Book Club: There is No Antimemetics Division Part 1

Book Club Episode 1 - Covers There is No Antimemetics Division Chapters 1-3 (Part 1) - Spoiler warning for these chapters.  Also discusses it's relationship to the SCP Foundation, Control, X-Files, Warehouse 13, and No Man's Sky.  Some light philosophy and discussion of Alzheimer's disease and how fragile our life and memory can be.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello again, extraordinary internet people. Here we are this time for episode one of this little personal book club. Certainly just personal, at least for the moment, though we'll see who all comes along for the ride. And on this first episode, we are covering There Is No Anti-Mimetics Division Part 1. Which so far is just a delightful book. It has been very enjoyable for the first part, so I am excited to see where the rest of it leads. To give just a little bit of preamble about There Is No Anti-Mimetics Division and its origin, this is a story by the author known as Quantum. It is from the SCP Foundation, which last time I described as sort of originating from the fanfiction community, and I think that is probably partially true, but I don't think it gives it fully the credit that it deserved as a collaborative writing community. It certainly draws influences from a lot of different spaces, but it is not something which is really purely fanfiction. It is not specifically about any one project or any one piece by another author or director. It is instead a group of people who are all drawing upon the collective imagination and mythology of our cultures to create something that is reminiscent of a number of different shows, books, games, some of which we'll talk about after sort of going through the narrative of the first three chapters of There Is No Anti-Mimetics Division. But I did want to give at least a little bit more color there to the SCP Foundation, the wiki that it runs, and its many different pieces, subgenres, and contributors who are doing something that stands out as unique and very interesting within the many spaces of the internet. And without further ado, let's get into sort of the story details and where it's taken us so far. We'll start off directly reading the Wikipedia synopsis of the book just to set the stage. Mary Quinn is the director of the Anti-Memetics Division, one department of the secretive unknown organization that protects humanity from unknowns, anomalous entities that can erase themselves from the memory of all who view them. As the Anti-Memetic Division's research deepens, Quinn begins to uncover repressed memories and finds herself ensnared in a conspiracy that threatens all of reality. And that is a wonderful setup to a book that really begins to chip away at our understanding of memory and reality. The introduction itself really begins with a very brief introduction through the use of an SCP case file, in this case for U0055. This is a low-grade anti-meme, or at least one that doesn't require any extraordinary caution or protection in and of itself. It is, however, representative of the class of unknowns known as anti-memes. It is an object that destroys any knowledge of it, any documentation of it, these things simply begin to leak away. The people who guard it spend a day that they really do not come out of remembering any of what they've done, only with the knowledge that they come out quite exhausted. And this is at the very low level of the anti-meme, and we very, very swiftly get carried into much deeper folds of what these things can possibly hold in terms of danger to humanity. Chapter one takes us into the setting of Marie Quinn waiting in an office largely nondescript to meet a mister Mollow. In this scene, Marie is treated with very little pomp, no circumstance, if given the synopsis that Marie is the director of the anti-Memetics division, this is something that sets the stage with her having absolutely no recognition from those around her, someone just waiting to be let into the office of a superior. After some time, Marie Quinn is ushered into the office of Mr. Mollow and his apparent assistant, Levine. They confront her with the immediate accusation that she is a spy and they are ready to shoot and dispose of her. This really immediately introduces just how unknowable the anti memetics division is. They are very clear that there is no record of her and there is no record of the anti memetics division for which she works. But her having the level of access she does makes her clearly a threat to what is going on. Now she's able to swiftly navigate her way through this situation by pushing back and really forcing them to look upon evidence that immediately shows that she is who she says she is and that the objects that she pursues are as unknowable and by that very nature to a certain degree as dangerous as someone of her stature deserves to be recognized as well. In turning this scene around, Marie is able to also confront the fact that the apparent assistant to mister Mollow, Levine, shouldn't be there. mister Mollow already has an assistant, and this is someone who is equally as unknown as he believed Marie to be. This ends up in Marie again being able to turn this situation around and then shoot Levine, apparently with his own weapon. She's able to do this because, in fact, she's followed around by her own not necessarily pet monster, but an anti-meme that has attached itself to her and which she is forced to, on the regular basis, produce tasty memories for so it doesn't consume her more important memories. Levine has managed to infiltrate Mr. Mollow's office and being by forcing him to skip some compounds or drugs that would otherwise help him remember both the organization that he works for and the people who work