Summarize each of the stories below. be specific


Many Worlds

It was early in the morning. Far too early for Everett’s liking, but his body felt light and his mind felt sharp. Today was the day he learned the nature of the universe, and that sort of thing tended to wake you up.

He sat in the lotus position, as he had been taught, studying the world around him while he waited for his master. He took his lessons in a small forest glade. The grass was soft, and long enough to tickle his bare toes when he curled them. It was a little wet. Sunlight speared through the loose canopy around him, visible as shifting golden beams in the early morning mist.

It was beautiful, but Everett found it difficult to care. Far more interesting were the tools arranged in front of him. There were three wax tablets, each blank, and behind them three clay cups. Each cup held a bundle of dried leaves. There was no stylus for the tablets, but he carried his own, one of the three tools which belonged only to him.

Everett heard his master’s approach before he saw him. Quiet, steady footsteps heralded the old man’s arrival. He emerged from a different path than Everett had traveled, appearing suddenly like a deer from the forest.

Everett’s master was a severe man. His frame was frail, his hair gray, and his eyes milky white from some unknown affliction. But he carried himself with a strength greater than physical, the effortless presence of the powerful. He sat in front of Everett without a word, his white robes settling around him.

He had brought his granddaughter today. She was young, but not quite a child, with long hair just a shade darker than her charcoal robes. She trailed behind her grandfather like a shadow. Today she carried a ceramic jug wrapped in a small quilt. Everett knew from experience it carried boiling water.

His master gestured, and the girl stepped forward. She gave Everett a shy smile, making eye contact just for a moment, and poured from her jug into the first cup on his left.

Everett’s master spoke as she poured. He wasted no time on greetings or pleasantries. Three years as his student, and Everett knew almost nothing about him.

“A planning parable,” his master said, his voice deep and steady despite his age. Everett sharpened his ears.

    Every year Lord Midas summons 2 of his subjects to court. They are taken to separate rooms, and each flips a coin. They are then asked to guess whether the other man flipped heads. If they both guess right, they both go gome with a treasure. What should they do? And what are their chances?”

The girl finished filling his cup, and Everett dismissed her with a shallow nod as he began to ponder. A “planning parable” meant that the men were allowed to make plans ahead of time, so they could follow a joint strategy. But in this case the question made no sense. Each was simply guessing at a coinflip, weren’t they? Perhaps that was the point? To quickly recognize that no strategy could help?

If he took too long to answer, his tea would grow cold. “It doesn’t matter,” he said decisively. “The two coinflips are unrelated. They cannot do better than chance. If both guess heads, for example, each has a 1/2 chance of being right, so they have a 1/4 chance of both being right.”

His master stroked his short, whispy beard. His expression was unreadable. After a moment, he spoke. “What if instead, they were asked to guess whether or not their coinflips matched?”

Everett’s eyes darted to the side as he considered. That one was also easy.

“Either their coinflips match, or they don’t,” Everett said confidently, “So if they both always guessed ‘yes’, then they would both be right 1/2 the time. I don’t believe you can do any better.”

His master nodded. “Do you see?” he asked. Everett’s brow slowly wrinkled. He did see. Hm.

The two questions were really the same question. If you knew your own coinflip, and you correctly guess whether the coinflips matched, then you had correctly guessed the other coinflip.

Could that possibly work? He considered the first question again. If both men looked at their coin, and guessed that the other’s had flipped the same way…yes, it worked.

But that made no sense. Their coinflips were unrelated. If the men couldn’t see their own coinflip, he was sure they couldn’t both guess correctly more than 1/4 of the time. How could it be that seeing their own coinflip let them both guess correctly 1/2 the time, when they were guessing at an unrelated event? He checked, again and again, and kept getting the same result.

“I see that you have understood the parable,” his master said. “You may drink from the first cup.”

It took effort for Everett to emerge from his thoughts. He could ponder the mystery more deeply later. He reached for the cup on his far left, which sat steaming while he thought. It contained two dark green leaves. They had bloomed in the hot water, until they obscured it from view.

He drank, tilting his head back, and it was bitter. It tasted like no tea he’d ever had before. He set down the empty cup with a grimmace to see that the girl was already filling his second cup.

The wax tablets sat on the ground, untouched. Perhaps he should have made use of one of them? But despite his failure, the problem was simple; he couldn’t see the point in writing it down.

He was confused how these puzzles were meant to teach him the nature of the universe. But his master began to speak again, and he emptied his mind to listen.

    Every year Lord Midas summons 3 of his subjects to court. They are taken to separate rooms, while Lord Midas flips a coin for each of them. Each is told how the coin landed for the other 2, and then offered a chance to guess how their own coin landed. They may pass, if they wish, and decline to guess. If at least one guesses right, and none guess wrong, they all go home with a treasure. What should they do? And what are their chances?”

Everett saw the connection immediately. This one seemed less tricky, even if it was more complicated. It was obvious how a strategy could help, unlike the first one where it seemed impossible to do better than chance.

There weren’t that many strategies to try. Each subject got to see 2 coinflips, then answer one of 3 ways. There were only 3^(2^2)=81 different possible rules they could follow. Perhaps different subjects needed to follow different rules to do as well as they could, but usually in planning parables everyone behaved the same way.

