Book Club: There is No Antimemetics Division Part 3

Book Club Episode 3 - Covers There is No Antimemetics Division Part 3 (Chapters 1-4 of this section, though there is more to part 3 of the book that we will return to) - Spoiler warning for these chapters.  We press forward, this time with Adam Quinn into a world that swiftly shifts, a world that becomes fractured and lost to U-3125.  Take a journey down a dark road with me.  Also, the word of this episode is juxtaposed!  I realized as I edited that I say it a lot this time around, so get your clicker and count just how many times we can sit wit the juxtaposition of narrative ideas.

Transcript

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Hello there, beautiful internet person. Here we are again, this time, for book club number three, which so happens to coincide with There Is No Anti-Mimetics Division, Part 3. In this case, covering chapters 1 through 4, as well as some previous context from one of the interludes of Part 2 that I had decided to skip over, ah, because I wasn't sure it would be entirely relevant in all ways to the continuing discussion, but which blends in nicely in a way that I think deserves discussion. So here we are, in this little space called Null by Design, for this continuing little book club, maybe just to myself, but maybe out there to all of you. Again, chapters one through four for There Is No Anti-Mimetics Division, Part 3. This is filled only with spoilers and is a continuation of my own interpretation of the narrative. If you don't want anything to be spoiled, you should retreat on into the night right now. Continue no further, buy the book by quantum, and catch on up. It will be a wonderful ride for you. But regardless of whether you've read or not, here we go. Here with the final interlude from part two, Ojai, which does seem to coincide with the Oji cult from earlier chapters. Herein we find Operative James Bess, there from the Memetics Division of the Unknown Organization, a specialist in religious ideas and cults, dispatched to investigate the Green Place, a place located, for the title of this chapter, just north of Ojai. Upon arrival he finds only a dilapidated white house resting amid unkept greenland in this space. He begins exploring the premises, hearing rambling speech from one of the rooms distant in this dilapidated building. He goes through and clears the building except for this final room from which he can hear some strange rambling. As he breaks into the room, he finds it utterly cluttered, stacked with computers, with devices, with notes, with the detritus of someone who has been locked in a room for far too long, a strange streamer's warren that has been far too long inhabited with no respite from its confines. There he finds a thin, pale, ragged young man, whose code name in this is Red, a wonderful juxtaposition between a place called Green and a man called Red. There's a scuffle between them. The man known as Red has no real combat experience, and though he does attempt to get the better of Operative Bess, Operative Bess has a mystical shield that helps him easily win the encounter. He disarms and pins Red, pulls out a device, a strange pen that emits a cognito poison, something meant in small exposure, to free others from infectious mimetic ideas. This does in fact seem to subdue Red, and Best begins the process of waiting for this man to recover. But unfortunately, he has made an error. As Red begins to recover, he utters a question to James. Where is your partner? But Bess doesn't remember having a partner. There's been no partner mentioned in this narrative. But he does have vague memories of coming into the building that do seem to indicate that he may not have been alone, that someone may have preceded him, opened doors that he doesn't remember opening himself, pathways that he felt like he was following through. And so he rushes out into the hallway, does a brief inspection, and though his partner, Gaines, he is there, incapacitated, screaming, dissolving from memory and reality. Bess can not perceive him at all. So he turns back to the room, where there he finds Red fully awake, fully recovered. Eyes fully open. And through those fully open eyes, James perceives an utterly destructive meme or anti meme there laying in wait through that gateway of this man's eyes. And as Bess perceives that terrible idea through Bess It Red, the escapee, perceives all that sent Bess on this ill fated mission. The creature lying in wait forms an outline of all that is come to bring James Bess to this house, all of the people involved in dispatching him here in this moment, and that forms the basis of a hit list, a hit list that the escapee will follow into the heart of the unknown organization to begin its utter destruction. And it's through that perception that that interlude ends. It is obviously not the Oji cult that we recall from earlier chapters, this is an idea spreading through internet streaming, so far past the nineteen seventies, and yet here we are, some rebuilt or rebirthed idea that was once before defined, found, and destroyed by some earlier anti memetics division. Instead, we're carried on from that directly into part three. And there chapter one Case Hate Red. We open with Adam Quinn. We are, after all, without Marie at this point, possibly being gone from our narrative. But we come to Adam in his new life. It's the early morning. Adam feels some vague sense of something lost, something missing within his life. A feeling he has in the gray moments of stillness between what is otherwise a very busy life of a