Junior Researcher Lee’s been working for the UO for all of four hours and he feels pulverized, as if an anvil were dropped on his head in that first introductory lecture. It’s lunchtime, and he’s found a corner so far back in the cafeteria that nobody bothers him, where he can chew and swallow mundane food, drink strong coffee, and digest the hard lessons of the morning.

On his Organization-provided phone, he pages fretfully through the Unknown database. There are, in theory, ten thousand possible Unknowns. In practice, only a few hundred of the available slots are filled, arbitrarily chosen numbers with wide gaps between most of them, and his initial clearance level allows him to read only a few dozen of those. He knows the numbering system has been juggled at least once in the past, to obfuscate the true count. And he knows that he isn’t seeing everything. A significant fraction of the apparently empty slots have entries that only become visible at higher clearance levels.

The ones he’s cleared to read are bad enough. There is U-5649, a deep cave in Chile filled with millions of cubic meters of living, breathing lung tissue. There is U-0980, an untraceable Chinese manufacturer of dimly sapient, predatory refrigerators. U-4333: anthropomorphic archaea. U-7012: a novelty record from 1989 that causes serious, permanent earworm. Its excruciatingly inane lyrics and melody are both sealed away behind frightening security warnings. Memetic threat. Psychological damage warning. Suicide warning.

U-0003, the first occupied slot, is (90416) 2003 YK118, a near-Earth asteroid with Kilroy Was Here graffitied on it in 75-meter-tall letters, complete with the cartoon bald man. U-9985, the last, is a mystical/geological anomaly on the Southern Ocean floor that periodically ████████ █████ █████ ███ ████ ███████████ blue whales. The redaction is in the original, Lee doesn’t have clearance to see the underlying text, but this anomaly has consistently “blanked” two or sometimes three blue whales per year, since it was discovered in—Lee blinks—1908.

They have to be jokes. That’s how most of them read. Like very bad, dark, frightening jokes. But in that first meeting, that first demonstration…

Lee is one of eleven Junior Researchers in the new intake. The other ten are sitting in a separate group at a separate table, chatting animatedly to one another. There are some instructors here and there, munching sandwiches. Other than them, the cafeteria—large enough to seat several hundred people—is deserted. To Lee, that seems odd. The UO site at Wyeleigh is large, a cluster of three-story buildings with an extensive underground complex, buried casually in a forest in the west of England. Where is everybody?

A man in a gray suit walks into the cafeteria, makes eye contact with Lee, and strides over. The man’s suit is sharp enough to cut. He wears a tie pin and a platinum wristwatch as big as a brick. He looks badly misplaced. UO Wyeleigh is a working site. There’s training, education, research, development, and analysis going on here, and even the containment of a handful of Category 1 Unknowns. Executives shouldn’t be here. So what is he? A lost executive, trying to find the helipad? A researcher or instructor, dressing for the job he wants, not the job he has?

“Hell of a first day,” the man says, holding a hand out. “Adrian Gage. G-A-G-E.”

“Lee,” Lee says. “Simon Lee.”

Gage sits. “Good to meet you. What accent is that, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Lee blinks. “New York,” he says. “I’m from New York. Are you the site director?”

“You seem on edge.”

“Well, that figures, right?” Lee asks. “You must know how that intro goes. When they wheel U-6389 out? And do that thing in front of you, that’s completely impossible? Jesus. They gave us all an hour to try it out ourselves, try to figure out the trick. But there isn’t a trick. It’s just…an error in the universe. A gap. Science doesn’t apply. Physics and biology go on vacation. It’s messed up.”

Gage nods and smiles.

Lee goes on, “And there are hundreds of these things. I just had almost everything I know overturned. It turns out I’ve spent my entire adult life being ‘protected’ from ‘dangerous’ knowledge, as if the whole outside world is a…a ball pit, for under-sevens. Stepping out of that has been…humiliating. To start with. And…” He blinks again. “You didn’t answer my question. What do you do here?”

“You didn’t answer mine,” Gage says. “Where are you from?”

“I told you,” Lee says. “I’m from—”

And then he just stops, his train of thought running off the end of the track into air. It’s on the tip of his tongue, the answer to Gage’s question, but he can’t get the words out. “That’s weird,” he says, shaking his head.

