Your hold on reality is only as strong as what you remember. The difference between a friend and an enemy is your memory of them.
But how do you guard against the things you can't remember?
"You're not my new boss," Kim 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 think I've been a professional antimemetics researcher since at least the mid-2000s. It's just that the first thing Grey ate was my memories of everything past the first day. And even then…"
There Is No Antimemetics Division1 is a story about ideas so dangerous you can't remember them, and reading it and its sequel, Five Five Five Five Five, feels like your mind is continually being folded back on itself to reevaluate your understanding of what you know just happened.
"You think this is like Memento, don't you?" Marion offers, charitably.
It's nothing like Memento.
The stories mostly center around Marion Wheeler, an agent of the Foundation (kinda lame name, but you'll forgive the author -- trust me). Marion is the chief of the Antimemetics Division.
There are ideas which cannot be spread. There are entities and phenomena which 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 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.
Antimemes are the enemy. At least, some of them are.2 The agents in the Antimemetics Division have to take drugs3 to force themselves to remember things that are trying to be forgotten.
But sometimes remembering is dangerous. Marion is slowly discovering and rediscovering and discovering yet again that there is something so dangerous it will destroy the whole world if anyone knows about it.
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 SCP-3125 every six weeks (42 days).
She has to figure out how to defeat an enemy that can only be kept at bay by not knowing about it (and even that doesn't really stop it). Every time she remembers it exists is a moment of mortal danger. Remembering that she's been fighting it her whole career (maybe humans have been fighting it as long as they've existed) makes it all the more dangerous.
Footnotes
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There Is No Antimemetics Division and Five Five Five Five Five are both available for free at the SCP Foundation. They used to be available on Amazon where the author self-published them, but I heard that they now have a publishing deal and new versions will be coming out later this year. ↩
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↩Direct observation is harmful to Nema's species. Her mother died when she was a juvenile, killed instantly when a Foundation researcher took a close-up flash photograph of her face. The Foundation thinks her whole species is extinct, wiped out by infertility and disease, as an indirect result of excessively close Foundation study. -
The drugs are called Mnestics and have very bad side effects: > "Nausea, and dramatically increased risk of pancreatic cancer," Marion says. "And very bad dreams." ↩