Twelve years earlier:

The meeting room is containment unit STM-00-1006, which is the skull of a stillborn Cryptomorpha gigantes.

The hollowed-out space inside the skull cavity is a prototypical Vegas room—a place where what happens, stays. People go in, they come out, their memories are sieved out of the universe as they leave, and they remember nothing. The skull was acquired in the nineties. The information suppression effect is a byproduct of the species’ natural antimemetic camouflage, a phenomenon that rendered the colossally tall creatures somehow nearly impossible to observe in the wild. It’s a phenomenon Edward Hix and his team spent years figuring out how to replicate. They’ve got it, now. They can synthesize C. gigantes bone, extruding it in prefabricated pieces from steel grids. They can bolt the plates together to make hermetically sealed boxes. Passive memetic insulation, no need for complicated machines; it’s got a lot of potential.

The skull is forty-five meters long, sixteen wide, and fifteen tall. It resides at the center of a vast purpose-built containment unit of its own, surrounded by the rest of the same C. gigantes individual’s bones, laid out in meticulous radial patterns for space efficiency. The ossuary occupies about a third of the containment unit’s floor area. The rest comprises immense industrial vessels that hold its harvested organs. Some of them are actual vessels, repurposed cargo ships loaded with brain matter and skin tissue. The unit is by far the largest single building at the Unknown Organization base at Stanmoor.

The floor plan of the warehouse is clear enough, navigable if grim. But from ground level, on foot, the place is a vertiginous, intimidatingly macabre place, even fluorescent-lit around the clock. Hix walks down an echoing canyon created by, on his left, a hundred-meter-long foreleg bone and, on his right, a blue steel container holding the creature’s duodenum, including the germ farm. Ahead, the skull peers down the canyon at him, a distant yellow-white tower, fuzzed with scaffolding and disused scanning rig, its eye sockets vacant black.

As he walks, Hix has to remind himself continually that these are all the remains of a single organism, one of the tiniest examples of its species.

Behind the C. gigantes skull, where there used to be the creature’s first neck vertebra, there is now a large compound mechanical airlock, a ramp and some steps, and a staging area. The staging area serves as a miniature customs desk, tracking every person and item entering and leaving STM-00-1006. Although memories are wiped on exit, written and electronic records emerging from the interior have to be handled manually. Standard procedure is for the first person exiting the room to bring written instructions for the Filtration Officer, telling them what other information from the room interior needs to be scrubbed, and what is safe to retain. Usually the list of information to retain is very short.

There are seats, scanners, a coffee machine, a trolley loaded with cleaning equipment, and a stack of cages for the germs. Parked just outside of the staging area, there is also a limousine—bulletproof.

“Where’s everybody else?” Hix asks the Organization clerk who meets him, whose name is Fletcher. “I’m not late.”

“This way, please,” she says, leading him to a seat near a scanner. Hix has gone through this procedure a dozen times now, so he knows to hold his left arm out. Fletcher tears the wrapper off a sterile bracelet-like sensor and clamps it around Hix’s left wrist, then studies a nearby screen. “They went in almost an hour ago,” she says.

Hix frowns. That’s not usual. Why would they tell him a different start time? Why would they need an hour of preparation time before he showed up? “Did they say anything?”

“Of course not.”

Hix hasn’t the slightest clue what this meeting is about, or what any of the previous meetings were about, or even if they have a common topic.

Actually, he does have some clues. The timing of the meetings is one. The first took place early this year, and when they emerged, amnesiac, they were clutching written instructions from themselves to themselves to continue meeting monthly. Around July, the meetings became weekly. They had three last week—he missed the last of them, he was on a work trip to China. And after Friday, they created a new schedule: they meet for ninety minutes every morning, starting today, Monday.

A more significant clue is the list of attendees. Other than Hix, three high-caliber researchers from his own organization are in attendance, along with the directors of Wyeleigh, Northkirk, and Stanmoor, the last of whom is Jason Lo, the Organization’s chief of Antimemetics and Hix’s direct manager.

He steals a glance at the car parked behind him. There’s also this one. Hix doesn’t know for sure who the limo belongs to, but the list of people in the world who have the authority to drive a street vehicle into an Organization containment building is extremely short. Someone from the C-suite is interested enough in their covert discussions to show up in person. This is a new and non-trivially alarming development.

He nods at the car. “Shouldn’t this place be lousy with private security right now?”

Fletcher shrugs.

“Anybody go into the unit with the C? Bodyguard? Anybody stay in the car?”

“No.”

Hix glances at the car again. The windows are tinted, though surely there’s a driver behind the wheel, at least. But where’s the real protection? Maybe it’s all invisible. Microbes. Occult spells of warding. He feels like the car is watching him back.

“Open your mouth, please.” Fletcher puts a disclike cap on Hix’s head, presses an emitter to the roof of his mouth, and fires two pulses of radiation through his brain. “Any psychic intrusions?”

Muffled by the emitter, Hix manages, “Uh-uh.”

She pulls out the emitter and discards it. “Did you experience REM sleep in the past twelve hours?”

He wipes his mouth. “Yes.”

“How many digits do you have?”

“Ten.”

“Count them for me, please.”

Hix spreads his fingers and counts them. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.” His right thumb is “five.”

