Book Club: There is No Antimemetics Division Part 2

Book Club Episode 2 - Covers There is No Antimemetics Division Chapters Part 2 (Chapter 1-4 of this section) - Spoiler warning for these chapters.  We dive deeper into lost memories and their meaning as Marie Quinn explores the entity which must be fought.  With it's relationship to the loss of memories I again discuss Alzheimer's and it's meaning in my own life.  Other media discussed includes Everywhere at the End of Time by The Caretaker, Severance, and some notes on negative space in Dune.  Next time, a lighter jaunt into my special interest in semi-narrative and non-narrative gaming.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello, amazing internet person. I hope this finds you well wherever you are, or whatever circumstances it might come to you in. But I'm glad to have you here for this episode two of my little personal book club. This time for part two, part two, chapters one through four of There Is No Anti-Memetics Division by Quantum, a book that I very much hope that you pick up and read, because this will be very spoiler-filled, and I very much recommend that you pick this up and give it a read. Especially make sure that you can support the author Quantum if you can. If you don't have the money to pick it up, much of it, perhaps in earlier draft forms, uh, but much of it is available through the SCP Foundation where it was first written. So I encourage you either to pick up a copy or to find and check it out there. But it is a delightful read and one which I am excited to keep covering, uh, because it keeps playing with a lot of different concepts in my mind. But let's get right into it. Part two, chapter one, finds us with Marie Quinn and Morgan Ollie, or Ole. Morgan is a new field researcher and is on her first true day with the Anti-Mimetics division. They've come to the site of U9429, an enormous stone oblisk or monolith that stands near the Whaley headquarters and in fact dwarfs it in size and volume. It's an object which, like most of the different unknowns that the Anti-Mimetics division deals with, has a memory suppressing field, a field that once you leave it, causes any memory of it or anything that took place on it to evaporate. Marie is taking Morgan here, though Morgan doesn't fully know at the start of this the purpose why. But this enormous monolith that rises into the sky at least one hundred and forty five meters has a ramp or a staircase carved into it. I believe a ramp is how it's described, but it may be a staircase, I may be misremembering that. Feel free to correct me. But they begin to ascend this monolithic obelisk. As they go up, Marie pulls from her pocket a lighter, a simple butane lighter, but has no true memory of where it came from, though quantum does reveal it was a gift from her mother whose past. A mother that Marie no longer has any memory of. As they ascend this object, Marie does spend some time quizzing Morgan about the nature of it. They notice a pattern of squares imprinted upon it, but don't fully understand what it may represent. Only that this is certainly not a natural object, not something that was carved in place, but something which was brought there by some society of immense and enormous power, something far exceeding anything that we could fully imagine to have moved, such a tremendous object. As they arrive at the top and the light quizzing continues, Morgan does manage to suss out the nature of the object, of the monolith, that it is not simply some giant object brought there by any random circumstance, but that it stands as memorial, a monument to a war, to some prior anti memetics division of some kind from some unknowable society. Marie confirms this, and in fact that her intuition about it marks her as someone extraordinary who may be a true rising star in the division. She reveals that this object is from thousands of years ago, from an anti mimetics war that killed millions of people, and that they are ruins and relics scattered throughout the world from this, usually found much as this object was, by chance, as anti memetics division members on Nestic Drugs have almost randomly encountered them throughout these journeys to other unknowns that they've been tasked to ferret out. And in fact, the anti memetics division does have the unknown that destroyed that society. It is now something considered to be inert, not necessarily because it posed no danger or has expended all of its power, but because it is an idea from a time so long ago, from a society so different from the one that Marie and Morgan belong to, that it's an entirely alien idea that can't be understood and cannot have an impact on their particular minds. And as they discuss this, Morgan does see something, something in the distance. A terrible and enormous kaiju, a pillar made of spiders, and ridden by some human form, a form that has two gunshot wounds. It now being known begins rapidly approaching, begins interrogating Morgan about who she is speaking to on the top of this obelisk. As it finally approaches and reaches them, though Marie can see and interact with none of this, and is wildly asking Morgan for any information so that she might help, while she also scrambles about in her own mind trying to figure out some way to get them help. But unfortunately, there is no help to be had in this situation, and the escapee does, through mere mental contact, kill Morgan. Marie manages to flee, flinging all the way down the monolith, until as she is almost at the end of it, the rider does appear to her, a