for it. These are specifically nestic drugs, spelled M-N-E-S-T-I-C, just like mnemonic, there's that silent M. Nestic really kind of grates on me as a word. It has a certain roughness to its texture, where there are amnesiac drugs that manage to force us to pronounce out all of those letters. And in this reading of this chapter, we really get that first an immediate sense of the scope of what we're dealing with, with how fragile both our own memories, the memories of organizations, of people around us can be when fighting things that are in and of themselves inherently unknowable. They are so unknowable that they require countermeasures just to go about day-to-day work, just to see them and be able to acknowledge them and fight against them. It also demonstrates quite nicely within this first chapter that anti-memes are not necessarily in any way associated with one another. Marie manages to use the anti-mimetic creature who follows her around to act against whatever Levine is, whether it's a sapient, human form anti-meme that managed to infiltrate the organization, or whether it's some more esoteric object, thought or feeling. We'll find out, maybe down the road, but it is just alluded to that their intent will be to take Levine's body so that it can be studied and learned from. And that is fun in its own right, that again we're dealing with an organization that has to take extraordinary measures just to be remembered, and that the objects it deals with, the creatures, the ideas, can act against one another. They are things that can steal from each other, can warp each other, and have influence that extends into that unknown realm in and of itself. And so there is a deeper, more convoluted ecosystem that we can barely even register. And it makes for the first moment very clear how does one fight an idea. And from there the narrative and the fight flows nicely into chapter two. Chapter two is still, I think, largely front material, introductory material, and we get the perspective of another character who's dealing with the concept of memory, what we possess, and how dangerous these different creatures, entities, unknowable objects really are. In chapter two we're introduced to Simon Lee, who is, at the outset, apparently a junior researcher being introduced to the anti mimetics division on his first day of training. He finds himself in a cavernous cafeteria. It seems made especially cavernous by the distinct lack of people within its enormous space. It is really almost just that other set of inductees, or apparent inductees, who are around maybe some other scattered folks, it's hard to tell from some of that description. Again, it's it's fairly limited in scope in terms of what it's meant to describe in this, except that there is something odd and empty about this very large space. And from this cavernous space emerges the character of Adrian Gray, a well-suited, dapper, business looking man who seems to be from some upper executive level, who stops over to speak to Mr. Lee. Something immediately comes out is odd about this as despite the appearance of being an upper level executive within the unknown organization, and seeming in most ways to belong, Gage lacks other distinguishing criteria that would be common within the space, such as an identifying badge. And as that progresses, Simon Lee immediately begins to realize as he's thinking back on his own life and experience, that he is right there and in real time, losing possession of his own memory and actively being taunted by the entity, Adrian Gage, who is stealing those memories from him at pace, and which reveals itself to be something extraordinary and supernatural quite quickly. At this point, some deeper instinct keks in in Dr. Lee, and he immediately flees into the facility, not going for the exit, but retreating deeper and deeper into the research labs. And these deeper memories and instincts carry Lee to, in this particular case, lab WYB zero eight seven zero three. In that lab, Lee finds direct record of the entity gauge. Not only that, but within the spare description of all of these others who have come before and attempted to describe and to fight back against it, that just within the recorded record, seventy-nine individuals have recorded themselves as making it that far and attempting to fight back at Gage, obviously all of whom have been unsuccessful. At that point, again, as the entity approaches Lee, he acts from in this case, probably fairly natural instinct, and throws his phone at Gage. This does actually manage to strike it where other attacks had seemed to pass through or not phase it. This again comes with some deeper and immediate realization that a phone is a connected device storing in some way, shape, or form, much of human knowledge, and it's that object which is able to physically strike the entity. Now through an extraordinary Deus Ex Machina, Lee finds himself in a spot where, just off to his side, there is an array of physical hard drives storing terabytes, petabytes of data. Not only that, but cabling that can be used to bundle them together into a makeshift weapon, and Lee does manage to use that to strike at and defeat, destroy, or disable the entity Adrian Gage. Subsequent to this extraordinary defeat of a terrible entity, Simon Lee encounters Marie Quinn, which, to him, seems quite the honor for an inductee to be able to meet the director, who immediately begins walking him through the fact that this is perhaps not the first time that he has experienced such a close call with an anti-mimetic entity. That this is in fact at least the fourth time that he has been through this kind of attack, forcing the need for recovery. And that in fact he is not an inductee. He is the director of training, or the head of training. I'm