Fletcher injects him with a substance that will prevent his body from rejecting the germ, then lifts a germ out of one of the cages. It splays its tendrils out, confused about being picked up. “Tilt your head back and look at the ceiling, please. Eyes wide open. And, if you could take off your glasses.”

Hix obliges, handing his glasses to Fletcher for scanning. “I dislike this part,” he states.

Fletcher has no comment. She lays the germ over his eyes, like a sleep mask. There’s a cold, sludgy sensation as it wraps itself around his chin and hair, then the tendrils meet behind his neck and begin knitting with his spine. Hix sees darkness for a few worrying seconds, then a circular indentation forms in the germ’s hide over the top of his right eye, and there’s a feeling like part of his brain dislocating, and a fake eye opens where his real one would be. The fake eyeball is around four times the size of his own. Though it is singular, its four pupils grant him decent depth perception, and he can see a little way into the ultraviolet.

The germ was originally part of this C. gigantes specimen’s gut fauna. The stillborn creature had a small but flourishing population of them, and the Organization managed to save them for study. The germ, whose neurological layout has some disturbing similarities to a human’s, is acting as an external block of short-to-medium-term memory, and as a proxy between the conscious Ed Hix and the real world. When the meeting is over, the germ will be removed and incinerated, along with all memory of the meeting.

There are other amnestic approaches—gas, injectable drugs, surgical techniques, occult rituals. These are safe, proven technologies for mass use on the general public and Organization staff alike, but they all operate on the same essential principle that the unwanted knowledge has already entered the mind and must now be removed or suppressed after the fact. Such procedures are imperfect. Memory removal can leave critical fragments behind, occasionally enough for people to rebuild dangerous wholes; and mnestic technologies for causing suppressed memories to reassert themselves are continually advancing. The Class Y family of biomnestics is promising to render all after-the-fact memory erasure techniques irrelevant. The only amnestic defense against the completed Class Y will be decapitation. So, if there’s advance warning time, it’s better to physically compartmentalize, to airgap; to outsource the memories to another organism entirely and never let them touch your own mind. You can’t be forced to recall something that you genuinely never experienced.

Class Z carries an entirely different class of problems with it, of course.

It’s a complex and dynamic field, one of several fields in which Hix is a world expert. There are machines that could perform the same task as the germ, silicon modules you wear like a headset, plugged into a surgically implanted jack behind your ear, but Hix would rather die than submit to interfacing his brain directly with a computer, especially an Organization-made computer. Nobody is getting his brain waves. When he joined the Organization, thirty years ago, he put a DNU in his will—Do Not Upload. Everybody thought he was crazy.

Of course, using both the germs and a Vegas room feels rather like overkill. That’s another clue.

“Your belongings have been scanned,” Fletcher tells him. He refills his pockets and takes up his laptop. Walking slightly unsteadily because of the new weight he’s carrying on his head, he climbs the stairs to the airlock.

■

Hix would be the first to admit that a typical Organization staff member has appalling taste. A typical Organization staff member picks brutal functionality over aesthetic pleasure one hundred times out of one hundred, and a depressing percentage of Organization staff don’t even comprehend the distinction. Hix sees this reflected in the architectural choices and interior design of the Organization’s buildings and offices, and in its labs and containment facilities, which commonly cultivate a hopeless, bleak-cliff-edge atmosphere. He sees it in its machinery, its devices, its tools, and even its font choices. Hard edges, clashing colors, failing aircon, impersonality, clutter, claustrophobia.

And so, STM-00-1006’s interior is a surprise and a delight. Hix actually sighs. It seems like someone hired a designer. The place is spacious and modern, well lit, with select walls painted in bright secondary colors. There’s not a bit of exposed concrete in sight.

STM-00-1006 isn’t a single space but a self-contained suite laid out on two floors. There’s a central meeting area with a double-height ceiling, a long oval table, and Herman Miller chairs. Along the left wall there are smaller breakout meeting rooms with frosted glass walls and doors. Above those, reached by a flight of stairs, there’s a kitchen area, and in the back are some additional rooms, restrooms, and storage. The carpet is gray and orange, a non-repeating hexagonal pattern. The place is well ventilated, and smells of coffee.

Right inside the door, Marie Quinn is waiting for him, holding two steaming cups of coffee. She was recently made deputy chief of Antimemetics, and she and he go way back. She hands one of the coffees to him immediately as he steps in. He takes it, automatically. “Oh. Legendary. Thank y—Aah. Yes.” He sees that she is wearing a germ on her head, just as he is. The effect is very disconcerting and he comes close to spilling his drink. “Aha. I try to prepare myself, but it’s always the first time, isn’t it?”

She asks, “How was China?”

“Is there a point in making small talk? We’re just going to have the same small talk all over again the second we leave.”

“Ed, a friendly conversation is its own reward.”

He sips his coffee. “Okay. Do you know Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem? In mundane terms, it states that there are some statements of mathematics that are true but can never be proven. Xie, who’s the UO China lead containment architect, was telling me that if you extend that concept from mathematics to the real world you get an assertion that some physical realities are just going to be there and scientifically unjustifiable. Inexplicabilities. Like there’s going to be a wall we hit one day, where all the remaining Unknowns are just going to be fixtures, permanently Unknowable, and we’ll have two options: give up and live our lives, or die trying and failing to know them. Which I thought was a thought-provoking take, because a Gödel sentence—”

“Ed. Small talk?”

He stops. He starts over. “China was fine. How are you?”

