There Is No Antimemetics Division

Thoughts

Highlights

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Addendum A:

Hey, if this thing really is an "anti-meme", why doesn't the fact that it's an "anti-meme" get wiped? We must be wrong about that somehow. Wait a minute, what if we were to keep notes about what it isn't? Would we remember those? Bartholomew Hughes, NSA 🔗

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It appears to be possible to remember what SCP-055 is not (negations of fact), and to repeatedly deduce its existence from these memories. 🔗

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He feels as if he lives at the bottom of a deep bath, everybody he ever meets looking down at him from slippery, unscalable walls, none of them able to reach down to help him. 🔗

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Some antimemetic force chewed up and swallowed the idea of the Antimemetics Division itself. 🔗

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User's Guide To Chemical Mnestics:

The Class-X mnestic drug is a failed eternal youth serum. X rejuvenates both mind and body by up to ███ years, but its effects are temporary, wearing off in a matter of hours. Furthermore, as the drug wears off, the suppressed time reasserts itself all at once, causing a harmful "whiplash" effect on the subject's physiology. X can rejuvenate an individual safely by up to thirty days, but with stronger doses the whiplash effect becomes dangerous, and past a threshold of 16-18 months it is fatal in all known subjects.

X's restorative effect on the human memory is essentially a side-effect of all of this. However, this side-effect is so useful that it has become the drug's main practical purpose. The Antimemetics Division uses small doses of X to temporarily sharpen or restore memories from the recent past. This aids Foundation operatives in the accurate recall of incidents involving memory-corrupting entities. 🔗

• [N] This is super cool. Aides accurate recall of and caused by memory corrupting entities

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"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. 🔗

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"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." 🔗

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Don't you get it? The whole division is looped! We start the division, we run headlong into this thing, and either it eats us, or we wipe ourselves out in self-preservation. The idea of antimemes is as old as forgetfulness itself. Humans have been looping through this problem over and over again since long before the Forties. Maybe for centuries!" 🔗

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The gap in her memory is about thirteen hours.
Then she adds her report to the extensive, complex map of Missing Time which the whole division maintains collectively. It is a map of holes, and the map is becoming large enough that very faint patterns are gradually forming. The outline of an enemy is becoming visible, or perhaps a group of enemies. 🔗

• [N] Cool

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You become absent humans, human-shaped shells surrounding holes in reality. 🔗

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"How do you fight an enemy without ever discovering it exists?" the Wheeler in the video asks. "How do you win without even realising you're at war? What do we do? 🔗

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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. 🔗

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"Ideas can be killed," she says, stepping into the airlock.
"How?"
"With better ideas." 🔗

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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. 🔗

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I've survived too long. I forgot what universe this was. For a while there, I thought, maybe... this was the universe where we win sometimes. 🔗

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SCP-2256 was the largest species to have lived on Earth. Resembling spindly, vertically elongated giraffes or brachiosauruses, adults of the species grew to over 1,000 metres in height. They weighed no more than 4 tonnes, with most of their mass being "camouflaged" by a very similar adaptation. With their broad, dish-shaped feet, they were able to walk directly on the surface of the ocean without sinking. 🔗

• [N] Cool monsters

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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. 🔗

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boondoggle 🔗

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She's Wile E. Coyote, she's already run off the edge of a precipice into clear air, and thinking that thought would be like looking down. 🔗

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arcology 🔗

• [N] arcology (noun): a large, self-sustaining ecological city designed to minimize land use and environmental impact 🌍🏙️

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Immemorial 🔗

• [N] The big rock structure and the new hire. Good one!

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ossuary 🔗

• [N] ossuary (noun): a container or space for holding the bones of the dead; a bone repository ⚰️💀

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prevaricate 🔗

• [N] prevaricate (verb): to speak or act in an evasive way; to avoid giving a direct answer 🤥🌀

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Apollyon 🔗

• [N] Apollyon (noun): a figure representing destruction or a demonic entity; often associated with the Devil in biblical context. 😈🔥

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He has more ideas, but there is, mechanically, no way to start working on the problem. It would eviscerate him the moment he tried to comprehend the entire problem. He'd need to design and build the box while already inside the box he was building. He would need to box the universe. 🔗

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sigil 🔗

• [N] sigil (noun): a symbol or sign with magical or mystical significance; often used in rituals or to represent concepts. 🌀🔮

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Before the end of the first month, he had proven to his satisfaction that the countermeme he was searching for existed beyond the comprehension of human intellect. A human being's mind would figuratively burst into flame upon contact with it; it was quite possible that their literal body would too, as a violent reaction to the profound, unalterable wrongness of every aspect of the universe around it. To create the countermeme, he would need to start from a human carrier of a suitable, "single-celled" base idea, and amplify that idea artificially using a machine. 🔗

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"There's an (anti)memetic monster called SCP-3125," she says. "It killed me, and the Division, and the Foundation, and now it's occupying our whole reality. It ruins humans. It's the worst thing that's ever existed. There's no one left but you and you can't stop it. You can't even look at it. Hughes needs an idea to amplify, so you took a lethal dose of biochemical mnestic to reify me properly, because I was the best idea you had. Does that cover it?" 🔗

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She feels it, now. She knows in her bones that she is irreal; an animate memory; an ideal, an abstract. When she started to exist a few moments ago she was mostly realistic, but she can feel flaws and complexity being stripped away from her. She can see the shape of the idea complex which Hughes is assembling around her. It looks familiar. It looks like a heavily reworked slice through the concept of the Foundation itself. The Foundation's noblest intentions and achievements, at least. The best purpose of its existence: to protect people. To swallow up all the horror, to manage it and understand it, to keep it under lock and key, so that people don't have to be afraid. 🔗

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"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." 🔗

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He says, "Last time. The time before this one, the time none of us remember, the time for which there is no evidence of any kind, but which I now realise must exist. That time, when we told ourselves and each other, 'We must do better,' what did we do differently, from then on, and why didn't it work?"
He says, "What does the Foundation need to be? Where does it need to be, and how far is that place from here? Can we see it from here? 🔗