“Simon, do you have a minute?”

Lee’s expression freezes. It is nine months since he tangled with Adrian Gage/U-7175, he is all the way caught up, and he has relearned and re-re-relearned that “a minute” is Quinn-speak for “an hour, maybe the rest of the day.”

“Sure,” he lies.

Quinn hands a thin folder to him. A U-document. In modern times, the Unknown database sprawls across multiple storage formats: solid state, tape, paper files. Quinn likes paper. It has some valuable attributes. It’s a shade harder to lose, for one. “Something in my reminders went ping just now. It was about this.”

He opens the seal. There is just one sheet of paper inside.

• Ref.: U-3125 • Cat.: ε0

• Containment protocol: U-3125 is kept at the UO Wyeleigh Passive Containment Archive, level 1, vault 601. This containment unit is a 10 × 15 × 3m cuboidal room clad in layers of lead, soundproofing, and telepathic shielding. Access is through an airlock system at one end of the containment unit. This airlock is programmed to allow only one person to enter the containment unit at a time, and to remain locked until this person exits before allowing another person to enter.

• Under no circumstances may any coherent information be allowed to leave the containment unit. This includes written and electronic notes, photographs, audio and video recordings, sound, electromagnetic and particle-based signals, and psi emanations. During the exit cycle, a purge system rigged to the airlock flushes the occupant’s memory by flooding the airlock with amnestic gas for three minutes.

• A senior Antimemetics Division staff member must visit U-3125 every 63 days.

• END OF FILE

He verifies that the other side is blank. “You’re kidding me. That’s the whole entry?”

“That’s the whole entry,” Quinn says.

It isn’t even the fiftieth strangest thing Lee’s seen in the files, but still: “No description, no acquisition report, no test log, no addenda? No clue who built the unit, or when, or how many times it’s been visited, or who carried out the previous visits, or what they took in with them, or how long they were in there?”

“Come with me.”

He gestures at his laptop. “I’m preparing education. Ideatic measure spaces. These newcomers are quick at the math, I can’t stay out ahead of them.”

Quinn flicks her head in the direction they need to go. He sighs and brings the machine with him.

■

It’s a five-minute walk from Lee’s desk to the room where the containment unit is installed. One question answers itself immediately: the vault is an Ed Hix model. His signature style of containment architecture is recognizable a mile out. Sleek, white, plainly impregnable without the aid of extremely heavy tools. Hix died under anomalously unclear circumstances more than a decade ago, which means the unit is at least that old.

Neither Lee nor Quinn recognizes it.

“Ten years is sixty-odd visits. Or more,” Quinn says. “As for the rest of the omissions, I expect there are good reasons.”

“You expect,” Lee echoes, doubtfully. “I don’t like the idea of you routinely exposing yourself to an Unknown so dangerous that we can’t even write the reason why we can’t write it down down. Especially because it’s impossible for us to recover any usable information this way. You’re going to go in, be incommunicado for two hours, and come out a smiling amnesiac. What do we gain from that? It’s just a breach risk.”

Quinn hears every word of this and elects to ignore it all. There is a vague shape of familiarity about the entry as written; there are a few word choices that reassure her, in an intangible way, that it was written by someone who knew what they were doing. Possibly her.

Lee’s still talking. “We should just scrub that last line from the file. There can’t be anything good in that room.”

Quinn puts her keycard in the slot. The slot is marked with an orange and red stripe, indicating the high level of seniority required to access it. Quinn is the only person on the site whose keycard has a matching stripe. The airlock rewards her with green LEDs and begins to cycle open. It’s built as a slender vertical cylinder with a single opening. The entire thing rotates on its axis. Inside, there’s barely room for a single person to stand without their shoulders touching the walls.

“What are you taking?” Lee asks.

Quinn ducks to step in, turns to face him, and shrugs. “A stick of nicotine gum.”

“I can get you field gear,” Lee says, as the airlock begins to rotate again, emitting a low, quiet thrum solely as an audible warning that there is machinery in motion. “We’ll raid inventory. Give me fifteen minutes and I’ll have Ives turn you into a one-woman war.”

If Quinn says anything in response to this, it’s cut off by the soundproofing as the airlock rotates.

Lee is left alone in the antechamber. He stares at the outer door for a worried moment. He presses his ear to the door for a while, but hears nothing. Not even a faint tremble from the airlock mechanism.

He turns away. There’s a seat. Not very comfortable. He settles down, reopens his laptop, and tries to context-switch back.

■

Inside, it’s pitch-dark for a few seconds, then some unseen sensor detects Quinn’s presence and brings the fluorescents up. Half of them, anyway. The others remain inert or flicker aggravatingly.

