Book Club: There is No Antimemetics Division, Conclusion

Book Club Episode 4 - Covers There is No Antimemetics Division Part 3 (Chapters 5 ^ of this section and the epilogue - Spoiler warning for these chapters.  This time let's build and find the keys to the super weapon and free the world of U-3125 if we can.  Also discusses the relationship between this book and Memento, Project Hail Mary, Scavengers Reign, and The Southern Reach, no particular spoilers to any of these related titles discussed.

Transcript

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Hello again, amazing internet person. Here we are again, this time for one last book club episode, for there is no anti-mimetics division. I'm glad that last time I stopped where I did, because there were only two chapters and the epilogue remaining to go through for the book, and it was good to save those for another time because it certainly picks up some steam, carries itself through to quite the conclusion. So where we'd left off, Marie Quen had come to an end, had been overwhelmed by the outsider, U thirty one twenty five, having manifested into reality, attacked and destroyed the headquarters at Wei Lai. We found Adam having been stripped of all memory of Marie and Marie of Adam during the course of those chapters. Adam finding himself in a new life, the life of a touring and teaching violinist who was there at the cusp of the end of our known world as again U thirty-one twenty five manifested into our realm and then began to in a totalizing way take it apart piece by piece. So here we pick up with chapter five Wild Light. We go from the frantic and destructive events to a scene twelve years prior to the end of our world. Twelve years prior to Adam Quinn's march across Great Britain in an attempt to find Ed Hicks, and instead we start off twelve years earlier with Ed Hicks arriving to the containment unit STM zero zero one zero zero six. This is an enormous containment unit that is constructed in part and perhaps in whole to contain the parts of a cryptomorph gigantes from the previous chapter those who we otherwise know as those who walk slowly. Specifically, STM zero zero one zero zero six contains the skull of one of these cryptomorphs, it having its own antimimetic properties, being what is termed a vagus room, a room in which what goes there stays there. It is an enormous skull in and of itself, the cryptomorphs being creatures that are one kilometer or more in height, so truly gigantic beings. But its skull, a forty five meter by sixteen meter monstrosity, has been converted into a series of meeting rooms. Meeting rooms that, as the title Vegas Room implies, and as I just mentioned, are places where what happens there stays there. Ed Hicks is arriving to this location, this at the headquarters at Stanmore. Ed Hicks begins to go through this facility and he arrives to find that he is the last member of a working group who is conducting some business at this particular safe room, but that he is the last one to arrive. Normally they would all arrive at generally the same time, go through the intake process together, uh, but this time, oddly, he is the last one there, arriving to a series of meetings that had started off as being monthly, then proceeded to weekly, and then in the last week having been three days during the prior week, a series of meetings that were clearly escalating in importance as they were dealing with something of the utmost seriousness. I think as readers thus far we can certainly interpret what those meetings are about. But Ed arrives and he begins to go through what is a grueling intake process. A lot of scanning, a lot of checking, a lot of asking if he's been through any psychic intrusions of any kind recently. An intake process that isn't just about questioning and searching him, but attaching a creature to his head, what is referred to as a germ or the germ, a type of creature that was recovered from the gut biome of this particular cryptomorph gigantes. They are creatures that bond with the central nervous system of the wearer, the victim, perhaps given how invasive the creature is in attaching to the head and brain, to the attendee. It's a difficult thing to really suss out what we should call someone who is going to wear the germ. But they are a multi-tentical creature with one very large central eye that has four pupils, so it does have some sense of depth perception, though not the same kind of binocular vision that you or I possess. Adam goes through the process of both being scanned and searched and then having the germ attached to him. And the germ is an interesting creature. It is something which through its connection to the wearer's central nervous system sees and experiences on behalf of the person that it's attached to. It intercedes in every way between itself and the person wearing it. This has the advantage of even for something as secure as the Vegas room, something which already has multiple layers of anti-mimetic protection, keeping all memory, all knowledge contained inside of that facility prevents even the experience or formation of memory in the person who's wearing it. It is, in a sense, completely interlocked within that nervous system, and is the thing which is experiencing reality on behalf of the wearer. This gives the anti-mimetics division an even deeper and more particular kind of protection from carrying ideas out of a space, in that it's not that the memory has been thoroughly wiped from the individual, which still leaves some risk of some memory or shadow of memory being left behind and possibly pieced together by the individual later, but by being an object or an entity