Literature / There Is No Antimemetics Division

Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is not your first day.

There are ideas which cannot be spread. (…) Dreams you can't hold onto and secrets you can never share, and lies, and living conspiracies. It's a conceptual subculture, of ideas consuming other ideas and… sometimes… segments of reality. Sometimes, people.

— Marion Wheeler

There Is No Antimemetics Division is a Web Serial Novel by Sam Hughes, also known as qntm (the creator of Things of Interest). It was originally posted to the SCP Foundation website from 2015–2020 as two series of short stories, There Is No Antimemetics Division and Five Five Five Five Five, which were later consolidated into a 2021 novel.

A meme is an idea that, by its nature, spreads to other minds. An antimeme is an idea that does not want to be spread. And an anomalous antimeme? That can be a very dangerous thing indeed.

The Antimemetics Division, under the leadership of Marion Wheeler, protects humanity from ideas and entities we’re physically unable to think about. But what happens when the mission changes? How do you win an all-out war for human consciousness against an enemy you can't even remember?

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There Is No Antimemetics Division provides examples of:

• Abstract Eater:
  • Alastair Grey, officially designated SCP-4739, feeds on “dense clusters of organically-stored information - essentially, extremely knowledgeable, complicated, interesting people”.
  • SCP-4987, the invisible monster that follows Marion around and eats her memories. She keeps it fed with useless trivia and has even trained it to eat other people’s memories on command.
• Amnesia Loop: The Antimemetics Division, as well as numerous other similar agencies, have been locked in one of these for decades, possibly centuries, regarding SCP-3125. Every time they become aware of its existence and fail to contain that knowledge, it attacks and destroys everyone even tangentially connected to this awareness. Once this became understood, deliberate, and carefully managed amnesia of it was their only defense.
• Anachronic Order: The events of the story are not organized in chronological order. For example, the first three chapters of the book’s second half take place in 2015, 1995, and 2012, respectively.
• And I Must Scream: Immune to SCP-3125? You’re still going to be subsumed into it and forced to commit horrific acts in order to spread it to other people; you’re just going to be conscious the entire time. Adam has a lot of fun with this.
• Apocalyptic Gag Order: The Antimemetics Division has been aware of the incarnation of SCP-3125 for decades (possibly almost a century) — but because of the nature of said apocalypse, they can’t tell anyone about it (including themselves, outside of specially-shielded Vegas rooms) without causing it.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: All people who take sufficiently strong mnestic drugs experience some degree of this. Marion Wheeler gets an even stronger form, ironically after she'd been rendered Deader than Dead.
• Backstory Invader: O5-8's assistant, Clay, is apparently some kind of antimemetic agent, or an agent working on behalf of an antimeme. O5-8 does not have an assistant, but this entity was inserted into his office, apparently first to get him to forget his class W mnestic medicine. It appears his further mission was to destroy the Antimemetics Division, but we will never know for sure, as he was killed soon after being discovered.
• Black Speech: Several memetic and antimemetic entities cause their victims to exhibit distorted, unintelligible speech.
• Breather Episode: "Fresh Hell", the story’s most lighthearted chapter, directly follows the much more depressing “Where Have You Been All My Life”.
• Characters Dropping Like Flies: Main characters die often and without warning to a variety of antimemetic threats. By the end of the story, every named character save for O5-8 and (possibly) Bart Hughes is dead.
• Chekhov's Gunman: The videotape Marion finds in "CASE COLOURLESS GREEN" mentions that she'd been having nightmares about someone named Adam. Marion, in the present, has no idea who this person is. Adam is her ex-husband, whose memory she wiped (and wiped her own memory of him) to protect him from SCP-3125; he is the narrator of much of the book's second half.
• Civilization Destroyer: When SCP-3125 finally fully manifests in our reality.
• Cosmic Horror Story: Unimaginably powerful, uncaring horrors beyond human comprehension? Check. Defeat that’s practically inevitable and can only be postponed, with any glimmer of hope quickly snuffed out? Check. Cults and tentacles and Brown Notes galore? Check!
• Curiosity Killed the Cast: SCP-3125 kills anyone who looks too far into the isolated incidents it causes and deduces its existence — along with their entire research group and family. Ten years before the events of the story, there were hundreds of antimemetics research groups all around the world. But they all discovered SCP-3125 and died to it. Now there’s just one.
• Damaged Soul: As with everyone who regularly uses powerful mnestics, Marion’s spirit remains in the noösphere after her death. But because the Class-Z mnestic that killed her shattered her mind, she’s an Empty Shell unable to speak or interact with anyone — in the words of an Ará Orún operative, “a Swiss watch filled with glue”.