The room’s interior walls are made from milky white glass (bulletproof, knowing Hix) and plastered with paperwork, taped up in vaguely coherent masses. Where there is no paperwork, people have drawn directly on the walls in marker pen. There is a conference table, long and elliptical, covered with more paperwork and a tangle of laptop computers and serpentine power supply cables. Power has returned to the machines and they are slowly booting. A data projector warms up and shines a map of the world over the far wall, almost lining up with a network of scribbled annotations on the same wall. Sticky notes of all colors litter the carpet like autumn leaves.

Other than that, the room is empty.

Skimming the paperwork, Quinn discovers that nearly all of it is handwritten and most of it charts the progress of conversations. Most of the entries are dated and signed, and most of the dates are weeks apart. The conversations are panicked and fearful back-and-forths about dozens of Unknowns, some of them antimemetic in nature but none of them obviously related to one another. None of the notes mention U-3125.

The only name Quinn recognizes is her own, which appears on one in ten or twenty of the notes. The notes seem authentic and the handwriting is hers. But her notes also seem as desperate and uncertain in tone as everybody else’s. This unnerves her.

There are diagrams on the walls too, which are too complex to decode at a glance, but complex enough to make her eyes hurt to look at them.

But where’s the primer? Asynchronous research—whereby the research topic is forgotten entirely between iterations, and rediscovered over and over—is a perfectly standard practice in the Antimemetics Division, and her people ought to be better trained than this. There should be a logical entry point to the data. An obvious single document to read first, which makes sense of the rest.

“The actual entity category is Epsilon 2,” a voice says. It’s her own voice, recorded. “Not that it makes much of a difference. The database entry you read on the outside is a stub; you already know that. It’s not the real document. And U-3125 isn’t in this room. You worked that out already, too. Take a seat.”

Quinn moves around the table until she finds the laptop making the sound. There is a video playing, apparently recorded on the laptop’s own camera. The Marie Quinn in the video is seated, and looks unfamiliar in a way that takes the one watching a moment to put her finger on. Not exhausted, not sick, not physically injured; she’s seen herself that way before, in the mirror. This woman’s willpower is gone. She’s beaten.

“In fact,” the recorded Quinn says, “this is the only room in the world where U-3125 is not present. It’s called ‘inverted containment.’ U-3125 pervades all of reality except for volumes that have been specifically shielded from its influence. And this is it. This is our only safe harbor. This room represents the length and breadth of the war.

“Every competent memetics research project finds U-3125’s fingerprints sooner or later. It manifests all over the world, in many different forms. Many of the manifestations aren’t even anomalous. Some of them, we already have catalogued separately in the main Unknown database. A very small number of them are even in containment. Impossibly virulent crazes, broken logic, invisible spiders as tall as skyscrapers, people born with extra limbs that nobody can see. That’s the raw data. Those manifestations are enough trouble to deal with in their own right…”

The Quinn in the video casts around, picks up a bright green marker pen and a blank piece of paper. She begins drawing a shape that isn’t visible from the camera’s perspective, while still talking.

“But once you get a little further down the road you start to see a pattern emerging in the data. You need to have the training in memetic science, but once you have that training and you have the data in front of you, it only takes a little extra effort to arrange those data points in conceptual space and draw a contour through them. Those data points are points on U-3125’s hull; those manifestations are the shadows it casts on our reality. You link four or five different Unknowns together into a single shape, and you see it…And it sees you…”

She’s still drawing. It’s detailed. She doesn’t look up, and her tone of voice is distant, almost as if she’s narrating the tail end of a frightening children’s story:

“When that happens, when you make ‘eye contact,’ it kills you. It kills you and it kills anybody who thinks like you. Physical distance doesn’t matter, it’s about mental proximity. Anybody with the same ideas, anybody in the same headspace. It kills your collaborators, your whole research team. It kills your parents; it kills your children. You become absent humans, human-shaped shells surrounding holes in reality. And when it’s done, your project is a crater, and nobody knows what U-3125 is anymore. It is a black hole in antimemetic science, consuming unwary researchers and yielding no information, only detectable through indirect observation. A true description of what U-3125 is, or even an allusion to what it is, constitutes a containment breach and a lethal indirect cognitohazard.

“Do you see? It’s a defense mechanism. This information-swallowing behavior is just the outer layer, the poison coating. It protects the entity from discovery while it infests our reality.

“And as years pass, the manifestations will continue, growing denser and knitting together…until the whole world is drowning in them, and everybody will be screaming, ‘Why did nobody realize what was happening?’ And nobody will answer, because everybody who realized was killed, by this system…

“Do you see it, Marie? See it now.”

Quinn is at the core of Organization antimemetic science. She had all the raw data readily accessible. There are extensive written calculations on the walls, but she doesn’t need to study them, she can do them in her head. All it took was that slightest push, that slightest suggestion. Staring through the laptop screen, eyes wide and defocused, she understands how it all links together. She sees U-3125.