human rider with two gunshot wounds continuously bleeding, gunshot wounds inflicted by her in the previous scene on the lake, though of course, she has no memory of that either. They have a brief moment of contact. It almost gets Marie in its clutches. However, she does escape over the threshold of this U nine four two nine's enveloping memory suppression field. The memory of the escape entirely vanishes, the memory of Morgan entirely erased both by this simple step as well as by the consumption of her and all memory of her by the escape. It's an interesting chapter which really emphasizes the scale of the threat that they have arrayed against them, something which dwarfs even an object created by a society of unknowable power and proportion, something which can almost disregard an object that large as if it's nothing. And so instead, we leave that chapter and we come to something much smaller and more personal. Chapter two opens at Marie Quinn's home. We come to her being woken from sleep, startled by something coming into the home, soft sounds as she probes her memory for what it could be, and knows only that something has managed to slip past the many layers of security, has triggered no alarm on its arrival. So she triggers her own silent alarm in order to get help on the way and arms herself with the only nearby weapon, a steel knitting needle, and as the steps come closer and as a figure enters her room, she leaps upon him, pinning him to the ground, questioning who he is, demanding to know who he is. It is, of course, in this case, Marie's husband Adam, though it seems that she has entirely forgotten him, but it seems that U forty nine eighty seven, Marie's pet anti memetic parasite, has eaten that memory of her husband, of all memory of her husband, though as he attempts to navigate, letting her know that he is in fact her husband, that he belongs there, and that she hopefully won't murder him with a knitting needle, that they've even nicknamed it, that this parasite bonded to Marie is named Sunshine, nicknamed after the way it appears in the corner of one's eye as it feeds on memory. The emergency teams arrive, they haul poor Adam away, and through an ongoing and continuous interrogation and review of evidence, Jeff Ives, the head of the anti memetics response teams, does confirm that this is Adam, Adam Quinn, Marie's husband, who again she is left with a terrible negative space where he should be. An absolute lack of any memory where someone who has been with her for a very long time used to occupy. She remembers even the entire scenario of hunting down an unknown U eight zero five one, a terrible digitizing finger monster that had overwhelmed and perhaps for a very significant period of time occupied a hospital, eating those that came through. It's on that hunt that she met Adam, and she remembers everything else about that encounter, about that investigation, except for Adam himself, a strange and terribly vacant space within what seems otherwise like a coherent set of memories. We then come back to Adam, poor Adam, somewhat mistreated by all of what's going on around him. We come to him recovering in a humanoid containment vessel. Ah which is, fortunately, a little bit like a nice if somewhat small apartment. But he finds himself there waking up after having passed out from exhaustion throughout the many, many repetitions of interrogation that he was forced to go through. And as he's waking and beginning to explore the area of his confines, Marie does arrive, arrives really to tell him not that they're reuniting, but that it's over, that she, unlike other members of the division, does not have the time or the space to reestablish their relationship. Adam of course challenges this, he's necessarily somewhat upset by this sudden and strange turn of events even though he understands through his decades of life with Marie what it means for people in the division to lose memory at this level. And so he challenges her and in particular brings up that he knew that she was fighting some kind of war, and how could he leave her to do that by herself? And it's that phrase that she was fighting a war that triggers more feeling even as the echoes of memories of their life are starting to come back in some small way. But it's that she was fighting something, something terrible, something that could be considered a war that truly triggers her. She realizes certainly and most deeply that sunshine has been, though some sort of memory parasite, a companion to her for a very long time, something which is, even if others don't fully trust it, something that she considers to be domesticated, and that it's not something that would suddenly turn on her and without some prompting, without being explicitly told or made to do so, eat memories so important to her, so deeply embedded over such a long period of time, it's a creature that feeds mostly upon trivia. So how could it so thoroughly wipe someone so important to her? And she realizes that it's this war. It's this that she is protecting both he and herself from in some way, even if she doesn't fully understand how or why in the moment. And in that moment, she compels sunshine to go much further to erase the memory of her from Adam, to wipe away all of that time in memory, if only to keep him safe from some far worse fate, an act of extremely cold love. She comes out, much to the shock of the other division members who have borne witness to this occurring, with the simple statement, my husband is dead, and he's given a backstory, like a retiree