They've hired a precog, too, who has a bag of ice on the back of her neck and is munching her way through a package of Ho Hos.

Seems like as good a place as any to sit and snack. Lucien has pretzels.

"Hullo. Isabella."

"Oh, I'm Lucien. Hi."

Oh wow she is pretty.

"What'd they haul you in for?"

"Oh I uh, technically asked to be here. I'm a diviner."

"Oh, I volunteered for the gig too, figured I might as well visit my mother on the company dime. I'm the precog."

"Oh I didn't know that they'd managed to find the funding for one this time."

"This isn't the first time?"

"There were a couple of others a few weeks ago, yeah."

"You local?"

"I'm from Jersey City, you?"

"I live in New York working for one of those faceless corporations that does predictions."

"Some of the faceless divination companies tried to persuade me but I've ended up mostly doing freelance work for medical studies I can convince to use divination."

"Oh, neat, what kinds of things do you wind up doing there?"

"All sorts of things! There's a study on asthma I tracked how much people were breathing out CO2 for, I did some stats for a hospital about what time of night they were carting the most patients between rooms, some exploratory work that involved testing lots of cancer treatments in parallel that was difficult too do all the measurements for by hand."

"That's so cool! I hope to get around to divination eventually but I hadn't actually thought of using it that far upstream in the process of research, all the flashy divination is the kind where you're just like 'this cancer treatment works' or something, but of course that takes so much more investment..."

"Yeah, I prefer to think of divination as a tool for amplifying science, not replacing it. Medical studies are pretty central to the sort of thing I'm excited for. Ideally I'd like more people to think of it as a tool they can reach for when they want to take measurements that costly or that they didn't think of in time. And also it'd be neat for more people to take up the sort of lower investment divination I'm working on."

"There are so many psionic skills that I want there to be more of in the world and people keep picking up the ones I don't want them to instead, as though they have priorities other than doing whatever I want, and I fear this will be the case for your thing too. Do you have other stuff you've got working or did you frontload divination?"

"I have a sort of memorized catalogue set-up and some not very functional sleep skipping."

Hopefully these are things she approves of people doing.

"Memorized catalogue?"

"I can remember what articles I read on a given subject and where to find them but not the contents, basically."

"Huh. I have a full eidetic memory that I'm really happy with. And verbal telepathy, and back in virtuality I picked up lucid dreaming."

"Oh wow, all that and precoging. I just got the broken sleep skipping out of virtuality. Though I am pretty happy with my cataloguing memory - probably I should get it to full but I'd miss the satisfaction of organizing everything I can get this way."

"My precog range is very short but they seemed to think it would help for this. What's wrong with your sleep skipping?"