“Ms. Quinn! Ms. Quinn.”

Marie Quinn has just finished an engineering interlock meeting and is headed back toward her office for a cigarette. Someone is running up to meet her in the corridor. Quinn recognizes her as Dr. Oli Morgan, a trainee field researcher who joined the Antimemetics Division only six months ago. Part of Simon Lee’s new brood.

“Dr. Morgan. Can I help you with something?”

“Uhm.” Morgan interlocks her fingers nervously. She is a full head taller than Quinn and half her age, with an athletic build, incorrigibly curly hair, and exceedingly thick glasses. She lacks experience. But she is very smart, and she is learning very fast. In another year, she’ll be among the best people the Division has, or has ever had, and Quinn is looking forward to that. Quinn loves nothing more than competent people.

Still, as the pause lengthens, that day of competence seems to be very much in the future. “Dr. Morgan, I normally expect my people to get to the point a little quicker than this.”

“There’s—a stone in the forest behind the site,” Morgan blurts. “It’s monumental. It’s like a skyscraper, it blots out the Sun. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Yes.”

“But I’ve never seen it before. I don’t understand how it’s possible that I never saw it. It casts a shadow across the whole site. I mean—was it always there?”

“Yes.”

“Is this because—”

“You took your first routine dose of ops-grade mnestics this morning, yes.”

Morgan seems alarmed. “That’s how it works? Something that big can just be right there and we don’t see it?”

“Yeah.” Quinn checks her watch, and mentally moves some scheduled commitments around. Extend this “smoke break” to the rest of the afternoon. Leave my weekly inspection of U-2200 where it is. Review promotion cases after the gym instead of before. Evening meal…at this rate, never…

Morgan, suffocating under the weight of follow-up questions, finally asks, “What is it?”

Quinn gestures to her left, down the corridor, indicating that she is about to walk, and that Morgan should follow her. “I’ll show you.”

■

In the database it’s U-9429. Morgan hasn’t read the entry; she doesn’t have access.

The stone is a single, unbroken, 91-by-91-by-147-meter vertical cuboid of ancient, weathered, dark basalt. It sits at a very slight angle, leaning fractionally to the north. Its regular angles clearly mark it as a carved object, a human-made artifact. It rises out of the forest to the east of UO Wyeleigh and dominates, not to say obliterates, the views in that direction from the windows of the site’s main block. It is, by volume, massively bigger than the site itself, even including its underground extents. It looms. It is absolutely unmissable. The idea that anyone could fail to notice it for any period of time is, Quinn has to admit, more than a little unnerving.

Quinn leads Morgan up the short forest track to the stone’s perimeter, and then right, following its perimeter, in its shadow. It is a wet autumn day, and rain is dripping from the very top edge of the monolith as well as from the conifers that grow right up beside it. The rain makes a constant white hiss, deadening other sounds.

“There’s a weak antimemetic clouding effect surrounding it,” Quinn explains as she picks her way along the track ahead of Morgan. “To most people it’s effectively invisible. You’ve hiked up to the top of some of these other hills, I’m sure. You should have seen it clearly from up there as well, but you looked straight past it. That’s normal. There’s a related effect that removes people’s memories after they’ve visited the stone. That effect is much stronger. It’ll cut right through your mnestic drug regimen, and mine.”

“So we’ll forget all about this?” Morgan asks.

Quinn holds up a battered little notebook and a severely chewed blue ballpoint. Morgan understands; she is carrying a notebook and pen as well. Information suppression is a complicated spectrum. Sometimes a written note is the only thing that will make it out of a zone that suppresses memories, electronic data, radio signals, and even audible sound. Alongside the mandatory Organization-issue “brickphone,” many Antimemetics Division operatives habitually carry some combination of an instant camera, a mechanical tape-driven dictation machine, a notebook, a walkie-talkie…

Not that Morgan was expecting to need anything today.

“Of course,” Quinn continues, “one side effect of the clouding is that I don’t exactly remember the way. I suppose we could set up signposts, but somehow it never gets done…Not because of antimemetic effects, you understand, just plain laziness…Ah, this looks like the way up.”

They come to a passage in the side of the stone. In fact it is not a passage but a tremendously deep groove, cut all the way from the top of the monolith to its base, a slot with a thin line of overcast sky visible overhead and steps leading up.