• Deal with the Devil: It’s implied that this led to Red becoming the human avatar of SCP-3125.
• Decoy Protagonist:
  • The second chapter, "Introductory Antimemetics", solely focuses on Paul Kim, and its ending implies that he and Marion will be the series' main characters. Two chapters later, he's taken over by SCP-3125, then either killed or brainwashed to forget the existence of the Antimemetics Division, and is subsequently never mentioned again.
  • Downplayed with Marion herself, who dies at the story's halfway point. While she goes on to narrate several more chapters via flashback, Adam is largely the protagonist of the story's second half.
• Duty That Transcends Death: MTF Omega-Zero (“Ará Orún”) is a task force of ghosts who still serve the Foundation even after their death.
• Eldritch Abomination: A few of them. SCP-3125, the big bad, is a powerful meme which is completely incompatible with human civilization as we understand it, and wipes it out.
• Fatal MacGuffin: The most intense mnestic drugs out there grant their user extraordinary abilities — aging backwards in the case of Class-X, remembering every memory you’ve ever had in the case of Class-Z — at the cost of certain death a few hours after ingestion. Marion and Adam both die by taking a Class-Z mnestic.
• Fingore: The disciples of SCP-3125 often maim the eyes or hands of the unconverted, including the left hand of Adam Wheeler.
• Genre Shift: The final third of the story (from the incarnation of SCP-3125 onwards) shifts from a straight Cosmic Horror Story to a more Lovecraft Lite tone. Before this point, each chapter involves the characters taking one step forward and twelve steps back in trying and horrifically failing to learn about a horror beyond human comprehension; once we find out exactly what the horror is and that it can be stopped, the narrative becomes a more optimistic (albeit still depressing and gruesome) adventure story with a (somewhat) happy ending.
• Giant Spider: The forces of SCP-3125 have enlisted the aid of antimemetic spiders as tall as skyscrapers. Exactly how and why they are allied is never made clear.
• Hope Spot: Marion correctly determines that a previous iteration of the Antimemetics Division built a weapon capable of neutralizing SCP-3125, and that the bunker underneath Site-41 fits the description of the location where it's supposed to be housed. She makes a run for the bunker, and successfully reaches it... and it's empty. Turns out the Antimemetics Division used to have several (now-forgotten) Sites, not just Site-41, and while Marion correctly predicted the Division's plans, those plans were implemented in a different bunker at a different Site. All she's able to do is contain the local outbreak of SCP-3125, killing herself and wiping out her entire team in the process, and merely pushing back the apocalypse by a few years at best.
• House Amnesia: In “Where Have You Been All My Life”, Marion wakes up to the sound of someone breaking into her home. She tracks down and subdues the attacker. It’s her husband, home from a work trip. She’s forgotten that he exists.
• The Immune: A small portion of the population (including Adam) has a natural genetic immunity to antimemetic influence, and can perceive antimemes to some degree. People with this immunity are also able to resist the effects of SCP-3125.
• Inescapable Horror: SCP-3125 is present everywhere on Earth except for the Foundation’s containment chamber.
• It's Not You, It's My Enemies: Because SCP-3125 kills anyone in the same "headspace" as its target (people who think in the same way as them — which usually includes the target's close family), Marion decides to wipe Adam's memory of her in order to protect him should she be attacked.
• Just Before the End: The first half of the book (and several chapters from the second half of the book) take place one year before the incarnation of SCP-3125.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Combating anomalies which create this is the entire business of the Antimemetics Division. Have I told you this already?
• Living Memory: Bart’s plan to destroy SCP-3125 requires a ‘countermeme’: a weaponizeable idea. Adam doesn’t have it, but Marion did, before she died — and Adam knew her better than anyone else in the world. So Adam takes a Class-Z mnestic in order to create a living memory of Marion and reproduce the countermeme she had in her mind.
• Magical Divorce: Marion and Adam’s marriage ends with mutual Laser-Guided Amnesia.
• Note to Self:
  • Much of the Antimemetic Division’s research is conducted asynchronously — as a series of notes for their future selves, who have presumably forgotten all of the research that came before.
  • SCP-3125’s containment chamber is full of these. When Marion enters it in “CASE COLOURLESS GREEN”, she finds a videotape she recorded for herself six weeks earlier that she has no memory of creating.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Most of “Ará Orún” is completely blacked out, with only a few fragmented snippets of text left to describe Adam’s experience within SCP-3125.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: In “CASE COLOURLESS GREEN”, Marion finds a videotape she recorded last time she entered SCP-3125’s containment chamber, and is unnerved to watch this past version of herself have a terrified breakdown before ultimately giving up. Played With in that this is implied to be in-character for the version of Marion who recorded the videotape: any attempt to destroy SCP-3125 would have also killed Adam (and presumably her children), whom Marion no longer remembers.