performing, touring and teaching violinist, the life that he's been left with by the anti memetics division, after he has been utterly erased from Marie's life and Marie from his own. It's a sense of missing that's too vague for him to truly grasp, but which in those still moments still leaves some sense of loss nonetheless. But here we find him moving past that as he begins getting into his day. In the early morning with the start at this hotel, just one of many, what he describes himself as a liminal lifestyle of touring, a place between places, a repetition of shows, just one very similar occurrence after another, these all with the New York Orchestra. On this particular day in the bathroom, as he begins to ready himself, a dark black slug falls from his eye, and then he removes another one that he finds in the corner of his eye. Disgusted, washes them away. And yet, despite this incredible disruption, something that should snap him into some real immediate action and sense of dread, it's immediately lost. They fall out of his mind, even though he's left with some lingering sense of unease. That sense of unease follows him as he's in a taxi, going to rehearsal, on his phone noticing some new viral video. People painting a black rectangle on a mirror and chanting words in some strange, unknown language, some almost seemingly reversed English with vowels and out of order sequences, but something that isn't familiar at all to him in any real sense. And during the rehearsal, the orchestra seems somehow distracted, and when he shares a meaningful glance with the conductor, and then after practice, speaks to the conductor for just a moment, the conductor mentions they need their eyes fixed, and then proceeds to, mostly unheard, mumble something in what may be that same or a similar strange language, though Adam can't fully hear it. And so instead, Adam pushes forward, left in that gray space between practice and the moment of performance. For at least a moment, Adam has some sense of true unease, a compulsion to flee. Some sense that he should flee, maybe from this entirely artificial life, a life that he can't perceive is artificial and constructed around him, but which has still left him, with some, again, quiet unease, an unease that lasts only in these moments of stillness. And then the show begins. The show begins and Adam finds himself lost as he always does in the playing of music, difficult technical music that he persists and moves forward in, until all of a sudden, he finds himself surrounded by a strange stillness and silence. The orchestra itself has gone entirely silent. The audience which he first perceived is at rapt attention seems far too still. The conductor has stopped conducting in any way, shape, or form. And there he begins to look around, to come back to his own senses, only to realize that all of these people around him have been replaced. They're terrible, strange, pinkish brown blobs of flesh, pillars of flesh that still stand as people do, but which otherwise barely resemble humans, things with strange protuberances, sensing organs that he can't understand, clothed in scraps of black and white clothing, draped over them, but not at all. Anything more, perhaps, than a costume. A strange and macal an utterly horrible scene that envelops him. Adam does manage to flee and escape this. It turns out the terrible fleshy pillar people aren't all that great at the moment in capturing anybody. He manages to flee up several levels in the building, only to find himself in a bathroom upon which he finds a mirror that itself has a black rectangle painted upon it, and as he stares at it, feels heat radiating from that rectangle, like staring into an open oven. At that moment, he does snap into some deeper memory, a knowledge that none of this is actually new, that the viral video that he saw that morning in the cab isn't a new one, but has been recirculating for several months, that there's some other second part to the video, something terrible that through that and through this rectangle is leaking its way into reality. As Adam flees from that mirror as he flees from that bathroom, he again hears the approach of many figures coming toward him. Though again compelled by the narrative, he does manage to escape with relative ease. But he escapes out of the auditorium into the streets, only to find something far more disturbing in many senses. A place utterly empty he finds streets that are packed with empty cars, many of them with their doors still open, but nobody around. And from a distance a strange sound, almost like the sounds of screaming in some terrible concert. As he looks around the corner from where he's at, he spots a colossal and dark and shadowy, but impossibly thin creature, something that he almost missed at first glance because it is so slender and shadowy. But there it is standing over the scene. And repulsed by it, he retreats back toward the auditorium, and from there begins to hear many, many different figures. Creeping in upon him, he's spotted by some of the terrible blocky flesh creatures. This time they are not so terrible at surrounding and catching him. They do catch him, they pin him down. All he knows is that none of this should be happening. Somewhere deep in his mind, somewhere deep in a barely recalled place of his memory, he knows that there ought to be someone here to stop this, that there are people meant to stop this. But all of those people, that person, that person particularly to him, Marie, are all gone. And instead what we have is this world, a world slipping into darkness. And instead of