“I’m fine,” she says.

“Weren’t you also…uh, out? For a few weeks?” Hix isn’t very good at remembering information about people.

“Adam and I went to Italy. It was our anniversary.”

“Great. How was Italy?”

“Only had to fly back to take care of an emergency once,” Quinn says, with a pained smile.

Hix spends a moment trying to figure out how to react to this, but before he can he is interrupted. There are three other people in the room, also wearing germs. Devlin, director of UO Northkirk, is at the main table, a very gangly and severe man, hunched over a laptop. And at the back of the room, Jason Lo is chatting with a man Hix does not know: Mahlo, director of the UO in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

He must be the C. It’s strange. In Hix’s mind, Cs are titans, epic men and women with authority blanketing the whole globe. But Mahlo is a basic little fellow of sixty or so, someone Hix wouldn’t look at twice, or even once, if he passed him in a corridor. Hix tries not to stare, but his own germ is extremely good at staring.

Mahlo catches his eye. “You’re here. Shall we begin?”

“Ah. Yes…‘sir’?” Hix doesn’t know how to address him. “I’m guessing you’re all caught up.”

The nature of the asynchronous work loop is that the first part of any meeting in a Vegas room is spent reading notes left from prior meetings. Hix’s correct guess is that there was an hour-long pre-meeting, and then everybody broke for coffee, and now they’re resuming.

Mahlo takes a seat at the head of the table, with Devlin to his left. Lo sits to his right, and Quinn to Lo’s right. Mahlo indicates a particular vacant chair, opposite Quinn, where a printed document is waiting for Hix to read it.

Hix sets his laptop down, hesitant to approach the document. “You want me to read this now?”

“Take as long as you need.”

“Do we have quorum? Where’s my team?” Hix asks. “We’re three bodies short.”

“Read the document, Dr. Hix,” Mahlo says. He seems upbeat. Perhaps he’s projecting an upbeat facade to help Hix to forget exactly how much authority and power he wields. C-suites’ net worths are said to be essentially infinite. It’s not really about money at their level. Mahlo, and his kind, can do anything.

Hix sits, and reads.

The document is a scientific paper purportedly authored by Hix himself, with various of his fellow researchers co-authoring, including two who should be in this room now. Hix doesn’t recognize the paper’s title or content, but that’s nothing special in his line of work. The text is written in his own formal, academic style, so he has no reason to doubt its authenticity.

It’s a brisk read, very dense and to the point, written for a target audience of other memetics scientists. In the abstract, it announces the observation of a new, titanically powerful and dangerous (anti)memeplex, provisionally designated U-3125, for which the authors plan to seek Γ0 categorization.

“Hmm.”

The main body of the first page describes eight different phenomena, most but not all of them anomalous, most but not all of the anomalous ones controlled by the Organization and having U-designations. From a cursory glance, the phenomena appear to be totally unrelated, either to one another or to the proposed U-3125. Hix suspects he could derive the implied link between them, given a few minutes, but elects to read on. He flips the piece of paper over. The whole document is just two sides of A4.

The other side is mostly mathematics. There is one graph, and one equation, and a brief technical description of two highly novel memeplectic transformation procedures, which the authors dub “amplification.” Then there’s—

Something like a jump scare in text form. There is a crucial logical leap, and for Hix, the arrival of comprehension is so blunt, so sudden and frightening, that it physically startles him. Even knowing that Γ was on the table, even primed to expect something extremely nasty on this side of the paper, he recoils. He hisses to himself: “Oh, fucking hell.”

Nobody else says anything. They wait, expectantly, for Hix to gather his thoughts and draw some conclusions.

He reads the rest of the paper, figuring out what it’s going to say almost live as he reads it. As he reaches the end, the initial shock hasn’t worn off. The sheer scope of U-3125 is a significant distance beyond his current comprehension. He’s had a glimpse of it through a keyhole. He would need time in front of a computer to play with the results to get a grasp of it.

No. He needs to build filters first, the equivalent of lead-lined gloves, to let him manipulate this radioactive idea complex with some degree of safety. He feels like it may have glimpsed him.

Category Γ is reserved for highly destructive active Unknowns that are functionally impossible to contain—something past ε. There are exceedingly few of them. A Category Γ Unknown is an Unknown more or less guaranteed to ultimately end the world, no matter what is done to stop it. The only thing that can avert that particular scenario is if something else, likely some other Category Γ Unknown, ends the world first. Their relative threat levels are measured not in material containment resources but in inevitable years. The fewer, the worse. And, considered relative to the others he’s cleared for…

“Yeah, this is it,” he says. It’s bizarrely liberating. “This is the one that’s going to kill us.” He looks around the table. “Did we obtain Gamma categorization?”

“No,” Mahlo says.

“No?”

Mahlo smiles thinly. “Current thinking in the C-suite is that Category Gamma is a confession of defeat. It’s bad for morale. It cultivates defeatist attitudes. Aside from the special categories, Epsilon is considered the top of the hierarchy as of right now. All extant Gammas are going to be reevaluated and recategorized Epsilon by the end of next year. Other than that, what do you think?”

Hix says, “You want a containment protocol? We’ve had this conversation a bunch of times before, correct?”

“Let’s imagine this is the first time,” Mahlo says.

Hix stares darkly at his paper. “We could exterminate all intelligent human life,” he says. “If there are no sapient hosts in this universe, U-3125 can’t incarnate.”