• Phlebotinum Pills: Mnestics, a class of memory-enhancing pharmaceuticals that enable their user to perceive antimemes, are the drug of choice of the Antimemetics Division and its employees.
• Phone Call from the Dead: How Ará Orún operatives, most notably Daisy Ulrich, communicate with the real world.
• Posthumous Character: Bart Hughes, the architect of most of the Antimemetics Division’s containment infrastructure, who died a decade earlier under mysterious circumstances. His work comes up often throughout the story, and several characters are trying to figure out what happened to him. Subverted in “Wild Light” when it’s revealed that he’s alive.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Every “victory” against SCP-3125.
  • In “Your Last First Day”, Marion manages to stop the incarnation of SCP-3125… but in the aftermath, she and her entire team are dead, the Division is wiped out, and with the final organization protecting the world from antimemetic threats destroyed, it’s implied she’s only pushed back the date of the incarnation by a few years.
  • By the end of the story, SCP-3125 has been banished from our reality. But almost every named character is dead. A year of human history, millions of people and trillions of dollars of infrastructure are gone. And there’s still no one left to protect the world from another antimemetic threat like this one — and SCP-3125 still exists.
• Regained Memories Sequence: Certain mnestic drugs (Class-X and some varieties of Class-Z) give the user access to all of their previous memories, at the cost of eventual death. In “Unforgettable, That’s What You Are”, Lyn Marness recounts sixty years’ worth of repressed memories after taking a Class-X mnestic. Later, Adam uses a Class-Z mnestic to recover his memories of Marion and experiences the past two years of his life in reverse.
• Remember the Dead: Spirits in the noösphere rely on their “anchors” — living people in the real world who knew them well and actively remember them — in order to keep existing. This is why Marion becomes coherent again once SCP-3125 incarnates and Adam temporarily remembers her.
• Rescue Romance: “Fresh Hell” tells the story of how Marion and Adam fell in love when he was a civilian who got trapped in a manifestation of SCP-4051 and she was the field agent dispatched to his case.
• Secret War: So secret that the parties involved don’t even remember they’re fighting in it!
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: In “Blood/Brain”, Red shows up and starts monologuing, before he’s quickly interrupted by Adam shooting him in the head. And then ordering an orbital laser strike on him.
• Supernatural Hotspot Town: Ojai, California has a thing for memetic cults.
• Switching P.O.V.: Each chapter is narrated from a different character’s perspective. There are eight different narrators in total, although the majority of the chapters are narrated either by Antimemetics Division chief Marion Wheeler or by her ex-husband Adam.
• Take Up My Sword: Marion dies at the end of the first half of the book in a failed attempt to destroy SCP-3125. The book’s second half mostly follows her ex-husband Adam as he puts together the pieces of her life and ultimately finishes the work she started.
• Titled After the Song: “Unforgettable, That’s What You Are”, “Where Have You Been All My Life”, and “Champions of Nothing”.
• Together in Death: When Marion and Adam finally reunite and fully remember each other, Marion is being erased from existence and Adam has just sacrificed his life in order to temporarily bring her back. They get a few moments with each other before the end.
• Tragic One-Shot Character: Several of the book’s narrators are introduced in the same chapter where they die, including George and Eli.
• War Memorial: The statue on the book’s cover is SCP-9429, a gigantic, antimemetically-cloaked basalt memorial constructed by the Oblitus people in honor of those who died during (what the Foundation believes to be the first and only) Antimemetic War against SCP-3125.
• Wham Line:
  • From “We Need to Talk About Fifty-Five”:
  This time she pulls out a gun and shoots Clay twice in the heart.
  • From “Your Last First Day”:
  It’s the wrong machine.
  • The first line of the third addendum to SCP-3125’s file:
  I found your body.
  • And the last line of the same addendum:
  Still existing despite everything,
  Adam Wheeler, interloper
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The first chapter mentions that Marion Wheeler has two children. They are never mentioned again.
• A World Half Full: The novel ends with SCP-3125 banished and possibly destroyed, but at tremendous cost. Over a year of history is missing. Huge parts of every urban center are walled out from normal consciousness, millions of people are missing, and almost no one is even aware that this has happened.
• Wound That Will Not Heal: The human avatar of SCP-3125 is shot twice in the chest. It continues to bleed, even over a year later, but it also never kills him.

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…Wait, what were we talking about? There’s nothing here. Just a blank screen…