salvation, there Adam is, penned by these creatures. Still, something in his mind hopes that it may still all be okay. Until, of course, as they mumble in their strange language about what of him needs to be fixed, that fixing is about to begin. And we transition directly into chapter two, titled Unthinkable. We return immediately to Adam. There is no shift of scene here as there have been previously. Instead, there is poor Adam, penned, penned by the non-humans, the replacements that have come to be, still perhaps hoping that this all may turn out to be okay. That is until one of the creatures produces a chisel, and they do in earnest begin the fixing. And from this point forward, within this chapter at this point, many large pieces of the text are redacted. Literal quite quite literal redactions. It is just blank black lines, somewhat like some files that many of us have come to know over the preceding months in the real world. Terrible, terrible redactions that seem to protect something dark and shadowy in our world that perhaps otherwise we should be fighting against. Here we find a broken world reduced to broken lines of text. There's only the occasional small snippet, and by and large I'm going to leave those snippets between the author and you, the reader. I think it's worth seeing, I think it is worth experiencing the jarring juxtaposition of this text. And in most cases I would leave my thoughts about other media until later. But this is something where I think we are powerfully compelled to understand the media as the message, and other books that do this in similar, if their own unique ways. Another book that's on my TBR, something that I've looked through some snippets of that I have heard some partial reviews of, comes immediately into focus for this, and that is House of Leaves, a narrative that very heavily relies on the medium as the message, where substantial portions of pages are left blank, where going through a car crash is met by text, continuously moving at ninety degree angles, just as the rolling of a vehicle would do. And so it's in this juxtaposition of text and narrative that we find something in this quite special. But we can't have redacted text forever. We instead come to messages that become somewhat more cohesive. Some last splinter of Adam works against this overwhelming darkness. He follows a nourishing ray of sunlight up and over the walls of some terrible, terrible prison that he's found himself walked within, something only half remembered even at this point. And he walks under a black sun, away from the core. And as he walks away, one last black slug slips from his eye, an unthreading, unraveling infection left upon the way. And so Adam wakes alone in a wide corridor, only to discover that he is missing two fingers, removed, presumably, by that chisel in which the fixing began just a time earlier in this chapter. And though Adam cannot actually recollect how he came to lose those fingers, only the ache in his hand, the ache of the wounds, he does find them to be healed, and in this understands that some substantial time has passed. And so as he comes further to awareness, he finds himself in a school with a strange point of light in the corner of his eye, a glimmer that compels him forward, forward in this case, to the library in the school, where he reads and forgets the text of an encyclopedia. All he knows really is that the glimmer after this seems stronger, seems sated, seems in some way like he is healed. And after this feeding of this glimmer, of this ray of sunshine in the corner of his eye, he explores further and finds that the school is without power or running water. Though a sickly red light continues to spill into the building from outside. And while he forages under this strange sick light, he does manage to find some bottled water, some shoes that will fit him because all he's left with are tattered remains of clothing. What's especially noticeable here is that Adam has found no one inside the building, no bodies inside the building, nor as he progresses further outside, not any sign of any bodies, at least that he can perceive. But he can hear some strange sound, almost like white noise, like the sound of the ocean crashing upon rocks in the distance, and he begins to follow that sound. Adam follows that sound for many miles, leading first into the city's center. Again, scenes entirely just of abandoned buildings. Buildings, abandoned cars, no bodies anywhere within sight. This is some place where the tragedy that's occurred, that whatever has happened has been durable. And his exploration continues, still under this same unchanging light, a terrible red eye that neither rises nor sets, but casts its gaze out upon everything. And as he continues, having foraged in a few buildings to get more clothes, to get more packaged water, more sealed food that's still within its expiration date, hopefully, he continues toward the sound, a sound that continues to evolve in definition, something that seems almost as if a terrible choir of human voices all singing together in some undiscernible agony. Until finally he crests a hill and sees a monumental sarcophagus, a building of true enormity, and it's from there that the sound is emanating. And above that enormous relic, a terrible and impossibly thin, shadowy figure stands over it, a figure that in its scale almost dwarfs this enormous sarcophagi, an object terrible and as high as a skyscraper. And some memory of what's happened to Adam returns, though we're given no specificity on what he remembers, only that he has to flee from it immediately. This