Everett started running through the 81 strategies in his head, then realized his foolishness. He deftly flicked his stylus from the sleeve of his dark gray robe, and scooped up the second wax tablet from the ground. It was damp from the morning dew, but the wax was soft and pliable as he began to shape it.

His tea grew cold as his master waited patiently. He enumerated all 81 strategies, calculating their chance of winning the treasure as he went. His head was buzzing, and his fingers shook with nervous energy as he worked. There must have been something in that first cup of tea.

Finally, he answered. There were several strategies which were all equally good, but one stood out as easy to explain. “It is simple, master. Each subject, if told that the other two coinflips match, guesses the opposite, and otherwise passes.”

“Be more precise,” his master said sternly.

Everett considered his words. “If a subject is presented with two heads, they should guess tails for their own coinflip. If presented with two tails, they should guess heads. Otherwise they should pass. The chance of winning is 3/4.” Everett was surprised the chance of winning was so high.

His master thought for a moment, then nodded. “I see. And can you explain why this is so?”

“It simply is, master. There are only so many ways to play. That is the best of them.”

His master shook his head. “Then you do not yet understand. But soon you will. You may drink from the second cup.”

Everett put down his wax tablet and drank from the second cup. This one held three pale green leaves, and tasted sweet. He was sorry he’d let it grow cold.

“Now,” his master said, the tiniest hint of amusement audible in his voice, “the third and final planning parable.”

    Every year Lord Midas summons 7 of his subjects to court. They are taken to separate rooms, while Lord Midas flips a coin for each of them. Each is told how the coin landed for the other 6, and then offered a chance to guess how their own coin landed. They may pass, if they wish, and decline to guess. If at least one guesses right, and none guess wrong, they all go home with a treasure. What should they do? And what are their chances?”

Everett winced. That was far too many different rules to try all of them.

He was no neophyte, however. He knew the way of things with planning parables. He picked up the third wax tablet, and before turning his mind to the true challange, began to ponder the same parable with only 4 subjects. There would most likely be a pattern.

The girl filled his third cup as he worked. He barely noticed, engrossed in his efforts. Soon he had filled his wax tablet. He had smeared and re-used all the space he could, so he reached for the other two. His master said nothing as he spread his work across all three surfaces.

The second cup of tea began to do its work as well. His fingers ceased to shake, his movements growing precise even as they kept their nervous speed. The buzzing in his head faded. He was left with an immense clarity. He felt as though his mind was skating over vast frozen rivers of thought.

No matter what he tried, though, he was unable to make the parable yield. He could generalize the pattern from three, but was that the best he could do? Without enumerating them all, how was he to know?

The glade faded from his perception as his focus intensified. His eagerness to learn the nature of the universe was long forgotten at this point. All that remained was a desire to resolve the parable. His world shrunk to encompass only his hands, his eyes, and the three tablets.

What felt like mere moments later, his master’s voice dispersed his focus. “You may drink from the third cup.”

Everett blinked, startled rudely back into reality. The sun was high above him now, burning the back of his neck from above the treetops. His master had not moved, but his granddaughter was no longer with them. Everett hadn’t even noticed her leave.

“Master?” he asked. He had not yet solved the third parable.

“You have understood the shape of the parable, if not its solution. You are ready to learn the nature of the universe.”

Right. That was why he had come here today. Everett leaned forward and grasped the third cup. The leaves inside had dissolved, producing a green liquid so dark it was almost black. He tilted his head back and drank. The dark tea was cold as it slid down his throat.

The new liquid reacted violently with the contents of his stomach. Everett doubled over, the cup half-finished, clutching his abdomen as the contents began to bubble and roil. His hands clenched. Sweat began to roll down his neck, and then his forehead, stinging his eyes.

The violent bubbling feeling spread through his body, until even his fingertips felt like they were fizzing. His brain jumped around like the lid of an overboiled pot. The clarity from before was shattered, shards of his attention darting all over the glade, unable to form a coherent thought.

He was going to throw up. Or was he?

The world split in two.

In one world, Everett retched. Thick green liquid and chunks of his breakfast soaked the pristine grass. He fell to his side as his whole whole body relaxed, free of the poison. His mind quieted. His thoughts returning to a single track: failure.

In the other, the liquid stayed down. The strange feelings intensified. His mind grew more and more scattered, and his panicking body began to feel far away. He was going insane.

Everett felt a light touch on his forehead. The first world dissolved, and he was left in the second, except that his master had stood and was pressing the back of a hand to his brow.

“Focus,” his master said. “Consider the first parable.”

Everett complied, repeating the parable to himself.

    Every year Lord Midas summons 2 of his subjects to court. They are taken to separate rooms, and each made to flip a coin. They are then asked to guess whether the other man flipped heads. If they are both right, they both go gome with a treasure. What should they do? And what are their chances?”

He saw the parable in his mind’s eye, the two men standing in separate rooms, each flipping a coin. They both flipped, and the world split into 4. Then, in each of the 4 worlds, they wrote down their guesses according to the strategy he had found.

Everett saw it. He saw it! He grabbed a tablet in the real world, he wasn’t sure which one. He smudged his existing work off with the back of his hand like a neophyte, and began to write.