from the division would be given. And so we're left with another terrible negative space perhaps not something as physically large as the monolith from chapter one of part two, but something which certainly represents an object, a set of memories, a person who occupied an equally enormous space in her life. And so we conclude chapter two, a chapter which we'll come back to in more of my reflections and concluding comments, but this is a chapter that had a very deep impact on me, the nature of forgetting people who have been in your life, of losing your own life, of things of such importance fading into a negative space, becoming something definable only by their absence. We'll come back to that. Chapter three brings us to another unknown. We start with Simon Lee, now being encountered nine months after the part one encounter with Adrian Gage, U seven one seven five, the creature that almost ate his memories and destroyed him. Instead we have Simon being intruded upon this time by Marie, this time to visit something very different. She's interrupted him to take a visit to U three one two five. They move through the facility and they make it to the chamber that U three one two five is held in, an Ed Hicks model containment chamber. A truly miraculous design, air gapped from everything else. In the notes is really only a statement that no coherent information about the unknown is allowed to ever leave this containment. Again, it is fully and truly air gapped from the rest of reality. The airlock that it's accessed through is flooded with amnesic drugs for a full three minutes any time someone leaves the chamber to ensure that absolutely no thought or memory of it can be carried back through, and with strict instructions as part of the protocol to have the second person helping with the visitation ensure that no documentation of any kind arrives on the other side of that airlock. This visitation is going to be done by Marie herself, and as she approaches the door to the airlock, finds that it requires really, perhaps only her level of access, or that at least of the very few people remaining in the Anti Memetics division, only she at present has the level of access to visit this chamber. And as she goes through, as she goes through the airlock and enters the chamber, it is a space entirely covered in notes, in writings and scribbles upon the walls and diagrams on the walls, documents spread everywhere, taped to the walls, spread about the floor, only a table sitting at the center, with a nest of computers and laptops from many different times, all connected in a rat's nest around it. And as she begins to try and think through what she's seeing, a recording begins. A recording from herself, from some earlier Marie who's visited this space. In it she, as I've somewhat stated here just a moment earlier, reveals to herself that this is truly a space separated from the rest of reality, a negative space unconnected from any other mind or presence outside of it. It is the one and only place that is safe from the escape, completely disconnected from any other possible knowledge of it. We find out that the escape is truly something different, an extra planar entity, a five dimensional being, which has been slowly, though now perhaps more and more swiftly, eating all of human reality. That, for the most part, what's encountered of it is almost just the outline of its hull, of its being. That simply knowing of it triggers the defense mechanisms of the creature that entirely destroy anything that comes to have knowledge of it. Building and continuously destroying, building a greater and greater negative space, a term that I keep coming back to on purpose. Building something which is absent, creating something which has been destroyed. It's an utterly fascinating concept to me. It is dealing with something of such enormity, of such power that it is tantalizingly just beyond our ability to imagine. It is a being which has eaten the division from four thousand members to near or somewhere less than ninety when the recording that she's hearing through was made. The Marie of the Present is witnessing a Marie of the Past who is entirely defeated. Who sees herself as having already lost the war around her? A Marie who at that point still remembers Adam can only think of defending him. The current Marie doesn't even have a staff of somewhere near ninety left. She has a staff of only thirty eight left, but perhaps protected in some way even by the loss of Adam, can't understand how defeated this Marie of the past truly is. She realizes that even now, seeing herself only a few days, weeks or months past, has to fight, must remember how to fight, must find some way to defeat this terrible extra planar creature, and realizes even though all hope seemed lost even to her, there must be something, there must be some way that the division has prepared itself for this moment, and so decides that she must evade the mechanism to erase her memory. And so she goes to exit the Ed Hicks chamber, holding her breath for as long as she possibly can, passing out in the process, but managing to come out, knowing something of what she must do. She encounters Simon, who she begins to tell she has to remember that she has to fight this thing, she has to win this war. And though he's disturbed by it and genuinely attempting to push her back to ensure that the containment protocol is followed, that even this hint of knowledge from the chamber is powerful enough to drag the escapee immediately there to unfortunately result almost instantaneously