is not a world that has ended, but a world that's been remade in some other entity's vision. Again, a change that hasn't just happened, but a change that's been durable. And so we leave this chapter in this broken world. We come to chapter three Blood Brain. Again we continue with Adam, this time continuing to wander, wandering through what has no true day or night, a fact so durable in his mind, that as Adam continues to wander and find refuge at different locations, he eventually constructs a rudimentary pendulum so that as he sleeps and then wakes, he observes whether or not this pendulum has changed its angle that it traverses, and finds that it has, in this case roughly forty five degrees from when he first went to sleep. In its way it confirms that though everything else in this world has changed, it does still spin on some axis, even if the light in the sky always remains fixed in its one place. As he continues to wander, Adam does sometimes cross paths with more of these enormous shadowy figures. Whether Adam is unnoticed, he does remain otherwise unmolested. The glimmer in his eye is leading the way for him, not in any specific direction, not along some GPS route, but like a wavering compass, compelling him in a general direction, and given no other option in this strange and altered world, he follows it. Though as he does, he comes to or at least close to many other sarcophagi in this world, from which the same terrible cry issues. He never goes within eyesight of any of these, very carefully avoiding that, but does pass by many, many that are near city centers, some that are out in the countryside, but very carefully navigating his way in between these terrible edify. And as he's being led forward, sunshine slowly becomes somewhat more agitated, more anxious, though it does eventually and finally lead him to the unknown organization facility or headquarters at Whaley. As Adam tries to approach, it is a building, a facility in a site that is shrouded from memory by the explosion of the anti-mimetic device that Marie set off. And so Adam comes nearby but sort of glances off the site several times, each time being directed back by sunshine until finally he gets close enough that he does perceive the facility. A at least one third destroyed location, though still at least mostly intact, even after the terrible events of the previous part of this book. As he approaches and wanders across the facility, he gains access to it through a portion that has been destroyed and knocked down, and begins searching through the rubble and then the more intact portions of the building. What he notices is that it clearly has to be some kind of secret facility. It has studiously imposed an entire lack of identification, juxtaposed with many layers of security. It's here that he first finds bodies strewn among the wreckage, bodies left because they are cast outside the memory of this world, seemingly safe within the envelope of the antimimetic field. And as he begins to explore, perhaps the single most important thing that stands out is as he moves into the building, his movement triggers lights to turn on in the building. The building has both power and running water. It's a facility that has been built to be durable against disaster, built by people who planned for some kind of deep troubles that could be possible. And as he continues further into the vaults, further into the edifices of this complex, he finds a vault four J, housing something labeled as U thirty one twenty five, the vault of the beginning of the end of Marie's own journey in the previous section. Eventually he comes across a map, a map that shows all of the levels of the facility, and to which he is immediately drawn to the last level B thirty triple zero basement level thirty, a place that houses only a single, unlabeled, enormous chamber. And he continues moving through the facility, eventually making it there. Moving in many ways from security door to security door, only by finding security badges on the bodies left within the facility. Let's put a pin in that. We'll come back to that. It's a fun little metaphor that I think crosses over nicely with other things I've discussed recently in the previous episode. Not of the book club, but just the previous little discussion, and we'll come back to that. But as Adam makes it through the facility, he does eventually make it to this final basement level. He finds the Ed Hicks vault where Marie's story ended. The vault that has been opened by holes carved into it by U-7381. The Impossible Ray Gun, the summoned rather than constructed weapon, which in fact Adam first stumbles over before he later recovers. Within the vault he finds twelve bodies, eleven of them arrayed in a semicircle around the final twelfth body. The body of a woman. And at the sight of this, the glimmer in the corner of his eye, sunshine, bursts into a cavalcade of memories, memories eaten at the edge of who he and Marie were, the edges of their lives, thousands of moments eaten over time, but which to Adam are only the edges of an alien and unremembered life. A wife who he truly has no real knowledge of, even though he perceives himself moment to moment in many different kinds of trivia through her eyes. All he knows is that in some way these memories were seemingly and uncomprehendingly destroyed and stripped away to protect him. And there, on that body, he finds one final security badge, the badge that he realizes will open Vault 4J, the memory hole, the place containing the plan to fight U thirty one twenty five. And there we come to chapter four, titled Quite