There Is No Antimemetics Division

by qntm

"We weren't Foundation at first," he says. "The first Antimemetics Division was a U.S. Army project. It ran parallel with Manhattan during World War II. We called ourselves the Unthinkables. "It began as an experiment in advanced propaganda. The objective was to cut through the physical conflict and find a way to rupture the ideological machine, to obliterate the idea of Nazism. After two years, enough theory had been developed that the task had been reduced to an engineering problem. Another two years, and the engineering problem had been reduced as well, and what we had built was a very special kind of bomb. "Unfortunately, we didn't understand what we'd built. Back then, we didn't have the mnestics or the shielding that we could use to protect ourselves. We didn't understand how far ahead you need to think when you're working with this kind of technology. "We got looped. It was textbook. We built the unthinkable bomb and test-detonated it... and it worked perfectly. The bomb destroyed itself, and erased its own successful detonation, and flattened all the knowledge which had gone together to build it. We forgot that we had ever built the bomb at all, and started over. "To our credit, we realised pretty quickly what must have happened. There was a four-year gap in our progress now, and there was no other way to explain it. But by the time we put the pieces together the second time, the war was almost over. The Nazis had been defeated by conventional means, and the Japane...

The worms are among the most widespread and successful antimemetically cloaked organisms in the world. They are everywhere, in every biome, in every room.

"None of this happened, Paul," she says. "You and I never existed. There is no Antimemetics Division."

There is an appallingly large percentage of the world which no human has ever properly looked at.

He's found his way into Heaven, and he's ruining it Like the Earth

"Our mission statement is 'Secure, contain, protect'. Somewhere down the line we really should look into adding 'and keep as many human beings alive as possible' to that." "It's implicit that humanity is what we protect," Graves says. "Secure the anomalies, contain the anomalies, protect the anomalies. How does it scan otherwise?"

It appears that those who know Hughes' fate meet it.

"Aeloni zaenorae. Fire."

"But if we have learned nothing else, we have learned this: humans can walk away from, and forget, anything. Civilization can go back to 'normal' after anything."