that completely intercedes on experience for that individual, once it's detached and is in these cases ritually incinerated after use, all of that memory is organomistically entirely removed from the world. And so now being properly prepared and integrated with his new perceptual headwear, Ed Hicks is admitted into the skull chamber. And after some brief pleasantries with our favorite character, Marie Quinn, who is of course still alive and present twelve years in the past, and is in the leadership hierarchy and still responsible enough to be a part of whatever this series of escalating meetings are, exchanges some pleasantries with Ed Hicks, who has been a mentor to her over time, and were introduced to a few other characters who were there having a cup of coffee before they get ready for getting down to business. Those characters being Malo, who we started off the book with, uh, as the chief of the anti-mimetics division, or one of the chiefs of the unknown organization who has responsibility over a significant portion of its operations in our world, and two other senior scientists or administrative officials, Lo and Devlin. But as we have, as a reader probably assumed, they are there, of course, to discuss U3125, the outsider. They have reached the conclusion that this is a memeplex of truly world-ending proportions, an anomaly that exists in what is a classification that is for morale reasons being removed from the hierarchy of categories, because simply label a set of phenomena is guaranteed to be world-ending does seem like it would perhaps put a damper on operations. But regardless of how they wish to run their classification hierarchy, U3125 is an entity, is a memeplex or complex of ideas that is wholly encompassing and able to corrupt all of human reality. It is something which has no real possibility of containment. It is something that exceeds anything they can really grasp as an idea or scope of entity that can be controlled. Ed is relearning this through, as we've seen with Marie Quinn's interactions with herself and asynchronous meetings in which memory is wiped in between sessions. Ed is relearning the gravity of the situation through a document that he and some of his colleagues themselves authored. And it seems, of course, again, that U 3125 will and can destroy all of human reality, that this is at this point a foregone conclusion. It has already begun to manifest within our reality, and there is now that has started nothing that can truly stop it. Or if they want to contain and stop it, the options that they discuss that may be available for doing so include such drastic measures as destroying all human sapient life. After all, if nothing exists to perceive and understand the idea, it can never invade and win. That, of course, seems like a rather poor goal to pursue as an organization whose primary objective is to contain and defend humanity from these kinds of unknowns. They do instead settle on the fact that rather than attempting to contain this idea, the only thing that they have left that they can possibly do is to try and come up with some way, perhaps to neutralize it, to destroy U 3125, which goes against some of their core principles, but given that it is something that threatens all of human reality, is something they have been authorized to pursue. And the only way of going about this, the only real possibility to stop U thirty one twenty-five is to create some sort of idea, some meme of even greater scope and power than U thirty one twenty five, and to use that to destroy this threatening idea. It is something that obviously has many ramifications and possibilities. What kind of idea, what sort of idea can you create to destroy something which is already set upon destroying your reality? Leaving that aside, what we come to understand is that the only person who can really hope to achieve this goal, or the person who gives this mission its greatest possibility of success, is Ed Hicks himself. There have also been perhaps a couple of other staff members who may already be secreted away to help in this eventual goal, but it is and does hinge on Ed Hicks, on his mind being the one that is focused on accomplishing this goal in what would have to be an entirely isolated and ultimately forgotten bunker, a facility entirely memory gapped from the rest of reality, something which the team would have to accept the ultimate sacrifice to enter and pursue that course of action. Ed isn't necessarily really jazzed about this idea. Ed is reluctant, refuses this mission, and it is only through the group gathered giving him another series of documents which he himself has authored, which detail out that he is really the best last hope available in order to save humanity, giving them a perhaps fifteen percent chance of winning, that he does finally accept that it will have to be him that enters this bunker, that is isolated away from all other human reality and experience in order to attempt this last most desperate fight against the enemy. And as part of that, and as we've learned that there has been a recorded death of Ed Hicks in the past, the teams gathered have already put into action a plan to fake Ed's death. It involves having created an exact perfect replica of his body, a real living being, though completely devoid of any conscious thought or memory, that they will place in a chamber to have suffered some form of accident, in this case, an argon leak, replacing the oxygen in a chamber that he was in and leading to his unfortunate but ultimately peaceful death. Ed Hicks does accept that he is the one that has to go on this, confirms to one of the members, Lowe, very specifically, who