not sure if they give a precise title, I didn't take that in my notes, unfortunately. But not somebody without resources, skills, and knowledge to draw on to fight exactly this kind of threat. And it is a beautiful walkthrough of how training, familiarity, routine, even against something that can begin stripping the memory from you, can still be relied on in certain stressful situations. Again, this is exactly in many ways as you would expect. It has a certain feeling of military routine and training kicking in when it's needed most under the most dire of circumstances, and this demonstration that the Anti-Mimetics division has relied on very deep levels of training, of routine to be called upon as action in situations of exactly this kind. Even though it failed, so many, so many dozens that came before. And it again very succinctly and powerfully implies and states how do you kill an idea? How do you fight back against ideas? And especially in this, how do you fight back against ideas that can destroy your own ideas, thoughts, and memory? This leads us into chapter three, which I really consider to be the first fully story-driven chapter of this work, the first real cohesive chapter that tells us where we're at and what we're dealing with for this particular narrative and not just unknowns that exist within this SCP Foundation universe. Chapter three, we're introduced to Andrew Hilton, a man of advanced age, who wakes up on a boat on a lake, there with a mysterious woman, who is, of course, Marie Quinn, the main character, the overriding central figure of this narrative, who is again there to guide us through these concepts of how does one fight ideas in memory. Hilton has been brought here for one final mission. This is a final mission to recover the memory of the Anti-Mimetics division. The division was apparently founded in 1976, except it seems that nobody has any memory of how it truly came to be founded or what came before it, except that there is some evidence that there was a history before that. And in order to do this, an extremely powerful nestic chemical, chemical X is being applied. This is in and of itself a fountain of youth drug, a compound which can drastically reverse aging, but only for a very temporary period of time, before it whiplashes back, inflicting all of the age that it's taken away back upon the user of the drug in catastrophic manner. And so they've waited until Hilton made it to the last age that he possibly could before naturally expiring, before applying this very extreme measure for memory recovery. As Chemical X is administered to Hilton, the years literally begin to melt off of him, and his memory begins to reestablish itself. He is the founder of the Antimetics Division and at first begins through that history of nineteen seventy six. But again, there is some earlier origin to this. And so more and more drugs are applied until we break back through into much earlier memories from Hilton. We come to find that the Antimetics Division was founded not in nineteen seventy six and not even through the unknown organization, and instead was founded sometime during World War II, originally as the Ideational Research Establishment, also known as, more colloquially, the Unthinkables. The goal of this organization was to find some way to destroy at its root even the idea of Nazism. In order to do this through its research, this first iteration of the anti memetics division, the unthinkables, discovers the technology to create an anti memetic body. And though they discover the first, at least to their knowledge, anti memetic weapon, what they don't create are any protections from it. At this point, nestic drugs are not even a concept. Unfortunately, they aren't able to use the bomb during the war. As they are coming to the conclusion of creating this anti-mimetic weapon, World War II comes to its historical end. And so the unthinkables and their anti-mimetic bomb go on to begin to collect dust. And as time goes by, it in its own way almost becomes naturally forgotten, not having some immediate use. However, that is when the Oji cult begins a rapid and viral worldwide spread, a mimetic entity or weapon, a truly viral idea that spreads almost just at any contact, something that is clearly not just a natural idea no matter its attractiveness, and as it begins to spread through the world, and as the cult begins its meteoric spread across the world in only a matter of weeks, the unthinkables are acquired by the unknown organization, and within twenty hours of that acquisition, the anti-mimetic bomb is used and the cult is destroyed. The idea at its root that founded the Oji cult is stopped and destroyed. But in and of itself, with no other protections, the Unthinkables or the Anti-Mimetics division of that time are also destroyed, all memory of it wiped from the people who activated the weapon to defend humanity. That group of people quickly manages to figure out what has been done, what they did, and begins to rediscover their own research quite quickly. And as this moves forward in this about 1951, we have the first true founding under Hilton of the Antimetics Division. And as they begin to discover nestic drugs, this reveals to them the world of unknowns and anti mimetic entities. And as Hilton wrestles with these many different memories, he begins to realize maybe for the first time, possibly, it's hard to tell if he would have known it at the time, but that the nineteen fifty one Anti Memetics Division caught, cataloged, and protected humanity from any number of unknowns and anti memes, and that the nineteen seventy six version of the organization found and catalogued many of the same things. And this, this space in between is what Maria Quinn is probing for, because if