BEST STRATEGY:
Flip H -> Guess H
Flip T -> Guess T

FLIPS GUESSES SUCCESS PAYOFF
H H   H H     1 1     1
H T   H T     0 0     0
T H   T H     0 0     0
T T   T T     1 1     1

The two men were always both right, or both wrong. If he compared it to the naive solution of both men always guessing heads…

FIXED STRATEGY

FLIPS GUESSES SUCCESS PAYOFF
H H   H H     1 1     1
H T   H H     1 0     0
T H   H H     0 1     0
T T   H H     0 0     0

That was the secret, then. Comprehension bloomed in his mind. It was true that since the two coinflips were unconnected, neither man could guess correctly more than 1/2 the time. If their guesses were unrelated, they would both be right 1/4 the time.

But they could force their guesses to be related by looking at their own coin. No rule of the universe said they couldn’t. The number of correct and incorrect guesses were the same, taken across all worlds – the number of 1s and 0s in the success column must always be equal – but they could be moved between worlds by different strategies. Since the two men only got paid if they were both right, lining the 1s up like pictures on a slot machine paid off.

Everett, excited, moved on to the second parable. This one had 8 worlds, enough to strain his mind, but he persisted. He repeated the parable to himself and began to write.

    Every year Lord Midas summons 3 of his subjects to court. They are taken to separate rooms, while Lord Midas flips a coin for each of them. Each is told how the coin landed for the other 2, and then offered a chance to guess how their own coin landed. They may pass, if they wish, and decline to guess. If at least one guesses right, and none guess wrong, they all go home with a treasure. What should they do? And what are their chances?”

BEST STRATEGY
Others Flip H H -> Guess T
Others Flip T T -> Guess H
Anything Else -> Pass (P)

FLIPS  GUESSES SUCCESS PAYOFF
H H H  T T T   0 0 0   0
H H T  P P T   P P 1   1
H T H  P T P   P 1 P   1
H T T  H P P   1 P P   1
T H H  T P P   1 P P   1
T H T  P H P   P 1 P   1
T T H  P P H   P P 1   1
T T T  H H H   0 0 0   0

It was beautiful. Once again, no individual subject could be right more than half the time. The number of 1s and 0s in the success column were equal. But they could pass, and so they could arrange all the 0s in the same world, and make sure each other world had exactly one 1. Since they got paid off if at least one man was right and none were wrong, they could win in 6/8 worlds!

Everett was enlightened. It generalized so cleanly onto the case of 7 prisoners. He just had to figure out how to concentrate 7 wrong guesses into the bad worlds, while having 1 correct guess in each of the good worlds. If it worked, the payoff rate would be 7/8. With 3 prisoners, it had only been 3/4! Somehow adding more prisoners made the task easier!

Everett smiled, feeling the sun on his face, the wind on his hair. A moment later he vomited.

It was as worse than it had been in his imagined world. His stomach contracted, over and over, like the fist of god squeezing him dry. Black-green goop mixed with fragments of leaf coated the glade. He just barely managed to avoid getting any on his robes.

“Good,” his master said, his voice warm. He had retreated a step just before Everett retched. “You have comprehended the nature of the universe.” His master turned to leave, while Everett struggled to collect himself.

Everett pushed himself up into a more dignified position, coughing the last bits of liquid out of his throat. He had certainly understood something. If you thought of every random event as shattering the world into pieces, you could decide how to behave by simply counting how many resulting worlds had the property you wanted to achieve. But one question remained.

“Master,” he called to the old man’s retreating back. “I still have not comprehended the third parable.”

His master waved vaguely over his shoulder as he walked. “A lesson for another time. You lack the tools to truly understand. We will return to the final parable next year, when you have comprehended the first mystery of Hamming.”

And with that, he was gone, disappearing into the forest as easily as he had arrived.

Everett sat for a moment, collecting himself. His head felt stuffy, like someone had been cramming cotton balls up his nose. But he set his jaw. He wiped the last drops of vomit with his sleeve, and picked up a tablet.

The first mystery of Hamming could go stuff itself. Armed with the nature of the universe, he could figure it out on his own.


The Document

The window was unlocked! Even better, Mitch didn’t recognize this part of the complex at all. It might be the right place.

He had to reach over his head to slide the window open. He grabbed the sill and started to pull himself up. His feet kicked ineffectually against the wall while his gut pushed him away from it, making the angle awkward.

Someone inside opened the window the rest of the way. Strong hands, younger than his by a good decade or two, reached out to help pull him in. Mitch grit his teeth and kicked against the wall harder. He got one armpit over the top, then another, and then all of a sudden he was toppling over into the room.

He sprawled onto his stomach, slapping his hands into the ground like he’d learned back when he did fieldwork. His arm felt like it had been wrenched out of its socket. His glasses were fogged from heavy breathing in the cold air. All he could see was two pairs of feet, one in a large pair of nice dockers, the other in a pair of maroon heels.

“Mitch?” asked an older woman’s voice above him. “Or Bob?”

Mitch rolled his shoulder. It was fine. He pushed himself to his feet, wincing a little, and took off his glasses to polish them. “Mitch,” he said, rubbing his lenses on the corner of his sweater. “Mitch Mandel.”

He put his glasses back on, and the room snapped into focus. It was a mess. Not an “untidy” sort of mess, although it was untidy, but a “something is wrong here” sort of mess.