asks, Are you and do you accept that you are the one person who may be able to accomplish this mission? And as soon as Ed confirms, really, both out loud and in his own heart, that he is the only one that can accomplish this, things inevitably and immediately fall apart. Lo, who asked the question has somehow, inexplicably been compromised by the outsider, pulls a gun out, a gun that they absolutely should not have had, a gun which only by its presence indicates some much deeper level of compromise in the whole system involved in having organized and accomplished this meeting of this particular group of people. But Lowe pulls a gun, shoots Ed twice. Well, shoots Ed once, collapsing his lung. A second bullet ricochets off of a laptop. Lo attempts also to kill Mr. Mollow, but he, by his status as a C-suite executive with the unknown organization, fortunately does have some form of force field and is otherwise protected from the gunshots. Marie, being somewhat apparently lower on the kill list, leaps into action, manages to disable and kill Lo. As they are recovering from this situation, they find that the other person who was in the Vegas room with them, Devlin, is also dead, whether shot or killed by some other manner is not immediately apparent. But what is apparent is that Ed Hicks has been killed. Being the two members of the team remaining, Marie and Mollow leap into action. Marie really leaping into action, immediately getting a powerful amnesiac out of a safe, because at this point, as we know that there has been any compromise of the facility and of the protocol by U-3125, another member of the team from outside, the person who is conducting the intake process, intercedes and whether because they are fully compromised by the entity or are merely at full risk and interceding on what Marie and Malo must must now proceed to do, is also shot by Marie. And at that point, the facility very obviously begins to fall into chaos. The same kind of chaos that we had at the Wayle facility when Marie was there and containment was breached. In that case, by her own actions in an attempt to carry out any memory of the plan to make it here to this facility at Stanmore and find out if Ed Hicks had produced a weapon. But here twelve years earlier, we have the very scenario that Maria's hoping much later in the future hasn't hasn't necessarily occurred. But here we are with the Stanmore headquarters being entirely compromised and now being destroyed by U-3125, the people going mad, alarms going off, something attacking the building itself from outside and beginning to render it apart. Marie, knowing that there is only one real option, puts into effect a procedure to sterilize the facility, to set off a bomb known by its codename Dry Erase, one of the incredibly powerful anti-mimetic bombs that will entirely erase from memory a facility and set of people, the same sort of weapon that she set off at the latter headquarters twelve years later. And so, again, she leaps into action. She immediately injects herself with a portion of a powerful amnesia drug, and then injects Mr. Malo with the other half of that dose, and they begin to affect their escape from the facility. They have available to them the limousine in which Mollow arrived. Fortunately, partially or wholly driven by some form of AI system, a system that they will have to override in order to escape, though. How they do that and how precisely they escape is mostly immaterial to this specific chapter. We know that they survive, we know that they are the characters that we follow further into this journey in the future. But Marie and Malo begin to escape, they begin to leave the facility to get outside of the area of effect of the dryerase bomb. And as they are leaving, we return to Ed Hicks, who is coming too, although remembering that he has been shot and killed. He is now not so much Ed, but the germ that was attached to his head. It is a creature which apparently intercedes so fully that That it captures the entire memory of the person who is wearing it. It at this point has, in essence, fully absorbed Ed Hicks, separates from his body, and, knowing that they did in fact have a plan to fake his death using a perfect replica of his own body, sets off to get himself a new body. He gets into the air ducts, and skitters until he finds the place that they said he was going to be found dead, reattaches himself to his copy body, and begins to jumpstart it for lack of a better term. As the facility is falling into chaos, and as he is attempting to jumpstart his own replica body, he does end up being attacked by one of the workers who has been possessed by U-3125. And through the help of the germ, by for a moment detaching from his new body and using its native powers or abilities to electrocute the replaced human who has come to stop him, or to stop anything. It's not necessarily there specifically to attempt to stop Ed Hicks. It is probably just encountering him there, perhaps being directed, perhaps not by U-3125. The degree to which it has found out this plan, I think, is neither here nor there, but he manages to escape and begins to effect his flight down further into the facility, into the bunker that there exists, that was where he had planned to reluctantly go anyway, to begin the project to build the super weapon. And that is chapter five, chapter five titled Wild Light, the name of the super weapon that he hopes to construct that he has a 15% chance of successfully building. And with the conclusion of that chapter, we we leave that interlude from twelve years ago, and we enter chapter six, Tombstone. We leave Ed Hicks in this time now we are