ANTIMEME

You woke with a stinging sensation in your head, little transparent worms wriggling through your vision. You did not register where you were, almost amnesic, soft bedding atop you, a plush pillow behind your head and a heavy-weighted notebook lying on top of the blanket. You picked it up:

READ IN CASE YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING.

Minji. The first time you saw her, she was sitting underneath a streetlight, reading, of all places, in Manhattan. No one stops to sit and read here. And you saw her there, a book about something with her legs crossed just slightly, all you wanted to do was make love to her. Buy her coffee, maybe, as hedge.

Everyone's busy with something, pricing their organs for their mid-life subsidies, for example; but her, she was sitting still in time, scarf looped over her neck enough times to fall in love. Around her the world pulsed, and she was still, making your heart sputter into little pieces of dynamite - pop, pop, pop! - covering your cheeks in red. And you had the audacity to ask what book she was reading - she said, Faulkner, an oldie but a goldie. And you never wanted to kiss someone so badly.

Eyes like the pools that girls would get naked and swim in. That mouth. You asked her where she was going and she said Nowhere, really - you were struck by how beautiful that answer was. How rare. Almost criminal.

So this is a poem for the woman sleeping next to you, who you have already forgotten, which I am sorry about, which is exactly why I am writing this. It's hard, married life and she hates your antimemetics job to death, but this is for life, she says, and then she kisses your temple, and the memories come rushing back.

I hope reading it rearranges that forgetful brain of yours. I hope it runs its fingers through your hair while she sleeps next to you.

Do you realize you're sleeping next to a goddess?

Good. Now kiss her after this poem is over. Don't put the notebook down and go pour coffee. Kiss her. Because she's the summer rain, the first kiss while the fog slowly clears. Stand at the edge of the world and kiss her until you realize that kiss could be the last, and then kiss her some more.

Her name is Minji.

Her name is Minji.

Her name is Minji.

You looked to your left. She was sleeping, facing you, one hand curled under her cheek, a t-shirt too large - which could mean that she stole it from you - and maybe, just maybe, the one she stole from you because it smelt like you, and maybe now, years later, it smells only like her.

You curl the page back

Another poem:

When she's asleep
and the night pours through
and the moon looks palpable through the window
almost poking in
I imagine you, Minji, your curved sleeping body to be the nest of our ship

Another page

I'm so sorry Minji
It's hard, all this forgetting
and misremembering and all this writing
I'd ask you the pain of me forgetting
and you say ten out of ten
and it'd break my heart
the richter scale will tell you how
hard it is to recover from an earthquake
and i can only imagine how hard a ten
must feel.
I'm so sorry for forgetting all the time.

This time, a poem written by Minji.

Why do you always forget, I say.

And you'll say back: just leave

But I love you.

and what if i leave first?

I will starve.

what if i find another?

I will die.

--Minji (check page 83)

You flip past many references, all the way back to page 83:

There's a small inline written by Minji: references handed out to every Antimemetics Division employee

REF: J-007

Containment: J-007 is kept in vault 9082A at the Secondary Archive building. This containment unit is medium-security. A 5 x 5 x 5 cuboidal room clad in layers of cement and electromagnetic interference shielding.

Security personnel have routinely lost their memory posted outside the containment unit. The shielding is 80% defective.

J-007 is a self-keeping secret, otherwise known as an antimeme. Information about the nature, physical appearance as well as its nature, is self-classifying - unable to be produced.

How J-007 was originally acquired is unknown. It was one of the earliest caught antimemes, hence its early number.

it is not indescribable, nor invisible; individuals are perfectly capable of entering J-007's containment unit and observing it, taking mental or written notes, making sketches, taking photographs and even making audio/video recordings. An extensive log of such observations is on file. However, information about J-007’s physical appearance ‘leaks’ out of a human mind soon after such an observation.

Individuals tasked with describing J-007 afterward find their minds wandering and lose interest in the task; individuals tasked with sketching a copy of a photograph of J-007 are unable to remember what the photograph looks like, as are researchers overseeing these tests. Security personnel who have observed J-007 via closed-circuit television cameras emerge after a full shift exhausted and effectively amnesiac about the events of the previous hours.

Who authorised the construction of J-007’s containment unit, why it was constructed in this way, and what the purpose of the described containment protocol may be are all unknown.

Despite J-007’s containment unit being easily accessible, personnel at the Secondary Archive uniformly claim no knowledge of J-007's existence when challenged.

All of these facts are periodically rediscovered, usually by chance readers of this file, causing considerable alarm. This state of concern lasts minutes at most, before the matter is simply forgotten about. A great deal of scientific data has been recorded from J-007, but cannot be studied. J-007 may present a major physical threat and indeed may have killed hundreds of personnel, and we would not know it.

Certainly, it presents a major memetic/mental threat, hence its (tentative) ε categorisation. At least two attempts have been made to destroy J-007, or possibly to move it from containment to another Archive Facility, meeting failure for reasons unknown. Addendum, 2226-11-10: It is hypothesised that J-007 was never formally acquired by the Organisation and is in fact an autonomous agent, inserted at Black River by an unidentified third party for the purpose of silently observing or interfering with other entities, the Organisation itself, or XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. No action to counter this potential threat is suggested, or indeed theoretically possible.

Antimemetics Division employees find their memory most harmed when observing entities; security personnel, require minutes to forget - employees need merely seconds.

Take the rule of memetics: the more you observe memory, the more you seek to observe ideas, the faster you lose them. There is a great evil in this world.

You shuffle your head above the pillow, pulling yourself up by parts. Your memory already foggier than the moment you woke up, which shouldn't be possible, the only one thing you remember was Minji. You turn your head left, towards her.

She wakes by parts, the sound of an early stretch, a hand finding your forearm, then the eyes, opening onto you. Those eyes, pools that girls swim in.

You read it?

I did.

All of it?

Not all of it, just a few pages.

Good. It's overload if you read too much of it at once.