At this point, he also notices that Gage, unlike every other person in the cafeteria, isn’t wearing his pass. This could be an honest mistake, albeit a serious one. But surely executives don’t get to the executive level without being scrupulously correct in everything they do?

“Who are you?” Lee asks again.

“Your life story was fascinating.”

“What?”

“You spoke four languages,” Gage tells him. “One now, and soon zero. Too huge an intellect to specialize, your education was a mixture of biochemistry and comparative international literature. You felt as if you’d die if you couldn’t find more foreign thoughts to cram into your head. You’ve been all over the world, hungry, and every country you’ve ever been to was like landing on another planet. You toy with anthropology, but there’s too much world for one human race to ever understand, let alone one human. There’s too much human race. We should pare it down.”

Lee nods. “Uh-huh. Can you give me one second?” He gets up and hurries to another table, to the instructor he met earlier that day. When Lee gets close to her he feels a kind of staticky sensation building up. He tries to shake her shoulder, and succeeds in moving it a little, but it’s like reaching through tar. “Hey! There’s a problem. There’s an intruder. I think it might be an Unknown. Dr. Bretton, look at me! Hello?” She doesn’t react. He tries the gaggle of his fellow newcomers as well, but they keep chattering and eating, oblivious to him shouting and clapping in their ears. “Hey! People! Oli, Tom, listen to me! No, no, no, no.”

He looks back. Gage has stood up and started strolling toward him, hands in his pockets, still with that confident smile. And there’s definitely something wrong with him now because he’s visible through the tables, like an augmented reality holoprojection jammed inside Lee’s eyeball.

Lee realizes with a stab of fear that he can even see Gage when he blinks. His eyelids close, but Gage is still there, an apparition in what for all of Lee’s life has been totally personal, private darkness. The only way he can avoid seeing Gage is to turn away, and even then he feels a radioactive prickling in the back of his eyeballs.

Lee tries to phone one of the other newcomers. The phone in the young man’s pocket buzzes, and other than that, nothing happens. Nobody reacts.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Lee says.

“Do you remember your father?” Gage says.

“I never knew my father,” Lee says, edging away. “Mom raised me.”

Gage’s white smile isn’t moving. “These people loved your perspective. They were going to put you to work on anomalous antimemes. But they don’t remember you exist. You don’t exist.”

Lee says, mainly to himself, “There aren’t any dangerous Unknowns on this site. It’s all Cat. 1, they covered that in the orientation. So either you’re not dangerous…or nobody knows you exist. And if nobody knows you exist, then that means you’re either brand-new or…you’re…What’s an antimeme?”

“Hell of a first day,” Gage says.

“Are you sapient?” Lee asks.

“You seem on edge,” Gage says.

Lee bolts. He exits the cafeteria, turns a corner, and runs ten or eleven paces down the corridor, to where there’s an elevator. He stabs the Down button and waits. The elevator door is highly polished, reflective. Lee catches sight of a face in the mirrored surface and nearly falls over with shock because it’s a face he has never seen before, and it’s apparently his own. “Jesus! Oh, no no no,” he babbles. “What the hell, what the hell—”

Gage comes around the corner, still only strolling, just as the elevator cracks open. Lee dives in and punches the lowest floor, basement level 8. It’s instinctive, although he could rationalize the decision in retrospect. (He can’t just get in his car and drive. It’s better if Gage stays on site than if he’s set loose in rational “reality.” And to do that it’s better if Lee retreats to the lowest, darkest corner of the site for which he has access. And then waits for Gage, and then locks all the doors behind them. And waits to die…) The elevator starts descending, and the apparition of Gage—visible through doors and floors—disappears upward, shrinking with distance and perspective, but still smiling broadly down at Lee.

In the elevator, Lee walks in frightened circles. I don’t remember what my face looks like. It said it had eaten all my secondary languages, but I don’t remember learning anything other than English. So—It’s eating my memories. It’s consuming information. And I can’t contact anybody directly, which means I’m on my own.

I’m not trained for this.