returning to Adam Quinn, who is trudging his way across Great Britain in his attempt to reach the Stanmore facility. While doing so, Adam has had the continuous urge to simply turn himself in, to return to the sarcophagi. This world no longer belongs to him, no longer belongs to humans, and he had, after all, some place there in the sarcophagi, a place in the new and emerging order of all things. This urge is in and of itself one of the manifestations of U 3125, an urge that most of the human population was unable to resist, resigning themselves to some sense willingly to whatever rests within the sarcophagi. A fate that we never really come to learn. Beyond just that urge, the trek has been hard on Adam. It is a trek that has occurred in utter isolation, one where he has been simply foraging through the remains and ruins of a society that formerly he had found himself entirely immersed in and protected by. And so, especially from his perspective, he is on a journey which he knows may ultimately be hopeless. But he does arrive at the Stanmore facility. This facility, in contrast to the Wei Lai facility, that secondary headquarters being fairly idyllic, being nested in a nice and rather lovely forested area, really quite a picturesque area, the Stanmore facility stands out as almost its opposite, a sprawling industrial facility, four kilometers of offices, administrative units, and containment areas. An area that, to Adam, feels much more like an industrial fuel refinery than anything else. But having recovered documents at the secondary headquarters and knowing that this is a mission that exists, that this is the one thing that may give hope back to humanity, finds a way into the facility, an enormous construction shaft. A shaft that has a stairway going down concentrically through the side of it, and he descends into the facility, making his way through the many different layers of security doors, all guided by the security identification that he recovered from Marie Quinn. To him, at the time he recovered the identification card, of course, just a body in a facility. Not something that he could recognize was previously the love of his life. But guided by that identification card, given access to all of the different layers of security, he finally reaches the inner vault, the bunker, where he hopes that Ed Hicks has been desperately at work. Adam opens the initial airlock, gains access, and finally finds the first non functional door in his journey through unknown organization facilities. He looks over at a screen which is spilling out some amount of incomprehensible text, warning signs, signals that he doesn't fully understand, uh, but indicates that he should essentially that there is there is a thing which is activated that is waiting for manual input in order to proceed. He looks up, finds a six-sided hexagonal device hanging from some wires, and it is in fact him looking up at it that provides that manual input, sets off an incredible burst of energy and light which knocks Adam out. And we return to Ed Hicks, now in the present, the present that Adam has reached, and we have Ed Hicks carrying Adam into the vault, into this bunker, a place that Ed Hicks found when he arrived totally empty, a place where he had hoped that some other staff might be secreted away, but who presumably were also compromised and killed by U-3125, a place that for twelve years, Ed Hicks has been utterly alone in pursuit of building this final superweapon. And we have an interlude in which we learn what some of this what some of this intermediary time has been for Ed. In the first year, he realized that any idea that could destroy U-3125 is in fact unthinkable by a human mind. It is an idea of such a normity that it would not figuratively, but quite literally, set the mind that perceived it on fire, and that instead of coming up with the full idea and concept which will ultimately be the thing he hopes will undo U 3125, he needs to invent the seed of the idea, or to at least figure out what that seed of an idea needs to be, so that it can be carried, so that it can be a carrier signal amplified further into reality so that it can come into its own existence independently and attack and destroy, in whatever sense that may mean, the being which at that point hasn't fully begun to his knowledge take over the entirety of the world. Again, it's many years into the future that the world, in our own direct sense, in the sense that Adam experienced, has ended. He just knows that it is the inevitability which must come to pass at some point in the relatively near future. And so there he toils away trying to figure out what to create. By year two in that space, he's not only figured out that there will need to be some seed idea that is carried out into a greater form, but that the machine required to amplify the what we'll come to call the irreality amplifier itself cannot fully exist within reality. It can only be partially constructed there and then must otherwise exist in the space of ideas in and of itself. These concepts, being quite irreconcilable with an ordinary human mind, do begin to drive Ed mad. They, along with being bereft of any social contact, and no manner to escape the bunker in any way, no way to ever perceive the outside world again, becomes tangled in his own ideas. And in so, in becoming stuck within his own webs of ideas, doesn't fortunately come to a standstill, but instead begins a series of processes by which he begins resetting himself periodically with powerful amnesiacs. He has, to some degree, to in some fashion, set a start point when he arrived, a fixed point in time which the other drugs that he has