"Meme" - Doctor Katherine Foster says - "A unit carrying ideas, symbols, or practices, transmitted from one mind to another. A concept. A piece of information."
"Yes, Doctor" - replied one of the two man sitting across the table in an otherwise empty conference room - "That is the textbook definition of a meme. Any kid who know how use the internet can tell as much."
Katherine is just slightly pissed of. The man who just spoke is simply an assistant. A glorified secretary. A substitute. More access than a site director, yet less influence than a Level 1 researcher. his opinions always ignored, his decisions always bypassed. His job is to arrange, record, transmit. Not comment. Not retort.
The other man did not respond to either Katherine or the assistant. He kept his eyes focused on his tablet, rapidly tapping and typing and swiping. Katherine fully understands that whatever authorizations or orders the man is giving out, they are probably way more deserving of his utmost attention than her little presentation.
After all, there are only 12 others like him, handling tens of thousands of Foundation personnel working on over four thousand SCPs.
So, she decided to step out of the line to grab the O5's attention.
"Sir, I believe you can recognize what this is."
Katherine put an image up on the big projector screen.
Deciding that the whatever on the screen is relevant to the meeting at hand, the Council member looks up. He glances at the screen just quick enough for the light to enter his eyes, then returns his gaze to the tablet before his pharmaceutically and anomalously enhanced brain could form an image of the screen, before his mind could process it.
Then, the Overseer look up again. This time for a few more seconds.
"Doctor Foster" - he says with amazement - "I believe that is a pair of boobs."
Katherine could not miss the chance to snap back:
"Well, sir, any kid on the internet can tell as much."
"Doctor!"
"Yeah, yeah", Katherine decides to ignore the assistant's angry scolding and continue on with her talk, "But technically, you are wrong."
"This" - she points a finger at the projector screen - "is a surface with a specific reflective characteristic, scattering photons of different wavelengths emitted from a laser diode."
With her finger, she traces an invisible line in the air from the projector over their head to the white surface, to her eyes.
"Those photons enter our retinas and trigger a complex photobiochemical chain of reactions that ultimately results in electrical pulses in our brains".
She taps he finger on her forehead.
"Our brains, in turn, form a mental image, then compare that mental image to a vast library of know images, experiences, memories, and concepts. Our mind eventually recognize the image as, and may I quote you, a pair of boobs."
The Doctor drags her finger on her forehead in small circles.
"Finally, the wonderfully complex human brains and sentient minds process the recognition of said image, light up specific neurons and release bits and pieces of chemicals, causing the body to produce tangible, physical changes."
"In my case, a slight blush. In this nerd's case…"
Katherine tilts her head toward the assistant, whose face now reddened with anger
"… probably an erection."
"THAT'S ENOUGH!" - the assistant stands up and slams the table - "THIS MEETING IS…"
"…interesting." - the Overseer interrupts. Despite her lack of professionalism, the man remains relaxed in his chair, tapping at the tablet. Though, Katherine could swear she saw the corner of his lips twitched a bit.
"Yes, sir."
His assistant says as he try his hardest to curb his anger, and move to stand against the wall, as far from Katherine as he possibly could.
Good boy. "Now, where was I. Ah, yes, information. It is a sentient construct. We detect patterns and make associations from light and sound that themselves means nothing. Those information are unique and exclusive to our consciousness."
"And so are memetic hazards."
Katherine tape on her laptop, scrolling past dozens of memetic entities that the Foundation had encountered and contained in the last decade.
"These anomalies by themselves have no physical effect. Their power is only as much as our consciousness gives them."
"A memetic kill agent cannot kill a computer or a car. It can only make one's neural synapses fire up in a certain pattern that would eventually results in a command that make the human heart beats so fast it crashes."
"A pyro cognitive hazard cannot melt a steel door or light up a fireplace. It can only trick our mind into thinking that being burnt alive is the norm to human beings, and have our bodies behave as such."
"4414…"
Katherine recall a skip they'd just recently dealt with
"… cannot peel a potato or remove the sausage skin for you. It can only make you believe that a sentence was a command, and that skinning yourself to death was the norm."
The assistant chimes in from across the room:
"So what, doctor? No matter what memes actually do, the Foundation already had good ways to deal with them. Amnestics. SCRAMBLE. Training procedures. And, you know, don't look at them."
Katherine couldn't help but to face-palm herself. Grabbing a file folder from her bag, she slides it across the table. The file perfectly stopped at the edge of the table, right in front of the assistant. Seeing that the guy has no intention to pick that up, she decides to cite to him the findings
"Three times the number of memetic skips over the pass five years. Seven times the cost. And god knows how many shits like 055 is out there, unknown and undocumented. And it is just going to get worse."
