"Aren't some of them going to go ahead and poison people or start fires?"

"Yep. We're tracking an initial batch to see how many and how frequently."

"Fair enough."

"My best guess is that about half will be releasable with a chip because of personality traits that make them predictably not very murderous once chipped. Some definitely won't be."

"You think you'll have a good enough screening procedure on that?"

"Depends how well it has to scale. If it's small-scale and a couple highly trained people can do it all, yes. Do you think we should be doing something else?"

"Hm, what's the drawback of doing a more - PSA oriented thing, don't invite them in, don't go out after dark -"

"Either gets ignored - there's something that makes people fail to notice magic or accept obviously nonsense mundane explanations until they've been exposed enough in different ways - or is explicit enough I'd worry about mass panic and witch hunts."

"Something? What kind of something?"

"Good question! I don't have the slightest idea. I do have examples, though. A demon got into a fight with a different species of demon on the metro in New York last week. Both of them are like vampires in shifting faces when they're fighting; one bled purple and one punched through the walls of the train in three places. Witnesses said they thought the guys were probably black or Hispanic, heavyset, averageish height, don't recall what they were wearing. You can look up a picture if you want; one had horns."

"What the fuck!"

"In even more blatant incidents you'll get 'guy in a costume' or 'guy with some kind of skin condition', which can be attributed to not wanting to tell the cops 'it was a demon!'. But I don't buy that that explains all of it."

"It would not seem so. Yikes. What constitutes enough exposure -? And how do people who get enough exposure after having seen an incident they wrote off remember the incident later?"

"What constitutes enough exposure varies by person. When we select agents for this program we tell them that there are secretly demons, tell them we'll take them to look at captured demons, take them to look at captured demons, and then ask them to affirm afterwards that they saw captured demons and to describe them. That always works."

"Have you experimented with leaving steps out?"

"If we don't take them to see the demons they assume it's some kinda hazing. All the other steps seem necessary for some people but not all of them."

"I guess that would be a reasonable assumption for any but the hardest core X-Files fans. - Do you have the X-Files yet?"

"We do! We checked if they knew anything but no, just the eerie tendency of science fiction to make so many predictions they get some right."

Giggle.

"I keep expecting you to find us, ah, a bit more suspicious. The government conspiracy to cover up the aliens doesn't usually get played as the heroes."

"You get some points for having let Talon write a note even though her story has to have sounded ridiculous if she explained it at all, and for bothering with a catch and release program. Also for delivery physician audience, that was keen. So far I haven't seen anything that bad apart from an arguable misappropriation of funds to support up and coming architecture geniuses, and I don't have any trouble believing that, in principle, government departments can sometimes be benign."