on the nose, U Thirty One Twenty Five. Here we come to Adam continuously listening to, re watching the recordings from the past and present Marie, who last encountered each other here, in this chamber in Vault four J, in the memory hole containing the plan to fight U thirty one twenty five. He finds one bereft of purpose and one that had one final desperate plan. He learns that Marie believed that she would find Ed Hicks, having built an irreality amplifier that would banish this terrible idea that has now since consumed the world. He finds her describing the asynchronous nature of how this research plan would have had to exist, of the chamber that he finds himself in itself. That there is a terrible failure scenario that past Marie knew might come to be, that U thirty one twenty five may, and so as we've learned, has come to win against this human reality. And we also have that juxtaposed against what present Marie had hoped was one final desperate plan and attempt that could win the war. Continuously reviewing these and coming to a full understanding of what he finds around him, Adam records his own message, an addendum in this end of the world. He's reactivated the nearby comms room, attempted to reach out across any known emergency channels and receive nothing back from any other facility. Whether that's because there's nobody left of the unknown organization, or whether they've cut off all communications in order to isolate themselves from the terrible anti memetic destruction of the escape is unknown to him. But what he has discovered is that there is a previous unremembered headquarters of the unknown organization, a headquarters that is located at Stanmore, and that he intends to go there. This message stands as one last broadcast among the many that he may fail, that it may not exist, or that it may not be the solution that he hopes it to be, that it may, like Marie's last desperate effort, not contain any last super weapon. Or even if it does, that as just one man, as one man with very little training, he may not make it, he may be killed along the way, and that any who follows should do so with abundant caution. And so he sets out, sets out from the ruined facility. As he begins to walk away from it, as he gets close to the boundary of the anti memetic projection left by the bomb that Marie set off, a figure waits a strange scraggly man a man who has gunshot wounds, still strangely oozing blood. The rider the man called Red. That figure can perceive that there's something there, something on the other side, and is speaking to that space beyond, specifically stating that he is not the hero, that maybe he should just kill himself. But all of this is through a veil. Red cannot truly perceive Adam at this boundary, this interesting anti-mimetic boundary, much like what in the earlier chapters we encountered with Marie and the enormous obelisk and the memory field which saved her from the encounter with the rider then. And so he has some safe distance and boundary from the rider, that is, until Adam does actually truly begin to see him. And through that recognition, Red begins to perceive Adam. And at that moment, sunshine leaps into action, manages one final, perhaps desperate attack. Sunshine launches its stored memories against the escapee, but in a moment is seemingly destroyed. But it is that one that single moment that gives Adam the chance to raise and aim that impossible ray gun, with which, with a silent click of the trigger, he annihilates the rider. First just taking one shot, annihilating a portion of it, and then like a good action movie, utterly destroying the thing in front of him, firing again and again until the ray gun utterly, utterly annihilates the body of the rider. And as that happens, a bevy of previously unseen spiders, both small and towering, begin to dissipate into the surroundings. And from here, Adam is left to follow this last plan to hopefully find Ed Hicks at the Stanmore facility. And so here, for this episode, is where my reading trails off. There is at least one more chapter left in part three. There is a chapter five, and perhaps more. But whatever lays beyond is best left until our next broadcast. Something that I wanted to be left to be savored and dwelled upon. I was kind of pushing against my own scheduling in this case. It's been a busy bit of time, and I didn't want to rush through what comes next. Again, I want to be able to savor and dwell upon it, because the writing in this section so far has been truly excellent. It is the very distinct change in scene, of pacing, of character that really, I think, bring this into focus. Throughout this, and I think as mentioned before, this was something that was serialized and published on the SCP Foundation, published over I and I am uncertain of the exact period of time, but it is something that stands out as a writer finding more and more of themselves and their voice upon this journey. And that is a beautiful and wonderful thing to get to travel along with. In a lot of ways it reminds me of Stephen King's Dark Tower saga. This, fortunately, in a much more compressed form, not having to take the full cycle of seven books to come to its evolution of an author, and instead, only in what have been a few relatively short but well-concentrated chapters, we get to see Quantum go through several different stages of development in narrative. And I think this is one of the things that writing communities and strong communities like the SCP Foundation show us is the power and nature of writing with others. It is finding a voice within a community and being