Well, right off the bat, it suffers from some Aerith and Bob. You have one really unusual name almost immediately followed by a more common one. It's slightly jarring.
Alex and Trebek—names Salvia gave them since they never told him their real ones—went right for Jason. With the practiced ease of professional bouncers and orderlies they pinned Jason down, bound his hands in plastic zip-wire and hauled him out while Jason screamed at the top of his lungs. A moment later Trebek gorilla’ed his way back into the room.
Later, you clear up that these guys are site security, but you might want to make that clearer here. Mentioning that they might be orderlies, but having them act like thugs is unnecessarily confusing. Also, if these two guys are assigned to this level and this section, I can't imagine them not having given their names. That's what lit-noir mafia thugs do, not professional security personnel working for a highly secretive and regimented organization. Sure, Salvia probably calls them Alex and Trebek in his head, but explicitly stating that it's because he doesn't know their real names is a bit immersion breaking.
“This aggression will not stand, man.”
While I appreciate the callout to The Big Lebowski, others might not be as forgiving.
Johanson was a stout woman with thin brunette hair that she dyed at least once a month to hide the grey. She was wearing a lab coat over a plain brown blouse and slacks.
You've given us an inordinate amount of detail that hasn't been given to any other character so far, not even our POV character. Kinda jumps out and screams 'pay attention to this person' even if she doesn't become important.
monthly Playboy Playmates
Unless this is set pre-1980's, which there's no indication it's not set modern day, no professional organization in the world would allow this, let alone the Foundation. That's the kind of thing you'd find in a garage run by Click and Clack, the Tappitt brothers, not a psychiatric professional's office.
He swept his hands over the desk and found a white pack of cigarettes. “Foundation’s Finest” was written on one side.
And again, another jarring anachronism. The movie titles you use earlier indicate at least post-2000. Most first-world nations have banned indoor smoking since the late 80s. I can't imagine the Foundation to be any different. Especially in an underground area where the air has to be piped in to start with.
I point out these last two items largely because they are completely immersion-breaking. You've not given any indication that this is anything other than the modern world, set ten minutes ago, so to find trappings of eras long, long with no justification for them past pushes willing suspension of disbelief right off the window ledge. There's no problem with their inclusion, but you have to give hints earlier on that we're not dealing with the current modern age to do so.
[ruminations on the ethics of amnestics]
This is good. Keep and expand on it a bit, though maybe ditch the A Clockwork Orange reference, unless dropping movie titles through the story is part of the hook, which it doesn't seem to be.
gripping nine millimeters in
This is largely a stylistic quibble, since your point comes across, but it might be better to say "nine-millimeter handguns" instead, just to avoid any potential confusion. "Nine millimeters of what?"
But this was the Foundation. Its business was the extra-natural, and its currency was madness. Pragmatic efficiency was considered the only way to deal with it.
“But what if this is a breach?” Johanson asked. “What if it’s an attack? Those groups we hear about, the Factory, the Church of the Broken God-”
I highlight these two lines because of the incongruity of them. Earlier, you have the POV character acknowledge the reality of the Foundation. That it deals in horrible things that are trying to kill you. Yet a few paragraphs later, you have someone who works at the Foundation (and presumably isn't their first day) having no idea what to do in the event of a security situation. Even the lowest level personnel is going to have drilled into them from day one that security is Serious Business. When the alarms go off, virtually everyone should already know what to do, even if that's just barricade yourself in an office and wait until the alarms stop. Having Johanson standing in the hallway idly wondering about what's going on is either needless exposition (as you'll tell us later, anyway) or she's holding the idiot ball. Again, these are professionals. Even if they don't deal with the anomalous, they are knowingly employed by the Foundation, they should have an idea of what to do when the alarms go off.
Salvia was stricken by the resemblance the man had to Peter Dinklage.
"…had to the actor, Peter Dinklage." Alternately, lose the name drop entirely and actually describe the man and then allude that he resembles a famous actor. If it's important enough to point out, it's important enough to paint a good picture of. Not everyone reading this is going to know off the top of their heads who Peter Dinklage is.
And now Salvia picks up the idiot ball and runs with it. So, we're in a highly-secured facility, an alarm has just gone off, gunfire has been heard and a strange little man pops up unannounced at your door and asks for a chat? Either Salvia is a moron or the little man has some sort of memetic effect attached to him to keep Salvia from immediately calling security. It would be reasonable for him to not call security if he was already under a ton of stress and trying to manage several other emergencies at once, but he's just mildly distracted, looking for his lighter. I would have to think that the strange little man would take precedence. I mean, I know what it's like to really, really, really need a fucking smoke, but some things take priority.
Salvia blinked at him. “Are you a wizard?”
The Gentleman winked. “Yer a wizard, Harry.”
Again, Salvia seems to be carrying the idiot ball. He knows the kinds of things the Foundation has locked up, a key that opens any long should not be all that surprising to him. Perhaps surprised that the strange little man as an anomalous object, but not about the object itself. Also, the pop culture reference, while amusing, is vastly incongruous coming from the character and pretty much unnecessary.
[unnecessary GoI name-dropping]
The conversation just after they pop out of the closet. It stretches the bounds of credulity pretty much to the breaking point. So, we have a psychotherapist who knows enough to be able to name several Groups of Interest, yet seems to be just picking them at random from a bag. This is a man who is a professional problem solver. Finding esoteric links from A to B is what he does. He obviously knows about the various GoIs, but can't piece things together enough to figure out the guy he's with is from MC&D? Or even if not figuring that part out, at least eliminating the other groups he mentions by name? Unfortunately, I'm not buying it.
not the sharply-dressed Luciferan power-brokers Salvia had come to equate with the rumors he’d been told.
No, that's the guy he's walking around, chatting and smoking with. At some point, one would think he'd twig to the fact that he's just going along here and maybe that's not normal. Maybe that's in his character to just go with the flow, but at some point he has to consider the ridiculousness of what he's doing.
[bit about the seizure]
This really doesn't add anything or tell us anything about Salvia we don't already know and the later exposition doesn't build up the story any further.
My brain is blowing its rape whistle, man!
Finally, some self-awareness from Salvia.
Wolfram and Hart
Cute Angel reference, but with the pop culture pile-up that's already forming it just jams one more log in. Also, while being reluctant to jump out of a window is perfectly reasonable, Salvia seems to have chosen an odd place and time to reach a weirdness threshold and dig his heels in.
682 was written on the side
Aaaaaand you lost me. These days, using 682 for, well, pretty much anything just stinks of being a cheap ploy to get upvotes. If you must include another scip, pick something newer, something more interesting. 682 has been done to death.
[…and all the rest]
I admit, I pretty much checked out after 682 as gatekeeper, but I did finish reading for the sake of completion and my final summation is: meh. As a tale, its competently written, there's no massively glaring errors that are table-flipping, rage-quitting bad, but it just doesn't…stick. In the end, they all get eight deadly worded. I just don't care about any of them. The only characters who are at all sympathetic are Jason and Johanson and they're trivial to the story. Salvia is a caricature of the The Dude and Bartleby scans more like some of the earlier incarnations of The Doctor. The other two Gentlemen introduced at the end are completely out of the blue and serve only to act as an echo chamber for Bartleby to toss off his one-liner.