in the loss of Simon, perhaps not exactly in his death, but in the repurposing of him into a weapon for the escapee. And he turns on Marie, tries to kill her with a knife. Fortunately, of course, for the narrative, she does escape and manages to flee. And she knows that she has to get to whatever weapon must lay somewhere within this last refuge of the division. And that is where we end chapter three. And we come to the last full chapter of this part, uh, that's not, to my knowledge, sort of interlude material. Another SCP file and another narrative case do come after this final chapter, but chapter four, your last first day is the conclusion of this narrative segment. Where we start is with Marie in an elevator, clutching a ray gun, U7381, an ornate and very tubular weapon. A weapon that was claimed to have been summoned rather than built, which is a wonderful touch and an SCP file I certainly need to track down and read in its full detail. As we come to Marie in this elevator, though, we are in catastrophic circumstances. The building is being destroyed, the people all around her are being at varying levels, unmade, torn apart from the memories down. Even her memories are very swiftly eroding. As far as she knows, this is her first day, and she should definitely, definitely not have to deal with any of this. And as she is going through these uncomprehending motions of wondering why she even has to deal with this, she realizes she has to have much more memory than anyone on their first day would, much more experience than that initial feeling or last set of memories that have clung on really positive her. And it's in these moments as she's thinking through if she has to know more, what can she do to get more, what can she do to get herself back into the fight, she realizes she has already taken those steps. She has taken a heroic dose of a perfect edetic memory drug, a substance of incredible danger, a truly full edetic memory drug, something that does not allow any memory to be lost, does not allow any sensation to pass through the mind without becoming lodged within it. And so everything immediately begins clicking back into place, even if entirely overwhelmingly. But she remembers the plan that she has to get to another secret chamber within the facility, something that must be like that chamber labeled U thirty one twenty-five, something similarly air gapped away, a place where as she flees to it, flees to basement level thirty, she hopes that she will encounter the creator of these chambers, Ed Hicks, a man who, in the chapter before, though I I glossed over it there, has been believed to be dead, dead for at least ten years. And what Marie hopes is that instead of dead, he's been hidden away, having faked his own death so that he could continue the project to win the war entirely in secret, because it would have to be entirely in secret. It would have to be done only by those entirely isolated from any other help or knowledge in order to keep the escapee from immediately destroying the project itself. And so she does get to basement level thirty. She is then immediately presented by a much larger Ed Hicks containment chamber, and as she desperately accesses it, she opens that chamber and finds no Ed Hicks. No super weapon that she had hoped to find. She finds something that is almost entirely empty, except for what appears to be one massively powerful, if somewhat diminutive, anti-mimetic bomb. And as memories and sensations begin to overwhelm her, and in fact for some period of time do fully overwhelm her, the escapee has begun sending staff down that same elevator. First Simon Lee, who does have enough access to open the chamber, and who uses the amazing ray gun to breach containment so that further people can be admitted into the chamber so that it can be connected, the air gap broken to the escapee. And it's in these closing moments as these repurposed staff begin to descend upon to mutilate her, that we do know that Marie has activated the bomb, that the bomb goes off, and that all of Marie, all of her memory, any memory of her, any memory of this anti-mimetics division is entirely destroyed and wiped away. At least to our knowledge, at least to where I have made it in this extraordinary story. It feels like we have probably lost the wonderful character of Maria Quinn. But I'm excited to see if she does come out the other side, if there's any chance that we may get to continue her narrative in some form or another. But at least at this point it does seem like she, all of her work, and everyone she's ever known are lost. And that brings us to the thoughts and feelings and other media that I was reminded of while making it through this journey of part two of the book. I think what I've alluded to throughout this discussion, ah, in the negative spaces formed through this elimination of memory in the different characters, is that what comes to me, what I mentioned in the reading of part one, is that a thing that I wrestle with from within my own family is Alzheimer's disease. It is the eating away of one's own self and memory. And it is their investigation and probing of these negative spaces in memory that really hits deep into my heart that they keep probing at this even as the negative space in their own organization continues to grow, continues to become the one and only most overwhelming fact of all that they do is that the harder they try, the more they seem to be missing. In the first chapter, Marie's lighter, from her mother who she cannot even remember, that to her this is