able to capitalize on it. And again, if you haven't read up until this point, if you're just slogging through the spoilers, get the book, read it, because it is demonstrative of what being a part of a good community can do. It is a book which is sometimes very blunt in its prose, but which is growing increasingly poetic. At no point have I thought that the writing is bad. There are points in which it has been somewhat blunt, in which the description of any given scene is very on the nose. But that's fine. Writing doesn't have to be any specific way, and this is something which finds its way through incredibly strong ideas very adroitly. So I am, again, thoroughly enjoying the journey through this book. It's one that will stay with me for a long time. One of the things that has stood out to me, particularly over my reading, is that in the first part, when we first came upon the memory monster following Marie around, that we have later come to under the name Sunshine, I really worried that it was just going to be a toss-away character, something just used as a literary device to help introduce us to the world. And instead, what we have, even though it has no dialogue and only the barest bit of description, a creature which has a deep place in this narrative, something which you can't help but come to care about. And instead of just being something lost in some preforatory text and chapters, it has found a full pretext. It has found its own evolving arc. And that, again, I think is something special because I worried that it might be lost along the way, and have been at every point pleasantly surprised by how enduring it's been, and how it has found a place in me where I think, but where is sunshine going to show up next? And has gone from again being almost just a literary device to something that came back and had a spot that gave us some further context in part two to being almost a central character in this third part. Obviously, in this last bit of action we may have lost sunshine. Even Adam wonders if it's gone or if it's possible even to kill an idea in that way. And I hope that it isn't. I hope that we discover sunshine again. But like we've found the body of Marie, I'm somewhat worried that we may not. And it's that worry for something which is Just a glimmer in the corner of the eye is something that should be treasured. Of other things that I've thought about along the way, and one thing in particular that my partner has brought up as a piece of context, offer this as a related work, is Doctor Who and The Silence in the Library. They bear very strong similarities, an alien force eating its way through a world, destroying everything that it comes across, and yet leaving strange echoes in its wake. I think that that's something that I could watch several more times while reading through each of these chapters and get some new and deeper context of. So, I don't have a whole lot more to say about how they go together and where they contrast at the moment, but hopefully I'll be able to come back to that. It's something that is still brewing and kind of forming in the back of my mind. I think it's something where there's enough dissimilarity that it's hard to just come to an immediate conclusion about how they have some nice dovetail, uh, because the escapee is utterly destroying things in a way that is very different from how the silence eats its victims. There's not an immediate loss of memory of those individuals, even if everything, largely including except for those last momentary bits of memory, that are eaten by the silence exists. But again, it's in that nearness to each other that I think there's something interesting to contrast that I still have time to work out. But in this case, I really don't have a whole lot of other notes to go over in terms of comparison with media. Perhaps like the redacted text in the preceding chapters, this message stands in its own through its retelling of this as the medium as the message, that my own redacted and fragmentary account and my impressions of this are something that describes something that is at once understood and yet still beyond my comprehension, that I am too, as Adam is, wrestling with something only half seen, only half understood. Though I have memory of all that I've read, I have only the memory that's been presented to me. I have the half memories of many characters in which I am trying to read in between the lines, and where one glancing look around at a world lost and remade in the vision of another is here in this retelling, remade by myself in some small and perhaps lacking way. The only thing that immediately stands out that was a call back to the last episode that I recorded on gaming and narrative and semi-narrative gaming, which had no intentional connection to this, but which in the explorations of Adam through the facility at Wale deeply reminded me of certain video game mechanics, Adam stumbling through the facility, finding locked doors and needing to go and find key cards. It is a tour through those thoughts in and of itself. That this in itself, in this telling, is a key card, unlocking some room in my mind, that I hope will carry us farther into this story, though at a later time. So I again truly thank you for following me along on this journey. It's been wonderful to have you here. It's been wonderful to have you in this liminal space between the platforms, in the crowded, jumbled pretext and post text of my own mind. So until next time, until next time in this place called Null by Design. Have a wonderful morning, afternoon, or evening. Whichever applies.