It is monumental. She has encountered terrible, powerful ideas before, at every level of memeticity, and subdued them or even recruited them, but what she’s picturing now is on another order of magnitude from what she knew to be possible. Now that she knows it’s there, she can feel it like cosmic radiation, boring holes in the world with its manifestations and effortlessly silencing anybody who recognizes the larger pattern. It is not of reality, not of humanity; human thought cannot coexist with it. It is from a higher, worse place, and it is descending.

The other Quinn presents her finished diagram. She has drawn a mutated, fractally complex grasping hand with fivefold symmetry. It has no wrist or arm, just five long human fingers pointing in five directions. At its core, there is a pentagonal opening that could be a mouth.

But the diagram was already there. It is plastered across the wall in the background of the video, plain as day, a meticulous collage in green, easily two meters in diameter and showing the same meme complex to a hundred times the level of detail. There are smaller diagrams of different elevations arrayed around it like spores, and its arms are spread wide around the seated Quinn, who sits directly in front of the mouth, with her back to it.

Quinn, watching, does not realize that the collage is there, and does not turn around.

“How do you fight an enemy without ever discovering it exists?” the Quinn in the video asks. “How do you win without even realizing you’re at war? What do we do?

“Seven years ago there were antimemetics research groups all over the world. It wasn’t just us, there were hundreds of groups finding their way into the same questions. Government agencies, military departments, private corporations, university projects. None of those other groups still exist. The last one ceased to exist sometime in the last seventy-two hours.

“Three years ago, UO Antimemetics was a mini-Organization of more than four thousand people. Today, we are ninety people. Tomorrow it’s going to be fewer. Our original headquarters is gone. Obliterated from our collective memory. No one remembers!

“There is no war. We’ve lost that war. It’s over. This is the mopping-up operation. The only reason we still exist at all is because we have better amnestic biochemistry than anybody else in the world. Because that’s all you can do when you see U-3125: run away and try to forget what you saw…seek oblivion in chemicals, or alcohol, or head trauma. And even that can’t work every time. It’s circling in. We meet it over and over again and we don’t realize it. There’s no way we can stop ourselves from rediscovering it! We’re too damned smart!”

She points at something on the wall, out of view of the laptop’s camera. Quinn, watching, turns to look. In an upper corner of the room there is a constellation of dizzyingly complicated schematics. Ed Hix’s initials are on every page.

“There’s a machine we could build. All it would take is twenty years, a lab the size of a country, and all the money in the world. Nothing that the C-suite would blink at if we went to them. But how do we build that machine without any of us realizing what it’s for? It would be like…designing and building and launching an Apollo rocket without a single engineer deducing that the Moon existed. The logistics would be absurd. Someone would start asking logical questions. And then it would be over. So what do we do?”

“Find another way,” Quinn says to the unhearing recording. The fatalistic tone of voice makes her angry. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“…I could tell everybody to walk away. I could send a little message to myself saying, ‘There’s danger down this road, you should disband the Antimemetics Division and pursue other projects.’ But I’d be suspicious. I’d start asking questions about my own decision, and then it would be over.”

Quinn is now crouched in front of the video, trying to understand what she’s watching. “What’s wrong, Marie? Are you okay?”

“I could kill myself in here,” the recording says. “But my team would find U-3125 without me, and then they’d have to fight U-3125 without me. It’s going to happen soon, whatever happens. In the next three months at most. This year, it will be over. I may die in here anyway. I’m on so many mnestic drugs that my endocrine system is shutting down. Taking amnestics at the same time is the chemical equivalent of trepanation. I don’t remember the last time I slept without having a nightmare about Adam, and I’m starting to forget whether U-4987 is a real thing or just the number that I gave to my life—”

“You’re not like this,” Quinn whispers. “You’re stronger than this. What happened to you? Who’s Adam?”

“I don’t know how we survive this. I don’t know how we win. We’re the last ones in the world. After us, there’s nobody.”

Quinn shakes her head, not believing it.

“So I’m done. I’m going to walk out of this room and forget all about this problem and then I’m going to be you, Marie, the last Marie, and you have to ████ ███ a way out of this, because I can’t.” She gets up and moves off-screen. She can be heard breathing deeply. Her speech is starting to distort. “God, my eyes hurt. I think something’s starting to ████ ███ ███ inside.”

She gets up, unsteadily. She looks away from the camera, in the direction of the airlock. It looks like she wants to say more. But she thinks better of it, and terminates the recording.

■

Quinn stares at her reflection in the dark screen, for a long minute.