At the bottom of the steps, Quinn turns aside and mutters some words. It’s not clear to Morgan what she is saying, or to whom she is saying them. Morgan doesn’t know that she has a follower. But U-4987 cannot enter the area of effect of the stone. It won’t disconnect from her, not that easily, but it cannot follow Quinn up the steps. So, it needs a little reassurance.

Then Quinn begins to climb, and Morgan follows. They climb in silence for some minutes. Morgan stops a few times to write down a note or two, hunching over to shield her notebook from the drizzle. Then she hurries to catch up with Quinn, who maintains a steady, indifferent pace.

Sometime after Morgan has lost count of the steps, the groove makes a ninety-degree turn to the left and continues to ascend. Quinn stops here, above Morgan, and turns to quiz her.

“What do you have so far?”

“What is this place?” Morgan asks.

“You tell me.”

“Uhm.” Morgan hesitates for a moment, uncertain where this is going. She checks her notes. “Uhm, well. Geologically speaking, this stone is an alien. At first I thought there could have been a mountain on this spot that was excavated into this shape by human hands. But the rock itself is wrong. It’s different from the mountains and hills near here. Which means it must have been excavated elsewhere, maybe carved there, and moved here.”

Quinn says nothing, but her demeanor seems to indicate that Morgan is on the right track.

“Which isn’t possible,” Morgan continues. “This is a single stone. Judging from its dimensions and density, it must mass north of three million tons. And that can’t be done. Human civilization can’t move objects of this size. Not in a single piece. The technology doesn’t exist.”

“Correct.”

“So how did it get here?”

“Good question.”

Morgan doesn’t have the answer to the question. She waits for Quinn to supply it.

But Quinn does not. “What else?”

“…It’s been engraved,” Morgan says, indicating the walls of the stepped passage. “Using tools. And I noticed the exterior walls are the same. There’s a lot of weathering, but here and there between the biological crud there’s this very clear, regular pattern. Right here, see? Tiny vertical rectangles. Like a…block cursor on an old computer terminal.”

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“Or a tombstone in typography,” Quinn suggests.

Morgan blinks. “…Yes. It’s a uniform pattern. Very detailed work, which would require good tools even by modern standards. I think this pattern is supposed to cover the entire exterior of the stone. And if that’s the case, the blocks are so minuscule and the stone is so large that there must have originally been millions of them.”

“Correct,” Quinn says again. “Anything else?”

Morgan thinks for a minute. She stares up into the rain, reflecting on the atmosphere that the stone, or sculpture as she supposes it would be better described, projects. Loneliness, quiet, desolation, awe…intimidation. And some fear. Although, with that intimidating, fearful atmosphere, there’s no sensation of danger. No threat.

“ ‘We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture,’ ” she says aloud.

Quinn hears this, but asks no follow-up question. Apparently satisfied, she turns and continues climbing the steps, and Morgan follows.

The passage makes several more turns, carving out an erratic, squared squiggle. Morgan takes no further notes. Her knees are about ready to explode by the time they reach the top.

They emerge, blinking at the light, on a wet, windswept, slightly slanted plateau. There are more of the tiny tombstone indentations underfoot. The edges of the monolith are some distance away but they are not marked; the dark gray surface just ends at a straight line not far out, and the horizon itself is below it, not visible. This gives Morgan some vertigo, particularly since the surface tilts toward one corner, and the engraved basalt underfoot is slick, wet, and getting wetter.

There is a small cluster of Organization scientific equipment up here, chunky weatherproof units stacked up under a canopy. There is a table, with a rugged, beaten-up computer terminal, switched off. Farther away is a diesel generator.

Quinn ignores the equipment and paces off in a different direction, facing away from Morgan and out at the sky, playing with her cigarette lighter, although not actually lighting anything. The lighter is actually a tiny propane burner intended for lighting stoves, given to her by her mother before she died. Quinn no longer remembers this.

Morgan waits for a while, arms folded for warmth, gradually getting wetter. She doesn’t seek cover under the canopy, because Quinn hasn’t. She senses that something is about to happen. Quinn is normally quite poised and difficult to read, but she looks apprehensive; upset, even. Focused intently on the lighter flame, Quinn seems to be unable to look her in the eye, as if she doesn’t want to push through with the next part of whatever this is actually supposed to be. Orientation? Initiation? Hazing?

What was that about getting to the point?

“It’s a memorial,” Morgan says.

“Hhn.” Quinn snaps the lighter shut and pockets it, moderately impressed. Only moderately, though. “That’s right. Of course, I practically told you that, when I mentioned tombstones—”

“How many Antimemetics Wars have there been?”