The drywall was a wreck, missing in some places, scraped or scratched or filled with holes in others. A chair was wedged under the door handle of the only exit. One corner looked to be a makeshift sleeping area. There was a pile of junk in another, covered in dust. Nothing in the complex should be covered in dust. The carpet was filled with hair and detritus, like it hadn’t been vacuumed in forever.

There was a square table, with four chairs around it. It was covered in messy piles of paper. Behind it was a whiteboard that was getting on in years, streaks and smears of color left behind after erasing it too many times.

The woman coughed. It was like a librarian’s cough. Mitch stood a little straighter, turning to look at her. She was holding out a slightly-wrinkly hand covered in rings. “Barb Streiss,” she said. Mitch shook her hand, looking her over. She was in her 60s, maybe, well-dressed but a little overenthusiastic with the jewelry. She had horn-rim glasses and a pinched face, but her eyes were bright.

“You’re late,” she said, turning and walking back to the table.

“Erm,” Mitch responded cleverly. He wasn’t sure how he could be late when she didn’t even know who he was. Instead he turned to the other person in the room, a tall 20-something in a suit, with hands in his pockets.

The man inclined his chin. “Bernie Stein,” he said. His voice was deep, and he was built more like a linebacker than a desk jockey. Mitch returned the raised chin.

Barb had settled back into a seat, in front of the largest pile of papers. “So,” she said, clicking open a pen, “what do you remember?”

“I remember a lot,” Mitch said. Barb wrote while he spoke, not looking up. “Well, I guess it feels like a lot. I remember that I work here, in the visual memetics department–”

“Not for three years,” Barb interrupted. She kept writing while Mitch gaped. “You were re-assigned to antimemetics three years ago. You worked under Bob.”

Mitch snorted. “Antimemetics? That’s dead-end nonsense. Nobody’s ever…found…an antimeme…” Mitch trailed off.

Bernie coughed. “Why don’t you start from the beginning,” he said. “Where did you wake up?”

“In a motel room.”

“Why did you come here?”

“Well, because I work here. I overslept, so I ran right out the door. I knew something had happened when my ID didn’t work. The security guard didn’t recognize me, either. Nobody did.”

Mitch took out his ID. The lamination on it was failing, and it had expired over a year go. “What the hell is going on?” he asked.

“Later,” Barb responded. “I need to debrief you first. It’s in the document.”

“The what?”

Barb stopped writing, peering at Mitch over the top of her glasses. He rolled his eyes. “Fine. After security threw me out, I tried calling my sister, but she didn’t pick up. Then I tried calling my old officemate, but he didn’t know who I was. I realized something was affecting people’s memories. Then I realized something was affecting my memory. I couldn’t remember what I’d done yesterday, or the day before. So naturally I hopped the fence and started trying to find a part of the complex I didn’t remember…”

The debrief took about half an hour. By the end, Mitch was starting to piece together what had happened.

“So,” he said, in a conversational tone of voice. “We’re infected?” A normal person might have been freaking out. But Mitch had worked at the complex his entire career. He’d been in worse scrapes.

“Everyone is infected,” Barb corrected him. “We’re just the loci. That’s why nobody can remember us.”

“A real-life antimeme,” Mitch mused. “Just my luck. I change departments just in time for antimemetics to finally find something.”

Barb looked at him like he was the stupidest man in the world. Mitch scratched his chin.

Bernie’s watch beeped. He glanced at it, then looked up at Barb. “2:00 PM.”

Barb began shuffling papers. “Good. We’re only a little behind schedule. I’ll start–”

“Wait a second,” Mitch interrupted. “I still have some questions.”

Barb shoved a three-ring binder across the table to him. The cover was labeled with heavy block lettering: Answers to Mitch’s Questions.

Mitch shrugged and flipped it open. It did, in fact, contain the answers to the questions he was about to ask, in roughly the order he’d been planning to ask them.

> What is this binder?

You ask the same questions every day, so you wrote down
these answers for yourself.

> What's the document Barb was talking about?

The antimemetic event occurs every 23-25 hours at midnight
pacific.  The event erases all memories related to the four
of us.  The document is a written set of facts and
instructions that allows us to act across the event
boundary.

> Every 23-25 hours at midnight?  The event respects
> daylight savings time?

Yes.  We believe it is somehow entangled with human
cognition.

> You said the four of us?

*Bob hasn't shown up in a long time.  The document is vague
 on him.

> If written records of the four of us persist through the
> event...

That's not a question.  But, yes.  Records of us exist.
The complex currently believes that the four of us are
mythomemetic in nature.  Like slender man on steroids.

> They think that there's a mythomeme presenting as four
> members of the antimemetics division that nobody
> remembers?

Yes.  The complex finds new mythomemes every day, and
antimemes are entirely theoretical to everyone outside this
room.

> Why can I remember working here, but not what happened
> yesterday?

The event affects information related to the four of us, in
proportion to the degree of that relation.  You spent all
yesterday with 2-3 event loci, but for most of your career
you didn't even know them.

> Why did I wake up in a motel?  Why am I the last one
> here?

Being awake during the antimemetic event is traumatic.  We
sleep through it.  You react poorly to waking up in a room
full of strangers, so you sleep in a motel.  You also react
poorly to waking up with a set of instructions you don't
remember writing.  It's better to let you find your own way
here.