There’s a faintly stunned pause. “Yes,” Quinn says. “You’ve pitched that approach before. And I don’t think any of us here have ever been completely sure if you were serious.”

“I’m completely serious that we could do it and completely serious that it would work,” Hix says. “The Organization motto is ‘Freedom means no fear.’ If there are no humans, there is no fear. Job done.”

“But also no freedom,” Devlin says. He has a thin, reedy voice. “The dead aren’t free—”

“We’re getting off topic,” Quinn says. “We’re not exterminating all sapient life.”

“We could immediately terminate and suppress all memetics and antimemetics research worldwide,” Hix says. “Not just in the Organization. We would have to systematically dismantle the whole scientific field, forever. Stop all the experiments, scrap all the research, brainwash all the researchers. If nobody actively researches this field, nobody will ever find U-3125. It stays buried in the farthest reaches of ideatic space indefinitely, like radioactive waste.” He looks up at the ceiling. The problem is interesting. “Ironically, the most practical way to do that would be to develop an artificial meme. One that encodes the idea that memetics research is intrinsically worthless and harmful. Enrich it with religious or pseudoscientific virals and release it to the general public. A year after it got out we’d be tearing our own labs down. Unless the Antimemetics Division’s institutional immunity to that kind of external threat was strong enough to stand up to the pressure. Interesting scenario. Even if we don’t go in that direction we should definitely think about war-gaming it in simulation, see what outcomes are likely—”

“Ed,” Quinn says.

“No, hiding wouldn’t work. It could be introduced externally or occur naturally—”

“We know. Ed, that’s already happened. U-3125 is incarnating as we speak. Look at these precursor anomalies. We’re in what you called the ‘foreshadow.’ It’s here.”

Quinn is referring to predictive models that Hix must have created himself during prior meetings, models with which he doesn’t have time to familiarize himself. Still, he gets it.

He wishes he didn’t get it. His fear comes from a completely different place from most people’s. The sheer alien scale of the adversary is enough to intimidate most into submission. From a cursory read, U-3125 looks like a nightmare scenario; it’s going to turn human civilization into something beyond Hix’s ability to imagine. But that’s every Monday in this job, and in any case Hix doesn’t have much of an imagination. He is intimately familiar with almost the entire Unknown database, and he is a world authority in anomalous containment. The few areas of science he doesn’t have genius-level ability in, he has trusted colleagues who do. Those are all solved problems, locked boxes.

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

He looks around the room’s walls. They seem to be holding up.

“We could hide in units like this for the rest of our lives,” he says. “Our whole species. While U-3125 roamed our reality unchecked, like a plague. Semantic inversion. I declare this to be the exterior of the containment unit. Done.”

No reaction.

“I don’t think we can do it,” he says. “If U-3125 is live in consensus nominality right now, the game is over. I don’t care if the Gamma category lives or dies, from where I’m sitting this Unknown is functionally uncontainable. I…my team and I may have said something different on prior iterations. I could be in the wrong headspace to see the answer. We are all of us different people from day to day.”

“No,” Mahlo says. “You say the same thing every time.”

“So that’s it. Is that it?”

Mahlo says, “The Organization was originally founded as a scientific research institution. And, although our responsibilities have expanded considerably in the centuries since then, I believe that, at our core, we are still a scientific research institution. In the majority of cases, this entails the establishment of formal containment protocols so that Unknowns can be kept safely, and indefinitely, and so that they can be studied. Standard guidance is against active neutralization of Unknown phenomena and to avoid destruction at all costs. Everybody in this room is aware of this.

“However. Senior Organization officials such as me have the right to waive that guideline under certain narrow conditions. I am exercising that right. I deem that U-3125 cannot coexist with our world. We must destroy U-3125. Forever. Does that change your assessment?”

“You want a neutralization protocol,” Hix deadpans. His expression is worsening by the minute.

Mahlo adds, “I know that neutralization is…generally considered easier than mere containment.”

Hix says:

“When I first joined the Organization, I asked my mentor, who retired many years ago, ‘What’s the biggest Unknown we’ve ever contained?’ That he was cleared for, I meant, of course. And he told me about a very old rumor he once heard, back in his earliest days, when he was just starting out. The rumor was that Abrahamic religions had not always been monotheistic. Originally, there were three capital-G Gods. And sometime in the past two hundred years, the Organization had killed two of them.

“I believed him. I was very young and inexperienced, and naïve, and kind of in awe. It wasn’t until years later that I thought back to the conversation—and the fact that I’d never heard that rumor, or anything like it, from anybody else—and realized he had been bullshitting me.

“And now it’s decades later still, and modern memeplectic technology is a hundred times more advanced than it was back then, and I built thirty percent of it, and I look at what the Antimemetics Division handles on a quarterly basis, and I know better than anybody on the face of this Earth what is or is not possible, and…”

He trails off. They’re all waiting expectantly for him to say something. He can’t get there. He’s in the wrong frame of mind. Maybe he’s in denial, maybe the solution is an idea he doesn’t want to take on board. How ironic—

“What did I say? Just tell me.”

“Your team suggested that just because U-3125 is the most powerful memeplex ever observed doesn’t mean it’s the top of the hierarchy,” Mahlo says. “You suggested that it would be possible to synthesize an idea an order of magnitude still more powerful than U-3125, specifically designed to neutralize it, and under our control. A countermeme.”