available to him will reset him to, but he begins systematically, as he reaches his own breaking points, resetting his own memory, coming back fresh to the ideas, having left notes to himself in much the same way that Marie did in the secured containment at the Waylive facility, uh, for dealing with these sorts of asynchronous problems. And so he relearns what he was doing and is able to attack those former struggles and stopping points in his own ideas as a relatively fresh version of himself. Though, obviously in a way that is going to keep having consequences. There's only, I think, so many ways that we can strip away that essence of ourself and restart. But there he is, doing that, fully having embraced the sacrifice that attempting to save humanity from this scale of entity really entails, truly being entombed in this facility. And over that period of time, Ed Hicks is able to successfully build the Irality Amplifier. It is a vast machine, a machine encompassing many different disciplines, though in that it is a machine that does not serve any specific function. It is an enormous mess of machinery and functionality, which anyone of any specific specialty, given time to really stare at and try and deduce what this machine is doing, would find that it really probably doesn't do anything. The machine itself is superfluous. The machine exists, is there to instill belief. It is a thing which is there to amplify the belief of the person who comes to it with the correct idea. Whoever has that seed idea will view that machine as the solution, solidify their belief that their idea is the answer, and that seed will then be amplified by that network of machinery out into something that is truly real and capable of contending with the kind of memeplex that U thirty one twenty five is. And it's into this vast machine that Ed is carrying Adam, carrying Adam into the heart of the super weapon, and as they reach the center of it, Adam is placed in a chair, a needle slipped into his arm, and in words that are truly artful, his brain explodes like a diagram. Adam comes to, recovers, in a sense, in a nice barbecue. He is at a nice house and a lovely forested area. There are a number of people there. It is wholly disconnected in this sense from the vast and vital machinery that he was just carried into. This is where Ed and Adam in fact did meet in reality. This is a barbecue that both Ed and Adam were at, and where Ed has some memory both of Adam and Marie. Ed reintroduces himself to Adam within this memory space and confesses that perhaps resetting himself, waking up each time as a new person who has, at each moment of reset, at each moment where he comes back to and encounters himself, someone who has one step along the way each time it's happened, come to find an older and older man, someone who has taken on a greater and greater toll, who has to each each time he resets, reckon and reconcile a much greater difference. It is something that has perhaps driven Ed a bit mad. Not only that, but in addition to confessing all of this toll that this last twelve years has taken on him, Ed reveals to Adam that Adam isn't the right man for this job. He is not who is meant to be seated here in the super weapon. He does not carry the seed of the idea that will destroy U thirty one twenty-five. That instead, the right person, the person who was meant to have found and located this place all along is Marie Quinn. As Ed is explaining this, as this memory, this memory space that Adam is inhabiting from Ed, Adam notices a woman among the mix of people. Someone who he knows that he needs to reach. He knows at some fundamental level that this is Marie that he sees, who he is compelled to reach, who he needs to reach, who he begins chasing, chasing like a ghost. A ghost that he needs to reach to complete himself. And as he's doing that, as Ed improbably, because of course we are in a memory space and not a real space, continues to follow him along these steps as he is attempting to reach what Adam can only perceive really as the outline of Woman, as the outline of Marie, as the shadow of Marie, someone whose name he can't even grasp in and of his own mind, something that he only senses at the tip of his tongue. As he attempts to reach Marie, he has, along with him, carried something that he recovered from the body of Marie from the headquarters at Wei Lai. A auto injector pen with the bold Z on it. An auto injector that we've encountered several times through the course of this story, always not entirely knowing what it is or what it's meant for, but which has, compelled by the narrative, arrived here at this point in time. And so, Ed injects Adam with this substance Z. As we learned during the course of this scene, it is a domestic drug that is so powerful, it is a substance which is an unknown in its own right, but is a nestic drug of such enormous power that it reverses the causality between action and memory, between experience and memory, it is something that can create actual reality from memory. And so as the drug begins to course through Adam, as it begins to dig through all of the different layers of mental damage and scarring and amnesia that have been inflicted on him, and as Ed tells him there to focus on the memory of her, to focus on the thought of Marie, there is a terrible cracking sound. Quite likely that terrible cracking sound is Adam's own skull being in some way shattered. But from that terrible damage done to Adam, Marie is manifested back into reality, is birthed back into this real existence, a whole being, a being with all of what she requires to carry the seed of the idea here to the super weapon. Marie