There Is No Antimemetics Division

There Is No Antimemetics Division

1

Induction

“Do anything nice over Christmas?”

This time the assistant doesn’t answer at all. She just stops typing, dead in the middle of a word, and stares at Quinn.

Quinn says, “Did I ask you that already?”

“Twice,” the woman says. Exasperation and puzzlement. “We already had that whole conversation. And we also already had the conversation where I told you you already asked me that and you apologized.”

“I’m sorry,” Quinn says.

“Yeah. That.”

“You think I have memory issues,” Quinn says. “You think I’ve got no long-term memory, and if I stay in one place for too long I forget why I’m there.”

The assistant, Rowland, says, cautiously, “I attributed it to stress.”

Quinn smiles sympathetically and shakes her head. “It’s not stress. Do you think Mr. Mahlo’s going to be much longer?”

The assistant has turned back to her computer. “This is the C-level. Meetings at this level take as long as they need to take, and you wait. Mr. Mahlo will see you when he’s ready.” She says this many times a day.

Quinn turns back to the window. The building is Georgian, with high ceilings, and the window is correspondingly tall, a rectangle of white. It is a stunning January day out there, brisk but clear and bright. Four floors below, the streets are rammed with traffic, like always. Beyond that, the river is busy too. Quinn watches a ferry.

She turns fifty this year. She is diminutive and flint-eyed, very dark-haired but rapidly graying. Today, her hair is strictly pulled back and up into a silver clasp. She wore her good suit for this, one button, very dark gray, with a solid blue blouse underneath. Ankle boots with stout heels, two silver stud earrings in each lobe. Contact lenses, not the usual glasses. On a lanyard around her neck she wears a security pass with a bright orange and red diagonal stripe.

She toys nervously with her lighter. She wastes a little of the flame. She is here to meet Mahlo, and the C-level is scary. Cs never want to see you for a small thing. It’s the end of the world, or nothing.

Something in her bag chimes. It’s time for a pill. She fishes her phone out and tells it to remind her later.

The door to the inner office opens. Five people emerge, Organization executives and a few EAs, with briefcases and laptops. As a group, they head straight past the assistant’s desk and Quinn toward the lifts. Their security escort, a featureless man who has been waiting silently in the far corner of the reception area since before Quinn arrived, detaches from the wall and accompanies them.

Quinn recognizes only one of the faces—Reinhardt, director of the Organization in Germany. The Organization hierarchy is an international sprawl, occluded and continually shifting, but she is a peer of Mahlo’s. Quinn doesn’t know the others. In any case, none of them glance in her direction.

And five more excruciating minutes pass.

“No,” Quinn mutters under her breath. “Sit still.” The assistant doesn’t notice this.

Finally, Mahlo’s door opens again. A different man pokes his head around the door. He’s twentysomething, improbably youthful, like a teenager stuffed into one of his dad’s business shirts. His haircut is barely regulation. In one hand he holds a tablet computer showing his boss’s day planner. It’s packed. The man evidently does not sleep.

“Marie? We’re ready for you now.”

■

The office door closes behind them with a heavy mechanical clunk, as if the thing is part of a machine built into the office walls. While Quinn takes the indicated chair, the young man turns and does some confusing additional things to the door, causing it to make several further strange noises. Mahlo and the rest of his tier have non-trivial privacy and security requirements.

The office is spacious, but contrives to be dark despite two big corners of window and broad daylight outside. The walls are all bookshelves and dark wood paneling; perfectly stylish, but a style from the nineties, a little worn, and not yet old enough to have become fashionable again.

As for the fellow behind the desk: Mahlo is a relatively small, unassuming, sullen-faced man whose age is curiously difficult to place. Depending on how the light in the room catches his face, he looks twenty-nine or fifty-eight, and when he moves, reaching for a glass of water or a pen, he does so with the fragile care of a centenarian. The stripe on his pass is black.