He remembers the near-empty cafeteria. And miles of totally unoccupied corridors and vacant office and lab space. Maybe it’s not just eating my memories. Maybe it eats people whole, completely removes them from history. Maybe it’s been haunting the building for years and that’s why the place is so empty, because it’s nearly finished exterminating us all?

I need to get help. I need to warn somebody. How? I can’t talk to people, I can’t call them. I should—I should put this thing in the database. A new Unknown.

But someone’s got to have already thought of that.

He pulls his phone out. He pulls out the listing. Hundreds of documented Unknowns, dozens of them tagged Antimeme, or Antimemetic.

The number. They said the numbers were random.

No. Not random. What was the word? “Arbitrary.”

Lee clears his mind. Gage. G-A-G-E. 7-1-7-5.

• Ref.: U-7175 • Cat.: ε1

• Containment protocol: I’m disregarding the format, because time is a factor. If you’re reading this, you’ve already been isolated from the Organization at large. Attempts to signal for help are futile. You are now inside 7175’s gullet, after ingestion and prior to digestion. You need to get to lab WY-B08-703 as soon as possible and continue the research until you find a way to stop or kill Gage, before it kills you. Don’t read the rest until you’re in the elevator.

• Description:

At that moment the elevator doors open at basement level 8. Adrian Gage is waiting right there, still smiling disarmingly. He steps forward.

Desperate, Lee hurls his phone overarm at the entity’s head. It’s a solid chunk of metal and it’s a dead hit. Gage screeches and reels backward, clutching one eye. Lee doesn’t stop to think about the contradiction. By the time Gage recovers, Lee is out of sight, haring away down the left corridor, just echoing, fading footsteps on concrete.

Basement level 8 is a sprawling, near-incoherent network of corridors and steps. There is, at least, signage. It takes Lee a solid minute and a half of running to reach the door for lab 703. It looks like a submarine bulkhead, wider than Lee’s spread arms. Lee spots the keypad from way out. Four digits. He tries 7175, and it works first time. The mechanism takes agonizing seconds to open up. The door is almost as thick as it is wide.

“Come on, come on, come on!”

“Do you remember your mother?” he hears Gage murmur, as if beside one of his ears.

Lee flinches. “I never knew my parents,” he hisses under his breath. For a moment he wonders what Gage might really mean by that, but he doesn’t have time to dwell on it.

He slides through the crack between the bulkhead and its frame as soon as it opens wide enough. He punches the control that will close and lock it again, as if that’ll buy him even one second. The lab inside is long, windowless of course, and stacked to the high ceiling with a jumble of equipment that Lee hardly recognizes. There are shattered pieces of thick glass underfoot. In one corner there’s a pair of computer terminals, locked. Lee unlocks one of them, and there’s the same entry waiting for him:

• Description: U-7175 is a powerful, slow-acting antimemetic kill agent taking the appearance of a male business executive calling itself “Adrian Gage.” U-7175 is attracted to dense clusters of organically stored information—essentially, extremely knowledgeable, complicated, interesting people. U-7175 isolates its victim from the outside world by enveloping them in an antimemetic field that makes it impossible for the victim, or anything done by the victim, to be perceived or remembered. U-7175 then consumes the victim’s memories and knowledge until they become vegetative and die. This process takes between 15 minutes and 2 hours.

• U-7175 is not believed to be a sapient being, although it imitates the behavior of one to the extent that it can appear sapient to the inattentive. Its victims are able to move and act freely, since it is impossible to escape once caught, or to signal for help. Communications such as written notes, graffiti, and electronic mail do get sent, and persist in reality, but U-7175’s effect spreads with each message, making it impossible for an external observer to perceive the message until such time as U-7175 catches them too.

• The database entry that you are currently reading is created and maintained by victims of U-7175, because it is only visible to victims of U-7175. If you are reading this entry, U-7175 has caught you. You are now isolated from the Organization and constitute an effective Organization of one. You have between 15 minutes and 2 hours to reach UO Wyeleigh, basement level 8, laboratory 703, then familiarize yourself with the existing research, and continue this research until you find a way to contain or neutralize U-7175, or, more likely, die. If your field of expertise is not related to antimemetic containment, we sincerely apologize, and advise you to start learning. Fast.