takes the headset from Ed, which he was using to communicate with Adam and she begins to share final moments with Adam, to have one last conversation with her husband, both of them now remembering each other, even while Adam's mind is being torn apart and regressed by substance Z. And as they share their last moments here, Marie, who is the carrier of the seed idea, tells Adam in some small sense what this idea, what the seed of the idea to destroy U thirty one twenty five is, and that it's that people shouldn't have to be afraid, that they should be in some way protected from the unimaginable and unthinkable things that lurk within the universe, that there should be someone there to protect them, and it's that belief in that idea, that one totalizing belief that something is meant to be there to protect them, that is the seed that can be amplified into something extraordinary. And it's during that moment that Ed does trigger the irreality amplifier. The machine kicks into action, Marie's belief is locked in immediately with it. They are one signal. And in that, Marie, in a very real sense, transcends human reality, becomes that idea, the idea of that protection, of something that can perceive and protect reality from its predators. And Marie again transcends this human form, is amplified in and of herself into ideatic space, into a space that is multidimensional, that contains all human thought, all human feeling, all human memory. And among that, she also sees you thirty one twenty. 25 hanging over it, warping it, and corrupting it. And as Marie continues to ascend, she becomes the wild light, the idea as super weapon. She sees all of human experience, she sees all of U3125, and in seeing all of it, also sees all of the ways in which it is an idea that should not and cannot truly or fully exist. Her being begins to at a fundamental and not even fully physical way, but at a mathematical and algebraic level, begins to destroy and blow away U thirty one twenty five. And as this happens, as Marie also understands that her own being cannot stay in contact with this human ideatic space, also continues to, I suppose in some sense, continue to ascend to transcend this existence in reality, fading away in and of itself from human reality, leaving only traces at its outer edges. And that is the conclusion of chapter six, Adam's final reaching of the facility, his own sacrifice to bring his half forgotten, half remembered wife Marie back into existence, her own transcendence of being into thought, and that transformation being the thing that ultimately saves not just the earth, but all human ideas. And we reach an epilogue. In the epilogue, we return to Mr. Mollow trying to put in order in some sense the conclusion of this amazing journey. He is reviewing the details of what it means for humanity to have reawoken nearly a year later, a year after the initial cataclysm of the manifestation of U 3125, a year of entirely missing time for basically all people, for all of what remains of humanity. And there's not only missing time, but many numerous missing places, perceived only really by those with mestic drugs and other aids to perceive what has been stripped away by U-3125, all of the places the different sarcophagi and whatever else may have intruded or been stripped out of reality by that entity. Of the many different people all over the world who are missing, but who can't necessarily be perceived. And what does it mean to reconcile this? In terms of the unknown organization, an organization which will still remain unknown to the greater breadth of humanity, it is forming a new spherics division, a new division just to try to wrestle with the enormity of the events that have happened, something that is going to have to try and piece back together the cosmology that exists beyond what had previously been understood as existing within idea or ideatic spaces. And in that, in having to wrestle with what must have happened, what terrible and unknowable things have to have happened for this much to be missing, he questions if they have really won, if coming back to this many missing spaces, missing people and missing time, what does winning even really mean? What did happen? How much of what happened is forgotten, and how much of it simply rests in denial? Do they who have been forced into that denial actually deserve to continue? And that is the question that this really hangs and hinges upon. Because although the story concludes, here we are, here we each as individuals are resting in this very real history and reality that we have to contend with, the very real nature that humanity has done the imaginable to itself, to each other in the past, does so in many ways here in the present, will probably continue to do unspeakable things to itself and each other in the future? What is it that we deserve? What ways do we have that we can transcend the terror that we are capable of inflicting? Can we become the idea that Marie has become? That people deserve to be able to live unafraid, to be unafraid of the darkness that surrounds them, the darkness that lies within our own hearts? How can we contend with a dark reality, a darkness that is most often of our own making, that has no extraterrestrial source? Can we, here and now, become those ideas that are able to protect each other from ourselves? I hope so. I truly do. I think it is within us, I think, that it is what we have to find. Although every day we confront different sorts and kinds of darkness that come from our own species. But let's not end quite on that note. That's that's not an especially happy note, and honestly, beyond that question, beyond the hope