there was a nineteen fifty one Anti Memetics Division and a 1976 Anti Memetics Division, what occurred to destroy it and require its refoundation? And so more of Chemical X is applied, and a breach in a wall in Hilton's memory is finally pushed through. What Hilton recovers is memory of some deeper, more terrible entity, a thing known as the escapee, a thing which, upon your knowledge of it, also gains knowledge of you. A thing that hates being known. And of course, pushing through this barrier of memory means that it now knows that they know of it again. And in this, some terrible spider like creature begins to force its way directly through Hilton and into this world, or perhaps just to reveal itself. It's not necessarily forcing its way through some other dimension or anything, but it is bursting into realization for both Hilton and for Marie. Marie immediately kicks into high gear to first try and shoot the terrible monster, that not working and realizing that the only way to get away from this, the escapee, is to completely and totally erase any memory of it from herself, and so loads herself up with a heroic dose of amnesic drugs. This of course is a truly dangerous act they being on a little boat on a lake, and as Marie understands, as she is partaking in these desperate measures, that something must have already been aware of her investigation and what was going on because though what she's doing makes sense for attempting to uncover this mystery, she is entirely without the many layers of backup and protection that she would normally have, and is instead alone with Hilton on this boat. Alone except of course for the escapee, whatever this terrible entity really is. It's an entity which, again, has a spider-like description in how it is bursting forth from Hilton within the chapter, but is also a thing so large that it lifts the boat that they're on into the air, some kind of terrible, not just spider, but monstrous kraken of some kind, or at least in its emergence into this world and how it's interacting with the scene, if not how it actually appears or exists, aha, as will I'm certain learn later on. The heroic dose of amnesiac drugs does manage to work, and either through the actions of the water and its waves, or through some deeper instinct to avoid drowning by swimming, Marie fortunately makes it to the shore of the lake and is recovered by an emergency team. After Marie is recovered from the lake house or the shore of the lake, she's taken back to the division headquarters and there, in conversation with Jeff Ives, who is head of training and of the recovery and rescue or rapid response divisions, begins to question what has just happened. The emergency signal that was responded to was not her own, but no one has any record of what that emergency signal belongs to, again showing the power of anti memes to destroy knowledge of things around them. But in this we come to a ritual of the anti-mimetics division, which is upon discovering any hole in their memory, this or other parts of the unknown organization, whenever personnel find themselves with what amounts to missing time, they record it into what is the probably largest, most terrifying conspiracy web ever posted to a set of walls. But Marie begins adding her account to this web of missing time and begins trying to connect the pieces to understand what is it that caused this missing time? Is there some common source to all of these different missing moments throughout their personnel? Creating in essence a map of absence, a map of a hole in their collective memory, something that perhaps all of these other past iterations of the anti memetics division have done before. After all, it is this creature who destroyed the nineteen fifty one based organization, forcing the recreation of it in nineteen seventy six. It is some terrible, mysterious entity which humanity has wrestled with for at least that many generations, if not significantly more, perhaps some kind of unknowable entity going back through the entire history of humanity. And that is where the immediately obvious narrative content ends for part one of There is No Anti Memetics Division. It does conclude with another case phile of an unknown, this time the case phile for those who walk very slowly. Giant ocean born creatures known only to some specific island cultures for many generations, which are sort of megafauna, which possess antimimetic qualities but otherwise seem primarily harmless. Now, whether that's true, whether or not the escapee has some direct relationship to those who walk very slowly, was maybe a predator of theirs, which as they gradually were forced into extinction, seemingly through primarily the observation of them, whether this triggered something remains to be seen. It may just be the presentation of an SCP case file. But it'll be interesting to see whether this last segment is truly non-narrative or is sprinkled in, some seasoning that will come up again later. But that's that's the the first part narrative. And it's something that brings up a lot of different related media in my mind. Stuff that, especially from a novel perspective, uh some things that I will likely cover in the future, some books who, unfortunately, I just got done reading and didn't didn't do any coherent note-taking about, and so I won't cover immediately. Uh but this is a work that calls out to so many wonderful contributions. Again, the SCP Foundation as a collaborative writing community is the most immediate thing that's present. This is a work that was first serialized through that wiki and through that collaborative writing project, uh, and so is continuously calling directly to that organization. That is where most of its terminology comes from. That's where a lot of its structure