now just an object that she has some echo of a memory of, knows that it has some importance, but not what, not why. Then the loss of her husband, done purposefully to protect him, to protect her from the loss of him. The memory that this dredged up in me uh was from my grandmother going through Alzheimer's. I had the experience of with my mother taking our grandmother, her mother, to the grave of her own husband. Now he had passed long enough ago in the past that she did remember his passing, remembered that he was gone, though really only vaguely, only kind of as an echo of memories of knowing that she had been married, but not still possessing by that point that we were at, that much concrete memory of any of those events in her life. Only that she did have some of it, but vaguely, in a very veiled way. And that was very difficult to know that you were guiding someone through their own life, most of which has been eaten away. Again, it is of all things in my life, the thing that I fear the most, the way I most fear going, and that I have to maintain that fear of because it is ah. Because Alzheimer's, to some degree, does perhaps strike randomly, but it is known to be a genetic disorder with several different possible sources, and so it's something that I maintain vigilance about, that I worry about with some frequency, even though it's probably very distant from being something I have to have active concern about. But yet it's there, a looming possibility of loss, of more and more of my life turning into the negative space around it, things that I'd only know that I've lost because there are people there who seem to be there for a reason that I can't remember. And there are earlier stages than this that I'm speaking of in Alzheimer's, where that is very apparent in the person who is suffering through it. That they have enough memory left that even if they don't have full awareness of what they are missing, they know that it's missing. They're aware enough of the people around them to know and to feel the pain in themselves that they have lost more than they can know, to know that they're going to lose more if that has already happened. And that's not a super happy little place to be, but it also reminds me of a musical work that is perhaps equally terrible because it is describing dementia and Alzheimer's, perhaps not Alzheimer's specifically, but of the process of dementia and death itself. And that piece of music is Everywhere at the end of time by the caretaker. It's available on YouTube. It's also available for purchase. I certainly recommend supporting the artist if it's possible for you to do so. But it is a six and a half hour journey using music as its guide to the experience of dementia. It is divided into several parts. The descriptions are with each part and describe different stages of dementia. It is a journey through a cascade of different classical music of era music. Music that to most people is probably somewhat familiar. Becoming more and more distant to more and more people, uh, for anyone who's fairly young. It's it may now be music that people don't have any real concrete recollection of, but it is to some extent, hmm, golden oldies? But we're not talking about rock music, we're not talking about this. It is more along the lines of classical music, and a cascade of it, and a cascade of music that is repeated over and over again through the piece, music which as you progress through each stage of the albums, begins to become more distorted over time, begins to loop in chaotic and unpredictable ways, begins to develop holes and spaces in it, that jumbles and tumbles into itself in ways that are disconcerting, that as you read through the descriptions of the stages of dementia that each section really outlines, I think hits very hard. But it is a beautiful piece of work. It's something that if you can dedicate the full time to listen to it in one sitting, although I certainly recommend not just sitting through it six and a half hours is a terribly long time to stay that still, especially with feelings that will likely be very disconcerting. Get up, move around, let yourself feel your toes while you listen to something that again, I think is very disconcerting. I think that it has a lot of impact if you really let it sink in and sit with you. But it is worth it. It truly is something that, if you're able to hang with it, is an experience that is worth having. On the lighter side of media, on media that I think is wonderful, delightful, though certainly has a darkness to it, severance is one of those pieces that I think is captured and alluded to and that may draw upon there is no anti-Mimetics division in some way. I would need to review kind of when things were being written to know if there's any influence one way or the other. But severance, uh, if you haven't seen it, and I very much recommend checking out the show, it is about the separation or severance between a work life and a personal life, a literal procedure that splits those two halves in two, creating a very literal work life balance. It is delightfully acted, but it in its own way outlines through the work self and the home self, ah the inny and the outy, that as neither can have any memory of the other, there is a questing in some ways to fill in those blank spaces, that a personality only half formed needs to find itself somehow. And beyond sort of the representations in that and the connection to memory and of the spaces in between, it is a visual feast. The any world is a truly liminal space. It is