That gets her. “So much for slow-burning theatrics. Someone told you? You read the entry?”

Morgan looks at her shoes. “Uhm. No. Really, I’ve never seen this place before. I was just guessing.”

“You look embarrassed,” Quinn says. “You’re embarrassed that you hit the right answer thirty minutes before I was expecting you to. You think you’ve shown me up. Right? Oli. Look at me.”

She looks.

“Keep operating at that level. Don’t slow down for my benefit, or anyone’s. I hire people who don’t think the way I think. My background’s in psychology. That’s why I hire botanists. And set theorists. And Egyptologists.” She gestures at Morgan. “People with alternate perspectives. People who can take problems the rest of us have been hammering on for ten years and see straight through them.”

“Will you tell me why we’re here?” Morgan asks, for what she hopes will be the final time.

■

“The problem,” Quinn says, “is that every single person in the world with reliable access to high-grade mnestic medication works for me, here. And the Division is pitifully understaffed. There are one hundred and forty of us, including you and me, and one hundred and forty pairs of eyes is not enough. We cannot look at enough of the world at once. There is an appallingly large percentage of the world that no human has ever properly looked at. This is unbearably limiting to all forms of antimemetic research. Antimemetic history, antimemetic paleontology, antimemetic cosmology…These disciplines, all of them, barely exist. They are nowhere.

“Nevertheless, we have seen this culture’s cities. One or two still exist. Pure dumb luck is how we found them. A Division researcher visits the U-9010 complex in Nevada, drives back across the Mojave while still on the dose…sees something on the horizon. That sort of thing. The cities are physically ruined, and there are heavy antimemetic effects shrouding them that make them nearly impossible to study, even for us. Large, simple things, like this stone, survived better, but even so…We think this stone was one of the last things they built before they died out.

“They were human beings. They were probably significantly more technologically advanced than we are. They existed thousands of years ago; perhaps tens of thousands, we can’t know for sure. It’s difficult to determine what really happened to them because their entire cultural memeplex was lethally irradiated. Their core cultural concepts, the things they created, and stood for, and valued highly, can never be known or propagated again.

“We think an idea stole into their culture that they did not have adaptations to defend against. A Category Epsilon idea complex. They may have fought it. But, ultimately, their culture is buried beneath that idea.”

Quinn pauses, letting the rain patter for a significant moment.

“Millions of people died,” Morgan says.

Quinn says nothing.

“And we forgot about this?” Morgan asks. “The rest of us. The fraction of the fraction, who survived the War, and became modern humanity. You and me and everybody. We, what, looked away? And walked away, and ‘moved on’?”

“Yes.”

Morgan staggers, vertigo swelling up and briefly getting the better of her. “Millions of people died. And we just forgot. Is that what you wanted to show me? You want me to write that down?”

“Yes,” Quinn says. “Yes. Write this down. You’re learning two things today, and this is the first. Humans can forget anything. It’s okay to forget some things, because we are mortal and finite. But some things we have to remember. It’s important that we remember. Write something that will make you remember.”

Morgan nods. It’s raining too heavily, so she retreats under the canopy and uses the table. Even so, a few raindrops spatter her notes. She writes intently and rapidly, for some time. What she writes is rushed and unrefined, with large parts crossed out. She wonders how she’ll react when she reads it for the first time.

After a while, Quinn joins her under the canopy.

Morgan, staring at her notes, asks Quinn, as if she doesn’t already know the answer: “And the second thing?”

Quinn says:

“It is possible that their culture had an equivalent to the Organization. It may even have had an Antimemetics Division. If they did, their Organization, and their Antimemetics Division, failed them.

“It’s a big reality. It’s a huge Organization, much bigger than you’re cleared to know. There’s a lot of Cat. Epsilons, and a lot of war-gamed scenarios where those Cat. Epsilons break containment and the orbital contingencies fail and an eye-watering number of people end up dead. And most of those Epsilons are handled by other divisions, on other continents. So, maybe the end of the world will be some other division’s problem. And yes, a big part of the job we hired you for is basic research. Lab work, as safe as it gets. And yes, it’s been thousands of years, and it may be thousands of years more.

“But maybe it won’t. And maybe it will be our problem.