that we can be the thing that transcends our own darkness, this has been a wonderful literary journey. This is something that I am incredibly glad that Quantum, that Sam Hughes, had the opportunity to write and had the opportunity to publish. And I am just, again, genuinely happy that it has gained enough popularity to be on the bestseller list, to be on the new and interesting fiction tables of bookstores around the country, around the world, because it is something that stands in a wonderful panoply of books. This touches on a number of ideas that I think are fascinating within our literature. Ah, of the things that this work really reminded me of, that I was thinking about the whole time that I've been reading through this, I've discussed some of these before, but we have, of course, repeatedly in many ways, the idea of the reluctant hero. Marie is a reluctant participant in many of these events. Adam is most certainly a reluctant hero who finds himself outside of horrors that he must contend with all around him in order to go on a journey that he has no real sense is going to succeed, which before her own death, Marie didn't think was anything more than a long shot, that even Ed Hicks, in resigning himself to a fate of isolation to attempt to construct a superweapon, had the great chance of succeeding at only really 15% probability that it would be a workable solution. And so we have what I think are a wonderful series of heroes in other uh in this particularly other films and books, uh, the things that kept coming to mind, the thing that most strongly comes to mind in its overlap both in how it contends with memory is Memento, where we have the main character Leonard being without any new memories, without being able to form new memories, having retrograde amnesia. He is, in that sense, a a hero without memory of his own actions, in a certain sense. He is a hero who is being dragged through cycles in which he is both the victim and the hero of his own and of other people's stories. Hero is an odd word to apply to that. I think within the sort of reluctant hero trope, we we he is the main character, he is the hero of the story, regardless of whether his actions have actually brought about any resolution in the world or whether it has simply created more complications. But he doesn't want to be there. He's been dragged there both by amnesia and only the vague sense of the loss of his wife, something that he knows has happened, but that, again, he has only the barest concrete memory of that keeps dragging him forward on his quest, his quest across his own tattooed body to find John G, the man who killed his wife, so that he can seek revenge, while this is being used by every other person around him. He is, in a very real sense, a victimized hero. And that is an interesting narrative. It's one that I need to come back to in my own reading of the story, uh Memento Mori, and viewing that movie again because truly an excellent job by both the original author and by the director, Christopher Nolan, to bring that into such sharp focus. In more recent movies and books, we have Project Hail Mary, uh, which has a partially amnesiac hero, at least someone who wakes to find himself without memory of in the initial scenes and without going too much into spoilers about the narrative, especially given that it is a newer movie that that I don't want to ruin for anyone, but a hero who awakes to not know fully what journey he is on, only that he's on a journey, and by reason of being trapped on a spaceship, has only one choice, and that is to figure out what he needs to do to move forward. Certainly, in that sense, a story of what it means to lose and recover memory, and in some sense, to be a noble sacrifice. An animated series that doesn't deal with memory in the same way, but I think deals in reluctant heroes is Scavenger's Reign. Scavenger's Reign follows a set of characters who have been marooned on an alien world by the crash of their ship. The well, the ship hasn't crashed at the beginning of the narrative. They have been on a ship that was disabled. In that sense, Rim World as a video game and Scavenger's Rain really pull very directly from each other in the sense that you are marooned on a planet and you must get back to the ship. You are not part of the main spacecraft crash, or in this case, in Scavenger's Rain, cataclysmic landing. It does, they do get it to land, and then it is their the many different characters that they follow, uh, their attempt to get back to that. But getting to the ship, from my sense of that story, is really, though it provides a focus, is just the backdrop for what it means for all of these characters to exist within an entirely alien biome. A biome which to them is horrific. A biome that to them feeds on them, which does not offer all that much sanctuary, although each of them are in their own way finding their peace with that world, even in their attempts to escape it. And it is that sense of the alien, of the foreign, of they, in this case in Scavenger's reign, they intruding on the alien world, and here in there is no anti-mimetics division, it is the alien intruding on the human world, intruding on and totalizing it, in the sense that U3125 comes to dominate and alter and corrupt the reality experienced by humanity. In this case, the characters are journeying across a similarly hostile landscape, though they are the alien intruders upon it, and it is just a really well-done show. It's one that is worth spending time with, probably watching more than once, because it is fairly short. The episodes are only 25 to 30 minutes long, so it's a very contained set of ideas that