“A bigger infinity. That would take…That could be…possible,” Hix hazards. “It would be absurdly dangerous. It would require tremendous resources. And ten to twenty years of real-time work, completely uninterrupted. To avoid observation, we would need to be hermetically sealed away from the exterior universe for that entire time. We would need a lab as big as a Launch Arcology. Wait a second.”

His brain has just caught up. He realizes the context in which he’s saying these things. And he’s been working for the Organization for a long time.

“It’s done,” he says. “The lab, it’s been built. It was built decades ago, in secret, and we put our best researchers inside it and now the work is done. That’s what we’re meeting for, now. We’re ready to go. We’re figuring out how to deploy the countermeme. That’s brilliant! If I’m right, that’s brilliant. Am I right?”

“Ed,” Quinn says. “When you joined the Organization, you were taught that a day would come when you would, with very little preparation, have to sacrifice much or all of your existence to protect what most needed protecting. You’ve worked here for thirty years. And all of that time you knew that that sacrifice would be in your future someday. We were all taught the same thing.”

It feels to Hix as if a shadow falls over him. He looks at Jason Lo, his director, who hasn’t spoken yet.

Lo says, “You’re right that the lab is built. Construction was completed in the last forty-eight hours. The construction crew have been amnesticized and dismissed. But the work hasn’t begun yet. That’s what today’s about.”

Hix says, “…That’s where my people are.”

“That’s where your people are,” Lo says. “They’re in the bunker, waiting. We have your cover story prepped. We’re faking your death. It’s time. You’re going under now.”

“Now? No. No, I doubt that.”

“Your team volunteered. I took care of them myself. They’re good people,” Lo says.

“Like hell,” Hix says, “did I volunteer for this. You plotted this. While I was in China. Right? God, I bet that’s why you sent me to China in the first place. So you’d have space and time to plot.”

Quinn says, “Edward!”

Hix says, “No. Any prior version of me who agreed to this was a damned imbecile, and I disavow his opinions. This is a prison sentence. Verging on a life sentence. I refuse to spend twenty years not able to see the sky. I refuse to be entombed alive in work. I have…”

He trails off, and stares through the table, eyes defocused. He was about to say, “I have family.”

But he doesn’t.

He tries another tack. “This…has a low probability of success. The time frames are bad. U-3125 will be here by the end of the next decade—”

“It has an excellent probability of success,” Devlin says.

“Define ‘excellent.’ ”

“Better than fifteen percent. If it’s you.” Devlin produces a thick report that presumably backs him up.

Hix peers at the document. He can see his own name on the cover. Goddammit. Fifteen percent is good. If he were anybody else in this room, he’d seize the chance with both hands.

Devlin goes on. “You convinced us that this had to be done. And that you had to be at the center. You were prepared to make the sacrifice.” He opens the document to a page in the back. The eyeball of his germ roves the page rapidly and finds the passage he wants. “Allow me to quote your own words to you: ‘U-3125 represents an omniversal-scale threat. It threatens alternate realizations of our cosmotype. It threatens microverses within our macroverse. It threatens universes that embed ours as fiction—’ ”

“Go ahead and think of it as a prison sentence, if it helps,” Mahlo interrupts. “Rescind your consent if you’d like. Go kicking and screaming. But the next place you’re going after this is the bunker.”

Hix glances around the room’s walls again. He makes it too obvious what he’s thinking.

“The door’s locked, Dr. Hix,” Mahlo says. “You’re not exiting until we’re through here.”

“What’s the cover story?” Hix asks. “How were you planning to do it?”

“An argon gas leak in STM-X02-370,” Devlin explains. “The leak will be real. There’s a forged body in there already, a U-9133 special, impossible to distinguish from a real one. And we’ve tampered with your public schedule for the day. It puts you in that room, not this one. As for—”

“He’s stalling,” Mahlo says to Devlin and the others. “He doesn’t need to know any of this.”

“Name somebody else,” Lo suggests. “Being serious. Who in the world, other than you, stands a credible chance of solving this problem? Who could we send instead?”

Hix says nothing. There’s nobody. Really, nobody in the world. And he can do it.

Lo presses, “Is there anybody else? Even if they didn’t want to. Who has the skills we need, who isn’t already in the vault?”

The world shifts positions a little. Lo’s standing now. Quinn looks around alertly, gripping the arm of her chair. She has a fountain pen in her fist, uncapped. It’s like she just remembered something. Mahlo glances at Quinn, puzzled at her reaction to, apparently, nothing. Hix doesn’t notice anything.

“It’s just me,” Hix says.

“It’s just you,” Lo says. “That’s good enough for me.”

“Hold on a second,” Quinn says.

Lo pulls a gun out of nowhere. Hix’s germ’s enormous pupils shrink to violet pinpricks.

This is not part of any plan. Everybody in the room knows it. It’s a real gun. It’s impossible that he could have it. Quinn starts to rise out of her chair. Her own sidearm is locked in a box outside.

Lo aims at Ed Hix’s chest and fires twice. The first round pierces him in the lung. The second round, fired as Hix collapses, nicks his laptop screen, which is bulletproof, and ricochets up into the meeting room wall.