• U-7175 has consumed ||||| ||||| ||||| ||||| ||||| ||||| ||||| ||||| ||||| ||||| ||||| ||||| ||||| ||||| ||||| |||| Organization researchers since this document was created. (If you are reading this entry for the first time, please add a mark.) We estimate that at least 50% of victims never make it as far as this database entry, so the true victim count is probably more than twice this figure.

“But how do I kill it?” Lee shouts. He scrolls and scrolls through the research, which is chaotic and haphazardly arranged, because nobody has found the spare seconds to sort it out. There are dozens of separate lines of research, contributed in patchwork by a succession of victims, all ending with variations on the same final line: “I’m going to try X. If you’re reading this, X didn’t work and I’m dead, which means approach X is a dead end, and you have to think of something else.”

He reads. Nobody has succeeded in physically engaging with Gage. Nobody can stall him, evade him, slow him down, reason with him, or redirect him to some other target. People have tried poisoning their memories with indigestible ideas, drip-feeding their memories to Gage to slow him down, replacing their memories faster than Gage can eat them, and force-feeding Gage too many memories at once to overfeed him and blow him up. They’ve tried committing suicide by amnestic drug overdose. None of it worked. More than a hundred people, most of them apparently possessing doctorates, have slid into the maw of this thing, fought briefly, and, with a greater or lesser degree of dignity, died.

There are no remaining untried threads.

“I’m fucked!” Lee concludes. He glances up. Gage is not in the room yet, but Lee can see him strolling down the last stretch of corridor. He’s a totally intangible being, physical obstructions are irrelevant to him. He can’t be hurt.

Lee clutches the pocket where he used to keep his phone.

Wait a second.

He scrolls again. He finds the three or four desperate wretches who died confronting Gage physically. Combat knife. Pistol, lifted from a security guard without their noticing. Hockey stick. Lee looks up and checks the room; sure enough, the stick is there, under a table. One man, an elderly botanist far out of his depth, said he was just going to try whatever he could find that was heaviest. That explains the shattered CRT television, and the layer of thick glass on the floor near the bulkhead. There is even CCTV footage of the botanist’s attempt. He accomplishes literally nothing. Gage is a holographic ghost, and the CRT drops right through him, imploding when it hits the floor at Gage’s feet. The botanist spends the rest of the video’s running time huddled in a corner, gradually losing his mind while Gage watches placidly.

The difference being, Lee realizes with his eyes boggling, a phone is a solid brick full of information. And before me, nobody tried using information as a missile.

Lee searches for the experiments—several of them, scattered—where the victim tried to divert Gage to a different data source. The general idea seemed to be to overload Gage by pointing him at something containing too much information: the internet, or the terabit feed from a live particle accelerator experiment, or a stack of hard drives containing the first few quadrillion binary digits of pi. But nobody could figure out a way to distract Gage’s attention; prominently placed screens full of data, he would ignore; data beamed at him electromagnetically (radio, laser) had no effect. And nobody could figure out a way to tunnel the information in through the victim’s mind as extra memories. It was written off as impossible, closed as a line of investigation.

The hard drives, Lee finds, are right there on the workbench next to the computer. It’s a half-rack unit, a cuboidal block of metalwork about twenty-five centimeters on a side, with the mass of a heavy bowling ball. One of the most ineffective conceivable melee weapons.

Lee snatches up the three longest pieces of network cable he can find, and starts braiding them into a chain.

Then he remembers who he is, and where he is, and what his responsibilities are. He goes to the computer, to the Unknown entry, adds himself to the victim tally, and writes up exactly what it is he’s about to try. Because he might not be the last one, and the world needs to know that this didn’t work.

■

Gage comes through the lab bulkhead to find most of the equipment in the room toppled onto the floor, to create room for the black and silver drive array that Simon Lee is whirling around his head on a two-meter chain made of plaited network cable. It makes a low thrumming sound as it whirls. Gage is not intelligent enough to stop moving forward, and catches the array directly in the side of his head, rack mount point first, like a morning star.

Gage’s defenses absorb and deflect the first few trillion digits of the impact. The rest of the data arrives hard. There is a green snap of light and a noise like a subway train short-circuiting, and Gage is a pile in the corner, his head caved in and the drive array partially demolished in pieces around him.