“Organization staff join Antimemetics for a lot of reasons, and one of those reasons is that they perceive the work to be easier. Safer. Lower-stakes. But an idea can end a world. An idea is alive. It can mutate, it can replicate, it can predate on other ideas…and it can hide. And—people deserve to be safe. This is the purpose of the Organization. It’s what we are for. Research, yes, Unknown science, because that helps, but ultimately we are here to keep everybody safe. Not just from scalpel monsters and optically communicable fasciitis and the Cult of the Holocene Impactor. From everything!”

Quinn is amped up. She realizes it at the same instant that Morgan notices it. Her usual cold facade has slipped, and she has betrayed some earnest motivation. She takes a second, cools off.

“To answer your original question,” she says, “there has been one Antimemetics War that we know of. Potentially others that we don’t know of. And there is, undoubtedly, one to come.”

Morgan says nothing. She looks dismayed, broken. She’s right to be, and Quinn is familiar with the reaction. This is, indeed, part of every new Antimemetics Division operative’s orientation. The magnitude of responsibility can be hard to handle. It’s meant to be.

“Welcome to the Antimemetics Division,” Quinn says. “This is your first day.”

■

Morgan writes for some time longer. Quinn waits, silently. The rain doesn’t let up.

“But what was it?” Morgan asks. “What was the idea?”

“U-9429-B,” Quinn says. “We isolated the memeplex itself in the seventies. We have the descriptor on ice in a Vegas room, basement level two. It’s harmless now, Cat. 1. It’s so culturally alien to modern humans as to be nearly incoherent. Think like Egyptian hieroglyphs. I’ll show you another day.”

“Are you saying it couldn’t come back?”

“In that form, it’s highly unlikely. Our culture just isn’t shaped like that anymore.”

Morgan stares at her notes. She’s drawn a sigil at the bottom, something Quinn can’t immediately identify.

“I study ancient cultures,” Morgan says, distantly. “I can read hieroglyphs. Some of them.”

The sigil isn’t a hieroglyph, as far as Quinn can tell. But then, Quinn isn’t a specialist. She hires specialists. That’s the whole point…

“What does it look like?” Morgan asks.

“U-9429-B?”

“Yes.”

An idea doesn’t look like anything, Quinn goes to say, but stops herself. Morgan doesn’t know it, but in the database entry for U-9429-B there are complex plots, visualizations of what it looks like as a constellation in memetic space. Now that she thinks about it, U-9429-B has numerous aspects. Symmetries, even.

“Ugly,” she says. “Fascinating,” she adds. “Why?”

Morgan is staring into the distance, now.

Quinn follows her gaze. There’s nothing out there. Just overcast sky and rain.

And after a few seconds, Quinn’s gut instinct kicks her, as it has many times before, hard enough to make her jump. Something is wrong here. A piece is missing from the scene.

She turns back to Morgan. “Oli, why?”

Morgan points at something, far away in the sky. Her breathing is becoming heavier.

Quinn sees nothing. “What do you see? Under heavy mnestic doses, some people say they see ghosts here. We even have some supposed interview logs. Personally, I think their veracity is dubious…”

“Um. It doesn’t look like a ghost. It looks like a…a half-starved…kaiju. A monster. A pillar made of spiders. It’s taller than this stone. At least twice as tall. It’s coming here. Is this normal?”

“No.” Quinn is already racing through the checklist.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“This isn’t part of the hazing?”

“No. I will never lie to you, Oli. I swear.” An antimemetically cloaked entity as monstrous as Morgan’s description has a zero percent chance of being benign. They need support. Quinn finds that her phone has no signal. Morgan’s will be the same. The only way to get a message out of here is with a written note. A paper airplane, thrown off the top into the woods?

“It’s bending down. I think it’s looking at me,” Morgan says, watching a space in the air descend. There isn’t even a hole in the rain that Quinn can perceive. “Its head is gigantic, it has to be ten meters wide. It has…graspers and arthropod legs all over it. Dozens of eyes. Some of them are blinded. There’s someone riding it.”

“What? Describe the rider.”

“Caucasian male, twenties, skinny. Jeans, trainers, dirty brown hair, needs a haircut. He’s been shot. He’s bleeding out all over but he doesn’t seem to notice. In the liver, and again in the throat, just above the clavicle. He’s smiling.”

Quinn spends a second wondering whether the gunshot wounds are intentionally creepy detailing, or whether the man is genuinely using some kind of advanced antimemetic power to ignore a mortal wound. And, if the latter, how, and how he originally sustained it. But more urgent questions are afoot. “He sees you?”

“Yes.”

“Does he see me? Hear me?”

