There Is No Antimemetics Division

by qntm

Passive black holes of information, active predatory infovores, unrememberable worms which covered the human skin like dust mites... contagious bad news, self-sealing secrets, living murders, Chinatowns.

"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.

Asynchronous research — whereby the research topic is forgotten entirely between iterations, and rediscovered over and over — is a perfectly standard practice in the Antimemetics Division, and her people ought to be better trained than this. There should be an obvious single document to read first which makes sense of the rest. A primer—

"You will feel this for the rest of your life. Every day, you will wake up with a sick cold feeling in your stomach where there used to be a real life. And you'll wonder why."

There is an appallingly large percentage of the world which no human has ever properly looked at. This is unbearably limiting to all forms of antimemetic research. Antimemetic biology, antimemetic paleontology, antimemetic cosmology, antimemetic archaeology... These disciplines, all of them, barely exist. They are nowhere.

She feels it, now. She knows in her bones that she is irreal; an animate memory; an ideal, an abstract. When she started to exist a few moments ago she was mostly realistic, but she can feel flaws and complexity being stripped away from her. She can see the shape of the idea complex