Before the annoying guy could open his mouth, she kept firing.
"SCRAMBLE is expensive and not always available. Fortification training is an absolutely disgusting process with low-ass passing rate. And amnestic… both of you know very well where all those drugs come from."
The O5 turns off his tablet and slap the cover shut with a clearly audible noise. "Your proposal, Doctor."
Calmly smiling, Doctor Foster produces yet another folder. This time, in front of the admin himself.
"You want to…" O5 glare at the document Doctor Foster presented for a fraction of a second, "use mnestic to fight memetic entities?"
"Let the mind know what is the norm. Force the brain to remember how to operate our bodies: how to breath, how to keep the heart beating, how to regulate metabolism. Fortify the baselines."
The Overseer closes his eye for yet another fraction of a second, as he recall hundreds of memetic-related entries and tens of thousands of experiment reports, estimating the plausibility, calculated the cost and benefits. He evaluate what limit the Ethnics Committee would set, and what responses his peers would have.
The Overseer makes his decision.
"A demo run. Build a memetic-specialized MTF unit trained with your… procedures, no more than twenty members. Once you get visible result, full program will be presented to the Council."
He glances toward his assistant, who pulls out a notebook as he bluntly orders Katherine:
"Resources request and timeline by 0900 tomorrow."
"You'll get it by 7".
The Overseer nods. "You are excused, Doctor Foster."
As she gather her belongings and walk out of the conference room, the Council member called after her.
"By the way, Doctor."
"Yes, sir?"
With a faint smile on his face, the administrator asked: "Whose boobs were those, Doctor?"
Katherine signaled to the assistant and smirked.
"His mama's."
"Meme" - Doctor Katherine Foster says - "A unit carrying ideas, symbols, or practices, transmitted from one mind to another. A concept. A piece of information."
"Yes, Doctor" - Replied the men sitting across the table, barely glancing at Katherine as he holds two cellphones, one in each hand, tapping continuously, only stopping for a moment to read whatever is flashing on the screen every milliseconds or so with his utmost concentration.
He did not even look up as he retorts - "I believe that is the textbook definition of a meme. Something any idiot with thirty seconds on the internet could produce if asked."
Katherine could neither complain about his manner nor respond to his sarcastic respond: she fully understands who he is, what he does, and just how important his attention and timely issued commands and authorizations are compared to the prologue to her presentation.
So, she decided to cut to the chase.
"Sir, I believe you can recognize what this is."
Katherine fasts forward to a slide.
The man takes a glimpse of the projection screen, and as soon as he has registered the image within his mind - anomalously and pharmaceutically reinforced - his gaze has already shifted back to between his phone screens.
Then, the man looked up again, this time for a while.
"Doctor Foster" - he speaks with a tone of amazement - "I believe that is a pair of boobs".
Katherine could not miss the chance to snap back: "Well, sir, that is something any pervert with thirty second on the internet could say if asked."
The man raises his eyebrows.
"But technically, you are wrong." - Realizing that the man is not at all amused, Katherine quickly continue - "This is a surface with a specific reflective characteristic, scattering photons of different wavelengths emitted from a laser diode."
Katherine point a finger into the air, tracing along an invisible straight line from the screen into her eyes.
"Those photons enter our retinas and trigger a complex photobiochemical chain of reactions that ultimately results in electrical pulses in our brains".
She taps he finger on her forehead.
"Our brains, in turn, form a mental image, then compare that mental image to a vast library of know images, experiences, memories, and concepts. Our mind eventually recognize the image as, and may I quote you, a pair of boobs."
The doctor traces her finger down to her cheeks, continuing to explain to the slightly less confused superior.
"Finally, the wonderfully complex brains release waves after waves of electrical pulses and chemical stimulants, causing our body to produce physical changes. In my case, a slight blush. In your case, possibly an erection."
The man was not annoyed by the remark. His line of work had required him to, regularly, meet with mad soldiers, abstruse occultists, researchers whose unintelligible speeches greatly contradicted their intelligence, and scientists so much into their own world they sometimes forgot all boundaries of moral and legal.
Compared to those people, he found Doctor Foster's sexual joke somewhat benign.
He is nonetheless not impressed.
"Doctor, professionalism, if you will."
"Yes, yes, I am terribly sorry sir, yes". Katherine was fired from one of the most prestige university in the world for her out-of-line lines like that - she dreadfully does not want to be fired from the Foundation for the same reason.
"Yes, sir" - she hurriedly continue before the man in charge could be anymore displeased - "Sir, I hypothesized that memetic cognitive hazards behave identically."
"For example?"
