There Is No Antimemetics Division

by qntm

You have between 15 minutes and 2 hours to reach Site 41, basement level 8, laboratory 053, familiarise yourself with the existing research, and continue this research until you find a way to contain or decommission SCP-4739, or, more likely, die. If your field of expertise is not related to antimemetic containment, we sincerely apologise, and advise you to start learning. Fast.

Congratulations on demonstrating a basic level of competence when it counted.

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.

"We'll raid inventory. Give me fifteen minutes and I'll turn you into a one-woman war."

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.

Impossibly virulent cults, broken arithmetic, invisible spiders as tall as skyscrapers, people born with extra organs which nobody can see.

"There's no war. We've lost the war. It's over. This is the mopping-up operation.

But how do we build that machine without any of us realising what it's for? It would be like building and launching Apollo 11 without a single engineer deducing that the Moon existed.

The Antimemetics Division operatives she meets in the corridors are all broken; some of them curled up and raving while their minds evaporate and they die one memory at a time, some infected with a collection of ideas which compel them to shout guttural phrases in strange languages, and to procure blades — never guns — and work on those demented victims, and each other, and themselves.

In one corner of the freight elevator there is even a half-corpse, unidentifiable, so many layers removed from reality that not even flies can smell it, its cells winking out of existence asymptotically over the course of years.

The human sensorium routinely generates huge amounts of data and the human brain is adapted to discard almost all of that data nearly immediately. Altering the brain's behaviour to retain that data is extremely dangerous even for very short time spans.

All those lost battles, every year of that entire lost war, but somehow you always cobble together enough dumb luck to walk away unscathed.

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

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.

SCP-3125 could be effectively neutralized using a machine proposed by the late Dr. Bartholomew Hughes called an irreality amplifier (see schematics, attachment 129). However, as well as requiring tremendous material resources, this machine could not be constructed without its builders understanding why it was being built, which would require an understanding of SCP-3125, which would prove fatal to the project.

S041-B30-000 was originally constructed to house a long-term project to construct Hughes' irreality amplifier. While that's been going on, the rest of us have been fighting an unconscious war in order to buy time. We have been losing, but losing as slowly as humanly possible.

There's an attic, but access is out there on the landing and, again, can't be operated silently. There's no alternate route to ground level other than jumping from the window, and someone has to be covering it. Even if she landed in the bushes alive, she'd still have to break the perimeter with a sprained ankle.

A better question than "Who?" is "How many?" She may already be straight-up dead, simply due to numbers.

she figures she can Home Alone her way through perhaps eight of them befo...

"I'm going to win this war," Wheeler says to him. "I'll beat the universe. And then I will come and find out why."

There's another conglomeration of severed fingers in the last room, coating the room's interior like the innards of an exploded elephant.

At the far end of the corridor, the main mass heaves itself around the corner. From this distance, it looks like an ambulatory eight-tonne pile of mouldy mashed potato and fat, wiggling maggots. There are toes in there as well as fingers, and small teeth, and bits of bone.

Behind them, something reached out and gently pushed the door closed with a click. They turned, and saw what it was, and ran.

She stares up into the rain, reflecting on the atmosphere that the stone, or sculpture as she supposes it would be better described, projects. Loneliness, quiet, desolation, awe... intimidation. And some fear. Although, with that intimidating, fearful atmosphere, there's no sensation of danger. No threat. "'We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture,'" she says aloud.

It perturbs him, from time to time, that he seems to exist in a kind of long shadow, cast by a vast class of thoughts which he is unable to think.

The mirror above the sink has been sloppily painted over with a tall, black, dripping rectangle. It's giving off heat; staring at it is like staring into an open oven. And he can hear a dull, grumbling, mechanical kind of noise coming from behind it. Like distant, muffled woodchippers.

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beautiful things, and smash them or cover them with filth. Find delightful people and disfigure

She was as much of a failure as everybody else in the Division, with only the uninteresting distinction of being the last of the failures.

The world can only end one way, it seemed to be declaring, gouging its statement into the flesh of reality. My world. My way.

It was about little more than survival now. It was about figuring out terms on which to face death.

It was difficult to know what was happening inside of the structures. Some of the millions were dying in there. Some weren't. Ulrich didn't look. They found out the ugly way that it was dangerous to look closely.

Recent developments on the latest-generation family of biochemical mnestics, Class Z, seem likely to produce a substance which renders all after-the-fact memory erasure techniques irrelevant. The only amnestic defence against Class Z will be decapitation.

Hughes stares darkly at his paper. "We could exterminate all intelligent human life," he says. "If there are no sapient hosts in this universe, SCP-3125 can't incarnate."

"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."

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'd need to design and build the box while already inside the box he was building. He would need to box the universe. He looks around the room's walls. They seem to be holding up.

The rumor was that Abrahamic religions had not always been monotheistic. Originally, there were three capital-G Gods. And sometime in the past hundred and fifty years, the Foundation had killed two of them.

'SCP-3125 represents an omniversal-scale threat. It threatens neighbouring realities to ours. It threatens microverses within our macroverse. It threatens universes which embed ours as fiction—'"

He feels like an ant, crawling across the face of a rough-hewn monolith, crawling into and out of the runes chiselled into the face of that monolith, runes which form an unstoppable, apocalyptic mythology.

We form these plans, and something unexpected happens, and the plans go out the window. And, under great pressure, we are forced to demonstrate creativity."

"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."

"What happened to those people? My people. Where are they? No one is just dead, no one is merely, passively dead. Death is caused."