"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!"