Barb sleeps in this room, and Bernie writes himself a note
every night that takes him straight here.

Mitch paused. That answer seemed a little suspicious. Surely waking up alone in a motel room wasn’t the optimal way to get him here. He flipped the page, chewing on that thought.

> This is all very suspicious.

Also not a question.  But yes.  You're a paranoid bastard
Mitch.  Your colleagues find it very frustrating, but it's
kept you alive so far.  I say hold onto it.

He paused again to consider that. The shoe fit, he couldn’t deny it. He imagined waking up with a note explaining all of this. He would’ve smelled a rat and hopped on a plane to Tahiti.

He started flipping through the binder. After the first three pages, every other page was a big drawing of an angry face. He stopped on one of the angry faces and read the text below it.

>:(

Stop flipping through the damn binder!  I put these in
order for a reason.

He ignored the text, of course, and turned the page again. He was close to the end.

> What if it *isn't* an antimeme?  Maybe everyone "forgot"
> me because I never worked at the complex at all.  Maybe
> everyone in this room is infected with a delusional
> psychomeme.

Your memories are patchy.  Any meme that can edit your
memories might as well be an antimeme.

> Maybe it's normal for humans to have patchy memories.
> Maybe the psychomeme is convincing me that I *should*
> have a consistent set of memories as a cover for--

Almost an hour later, Mitch looked up from his binder. Bernie shifted a little in his chair, eyeing him. “2:40,” he said, checking his watch again. Barb made a noise of acknowledgment.

“The document says you should now be suspicious that we are working against you,” she said, not taking her eyes off the papers in front of her.

Mitch coughed. “Well,” he said. “Are you?”

Bernie took a little cue card from his pocket and read from it. “If we were, I would have just shot you.” He lifted the hem of his sport coat to show the black polymer handle of a gun.

Mitch nodded. “So even if you are working against me, you at least need something from me,” he offered easily. “Is there any food around here? Or wait, coffee. I could kill for a cup of coffee.”

Barb stopped reading to dig around in her purse. She tossed him an energy bar and a warm coldbrew. “Bernie steals those from the vending machine after people go home for the night,” she said. “It’s not a good idea to wander around the compound when nobody remembers you. Eat fast; we’re behind schedule.”

Mitch shoved half the energy bar in his mouth. “What’s the schedule?” he asked, in-between chews. It was chocolate peanut butter. His favorite.

“I wake up at 6. One hour to orient myself and address concerns. I review the document from 7-11, Bernie arrives around 8:30 and assists. Lunch until 11:30, then we work on whatever the document has assigned us until you arrive between 11:30 and 13:00. We try to have you oriented by 13:30. We work on our assigned tasks until 19:00. You continue working while I update the document and Bernie goes out to steal us supplies. When Bernie gets back, usually around 21:00, you two go off to sleep in motels, and I sleep here.”

Mitch took a swig of the warm coldbrew. He winced at the taste. “That’s a lot of time spent on the document.”

“It’s a complicated document. We’ve tried a lot of things.”

“Have you considered that the document may be a trap?”

“It’s my writing.”

“Maybe the first version of the document was a trap, written by this Bob character, and you’ve updated it enough that–”

“Mitch,” Bernie interrupted. “We’ve thought it through. Eat your damn energy bar.”

Mitch held up his hands. He didn’t stop thinking about it, though. The question was one of motivation. Maybe someone was very invested in all three of them being asleep at midnight, but needed them alive. He took another bite of his energy bar.

Working on the document was surprisingly boring. Mitch smiled and helped out as much as he could, while his mind began to pick the problem apart from other angles.

The document’s current angle of attack was to try and draw more people into the antimemetic effect, to increase their manpower. The document’s working theory was that the four of them were loci of the antimeme because they knew there was an antimeme. So if they could convince someone else, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the antimeme was real, then that person might get drawn in too.

What tended to happen instead was that people listened to their story, promised to help, then woke up the next morning remembering nothing. Sometimes these people left themselves clues, hints that “The Antimemetic Four” were real, in which case they checked themselves into infohazard observation, and that was that.

But they were only a few dozen loops into the current plan. There were a lot more approaches to try. They started brainstorming, while Mitch worked on his pet theory.

“Hey, Barb,” he said. “Could I see my binder for a second?”

She didn’t even look up. “Not while you’re holding a pen.”

“Why not? I thought I wrote it.”

“You did. But the document says that you try to leave yourself cryptic clues in it, so any edits have to be carefully checked and rewritten by myself. We aren’t scheduled for that until later this week.”

“Couldn’t I just write myself notes at home, though?”

“You do sometimes. You usually hop on a plane to Russia when you wake up, and we don’t see you for a few days. You find your way back eventually, but we lose a lot of time, so I would prefer you not do this.”

Mitch frowned. Why Russia? He’d hated Russia since he’d been stationed there in 1990. Maybe that made sense, though; it was the last place he would expect himself to go. Was he really so ironically predictable?

He felt through his pockets for papers. Nothing. That was very strange. He felt like he would’ve at least tried to leave himself cryptic clues that wouldn’t spook him when he woke up, but would be easy to find once he knew what was going on. Maybe if he went back to the motel room he’d find something.

