"Smashing! There's a gin and tonic with my name on it at the bar, 'scuse me dear." She pushes her way past Morgan and disappears into the crowd.

Bonesaw is quickly engrossed in a discussion with the doctor next to her, a skeletal man with wispy hair who claims to be an American psychiatrist, on the history of LSD in psychic bioengineering. Gemini hovers nearby, third arm dangling through a gap in the hospital gown.

"… I'm going to check out the trade show."

Then so will he.

They're ahead of the pack!

The trade show is set up in the west wing of the country club; few of the attendees have beaten them there. Rows upon rows of booths line the halls, every iniquitous facet of the healthcare industry laying out its wares for the discerning mad scientist to peruse. In between baleful steel contrivances and free samples of noxious elixirs are stacks of branded notebooks and pens with corporate logotypes on the barrel. A few people in the same bland uniform as the woman at the door stand around, unmoving.

"Glenn! You're working this year?"

A man in a green shirt waves at him from the nearby RejoovenEsense sales team, beckoning him over.

"I'll see you later, Doctor Waller," he says, leaving her behind to catch up with his friend.

Awesome.

Morgan is now free to wander through the trade show, whispering the names of the companies under her breath as she passes them by. Most of them are in the business of making drugs or medical devices, albeit without FDA approval. She's withholding judgement on the pharma companies, but some of the surgical tools seem… pointless? Cruel? Pointlessly cruel? One company appears to be hawking an endotracheal tube covered in metal spines— actually, no, she can't let that one go without at least asking.

"Hi there," she says cordially, approaching the table. "I'm curious, what are the spikes on this for?"

"They're to hold it in place," says the salesman. "Stops it from coming loose if it's pulled on."

Morgan was under the impression that 'comes loose if pulled on' was a desirable feature in ET tubes. Traumatic extubation is at best highly counterproductive.

"I see. And, how is it that it's meant to be inserted and removed?"

He runs his hand down the length of the tube. The spines, slightly slanted, flex obligingly.

"Then, when you want to extubate, you press this button here…"

The spines fold back into the tube while the button is depressed. He runs his hand the other way.

"Do you find that physicians have this problem often, in your experience?"

"All the time," he says knowingly. "I spent so many years hearing about patients pulling out their central lines that I decided to go into business. That was my first product – I've got one right here, take a look."

The product in question is a hybrid between a venous catheter and a whaling harpoon.

There is no mechanism for safely removing that one. Morgan doesn't even have to ask – it's written on the packaging.

She keeps going.

At the end of this row is a booth for Sentry Chemical Procurement, managed by a young woman with an intense expression.

?

!

No. Absolutely not. This was not in the briefing nor on the mission agenda, what in the secret fucking name of God are they doing here—

"Doc! What've they got you doing here?"

"… giving a talk."

Oy vey. The Foundation silos all activity by default, but there are not one (the central directory), not two (RAISA), but three (O5 Command) separate administrative mechanisms that ought to have warned her about prior Foundation contact with the anomaly before she walked into it. This is a horrific case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

(By most standards. If you were to discuss all such cases ranked by how objectively embarrassing they were it would be a very long time before you were no longer talking about any of the so-called Antimemetics departments. Anything involving memory erasure immediately becomes more complicated than the plot of a time-travel thriller novel. Still.)

Someone is going to pay for this, and it won't be Morgan.

"Mental how they won't stop to say they're sending two birds in at once," she says wonderingly.

"Are you here looking for a moonshot chemical?"

The Foundation has used amnestics to maintain the veil since its inception. The two most common categories are class A (drugs that disrupt memories formed in the last six to twelve hours, typically more effective when those memories are intense or unusual) and class B (incremental retrograde amnesia working backwards from the present, which invariably requires five minutes of plugging formulae into a calculator to get the right dosage), but there are others with more specialized effects. Class A amnestics are the workhorse of the Foundation's rapid response task forces – and most of them are anomalous.

The active ingredient in the most commonly-used class A amnestic is Compound Y-909, and while its source is classified (Morgan has heard it called "eel slime", which is evocative enough to make her stop asking questions) its anomalous nature is not. Various other amnestics come from or are themselves SCPs, a state of affairs the Ethics Committee considered a necessary evil until the late 20^th century. The ongoing research program into mundane amnestics has seen mixed results. The most successful among them, a class A with a shelf life measured in days, has the side effect of replacing lost time with memories of a state of euphoria. This has lead to several highly ironic scandals beginning with stolen goods or research, followed by the emergence of an underground drug trade or illicit manufacturing lab, and inevitably ending in collapse as everyone involved forgets what's happened.

That is not the Foundation's problem – curbing the abuse of mundane drugs is outside their mandate and the secret is self-keeping to a degree – but the need to develop newer and better amnestics has weighed on the Pharmaceutical Department for decades. The conference is certainly fertile ground for that kind of research. This is the only reasonable explanation Morgan can think of for Kelsey's presence today.

"Aye, and to see about making inroads. Have to keep the wheels of progress turning."

Foundation departments with weak management trend towards causing more problems than they solve, a tendency that people like Morgan Waller are hired to keep under control. Employees that cannot perform are amnesticized and let go, committees that endlessly bikeshed are dissolved, but people who get results in unorthodox fashion are kept – kept on a short leash, but kept.

Morgan has a sudden suspicion that her presence here is not a coincidence.

"Have you considered not buying anomalous items from other dimensions? We get enough of those without soliciting them."