“Eat that,” Lee declares. And half laughs, half chokes with relief.

■

“It was chewing its way up the Antimemetics Division hierarchy,” Quinn tells him in the aftermath. “It was only a matter of time until it bit down on somebody dangerous. Congratulations on demonstrating a basic level of competence when it counted. Dozens of others couldn’t.”

Lee still feels rattled. But the shock is dissipating, faster than he’d expected.

Marie Quinn, it turns out, is the Antimemetics Division chief. She is Lee’s new boss. Her office is smaller than he figured it would be, a windowless box in an unremarkable corner of the main Wyeleigh building. She is small too, disappearing into her chair, behind a steaming coffee mug and a desk stacked with paperwork. Paper. Who still uses paper? Lee actually did a double take when he noticed the filing cabinets lined up against the other wall. Quinn wears glasses with thin blue rims. There’s a picture on her desk, but it’s aimed away from him. The smell of coffee in the room almost masks the lingering smell of cigarette smoke. There’s no ashtray in evidence, but there is a lighter standing on its end beside Quinn’s ergonomic mouse. Ah…Lee recalls that this office is the last door on its corridor before a fire exit leading to a sad little interior courtyard. That’s why.

“I want to say it was dumb luck,” he says. “I want to say that I just threw my phone, it was instinct, it was muscle memory. It was my first day, and I got lucky as hell…I want to say those things, but I’m sitting here, and turning those statements over, and none of them would be true, would they?”

Quinn waits expectantly, and says nothing.

“You’re not my new boss,” Lee says. “You’re just my boss. This isn’t my first day at all. I’ve been working here for…well, it must be over a decade, right? I feel…experienced. It’s just that the first thing Gage ate was my memories of everything past the first day. And even then…”

“I see very little luck in what happened today,” Quinn says. “Instinct and muscle memory are just deep forms of training. Like I said, a basic level of competence. An ability to piece your own life and all of your past knowledge back together, faster than nearly anybody else. This is what we try to drum into you. And sometimes, thankfully, it takes.”

“This isn’t even the first time we’ve had this conversation,” Lee continues. “There’ve been other incidents. With other Unknowns with memory-erasure effects. You’ve sat there and watched me put myself back together before.”

“And it hasn’t got old yet,” Quinn admits, with something that might be approaching a smirk.

“How long does it usually take for me to recover?”

“A month,” Quinn says. “Sometimes a month and change. But if you want the honest truth, people in this division are as competent on day one as they’ll ever be. Newcomers show up firing on all cylinders, or not at all. The rest is just fine-tuning the meds. At least, that’s what you always say to me.”

“…It sounds like I know a lot about newcomers,” Lee observes. “I was eating with them in the cafeteria when Gage showed up.” His lips move silently for a second. “Is that my job?”

Quinn raises an eyebrow, waiting for him to finish the thought.

“I work with Dr. Bretton?”

She’s still waiting.

“I’m an instructor,” he says.

“There. See?” Quinn says. “You brief newly recruited antimemeticists and guide them through their first ten months in the Division. Education, training, early career guidance, introduction to hands-on research. The demo with U-6389? That’s you, you’re the one who delivers it. We’re a shorthanded division, so you also have some actual, formal research duties. Those will go away one day, once you’ve hired and trained enough good people to cover your workload.”

She studies her computer screen. She pushes one key. She looks back at Lee.

“Anyway…Bretton can handle the new intake alone while you recover. And while you’re recovering, I need a completed U-7175 entry. I need you to nail down the model for Gage’s predatory pattern and exactly how you neutralized it. And I want you to work out what it did with the bodies. Were they incinerated, disintegrated, are they still lying around the site in cloaked heaps? You can rope some of the newcomers into your investigation if you like, it might be educational. Oh, and I need countermeasures, in case it comes back.”

“It’s coming back?”

“Oh, you know this one, Simon. You learn this on day one.”

Lee thinks. “Ah…There it is. It takes a lot to kill an idea.”

Quinn beams, satisfied, faintly prideful.

Lee asks, “What does it take?”

Quinn says nothing for a long time. It looks as if she knows the answer, but she’s debating whether to share it with him.

She says, “Perhaps we’ll get to that on day two.”