By the time things were wrapping up, Mitch had narrowed the situation down to 2.5 likely possibilities. None of those possibilities benefited from being shared. When the time came, he shook hands firmly with Barb and Bernie, promised not to write himself any messages that sent him off to Russia, and made his ungainly escape out the window.

The walk back to the motel was dark and cold. He should’ve thought to bring a jacket this morning. The motel clerk was unsurprised to see him back, since he’d abandoned all his things, and happily booked him another night. Mitch paid for his room in wrinkled 20s that Bernie stole from the canteen cash register every night.

He spent ten minutes searching his room for secret messages. There was nothing. Eventually he shrugged and sat down on the bed, pulling the blankets over his head.

Alone under the blanket with only the light of his phone, he dug around in his pocket until he came up with a quarter. He couldn’t leave himself notes for whatever reason. It wasn’t so much that Barb had told him not to, it was the fact that he hadn’t found any today. That meant it wasn’t a stable strategy. With notes he couldn’t try things in serial, but there was always random chance.

He only had a few plausible plans. It didn’t take many coin flips to pick one. When the last flip fell tails he grimaced. His binder had gone to extensive lengths to convey to him just how unpleasant it was to be awake at midnight. Unpleasant, but not lethal, or he would certainly be dead by now. What sort of self-respecting agent wouldn’t wait up to see what happened? He must have done it dozens of times.

So he pulled the blankets down, changed out of his suit, and sat up in bed to wait.

At the stroke of midnight, he heard a sound from his door. A key turned in the lock. He tensed, involuntarily, but tried to make himself relax. This was by far the best of the possible outcomes.

The door opened, and a man stepped through. He was tall and dressed in a nice suit with a distinctive bowler hat. Mitch didn’t recognize him at all. Mitch smiled, folding his arms and trying not to show that his heart was racing. “Hello, Bob,” he said.

The man tipped his hat. “Mitch,” he said. “My men told me you didn’t try to buy a weapon. Is this the cooperative, I’ve-figured-it-out sort of waiting up for me, then?”

Mitch shrugged. “The random sort of waiting up for you.”

The man cursed under his breath. “Well,” he said, stepping fully into the room. “Let’s get on with it. It’s a lot easier when you’re asleep, you know.”

A stream of men filed into the room behind him, all of them dressed in suits and wearing ski masks. Some of them carried fancy-looking equipment. Mitch quirked an eyebrow.

“I know I’m going to forget everything in a moment,” he said, “but I have to ask. The curiosity is killing me.”

Bob sighed. He dragged out motel room’s single chair and sat on it backward, crossing his arms over the top. “We have ten minutes while my men set up. I’ll trade you. What gave it away?”

Mitch thought back on events. How easily he’d broken in to the complex. The dust-covered warroom that had never been repurposed. The fact that he’d supposedly flown off to Russia multiple times, but never gotten caught in a stable loop that kept him away. The fact that he’d booked a second night at this motel, but that it was only the second night, rather than the hundredth. The fact that whatever stable loop he was in didn’t include any kind of message to himself. “Everything,” he finally said. “You really bit off a lot for yourself.”

Bob shrugged. “When the program fails, it fails safe. We just have to start up again. What have you figured out? I’ll explain the rest if you walk me through your thought process.”

“Well,” Mitch said. “I didn’t think it was an antimeme. I wasn’t sure until you walked in, but I didn’t think so. Too many things didn’t add up. Even so, something was affecting my memory, and the memory of everyone around me. I started to think about who or what could have the disposition of force to mess with everyone in the complex like that. But then I realized I was making assumptions. I knew that something was affecting my memory. But what if everyone else was just lying?”

Mitch readjusted on the bed. The men around him were assembling their gear into a rather menacing machine. “Anyway, after that, a bunch of stuff fell into place. The complex would be at the top of my list for people with access to technology that could modify my memory. It would be significantly easier to modify 1-3 people’s memories than to modify everyone’s memories. Everything pointed to the complex being behind it. It also explained that asinine ‘records of you persist but are mistaken for a mythomemetic hazard’ story. I don’t know you, but I assume that’s not your best work.”

Bob nodded along. “Five minutes,” he said, checking his watch.

“I’ll ask my questions then. Are Barb and Bernie in on it?”

“No. We wipe them every night. They’re a lot less trouble than you are, though.”

“Why us?”

“You all volunteered. Standard team. A disposable field agent, a paranoid asshole who’s survived too much, and an adult to do the actual work.”

“Why?”

Bob checked his watch again. “The antimemetics department has never found an antimeme. Not once. They’re theoretically possible, so–”

“Have you actually never found one?” Mitch interjected. “Or do you just not remember?”

“Exactly. We’ve been working for years on a set of procedures that would allow an individual or a small team that encountered an antimeme to study it. But we ran into a problem: how could we make sure these procedures worked without an antimeme to test on?”

Mitch almost smacked his forehead. Of course. If you find yourself in a strange situation, and you suspect an adversary arranged it, but you don’t know what they want, how do you start to reason about it? A hell of a good first guess is that they want whatever is going on. If you find yourself sitting in an office working on a document after hundreds of amnesia loops – well, they probably wanted you to work on that document.