"A lethal memetic entity cannot launch a death ray to stop people's hearts, it can only trigger certain neuron pathways that eventually trick the mind into commanding one's heart to stop. That the heart not beating is the norm."
"A pyro-cognitive hazard cannot light up a fireplace or heat up a cup of coffee, it can only trick the mind into thinking that the weather is so cold and that the body need to warm up. That increasing the metabolism rate to the point of autonomous combustion is the norm."
Katherine pauses for a bit, half to catch her breath, and half to try reference remember a recently discovered memetic skip.
"Or take 4414. A png file - a stream of high voltage and low voltage pulses, translated via electrical processes into lit-up pixels on a screen. It cannot peel skin off people's fingers. It can only trick the mind those who are infected into believing that skinning themselves to death is the norm."
The Overseer places both his phones onto the table, entirely focusing on Doctor Foster. "And you think we should?", he asked.
"Let our mind know what is the norm. Let our mind remember with absolute certainty how to operate every organ in the body, how to not hurt ourselves, how to not kill ourselves."
"We had been doing fine with amnestic. What's changed?"
"Nothing's changed. Our job is still the same: Secure, Contain, Protect. And last time I checked, sir, forgetting things is running away. You can't contain something if you can't even look at it, let alone remember it."
"Memetic fortification training…"
"Is, with all due respect sir, throwing a bunch of mild memes at agents until they vomit, and then let those who are still puking by the next day to get some A's." - Katherine answered with a clearly disdain voice - "It's inefficient, brutal, unreliable, and in my opinion stupidly disgusting."
The man nods in agreement. As an administrator, he has gone through hundreds of training sequences, most of them to allow him access to specific skips, and many of them not something a good proportion of Foundation personnel could pass.
Katherine decides to make her pitch:
"My proposal should, if successful, allow a more probable training sequence that helps to counter more memetic entities and cognitive hazards, allowing more researchers to get access to currently unavailable skips and materials. And it would also…"
She smiles and says
"…require less amnestic. Much, much less amnestic. I mean, you of all people would know where all though amnestics come from."
"Show me." The O5 said.
Opening a document folder, Katherine flips through all the introductions and concepts and background knowledge, and she places a specific page in front of the man.
"You want to use mnestic to train people again memes? That is the most ridiculous idea this Foundation has ever had."
"And the most ridiculous idea I has ever proposed."
The Council member spends few seconds analyzing risk and benefits, cross-referencing thousands of lab reports for anywhere close to an estimated success chance, considering how the Ethnic Committee would react to that much D-class, estimating the respond of the other Council member - or lack thereof.
"Funding and timeline before 0900 tomorrow, Doctor. You are excused."
"It will be on your table by 7, sir."
As Katherine is about to close the door, the man called after her:
"One moment, Doctor."
She frowned. Did he find an error? Did he change his mind? Did some bad antimeme put the wool over his eye? Did he remember to reprimand her for all the crude languages?
"Yes, sir?"
He smirks:
"Whose boobs were those?"
Basic ideas
Meme: unit of information, concept, idea
Memetic: pertain to information, concept, idea
Information: a sentient concept.
An painting is physically a group of materials with different reflective properties, fixed in space in a pattern.
A sound is just a series of changes in atmospheric pressure obeying physical laws and equations.
A text is just a collection of high contrast distinctive geometrical shapes.
The mind perceives these patterns, compares them to memories, associate them with experiences, and gives them meaning.
Memetic / Antimemetic entities: only affect the minds
Deal with memetic hazard is only achievable by dealing with the sentient minds
Proposal: Fortify the mind. Establish a specific baseline threshold. Install how the mind works, how it processes information, how it deals with what could cause harm.
(Sequel?: An agent went through training, fighting some kind of bad meme / antimeme, using the baseline norm and logic set in stone for him using mnestic to contradict the illogical anomalous effects / OR using baseline set-in-stone memories of object/person/place to fight antimeme effect
Agent take mnestic while being reminded to recall everything about his daughter. Later presented with a memetic cog hazard, tricking his brain to tell his body to solidify his skin - basically rapid FOP. The agent recalls his daughter's body temperature, soft and smooth skin, golden flowing hair, laugh, voice, dance, etc. and is able to fight again the cog hazard's petrifying effect.)
Plot:
Explain (to O5 / director?) how memetic entity works
Explain how memetic entity cannot affect reality directly
Proposal for new counter-memetic measures: use mnestic
O5: focused on work, sarcastic
Kat: weird-ish researcher, sometimes step out of line (sexual / moral?)
diag: reporting, some banter?
Problem: o5 guy tone inconsistent af. Maybe 2 guys: 1 stern and ask for proofs and shits, 1 more playful and banter. Break general O5 character profile?
Too much expositional?
Per 
