There Is No Antimemetics Division

by qntm

"There are ideas which cannot be spread. There are entities and phenomena which harvest and consume information, particularly information about themselves. You take a Polaroid photo of one, it'll never develop. You write a description down with a pen on paper and hand it to someone— but what you've written turns out to be hieroglyphs, and nobody can understand them, not even you.

"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.

Now that she knows it's there, she can feel it like cosmic radiation, boring holes in the world with its thousands of manifestations and freely laying waste to anybody who recognises the larger pattern.

She looks into Paul Kim's eye, but it isn't his eye anymore. She squints, wondering if she's making eye contact with anything but a hole in space.

Noise, Hughes always held, is a symptom of imperfect engineering.

"Ideas can be killed," she says, stepping into the airlock. "How?" "With better ideas."

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

On reflection, he doesn't know if it proves anything. It's not clear whether the Sun or the Moon still exist, or any celestial object at all other than the red-black eye socket at the horizon. The eye never moves. It casts long, threatening shadows, while being bright enough to blind Wheeler whenever he has to walk in that approximate direction, which is about half the time.