Morgan is transfixed and is starting to look genuinely frightened. “He wants to know who I’m talking to.”

“Don’t tell him. He doesn’t get information about us, understand?” Quinn pulls her walkie-talkie from her waist, sets it to broadcast an emergency beacon, turns and hurls it overarm as far as she possibly can, in the direction of the Wyeleigh main building. With luck, it’ll land intact in the forest, outside the suppression zone cast by U-9429, summoning a Hazardous Response Team. “Ask who he is.”

Morgan is standing very still, with her arms clamped rigidly at her side. “Who are you?…He says…he says he’s nearly finished. He says he’s going to kill me.”

“Like hell. Oli, listen to me. We’re running for it. Back down the steps. If we can get to the perimeter of the stone it’ll flush our memories.”

“I can’t move.”

Quinn hauls on one of Morgan’s arms. She can’t be moved. “Put one foot in front of the other!”

“It’s got ahold of me.” Morgan is goggle-eyed and starting to hyperventilate.

Quinn disengages and surveys the situation. She can’t see or touch any grasping spider legs, or the monstrous face that Morgan can’t look away from, or the rider. But she believes Morgan that they’re there, real for some value of “real.” She claps one hand to her side; but of course she isn’t carrying her sidearm, because U-9429 is a Cat. 1 Unknown, and this is home territory, and why would she be? Not that it even makes a difference when this mythical rider is able to laugh off gunshot wounds. There aren’t enough options in front of her. She very badly wants to swear, and bites down hard on her tongue.

Morgan screams.

“Oli!” Quinn shouts. “Don’t look at it. Look at me.”

“I can’t.”

“You’re stronger than this.”

“I’m not,” Morgan cries.

“You’re the best we have,” Quinn says. “I’m not making that up. You saw this thing when nobody else could. That makes you smarter and stronger. You can fight it. Concentrate!”

“He hates us so much,” Morgan says. “I can’t think through it. I can’t see. Please. Please don’t.”

Quinn circles behind Morgan, plants one hand on her shoulder for stability, and punches her behind the ear. Morgan sags in place, then falls forward to her knees. Quinn is just about able to catch her before her skull connects with the ground.

But she didn’t hit her hard enough. Morgan is unconscious only for a second. She struggles as she comes back. It’s like she’s waking from a nightmare into another nightmare. She clutches at Quinn’s hand. She can’t scream. Her heart stops.

Quinn rolls her over and administers CPR, but without equipment there’s very little chance of her restarting Morgan’s heart.

Nobody’s coming. She didn’t throw the walkie-talkie far enough.

It’s almost ten minutes before she gives up.

■

And then Quinn is collapsed against the wall of the passage, on the next-to-last step, about to leave U-9429’s field of influence, trying to figure out what in the fuck she can possibly write to herself.

It’s back. It’s here. It never died. We just couldn’t see it. Has it mutated?

Morgan could see it. All she did was look at it and it killed her. She was as good as any of us. She was as capable as she was ever going to be and she wasn’t good enough. How do you fight an antimemetic monster that only eats the best antimemeticists?

You…you could try to build some kind of countermeme. But you’d need to be shielded while you worked on it. You’d need a hermetically sealed, self-sustaining lab as big as an arcology. Like the ones Ed Hix used to build. Like…the one under the Wyeleigh labs. Basement level 30.

God. How long have we been fighting this thing?

There’s a rustling behind her. She turns to look. Far away up the steps, there he is, the rider Morgan described. A scrawny young man with a hostile frown and, yes, two steadily oozing gunshot wounds. His shoes are soaked in blood.

He calls out, “Marie Quinn! I owe you for the lake.”

Quinn stands up. She doesn’t know what lake he’s talking about. But she says nothing.

The rider gestures. Blue and brown and black spiders of all sizes cascade around the corner, flooding the passageway up to his knees, pouring over his shoulders, tumbling down toward Quinn. They make a strange, organic rustling as they pour, like wet leaves. There must be millions of them. The spiders would probably be much more effective if she was at all afraid of them.

It’s too bad. She’s just learned a great deal about this entity; that they have history together, and that it personally dislikes her, and that it apparently has a humanoid mouthpiece…and a poor imagination. But she has only a second before the cascade of arachnids overcomes her, and that’s not enough time to even write a single word. Morgan’s death, then, was for nothing.

She steps backward, over the threshold.

■

The rain is finally easing off. Quinn lights a cigarette and heads back to the main building. It’s almost time for her weekly inspection of U-2200.