■

Lo turns, now aiming at Mahlo. He gets two more rounds off, each causing an ear-splitting electronic shriek and a flash of brilliant green light as Mahlo’s protective ward absorbs the energy. Quinn lunges at Lo from behind his gun arm, deflecting it upward with one hand while plunging the fountain pen into his throat with the other. Lo struggles. Quinn pulls hard, opening his throat all the way up. Lo’s fingers loosen and she spirits the gun away. Lo gurgles in agony and stumbles backward, clutching futilely at his wound. He smashes his head—the germ he’s wearing on his head—against a glass meeting room door, and slides down it into a spreading red lake. Quinn shoots him, once, through his head and germ, making sure he’s neutralized.

There are two seconds in which nothing happens.

Mahlo’s eyes meet Quinn’s. “Your thoughts?” he asks.

“Jason Lo was compromised, I don’t know how,” Quinn says. She makes the gun safe, holsters it, and vaults over the table to check on Hix. He’s dead, she finds. Devlin is dead too. When in the hell did Devlin get hit? What just happened in this room? “This whole base could be compromised from top to bottom.”

“Compromised when?” Mahlo asks. “By whom? I thought U-3125 incinerated its victims. I thought it wasn’t survivable. But Lo was still high-functioning.”

“We’ve miscalculated something,” Quinn says.

“Could there be a secondary form of the infection?” Mahlo speculates. “If the U has a need for conscious exemplars—”

“They could represent an exploitable vulnerability,” Quinn says. “Something we could isolate. If we could work out a way of doing it while blind.” She stands and backs away, running her hands through her hair, trying to focus. The whole plan is wreckage. They need to start over and she doesn’t know where to start from. “We just…lost…Hix was crucial. He was our best option.”

Mahlo asks, “Do we have alternate options?”

Quinn says nothing. She has inklings. She doesn’t dare voice them, in case the act of speaking the ideas destroys them. What if someone else like Lo is listening to this, somehow? What if Mahlo himself becomes compromised? They got this far using discipline and structure, by containing their plan inside a sealed unit and destroying their own memories of it every time they left. That was working. But how can she execute any kind of plan without trust?

She looks desperately at Mahlo, and a lot of what she’s thinking crosses the gap without words, through her expression alone.

Mahlo is calm. “The Organization no longer believes in unsolvable problems,” he says. “Congratulations on your promotion to chief of Antimemetics. Tell me what you need.”

“I need time,” she says. “To think.”

As she is thinking, she and Mahlo realize that there is a faint new sound in the room, a kind of electrical fizzing.

She turns around. It’s coming from the airlock. There is a panel of controls beside it. The fizzing rapidly intensifies, culminating in a loud, sharp electrical discharge that causes the controls to go dark. After a few seconds, some kind of viscous, glossy liquid begins flowing out from the lower edge of the panel. It looks like machine oil. The fluid spreads across the floor.

And the inner airlock door begins to whirr open.

Quinn opens the panel. The machinery and wiring inside are an illegible mess. “The hydraulics have been sabotaged. Lo must have smuggled tools in as well as the gun—”

“It’s mechanically impossible for both airlock doors to open simultaneously, is that correct?” Mahlo asks.

“It was,” Quinn says. She hurries to the back of the room, where a medical kit is mounted on the wall. She throws most of the kit aside, keeping only a strangely shaped capsule with a thin nozzle and pink fluid inside.

“What happens if both doors open?”

“Unclear.”

“U-3125 is out there,” Mahlo says.

“I know.” Quinn applies the capsule to her right wrist and infuses the first half of the dose. It’s fast-acting chemical amnestic. She hopes that splitting one dose between the two of them will be enough.

The inner door finishes opening fully. A few hopeless seconds pass, and then, inevitably, the outer door begins to open too.

For Quinn, it is as if a suffocating wave rolls over her, pouring into the containment unit from outside. She feels seen, in the worst way. She feels caught in a hostile spotlight, pinned, guilty. In her body, she senses an angered vibration, a kind of wrathful engine ramping up in response.

Outside, Fletcher stands up from her terminal, puzzled. She has never seen the interior of the containment unit before. She calls out to Quinn and Mahlo, “What’s happening in there?”

“Stay where you are,” Quinn orders her.

“I feel something,” Mahlo says. “In my head. My germ, I should say.”

“Me too. Roll up your sleeve. You also need to deactivate your shield for a second.” He obliges, and Quinn gives him the rest of the drug. Quinn sorely wishes the shields were standard-issue, but they are exceptionally hard to come by, and there are serious controversies and side effects associated with them.

Fletcher is coming up the airlock steps. There’s something in her hand. A gun. Quinn’s. It was supposed to be locked away.

“We have a major containment breach,” Quinn tells her. “Don’t come in here. Return to your post.”

Fletcher isn’t listening. She says, “There’s a █████ ███████ in your mind.”

Quinn knew that U-3125 ruined minds. She didn’t know it could do it this fast. She says, “Ms. Fletcher, I’m armed. If you step inside this unit, I am going to shoot you. I’m serious, get back. Last chance. Fuck!”

Fletcher raises her weapon. Quinn kills her. She falls backward. She bumps down the steps, most of the way to the bottom.

In the distance, a base-wide containment alarm starts up.

Quinn says to Mahlo, “We need to get you out of here. Then we need to sterilize the base.”