and its case files come from. And it's just wonderful to see how it has emerged into the more public and popular eye. Uh, the SCP Foundation is something that I've been vaguely aware of for quite some time, but not something that I spent any amount of time reading through on any consistent basis. And so being reintroduced to it as something of much more significance than I would have paid to it is just quite wonderful, and I think deserves much more attention whenever people can come across it and find their own stories within it. But there are so many different things that both draw their own inspiration from the SCP Foundation, uh, one of those things being the video game Control. Uh Sam Lake directly credits it as being a tremendous source of inspiration for that game and its narrative. Uh Control is a wonderful action game. I've played a decent bit of it, but I am not that great of an action gamer. I do not gel with a lot of shooting game mechanics very well. Uh, so I haven't finished it. It's something that now I I obviously need to go back to and give uh some more attention and time to. But control features a number of things that directly call out to the SCP Foundation and to this work as well. It follows Jesse Faden, who becomes the brand new director of the Federal Bureau of Control, a secret agency that lives in the oldest house, its headquarters, which is in and of itself an artifact of much power and mystery, a building that reshapes itself as it's resided within. And there they keep track of objects of power and respond to altered world events through their organization. It is a fascinating game which plays upon the many different aspects of being within and fighting the unknowable. Jesse is immediately confronted with some terrible set of events which have begun to unravel the Federal Bureau of Control, taking over much of its staff, an entity or set of entities named the HISS, some invasive organism of extraplanar origin. It very directly calls out to the SCP Foundation in the objects of power which are found around the old house. These have their own case files and documentation, often wonderfully acted and played out and recorded by its voice acting cast, and which really give it in so many ways a place within the larger narrative established by other works, such as The X-Files, I think this being one of the most obvious and enduring uh TV fictions that has wrestled with and given us a template for how do you wrestle with the unknowable, with strange events and things outside of the ordinary? A much less dark, much funnier work that played in the same space as Warehouse thirteen, again, going into the realm of an organization dealing with various kinds of objects of power, of mystery, that it has to catalog and then warehouse in order to keep humanity safe. In how the unknown organization and the anti-memetics division have to contend with the unknowable and the enormity of what anti-memes represent, it has, in my mind, significant overlap with the Southern Reach Quadrilogy, uh, those being Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance, and Absolution. Absolution having been published ten full years after the original trilogy, uh, and provides a certain sort of preface to those works, although as a preface, it is a work that in my mind really depends on already having read what comes after it in the narrative. It is something which is filling in gaps in what people wanted to know and understand from those original three. And it does a beautiful job of not answering most of those questions, and doing so in unexpected and interesting ways. Another game that called out to me in especially the reading of chapter three, is No Man's Sky, a game in which you are an entity with no memory of how it got to where it is or what it's really meant to do, but is acting out in its life, in its mission, as one of many iterations. And it's that iterative quality of No Man's Sky in particular that overlaps with this. In most ways, No Man's Sky is just a sci-fi survival builder exploratory game. It has its own very interesting and complex history releasing under marketing that may have overpromised on what it delivered, but is one of those projects which the development team refused to let it die, and it came to have a much deeper narrative which involves a compelling story about memory and iteration that only came to be through the process of many updates over a number of years, and is something worth exploring on its own. It's something that I have been through some of the iterations of, both in the sense of its iteration through how it has developed as a game and its many different layers of mechanical systems, but also through its own narrative of that missing memory and iteration, and in this a quest to recover and rescue a friend, or at least a voice from the void called Artemis. And so it has that echo of Marie Quinn bringing Hilton back through his own memory to learn the history of the iterations of the anti-Mimetics division. It's just such a wonderful, wonderful book so far. Its willingness to play with these really wide-ranging concepts. Memory is something that I think is inherently difficult to play with in a narrative sense in this way. Working with things that self-destroy memory of them is a space that feels difficult to tackle. It is not just amnesia, it is not any single source of memory loss. It is a confluence of many different competing forces. And as someone who has a family history of Alzheimer's disease, anything that wrestles with the concept of our memory, what our memory makes us, and what the loss of it takes away really holds a certain inherent interest to me, because you see these characters wrestling with something that strips away much of their very essence. You