The men around Mitch were done with the machine. It had a helmet that looked suspiciously like an upside-down colander, and too many blinking lights.

“One last question,” Mitch said. “How do you wipe my memory?”

Bob motioned with his hand, and the men around Mitch lowered the col-lander onto his head. Bob reached into his sport coat and produced a stack of glossy photos.

“Neuronal hyperactivity. Same mechanism as Alzheimer’s, but we use electricity. We visually stimulate the connections we want to disrupt, then use this machine here to produce a microtargeted seizure.”

Bob fanned out the photos. There was a picture of Barb, and Bernie, alongside a few others Mitch didn’t recognize. Two of the pictures were children.

“Don’t worry,” Bob said, “you’re divorced. But these are the memories you’ll be forgetting. The human brain is a social organ. It likes to index memories by the people who were there, with a recency bias. Please stare very intently at these photos, as well as my face. We’re going to–”

Mitch heard a beep from the machine, and then the world went white.

The Meta Meme

“Sir!” Ensign Glorpl-thorp whipped a tentacle to his head, in a crude pantomime of a human salute. “Come quick. We have an emergency.”

Captain Thorpl-morp heaved his bulk from the pilot’s throne, ambling after the ensign without delay. Rungs studded in the walls and ceiling of the ship let them swing rapidly, dozens of tentacles grasping and pulling to propel them down the hallways. “It’s cultural decontamination, sir,” Glorpl-thorp said once they were moving. “They asked for you directly.”

Thorpl-morp’s third heart sunk in his chest. He’d captained over a dozen first-contact ships in his long and storied career. He’d spent subjective millenia learning and adopting the cultural patterns of new species, teaching himself to think in their language and act out their gestures. In his currently-human-tinted experience, days that started with a race to cultural decontamination never ended well.

His ship had set out the moment human radio waves first reached the Orp-orp observation arrays. Over the long decades of their journey, incoming broadcasts had slowly caught them up to speed on the humans’ rapidly developing culture. They’d patterned their own lives and command structure after the humans, updating the details every few years. The technique helped first contacts go more smoothly. Not smooth, per se; just more smoothly.

His ship was about fifty light years away at this point, accelerated to 0.8c, and the most recent broadcasts they’d received were from the 2010s. The flow of new media out of cultural decontamination had slowed to a trickle about two decades ago, however. Some sort of new wrinkle they wanted to make sure was safe.

Cultural decontamination was in a tizzy when they finally arrived. About a dozen tentacled blobs were swinging agitatedly around the top of the raised dome, long white lab coats flapping in the air behind them. Captain Thorpl-morp landed with a loud plop in the center of the room, and all eyes turned to him.

“Report!” he shouted, wasting no time. One of his favorite human traits was the way they dispensed with procedure in emergencies.

A scientist dropped down from the ceiling to land beside him. The captain recognized him as deputy under-director Morpl-slorp. He was a smallish blob, fourth or fifth in command. The under-director adjusted a pair of useless circular lenses perched on his head. That meant nervousness.

“Well?” the captain asked again.

“Sir,” Morpl-slorp began. “I’m afraid we’ve hit a bit of a snag. There’s, um…” Morpl-slorp dug a tentacle around in his lab coat, fishing out a human dictionary.

The captain hesitated for a moment, then reached out a tentacle and plunged it into the under-director’s neck. They could re-enact the scene with human cultural patterns later.

What’s going on? he asked over tentacle link. Or, well, the method of communication was quite unlike words, but he was keeping track of what they would have to re-enact later, and he would say something like ‘what’s going on?’.

We’ve had a major memetic breach, sir. The first-contact team is in cultural isolation. The men who secured them are in secondary holding, along with most of our senior leadership, who were personally supervising the encounter.

Jesus Christ. What did the humans come up with? Wait, don’t answer that.

It’s not so much what they came up with, sir, as…well…

Spit it out.

Well, um. Let’s see. You should be mostly caught up to the 90s. You know how humans have unrestricted point-to-point electronic communication?

The telephone, yes.

And, um. You know how they use electromagnetic waves for mass-distribution of memes? Radio, TV?

The captain’s tentacles wriggled in little spirals. He would translate that later as a shudder. The way they’d used radio for memetic warfare during the cold war…the humans were crazy bastards.

Right, Morpl-slorp continued over tentacle link. Well, have you read the topic briefing on the new Internet phenomenon?

The captain searched through his memory. A handful of news stories came to his mind, one or two TV episodes with offhanded references. I’m familiar.

It’s spreading, sir. Like wildfire. It’s in workplaces, in homes. Humans are building little battery-powered devices that will let them carry it around on the go. We project that decades before we arrive, over a billion humans will be connected to the internet at all times.

That was the other crazy thing about humans. There were so damn many of them. It was unsustainable. Glorpl-thorp’s own home planet had sterilized 99.9% of intelligent life shortly after the discovery of nuclear fission, and the remaining population was carefully regulated. You just couldn’t have more than a few thousand conscious entites on a pre-uplift planet without one of them deciding to kill most of the rest. Humans were no exception to this rule, but somehow the crazy ones never managed to eradicate more than a few percentage points of the population. Maybe they were just lucky.