“There’s a contingency warhead,” Mahlo says. “Code name DRY ERASE.” He clutches his head. His germ is twitching unhappily and changing color and texture, as if an infection is spreading across its pale gray skin. Its cognition is not the same as a human’s; it is vulnerable to U-3125, but it does not react to it in the same way. “I can feel it. It’s like—steel jaws. This is…most unpleasant.”

“Who drives your limousine?”

“Machine subintelligence. U-0150-C derivative. It can be overridden if you prefer.”

“We need to get to the perimeter,” Quinn says. “There’s nothing else that matters. We don’t need to remember why. Got it?”

Mahlo doesn’t have much field experience. The amnestic is blurring his thoughts. “I’m deferring to you,” he says, dozily.

“Get to the car. I’ll cover you. Go now.”

Mahlo goes. He stumbles a little as he reaches the bottom of the airlock steps. From the top of the steps, Quinn has a slightly elevated position, and is able to see clearly across most of the warehouse. There is no one around that she can see. She should be able to make it to the driver’s door unharmed. The limousine probably moves like a tank, but once it’s moving, it’ll move. The perimeter is about a two-kilometer drive from here. U-0150-C is bred to drive cautiously. It’ll try to stop at checkpoints and gates on the way out. She’ll have to override it.

She doesn’t know exactly how DRY ERASE works, or what kind of physical range it has. She doesn’t remember the last time this happened. She does know that each time DRY ERASE is used, the Organization loses more information about how it works, and where the warheads are placed, and when and how to activate them.

It occurs to her, momentarily, that this is the only fact she still remembers about it.

There is a chaotic noise in the distance, discordant alarms faltering and merging into sounds of human panic and anger. She sees a part of the warehouse ceiling buckle, and start to cave in. And in the white sky outside, there are dark threads moving, dragging across the face of the site, converging.

■

Hix stares, sideways, at the airlock opening. He watches the legs of the spiders move past. As he watches, the first alarm cuts out and is replaced with a second one, very different from the first, along with a repeating, pre-recorded announcement that is garbled and difficult to decipher.

Hix’s skin flickers. His brain feels like steel wool. He makes the only sound he is able to make, a pained, near-ultrasonic trilling.

He was shot. Shot dead, right through the sternum. It wasn’t quick and it wasn’t clean; it took him five incoherent, ugly seconds to die and he doesn’t have the words for what those five seconds felt like and there is nothing in his prior experience to compare them to. He was murdered. He remembers Lo’s dull eyes behind the muzzle flash. And, dimly, as he fell back, Quinn, going for the disarm…

But it is slowly becoming clear to him that this happened elsewhere. To another body. The memory of the trauma is already leaving him, left behind in that other mind. He is decapodal, now. He has tetrachromatic vision, and specialized organs that can generate electric fields for sensing and stunning prey—two of them, one stack of electrocytes in each primary tentacle. He has strange new thought processes. He lived.

And he knows what he needs to do now. It could be impossible, but it’s there, obvious and inescapable. He expressed dissent during the meeting, but the meeting has now concluded, and he has well-defined actions to take away. He is moving before he knows it, his tentacles autonomously making a good fraction of the decision for him.

He is small, with quick, slippery locomotion. He races across the deserted warehouse floor, evading piles of rubble and oil slicks of spilled C. gigantes viscera. He reaches a vertical access point, an isolated block where a freight elevator and an emergency stairwell lead down into the immense subterranean extents of the Stanmoor complex. He ignores the elevator and the stairs, and squeezes himself through a grille into a filthy, narrow ventilation shaft that will take him deeper, faster. Mahlo and Quinn are bound for the perimeter, he knows, and he could conceivably try to do the same, but he’d never make it and that’s not where he needs to go. He stops at basement level 2. Room 370, Cryogenic Distillation, where the argon leak—he doesn’t have fingers to cross—is still imminently scheduled to occur. He enters through a vent in the ceiling.

His body is there. His other body, the forgery. It is freshly minted, fully clothed, accurate to the freckle and the filling, prone, breathing slowly, and entirely vacant. Ready to die.

There is an Unknown, elsewhere in the Organization, that can produce things like this. “Shallow clones.” The procedure requires the Unknown to have “closely observed” a subject in order to create the duplicate of them. Hix has never knowingly authorized the Organization to let that U observe him, but that doesn’t mean anything. The procedure also requires an existing human corpse to serve as “raw material,” a fact to which Hix, who has worked with the Organization for an awful number of years, is entirely numb.

He slithers down the wall, loses his grip halfway—dusty suckers—and drops to the floor with a wet, fleshy thump. He scrambles out from behind a machine and latches onto the forgery’s head. He wraps his tendrils around its brain stem and eyes. His germ physiology forms the bond as a kind of reflex action. As if it was bred to want to do it. It’s the same reflex that caused him to release his old body when it died.

The forged brain, he finds, is cold. No thoughts, conscious or unconscious. It stirs. Slowly. Hix thinks, as hard as he can using his stolen germ brain: Motor control. He doesn’t need a full, working brain, not yet. His skin shifts texture and color, in waves. It’s like trying to jump-start a car.

A finger twitches.