see the anti-Mimetics division in and of itself having to wrestle with the fact that it is forgetting its own history, that it is fighting against forces that are pushing back, and that through its growing map of an ever growing hole in its own memory, discovering over and over again through its lack of memory, just how much it's lost. The enormous cafeteria presented to us in chapter two, which is found to be almost entirely empty, is something that is nicely played with through that dynamic. It's only by looking at that empty space that we can wrestle with what's gone. It's obvious that there should be something more there, that such a large space was meant to be filled. And so if you're fighting against things that erase the very memory of what it destroys, how do you grasp who are the people that should fill that space? And that again comes back to us toward the conclusion of chapter three. In the conversation between Marie Quinn and Jeff Ives, we get a deeper look at much of what is missing. Marie confronts Jeff with the fact that if he's been training people for the division for decades, how many people is that really? If he's been doing class after class of inductees, shouldn't there be more of them? They're confronted by the fact that they are, to their knowledge, an organization of two hundred members doing the work of what should be two thousand. And if those numbers are true, that means that they have been reduced to a decimal, not just decimated, but reduced to a decimal of what they should be. And that is something enormous to wrestle with. Not to have access to any nesti drugs, not to have access to any chemical X. There will be no final reversal, no final mission that carries you back through those memories. Unless of course perhaps there is an afterlife and you do get to be dragged back through that through that or to that. And what would that mean to rediscover oneself? From the many different narratives that could, of course, be its own horror show. You could be dragged back to and through a life that wasn't one that you would have wished to live. Of course, the hope is that you have lived exactly that life. I think we get there into the Nietzschean concept, and it's not unique to him, but it's his philosophy that I'm most familiar with it. Ah, but the reversal of being confronted at the end of one's life by a demon. And in this case the demon confronts you with the knowledge that you will live the same life. You won't relive your life in a way that you can alter it, nor will you even have knowledge that you're living it again, but instead upon your death your life in every one of its moments will repeat, and do you greet that knowledge with horror or with acceptance? Have you missed out on your own life in some way, or have you lived a life that even if you lived it again with no changes or knowledge that it happened, that just with the knowledge that it would happen, that you can be content in that knowledge, with all of its blemishes, with all of its mishaps, that you would accept living back through your own life. And I think we should all come to that with some form of contentment. It is our life. No matter what tragedy it's contained, it is who we are. There is no one else we could be. There is no turning back the clock and making different decisions. And this is also something that there is no anti mimetics division presents in this first part and these first chapters. None of these characters in the recovery of their memories can make any changes. They can only move forward. They can move forward knowing, even if they are recovering much of who they were, that there may be gaps, that that recovery, just like any other physical injury, may only ever be partially complete. And that contains its own sense of horror and dread, that we know that we will have lost parts of ourselves along this journey, that the characters have unrecoverable moments. Again, I think that this is also nicely presented in No Man's Sky as you as some unknowable iteration, bereft of its own memory, live back through some life that the universe itself is pushing back against, that many species simply make way for, having more knowledge of what and who you are than you do through their simple recognition of you, their acquiescence to your mission, and their non interference in where you go and what you do. At least from a story standpoint, pirates are going to try and shoot you all the time, and again there is a galactic force which is pushing back against your manipulation of reality and the universe. And that seems in some fashion like what the escapee is doing. It is pushing back against any memory of itself. And so I'm very excited to see where part two takes us. Where will Marie Quinn and the Anti-Mimetics division get to? We already know that characters can be lost along the way, that their memories can be lost. So I'm interested to see will we conclude with the same lead character that we've begun with? For the moment, I certainly hope so. Marie Quinn presents as a very interesting character. I have looked up no spoilers about this story. I've I've avoided really as much knowledge of it as I can. This is something that I am coming to very fresh, so I could be very wrong about where we're going in very many ways. But I am interested to see what of these first three chapters ends up being revelatory to later sections, and it's just going to be a fun ride. I really look forward to seeing what other ideas this stirs in me as we go along, and I hope that you continue to join me along the way, so that we can both lose memory of this whole encounter together. But until we do that, again, thank you for joining me here, extraordinary internet people, and I'll see you next time in this space between the platforms.