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All of these facts are periodically rediscovered, usually by chance readers of this file, causing a great deal of alarm. This state of concern lasts minutes at most, before the matter is simply forgotten about.
"There are SCPs with antimemetic properties," Marion goes on. "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. You can look directly at one and it won't even be invisible, but you'll still perceive nothing there. Dreams you can't hold onto and secrets you can never
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"Which makes them a threat. That's all there is to it, really. Antimemes are dangerous, and we don't understand them; therefore, they are part of the Problem. Hence my division. We can do the sideways thinking that's needed to combat something which can literally eat your combat training."
"There is an invisible monster which follows me around and likes to eat my memories," Marion explains, patiently. "SCP-4987. Don't look it up, it's not there. I've learned to manage with it. It's like a demanding pet. I produce tasty memories on purpose so it doesn't eat something important, like my passwords or how to make coffee."
What if I've met this thing before? What if everybody on the site has met it multiple times... and... nobody remembers? Is this what an antimeme is?
"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.
Don't you get it? The whole division is looped! We start the division, we run headlong into this thing, and either it eats us, or we wipe ourselves out in self-preservation. The idea of antimemes is as old as forgetfulness itself. Humans have been looping through this problem over and over again since long before the Forties. Maybe for centuries!"
"In fact, this is the only room in the world where SCP-3125 is not present. It's called 'inverted containment'. SCP-3125 pervades all of reality except for volumes which have been specifically shielded from its influence. This is it. This is our only safe harbor. This room represents the length and breadth of the war.
She feels dwarfed by it. She's encountered terrible, powerful ideas before, at every level of memeticity, and subdued them or even recruited them, but what she's picturing now is on another order of magnitude from what she knew to be possible. 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. It's not of reality, not of humanity. It is from a higher, worse place, and it is descending.
"How do you fight an enemy without ever discovering it exists?" the Wheeler in the video asks. "How do you win without even realising you're at war? What do we do?
"SCP-3125 is a five-dimensional anomalous metastasized mass of bad memes and bad antimemes and everything in between, seeping through to our physical reality. It isn't coherent and it isn't intelligent. It can't communicate. This is an auditory hallucination."
"Ideas can be killed," she says, stepping into the airlock. "How?" "With better ideas."
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SCP-3125 is not yet entirely present in our reality. Upon its arrival, the highly interconnected nature of human knowledge exchange systems means that it will take no longer than twelve hours, possibly as few as four hours, to encompass, dominate and replace all human thought. At this point, "humanity" as an abstract concept, along with all attendant abstracts such as "civilization", "culture", "society", "community" and "family" will have ceased to exist. The Foundation terms such an eventuality an MK-class end-of-world scenario.
"I work for an independent scientific research institution with a specialist focus on the containment of hazardous anomalous phenomena. We have an international mandate and formidable resources and... unimaginable responsibilities. We... we watch the blizzard. And we guard the little fire. We're called the Foundation."
"We think an idea stole into their culture which they did not have adaptations to defend against. A complex of ideas. A Memeplectic/Keter-class end-of-world scenario."
The dread idea is beating on the door of his mind, demanding to be let in. It's wrong, the shape of it is awful and it's too big and slick with poison and he knows if he lets it in it'll swamp everything he is, filling his home up with sludge and broken glass. It wants to drown him in it and he knows it'll replace everything he is with itself.
He wishes he didn't get it. His fear comes from a completely different place from most people's. The sheer alien scale of the adversary is enough to intimidate most into petrified submission. From a cursory read, SCP-3125 looks like a nightmare scenario; it's going to turn human civilisation into something beyond Hughes' ability to imagine. But that's every Monday in this job, and in any case Hughes doesn't have much of an imagination. He is intimately familiar with almost the entire SCP database, and he's
She looks "up", at the unimaginably gigantic memeplex which she has to kill. Inside its maw, human existence, all humans and all things humans have ever done, said, thought or been, are burning alive. SCP-3125 is, in large part, the lie that SCP-3125 is inevitable, and indestructible.