aren't going to take a tremendous amount of investment to get through. But it contains many of these same characteristics of what it means to travel and contend with things that are just barely grasped at the edges because it is a coherent biome. The place and planet that they find themselves on isn't operating by any strange rules in terms of reality or physics, but it is something that they can only perceive the general edges of. In that way, and again, going more to the concept of the alien intruding on the human, and it's one that I've touched on before in this, the southern reach, where the intercession of some alien phenomena begins to alter the human world, starting with Area X and perhaps expanding, eating through both space and time. And what does it mean for any given character in that to contend with the unknowable, to contend with things that are much greater than human experience, that defy the normal logic and rules that we operate within? And that, again, it is a wonderful journey, it is a very surreal journey that doesn't come to any clean conclusions, it doesn't have any easy answers, uh, it does not end with, as in this narrative, U3125 being eliminated. Although, again, the world has been fundamentally altered by its having been touched by that entity. And so, to that degree, these have a lot of space in which they overlap. The Venn diagram includes a lot of the same space in that sense of the alien changing the human. Very much worth going through and comparing the ideas that you come to as you examine both of those works. Just again, wonderful works. This was an incredibly fun journey. Uh, it dealt with a lot of different topics in ways that I think help us contend with the struggle of understanding ideas, of understanding memory. Uh, as I said in the previous book club episodes, this whole narrative really dragged me very close to my experiences and memories of dealing with family who were experiencing Alzheimer's, where memory is gradually stripped from a person where there is something in this case, entirely explainable and biological, interceding upon someone who you've known, that is both stripping them from you and you from them, and all of the emotions and difficulty and complications that are inherent to dealing with that kind of end-of-life journey, especially when you have to carry on, knowing that you can be removed from the world of other people who you are going to lose, and that you can be lost to them before they are lost to you. And all of these stories that contend with memory, Memento, The Southern Reach, Project Hail Mary, these are narratives that deal in their own ways with these kinds of grappling with remembrance, with loss. And I think those make them incredibly worthy, incredibly human narratives that help us connect with ourselves, that help us look at our lives and hang on as dearly as we can for as long as we can to what makes us who we are, to the memories that constitute our beings, to what we mean to the people around us. And I think that is the thing that should keep giving us hope. That should be the thing that lets us know that we can contend with the unknowable, the thing that carries us forward and gives us hope that we can deal with our own darkness, that it is who we are in our memories and who we create in the memories of others that will always be carried on in some way, even through all of the different ways that they can be lost and changed and corrupted, it's worth having that impact. It's worth trying to protect others as much as we can from those losses. And that's where we get to in this little journey, in this first book club, in this first work that I am covering and thinking through in my own mind and heart. And I'm really glad that you've joined me along the way on this ride. We'll see what we come to next. I'm debating in my own mind. Has this series of episodes done what I hoped that it would? Am I covering things in too much detail, in too little detail? Are the ways that I am thinking through and comparing it to other narrative valuable to how I think through the thoughts about this work? Uh so we'll see where those thoughts carry us as I move on to other books. It'll be interesting to see exactly where we land because although this was a wonderful jump through fiction, I spend a lot of time reading nonfiction. Uh, I spend a lot of time with historical and philosophical works in political and psychological theory. Books, uh, just because those are the sorts of things that fascinate me. Those would be very different to cover than this. They are certainly not constructed in the same narrative sense. So we'll see, we'll see how we integrate that into this kind of format, how we integrate that into what I want to discuss. And then we'll also see what works of fiction I move on to as well. I know one of the longer sets of books that I'm planning to start reading soon is Dungeon Crawler Carl. That has come highly recommended from every friend I have who has read any part of it, and so I'm really looking forward to that journey. Uh, that I don't know if I will do quite in the same way, especially since it covers now, I believe, eight books. Uh, doing it in the same sort of chapter by chapter or part-by-part format, uh, well, it would give us a lot of content. It would give me a lot to chew on for a very long time for it. Whether it would be effective for a series that long or not, I need to take some time to think through. But again, thank you very much for joining along on this journey. And as we dig through these many different spaces in our minds and memories, I hope to find you here again in this little space between the platforms.