'mnemonic'—anyway, otherwise a single dose of our weakest mnestics wouldn't be enough to allow people to remember."

"What do you actually... do, in your jobs?"

"The two main things are threat containment and research. We have people who study the effects of antimemes, both in individual cases and as a class, and we have people whose job is to find and neutralize antimemes that are dangerous to humanity."

He gives her a bit of a concerned look.

"We did consider the possibility that you were one of those, yes. It is not our current understanding of the situation. Your condition seems to be much more dangerous to you than it is to anyone else."

"Yeah but now I have to watch my mouth telling you anything you might not already know in case you decide to murder me."

"—we don't kill Unknowns if we can help it. If you're not, yourself, in imminent and unpreventable danger of killing anyone else, we would have no reason to murder you. The worst case is that, yes; the worst realistic case is locking you up. My current plan, if you decide to just say goodbye to me and the idea of the Division, is just to let you live your life, and it'd take a lot more than you saying the wrong thing for that to change."

"If you lock me up you're gonna forget to feed me," he says flatly.

"You are not the first time we've run into an idea that is forgotten the minute you get distracted from it, and feeding a human is a lot easier and cheaper than the cost of the containment of some other such entities we do currently have locked up. You being human, we would also provide you with much more than just food. At minimum consistent social interaction, internet access, and somewhere comfortable to live."

"I work over the internet," he says, and then he looks like he regrets saying that.

"I know. You work over all kinds of records of you we have run into or made, including supernatural ones."

"Supernatural records?"

"A relatively low-classification example of Unknown the Organization has is a kind of stone that can store projected thoughts. You can think at it, and then someone else can receive the thoughts you stored in it. Thoughts about you stored in this kind of stone are also subject to your antimemetic effects."

"Does the stone forget them? Computers and paper don't."

"No. If it were sentient, maybe it would. We haven't tested you against our sentient AI, it disprefers being a part of tests related to antimemetics unless it's really important."

"Whoa. Where did you get a sentient AI?"

"That is, unfortunately, classified."

"...fair enough I guess."

She'll wait to see if there's anything more Skip wants to say. She doesn't want to pressure him, that's not how you get a potentially useful asset to accept to be interviewed for a job, especially when the interview will involve experiments.

He's taking them on a meandering stroll through the neighborhood past the prettiest front yards. "I dunno if I'm smart enough to do research."

"We haven't looked deeply enough into you to try to untangle your past, so this is just a guess, but I assume you didn't have the opportunity to really go to school?"

"Oh, no, I went to school, people asked me what I was doing out of school during school hours if I didn't. Somebody managed to wedge me into the paperwork, even, and that stuck. But it was pretty hard for the teachers to grade my work or anything."

"So there might be instruction you could take to, and you could learn something new about yourself.

"Or not. You don't need to go into research if you don't want to." She smiles. "I didn't. Don't have a head for all of that."

"Running around having, what, Indiana Jones adventures, also seems like a skill not everybody is cut out for!"

"It isn't. I'm not guaranteeing you a job. And even if we offer you one, you don't need to accept it. I'm not here as step one in a plan where step two has you in the Division's headquarters no matter what. I'm here to offer you opportunities.

"And to be clear, we will try to fix you, if you want us to, even if you don't want to work for us. That's an entirely separate offer."

"If you fixed it would it be retroactive?"

"It might or might not be. The fact that media you interact with retains the effect long after you've stopped interacting with it suggests that there is an active force suppressing people's memories, and with it gone perhaps those memories would come back. But it could be that this force will merely permit new memories to be retained, and past ones are gone. We can't tell from just what we know."

"I guess I don't really know what my family'd think if they could think about it."

"I'm sorry. Even if we don't fix it, we may be able to find out who they are. Computer records were less widespread and less robust twenty years ago, though."

"- no, I mean, like, that would be neat too but I lived with mostly one family while I was growing up, however many hot potato passes it took to get me there."

"—is Ms. Annika Bailey from that family? Is that why you use that last name?" She hadn't assumed it was a coincidence but she also hadn't guessed they had a more sibling-like relationship. Even if one-sided.

"...yeah. I don't use it in front of her."

"I see." This poor kid.

"There were enough siblings and our parents were cool enough about having people over that I could be around most of the time."

She nods. "We unfortunately don't have mnestics that can recover permanently-lost memories without cost. It's possible that the class of mnestics I'm regularly on could work for more recent memories, at a higher dose, but we haven't experimented with that yet, and it does have some very unpleasant side effects. Nausea, dramatically increased risk of pancreatic cancer, and very bad dreams."

"Leave them alone. I already almost sent Gil to the psych ward."

"We wouldn't force them to have it without your and their consent, and certainly not before actually testing that it works."

"How do you test that kind of thing? I don't even know if I work on animals."

"For this, we would have someone take progressively-higher doses and see if the effect responds to that."

"How long of a trip are we talking about if I get in your car, do I need a change of clothes?"