introductory antimemetics | Glowfic Constellation

Quinn is actually quite annoyed by this anomaly. She usually doesn't bother to feel annoyed by anomalies, she's been in this line of work for almost two decades now, but she ran into this one entirely by accident, and it caused her to lose the memory of her anniversary dinner the other night because it upset U-4987. She has little enough time with her husband without having her memories of it stolen from her.

She didn't figure that out immediately, though. She was chasing down a report of a suspected anomaly in the area, and when it was time to feed Sunshine, she dipped into a grocery store to chat with random people about nothing at all. And it did feel fed, at the time, and of course she doesn't remember what memory she fed it. The problem is that whatever it was didn't actually sate it, and it lost the memory, and then ate something else that it was sure it could retain. And it wasn't until Adam mentioned the dinner two days later that she realized she forgot, and that's one of the most irritating ways to lose a memory. She and Adam had a recreation of the dinner for her sake, but now it feels personal.

Now, what does she know about this anomaly? It at least passes for human, probably. The feeling she had as she walked out of the grocery store was what she had been expecting: having just lost a memory that she'd expected to lose, after deciding to go inside and talk to a human, so unless it modified her memory after the fact (which it could've), she acted in accordance with her plans. It seemed localised enough, and she hasn't had any other unaccounted-for similar episodes of lost memory (that she noticed) since. It hasn't erased the memory of the grocery store itself, or really anything other than the supposed interaction she'd already meant to forget. Its behavior is entirely unrelated to that of the reported anomaly. It's resistant to Quinn's regular class W mnestics. And that's about it.

So now she's gotta review the actual evidence. She got the security footage from around the time she visited, and she has an operative on the same mnestic she's on watching it.

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"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."

some_guy

"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."

some_guy

"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."

some_guy

"- 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.

some_guy

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

"I see." This poor kid.

some_guy

"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."

some_guy