Quinn forces herself to set her bag beside her chair, not clutch it defensively in her lap. She takes a deep breath. “So. What’s our topic? All I got was the meeting invitation, no agenda or subject. I mean, the UKI director says ‘jump,’ you jump, but—”

Looking to her right, she notices that the young man, without saying anything or making any undue sound, has set his tablet down on a table, produced a gun, and aimed it at her head. Quinn stops talking. She sits still in her chair for a little while, absorbing the change of pace. Her heart rate rises to a hummingbird’s.

“Okay?” she hazards. She licks her lips and grips the armrests, otherwise staying perfectly still, waiting for another prompt. The young man’s face is totally neutral now, like this is just how meetings go.

Mahlo asks her, “Who do you work for?”

Quinn blinks. “What? Oh, God.”

He checks his notes. He speaks with a slow, almost soporific rhythm. “Marie Quinn, forty-nine. Married, no children. Avid hiker, adept climber, enjoys knitting and birdwatching. Sound education, airtight financials, a perfectly consistent background as far back as we can examine. And you’ve got full Organization credentials that we’ve never issued, including access to a list of installations and rooms that . . . Well. Some of these locations don’t exist, or were torn down decades ago. At least one hasn’t been built yet, yet you’ve got the front door key to it. That’s before we get to your level of access to the Unknowns themselves, which I can only term as ‘egregious.’

“So you’re a spy, and your objectives are misaligned with ours, and young Mr. Levene’s recommendation was to transfer you to Processing and let them unwind you, but I was able to bring him around. I talked him into a face-to-face. I thought there was a slim chance that if we locked you in a shielded room and asked politely, you’d have the good sense to spare yourself the rest.”

Quinn takes a shallow breath. She glances sideways at the gun. Levene hasn’t moved. “Mr. Mahlo, you know me. We’ve met several times. I’m your chief of Antimemetics.”

“We don’t have an Antimemetics Division,” Levene says.

“. . . Mr. Levene is mistaken,” Quinn says, to Mahlo. “The Organization has a research division for every class of Unknown and more. Telepathics, Inanimates, Cryptozoology. My division doesn’t always show up in the listing. It’s not something we can help. It’s the nature of the work we do.”

She hesitates. Silence from the other two. But she hasn’t been told to stop. Another glance at the gun.

She needs a raise.

“There’s the easy stuff,” she says. “There are Unknowns that are basic monsters. There are impossible books and haunted Siberian research labs and psychic teenagers and mythological swords that make you crazy. After that, things start to become interesting. There are Unknowns with dangerous memetic properties. There are contagious ideas, which require containment just like any physical threat. Viral concepts. They get inside your head, and ride your mind to reach other minds. And so, we have a Memetics Division. Right?”

“Right,” Mahlo says. He could name a score of Unknowns fitting this description without thinking.

“There are Unknowns with antimemetic properties,” Quinn goes on. “There are ideas that cannot be spread. There are entities and phenomena that harvest and consume information, particularly information about themselves. You take a Polaroid photo of one, it’ll never develop. You write a description down with a pen on paper and hand it to someone, but what you’ve written turns out to be hieroglyphs, and nobody can understand them, not even you. You can look directly at one and it won’t even be invisible, but you’ll still perceive nothing there. Dreams you can’t hold on to and secrets you can never share, and lies, and living conspiracies. It’s a conceptual ecosystem, of ideas consuming other ideas and . . . sometimes . . . segments of reality. Sometimes, people.

“Which makes them a threat. That’s all there is to it. Antimemetic entities are dangerous and they are beyond our understanding; therefore, they fall within the Organization’s remit. Hence, my division. This is our specialty. We can do the sideways thinking that’s necessary to combat something that can literally eat your combat training.

“Mr. Mahlo: You already know all of this. Dig deep.”

“This is a cover story,” Levene says to Mahlo, not taking his eyes off Quinn. “It’s a good one, but she’s had it worked out in advance.”

“Levene, put it away,” Mahlo says.