In one corner of the room, an atmospheric monitoring unit starts bleeping urgently. The leak has started. Or, at least, started to be measurable. There is some kind of faint background hiss in the room, there has been since Hix arrived, but in germ form Hix has relatively poor hearing. It is unclear which machine or canister in the room has failed. Argon is invisible and totally odorless and tasteless. Hix realizes that the forged body has “collapsed” a few meters short of a rack containing emergency gas masks. It also appears to be wearing high-end noise-canceling headphones—Hix’s own, duplicated or just stolen. Hix twitches, vaguely insulted by the fake Hix’s implied disregard for critical safety regulations. That was supposed to be the story? He was “prevented from hearing the leak warning until it was too late”? Who would buy that? He survived three decades working with some of the most dangerous phenomena and artifacts in existence by playing fast and loose with the rules?

Argon is heavier than air. Get your head up! he screams into the cold brain. There is no way to tell how much of the bad air he’s already breathing. Argon is not a poison. There won’t be an allergic reaction, coughing or watering eyes. It is the simplest, most peaceful death conceivable. That’s part of what makes the substance so lethal to handle. If it feels like everything is fine, that’s how you know you’re dying.

The body’s lips start to move. “Get your head up,” they whisper. Germ Hix has one eye, and he’s focusing on the gas mask on the hook. That’s the goal. Get the mask on.

The secondary message is still repeating, in between wails of the secondary alarm; Hix almost doesn’t hear the door open behind him. A man comes through. Torn high-visibility overalls wrapped around a filthy, stout blur, a man who might have been a technician, drooling blood from a jaw missing four lower teeth, brandishing a long, flat-head screwdriver. He hesitates for maybe one second, and looks at the body under Hix. He says, apparently to nobody, “Two more eyes in here.” His voice is slurred.

Hix saw U-3125 before, pinned to a piece of paper, as mathematics. That abstract, that possibility pinned him to his chair with fear. But now he sees U-3125 in person, years before it was meant to be possible, and what he finds most baffling and frightening about it is how little passion there is in the blurred man’s aspect. He moves forward like Hix is the fifth of eight radiators he needs to replace today. Like prying the forged body’s eyes out with the screwdriver is just business, just quota. Colorless and furious.

The blurred man takes the prone body by the shoulder and rolls it over. He grasps Hix’s slimy germ body and tries to pull it away, exposing the forgery’s human eyes—it looks like he doesn’t care about Hix’s own eye, which is four times the size, with four pupils and a bright blue sclera. Hix slips through the blurred man’s grasp and hangs on to the body’s head. The man produces his screwdriver and plunges it into the fat part of one of Hix’s tentacles, aiming for the eye socket beneath it. Hix emits an ultrasonic shriek of pain. Something connects. His body plan flips like a pancake. Four limbs. Two arms.

He brings a fist up into the blurred man’s face. With the other he makes a grab for the screwdriver.

An awkward scuffle ensues. The blurred man is driven by a complex of inhumanly powerful thoughts and isn’t able to fight in any kind of intelligible, directed way. But Hix has limited self-defense training, is several weight classes smaller, and has his consciousness split across two different nervous systems. He never gets a clear picture of what actually happens. He makes it up to one knee, and manages to take one deep breath of clean air. A fist lands in his stomach and he stumbles backward and smashes his cranium into an unexpected piece of equipment, a gas valve. It’s not the one that’s leaking. He flails for support, trying to find footing or land a punch on his assailant, and misses, and the man grabs him, and fingers and thumbs close around his throat.

Hix cannot get the fingers away from his throat. He doesn’t know how. He manages to get to his knees. In desperation, he disconnects from the forged body again, scuttles up the blurred man’s arm, straps himself to his chest, and delivers an 850-volt electric shock directly across his heart.

The fingers clench for a split second. And then the blur falls away, stunned and trembling. Hix returns to his own head, as quickly as he can, before U-3125 can occupy it too.

The argon is up to around knee-level now, he guesses, wildly. The blurred man lies face down in it. He isn’t dead, but he isn’t going to get up. He’ll take four or five more empty breaths, and then he’ll die.

Hix staggers over to the gas masks, takes one, and spends several pointless seconds trying to figure out how to wear it and the germ at the same time. At last, he realizes that he can just leave the argon leak behind. He’s upright, and the door is right there. He discards the mask. But there is shouting in the distance, so he stops for a second and returns to the blurred man, and retrieves the screwdriver.

■

But what is it?

Where is it? What does U-3125 look like, truly, in its entirety? Its motivation, its origins, its modus operandi—how much of that can be known? Does it have to be known, to solve the problem? Does it matter how intelligent the intelligence is, once it’s inside the box, once it’s checkmated?

And what incandescent, mind-wrenching form could the countermeme take? How could human hands assemble something so devastatingly powerful and hold it steady; what human mind could wield it without exploding from the inside out? What would deploying that concept in anger do to human ideatic space? How far out from the solution is modern memetic science—a year, a century? What deranged impossibility has Hix just committed himself to?

He doesn’t know anything. Stanmoor is coming apart, and something violent and psychotic is flooding its corridors and its people, a livid roving swarm that makes every human into the worst possible thing a human can be. He descends a deep, seemingly bottomless stairwell. The elevators are out and the emergency lighting is starting to warp and flicker too. His germ is succumbing, slowly. It feels like his thoughts are corroding, rusting.

He can hear and process the looping audio warning now. There’s a key word in the message: “ERASURE.” Quinn and Mahlo must have escaped to safety, and discarded their own germs. He can only have minutes before they trigger the warhead.

He can make it. He can lock himself in. He’s going to miss the sky. It hurts to think.

But he can think.