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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some_guy

"I don't know what it's trying to do. If it's trying to do something at all and isn't just there like the weather."

"Perhaps a better word would be 'targeted'. Many antimemetic effects like yours infect everything they touch, making whole other concepts unthinkable."

some_guy

"...well probably that would have gotten me killed when I was a baby?"

"That's a good point. And in case the effect is, itself, sentient, that could well be a purposeful adaptation."

some_guy

"Or it could've evolved like that. If it needs me alive."

"These things usually do, yes. Antimemetic entities need memes and humans are the main extant source of those on this planet."

some_guy

"I'm a meme?"

"A meme in the technical sense, a unit of an idea. Concepts, thoughts, cultures, those are all made up of memes. ...the word has been slightly ruined by the internet recently, admittedly," she says with a half smile.

some_guy

"Nobody could ever think to look for me in their reaction gif folder."

"No, I imagine not. ...we will probably want to look into your parentage to see whether it's genetic or a one-off, by the way."

some_guy

"I probably didn't wind up crossing state lines because that would be a weird thing to do with a random baby you found lying around but I don't know exactly how old I am or anything. When I talk about my family I mean the ones I mostly lived with for as long as I can remember and I don't show up in any pictures from before I looked about two or three ish."

"It might not be possible," she agrees. "Like I mentioned, records two decades ago weren't as thorough."

some_guy

"Well, the state you'd be looking in is Maryland, probably, if you wanna see if five different fire stations have suspiciously similar surrender records."

"We'll see what we can do."

some_guy

And here's the house he lives in. He'll go get his toothbrush and clothes.

And she'll follow, because she is definitely not on a dose of mnestics that can survive losing track of him, if such a dose exists.

some_guy

The toothbrush and clothes are in a slightly cursed-looking bathroom. His laptop he retrieves from an end table; it's not in the lost and found yet. On the way out he casts a longing glance at the Nintendo Switch but it isn't his.

Well, they can get him a Switch.

The car she takes him to does not look like the stereotypical scary government car. It's a mom car. She has a driver, she's not the one driving because that might cause her to become too distracted to remember he exists.

some_guy