I'm a researcher at Biosite 66. I've never been part of the most important stuff. I've never

been one of the big shots. L. I don't know what the most important stuff is. It's not my

clearance to know. But that's a comfort, not a curse. I have gotten the faintest inklings that

it's better not to know. We die in the dark so you can live in the light up stuff.

Well, I like to die in the dark, with at least a flashlight in hand, so to speak.

So that's why it doesn't bother me when I get assigned to the small stuff.

It's what I'm good at.

The pay is amazing, and I get a fair bit of downtime too.

I was between things when they assigned me to skip 13. I always

expected the lower numbers to be more important, so when the errand boy slid the little

pack of cigarettes and its associated paperwork onto my desk, I got a little nervous. But when I

read it over, my concerns were eased slightly. They were straightforward little things.

I played with one or two in my hands and looked them over.

Apparently, all they did was make the smoker start to think of themselves as a woman.

Not just any woman, but a blue woman.

With blue hair, blue lipstick, blue dress, the whole shebang.

A simple perception affecting anomaly. Hell, it was basically a more specific psychedelic, harmless, suspiciously so. You get a healthy

helping of paranoia working at the foundation, no matter how close to the bottom you are. I wondered

what the hell my task would be with these silly little cigarettes. I looked over the attached memo to find my answer.

When I finished reading it, I laughed out loud.

They wanted me to smoke them.

It was an obvious answer.

...