She’s never seen herself so weak. To see herself that way has damaged her self-confidence. She feels disconnected from what she saw, like it happened in an alternate universe. She feels revulsed and appalled by that version of her, more so to know that that version is still inside her somewhere. It doesn’t make sense. I’m looking at all of the same facts. What made her give up? What did she know that I don’t?

Who was Adam?

The answer to this question is so obvious and sickening that she instinctively distrusts it. She circles around the answer, probing it, trying to find reasons to reject it, but it is inescapable. Adam was someone she knew when the video was recorded, now completely removed from her memory. Adam was someone the thought of whose safety paralyzed her with fear. Someone in the same headspace. Someone she couldn’t bear to lose.

And then she lost.

But what if…

(But how’d the room get built in the first place? Anybody’s guess. Quinn imagines Hix building it as a proof of concept, followed by a cascading series of lucky chances that led to it becoming the war room. Someone discovered U-3125 at random, while sealed in the room; they wrote notes to themselves that set up the skeletal external Unknown database entry and the containment protocol; most of the paperwork and computer hardware was left behind by later visitors…It could have happened…)

But what if there’s another room?

Right then, unbidden, a cute factoid comes back to her. UO Wyeleigh is a large, old complex, and almost completely vacant. There are offices aboveground, laboratories and containment units belowground. And far, far below the basement levels there is an empty heavy engineering lab, an underground complex the size of a football pitch. Self-contained, in pristine condition, totally disused. Sealed up, original purpose forgotten. Nobody has entered it in living memory. Built who-knows-how-many decades back by a dead generation of antimemeticists. For reasons “unknown.”

What if that’s where we built our weapon?

Do I really believe I’m that smart? That my team and I had that much foresight? That we got that lucky?

She turns to look at the airlock, running the numbers in her head.

She had ninety people. I have…thirty-eight. Nine weeks until the next iteration. That’s past the end of the year. It’ll be too late. If I leave this room now, I will never be back. The plan I have now is the best plan there’s ever going to be.

I can’t defeat the airlock. Not an Ed Hix model. Not from the inside, using nothing but office equipment. So it’s the hard way, then. The cycle takes three minutes. And as soon as I’m through, U-3125 will see. It’ll know.

We’re the last ones in the world. After us, there’s nobody.

■

Lee is so deeply buried in work and the airlock is so quiet that it cycles almost all the way open before he notices.

“We need to check you for notes,” he begins, but then he sees that Quinn is curled up in the bottom of the narrow cylinder, panting as though she just finished a marathon run. Lee holds a hand out but she shakes her head, electing to stay down, knees bent up to her chest, sucking down lungfuls of air.

“What in the hell happened in there?” Lee asks.

“Just need…” she gasps, “…to breathe. Be okay in a…second. Haaaaah. I think I blacked out for a moment, might have inhaled some. Haaaaah. I think I’m okay. I remember the plan.”

Lee looks confused and worried for a second. Then it replaces him. “You shouldn’t be able to remember anything. What did you do?”

“Hit my head,” Quinn says, then goes back to concentrating on breathing properly. She suddenly becomes acutely aware that Lee has her effectively cornered. Disliking this arrangement, for reasons that she’s only gradually putting back together, she levers herself up to one shoulder and tries to stand. Lee puts a hand on her shoulder and pushes her back down.

“You look terrible,” he says. “There’s something ██████ ██ your neck. Do you see that?” He points at her throat, then taps the same spot on his own.

“What?”

“On your neck. █ ███ ██████ been infected by whatever was in there. We need to act quickly.” He pulls a multi-tool from an inside pocket and unfolds a short, gleaming blade. He does this in such a methodical, ordinary way that Quinn almost doesn’t react when he leans down toward her to cut her throat.

Almost. She grips his wrist. They’re locked like that for a moment, a tableau. She looks into Simon Lee’s eye, but it isn’t his eye anymore. She squints, wondering if she’s making eye contact with anything but a hole in space. Lee was, of course, in the same headspace as her. But she had hoped, prayed to her little god, that he would not succumb so quickly. And in a crazed little way she’d thought there would be at least a sign, a theatrical doubling-over as his mind was wrenched out of its socket.

She already feels the force bearing down on her own skull, trying to drill into it. But she knows its shape. And she discovers to her fleeting surprise that there is a kind of bulwark inside of her, something in her heart that’s pushing back, hard. She can hold out, maybe for a few minutes. Long enough. Barely.

Lee’s wrist spasms as he tries to drive the knife forward. Quinn parries and its tip glances off the airlock interior wall with a screech. They scuffle for an awkward second, then she boots Lee in the stomach with both feet, sending him sprawling in the antechamber. She launches out of the airlock, dives over him, and sprints away from the containment unit.

She feels U-3125 following her as she runs, like a spotlight. She hears a distant crash in another part of the building, as the first piece of ceiling caves in.