There Is No Antimemetics Division Quotes

“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.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“Ideas can be killed," she says, stepping into the airlock.

"How?"

"With better ideas.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“we can't even write the reason why we can't write it down down,”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is not you first day.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“If something can cross over from conceptual space into reality, taking physical form, then something can cross in the opposite direction. It must be possible to take a physical entity, mechanically extract the idea which it embodies, amplify that idea and broadcast it up into conceptual space. A bigger idea. A better idea, one designed specifically to fight SCP-3125. An ideal. A movement. A hero.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“If you know it exists, it knows you exist. The more you know about it, the more it knows about you. If you can see it, it can see you. And you can see it. You've been looking right at it all afternoon.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“There is no worse case scenario than what's happening now. There's no race against time; there's no ticking clock; there's no last second, the last second was years ago. There's nothing to avert. This is it, the final game position, the highest and most refined form of human civilisation. This is the shape of the next million years.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“You convinced us that this had to be done. And that you had to be at the center. You were prepared to make the sacrifice." He opens the document to a page in the back. The eyeball of his germ roves the page rapidly and finds the passage he wants. "Allow me to quote your own words to you: '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—”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“None of this happened, Paul," she says. "You and I never existed. There is no Antimemetics Division.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“You know what I hate most about you, Marion? You're consistently, eternally wrong… and yet you're still alive. All those lost battles, every year of that entire lost war, but somehow you always cobble together enough dumb luck to walk away unscathed. The eternal sole survivor. You don't deserve that kind of luck. Nobody does.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“We don't have an Antimemetics Division," Clay says.

"Yes, you do. We do."

O5-8 says, "We have a Memetics Division, a Telekontainment Division, Fire Services, Ops-A, Ops-B, Personnel, D-personnel and two dozen others. We don't have an Antimemetics Division."

"Do we have an Irony Division?" Marion asks. She hesitates hopefully. "No? Alright. Well, try this: why do you think the Antimemetics Division would show up in the listing?”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“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.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“Ideas can be killed," she says, stepping into the airlock. "How?" "With better ideas.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“SCP-3125 is adapted for survival in an ideatic ecology considerably more violent and hostile than our own. (Here, "our own" refers to human head space: the set of all ideas which humans have or are biologically capable of having.) Because humans have no natural exposure to ideas as aggressive as SCP-3125, human minds have no protective evolutionary adaptations against it. Individuals possessed of SCP-3125 become incapable of entertaining weaker, "conventional" ideas, and become instead wholly bodily subordinate to the purpose of serving and disseminating the core concepts of SCP-3125. In addition, although undergoing no outwardly visible physical alteration, they cease to be externally recognisable as human.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“Class-Z mnestics are the last word in biochemical memory fortification. Class-Z mnestics permanently destroy the subject's ability to forget. The result is perfect eidetic memory and perfect immunity to arbitrarily strong antimemetic interference.

The dose is taking effect now. Wheeler didn't read the book because she already knew every word of it. She knows everything that's about to happen to her. She can already feel her mind hardening, like steel, and the developing symptoms of extreme sensory overload.

She can see everything.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“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.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“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.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“The light collapses. The figure smashes into focus, becoming physical. It's a real human. A skinny twenty-something: scruffy, uncut hair and a sketchy beard. He is shirtless, and there is a deep, black pit in his clavicle, a hole where he has clearly been very badly wounded. Blood has run down his chest, soaked his jeans and forearms, and dried black. Fresh blood is still coming, building up thick layers, which shouldn't be possible. Wheeler doesn't spot the second hole in his gut, obscured by too much blood.

Wheeler is trying to keep his expression neutral, but he knows it isn't working. He can feel his left hand, his bad hand, starting to shake. A part of him still wants to ask the guy why. But there is no possible answer.

"This is what the human race really is," the man explains, spreading his hands to gesture at the whole world. "We lied to ourselves that we could be better, for thousands of years. But this is it. This is what we've always been. We've never been anything else.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“When that happens, when you make 'eye contact', it kills you. It kills you and it kills anybody who thinks like you. Physical distance doesn't matter, it's about mental proximity. Anybody with the same ideas, anybody in the same head space. It kills your collaborators, your whole research team. It kills your parents; it kills your children. You become absent humans, human-shaped shells surrounding holes in reality. And when it's done, your project is a hole in the ground, and nobody knows what SCP-3125 is anymore. It is a black hole in antimemetic science, consuming unwary researchers and yielding no information, only detectable through indirect observation. A true description of what SCP-3125 is, or even an allusion to what it is, constitutes a containment breach and a lethal indirect cognitohazard.

Do you see? It's a defense mechanism. This information-swallowing behaviour is just the outer layer, the poison coating. It protects the entity from discovery while it infests our reality.

And as years pass, the manifestations will continue, growing denser and knitting together… until the whole world is drowning in them, and everybody will be screaming 'Why did nobody realise what was happening?' And nobody will answer, because everybody who realised was killed, by this system…

Do you see it, Marion? See it now.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“Ideas don't die.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“You spoke four languages," Grey tells him. "One now, and soon zero. Too huge an intellect to specialise, your education was a fusion of biochemistry and comparative literature. You felt as if you'd die if you couldn't find more foreign thoughts to cram into your head. You've been all over the world, hungry, and every country you've ever been to was like landing on another planet. You toy with anthropology, but there's too much world for one human race to ever understand, let alone one human. There's too much human race. We should pare it down.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“We're the last ones in the world. After us, there's nobody.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“But an idea can end a world. An idea is alive. It can mutate”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division: A Novel

“It’s not of reality, not of humanity. It is from a higher, worse place, and it is descending.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“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,”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“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.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“second;”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“That's a lie. That's what you are. You're the lie.”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division

“And he ruined the world And now you have to live in Hell”
― qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division