bright, it is confusing, it is one repetition of the most generic sorts of office spaces you could possibly imagine while also being jarringly bright of being a near featureless white in almost every one of its aspects except for the pieces of office furniture that represent the different rooms and spaces, and that seem almost suspended within a three-dimensional space that would be like a a 3D modeling software. It's each thing is so immensely isolated in its exactitude and its presence that it is it is that kind of modeling experience as you see each of these things interact with each other, and it's just beautifully done in every way. The acting is superb. I won't go into the storyline here. It would be fun to discuss, perhaps, at some other time, but I can't spoil too many things all at once. I am, after all, spoiling a genuinely wonderful book that I hope that you are reading ahead of any of this description. I certainly hope you haven't made it this far without having read up to this point in the book. Uh, and so I won't I won't go into the story and nature of Severance further, but it is just a wonderful piece that, again, I think through its use of negative space, of its use of liminal architecture, really is just a joyful ride, even if some of the subject material can be a bit darker, uh, but done wonderfully playfully. Uh I think one thing that that doesn't really come with any genuine spoilers is that the any work self being something that is artificially created is divorced from any other real knowledge or experience of the world. It's a naivete contained within what is a very, again, brightly lit, very, very featureless sort of place that has many tacit features of something that is almost a Disney-like quality in terms of how artificial it is and divorced from the rest of the world it is that these work personalities have to navigate without any social knowledge that would have come from a fuller life. And again, the acting in it really brings it to life in a way that has to touch your heart. And I keep touching on and moving past severance. One of the things that I've kept touching on is just the sort of concept of negative space, the use of negative space in art, in design, to through the purposeful elimination of other elements, really define. What is left within frame. And one other artistic work that I think makes absolutely brilliant use of negative space is Dune. The newest Dune movies, particularly the first one. It is placing characters in enormous spaces, placing them next to monumental architecture, the sort of monumental architecture that chapter one of this part of There Is No Anti-Mimetics Division presents us with. It is something which dwarfs the characters and in that certain sense dwarfs their story. These are things that exist over times that are barely comprehensible, that even the narrative is dwarfed by the knowledge and existence of this architecture. It is something that goes beyond what we can capture with simple visuals, with simple stories. And yet there it is, presented as a backdrop upon which we have to understand the smallness, and I think specialness of our own lives and our own narratives in these places, because all of us are very small figures in a very, very large world. And that doesn't mean that our stories don't matter, but it means that they are playing out on something which outranks us in scale, and that even our whole planet, when given just our own neighborhood in space, is dwarfed by objects that we can barely see. Jupiter is I can't remember the exact number of Earths that would fill its volume, but it's orders of magnitude. And yet there it is, a dot in the sky that we can barely see. And only see some of the time. And our lives play out in this space. They are the most important possible things to us. But nothing beyond our atmosphere cares what our stories are. Not really, especially because, up at least to this point, we haven't, to my knowledge, discovered any other intelligent life that might perceive or care about what those stories are. And which, if we take something like the three body problem, may simply disregard them anyway. Again, it's the scale of which it is that space is mostly negative and empty from that perspective, that it is those small dots that are occupied that come to have so much more meaning, that really define what meaning can be to us, what it should be to us, because it is something special and rare among the stars. And I think that's where we'll leave it off this time in terms of this narrative. Next time, uh we won't have book club again immediately, give myself some time to read through, come to similar notes and thoughts, uh, but next time, one of the things that we've been coming up uh with both this book and just in general in my life, and a lighter, happier topic to focus on. Semi-narrative or non-narrative games. Gaming is a special interest of mine. I spend a lot of time releasing a lot of any pent up energy or anxiety through gaming, and I in particular love games that don't necessarily have a specific narrative to present. They're all these little interactive gems that we can wander through, an ongoing sort of Lego land, games in which we are constructing our own narrative and story out of the tools that they give us. So I'm very much looking forward to meandering through my thoughts on that kind of gaming, and we'll see if you want to come along for that journey as well. But until then, thank you for joining me along this discussion, and I'll see you next time in this space between the platforms.