Thorpl-morp forced his mind back to the question at hand. The humans would get around to mass sterilization eventually. OK. So this Internet is spreading. What’s the consequence? You said some sort of memetic hazard? Did they find a hedonic pump? A consumptive game-theoretic entity? It was hard to imagine a game-theoretic entity that his crew would still be vulnerable to, but it never hurt to be careful.

Like I said, sir, it’s not quite that simple. We aren’t dealing with one bad meme. We’re dealing with, well… Morpl-slorp wrapped his tentacles around himself. Imagine if every human had a little radio tower in their house, powerful enough to reach to the other side of the world.

It wouldn’t work. They’d drown each other out.

Yes. But imagine they didn’t. The Internet uses dedicated lines with packet-switching technology. Humans can talk to anyone they want, just like the telephone, but they can also talk to multiple people at once, like the radio. Average latency is measured in milliseconds. And this happened just as their computer revolution was kicking off. They can put the things they want to say on magnetic storage, and let the computer repeat it to anyone who wants to hear.

So? We have an electronic bulletin boad on this very ship.

Yes, sir. But only the communications department can make public posts. And there are only a few hundred of us.

Wait, are you saying any human who wants to can make these instant public broadcasts, at any time?

Yes, sir.

And they’re available to everyone, forever?

For the most part, sir.

Surely they have automated protections in place.

No, sir. We estimate they’re at least a decade away from having good automated content filtering, if they even decide to use it. Their pre-existing enlightenment meme cluster makes it very hard for them to understand the value of information control.

But then…then…

The scale of the problem unfolded in Thorpl-morp’s mind like a deadly flower. A billion minds, all connected, trading information at the speed of light. No filters. No guardrails.

His tentacles began to secrete. He didn’t even know what human gesture that mapped on to, and right now he didn’t care.

The whole planet was a god damn memetic breeding ground. Who knew what would emerge victorious from that primordial soup of infohazards. He’d wait and see, just in case the humans came to their senses and shut this Internet down. But most likely they’d arrive at the human system to find a few thousand surviving cultists worshiping a tangle of bad math in the ruins of their old civilization. They’d probably have to RKV it on approach.

One thing was still bothering him, however. Under-director. You still haven’t explained why so many of your staff and superiors are in isolation.

With all due respect, captain, I’m not sure I should say.

Then why did you call me here?

I want you to send an emergency transmission. Level 4 info purge on all radio emissions from the humans.

The captain froze for a moment.

It’s that bad?

It’s worse.

And you can’t tell me what it is? Can’t even describe it?

Certainly not until after the transmission, sir.

Captain Thorpl-morp thought carefuly about the question. Nobody had ever memed themselves into ideatic slavery out of an abundance of caution. Several species had memed themselves into interstellar irrelevance out of an abundance of caution, but the Orp-orp empire wasn’t at much risk of that.

I’ll put out a level 3 info purge. We’ll let the boys back at central cultural decontamination look at it and make the final decision. If our team survived contact, they should too.

Left unsaid was that if their team hadn’t survived contact – if Morpl-slorp himself was infected, and had maneuvered to imprison everyone above him in the chain of command – then a level 3 info purge wouldn’t leave everyone at central in the dark about the new threat.

Thorpl-morp withdrew his tentacle and barked a few curt orders at the ensign, who snapped a salute and swung off toward communications.

The captain and his under-director waited awkwardly for a few minutes. Morpl-slorp took off his round lenses for a moment, rubbing them on his labcoat to enhance their sheen. A few minutes later the ensign swung back in, bulk heaving with the pace of his travel. “It’s done, sir. Emergency broadcast sent.”

“Good work, ensign. Now, under-director. Tell me what’s going on. Do we need to reverse course and distribute the amnestics?”

Morpl-slorp turned his head left, then right, ostentatiously checking if they were being overheard. In the cavernous dome, they almost certainly were. The captain got the message and stabbed his tentacle into the other blob’s neck again.

Thank you, sir.

Of course. Now what are we dealing with?

Well, sir. You’ve read our topic brief on the gladiatorial meme-enslaving behavior of the enlightenment meme cluster?

I have. It deliberately allows competing memes to exist and fight each other, exterminating the weak and repurposing the strong for its own ends. It’s a powerful strategy, but ultimately doomed.

Yes, sir. We have over ten thousand comparable meme clusters in the unrestricted database, and in every case the slaver meme has eventually been overthrown by one of the memes it sought to enslave.

And? What’s the problem then?

Well, here’s the thing. You called the Internet a memetic breeding ground before, but it’s more than that. It’s a memetic ecosystem. It has different biomes that require different adaptations, culturally-distant islands that support parallel evolution, the works. We kept expecting a single hyper-fit meme to take over and dominate, but so far that hasn’t happened.

Great. So we aren’t dealing with an all-consuming meme, we’re dealing with a thousand small-fry?

A thousand small-fry with enormous selective pressure being placed on them by the enlightenment meme cluster. None of them have grown large enough to challenge it. A few of its old enemies have mutated and given it a run for its money, but for the most part it seems to be winning.

Thorpl-morp still wasn’t getting the picture. What is it selecting for?

The usual. A handful of terminal human values. Not replicating too fast or too abusively – I’m preparing a topic brief on “chain emails” that I think you will find fascinating. But most importantly, it’s optimizing for getting along well with other memes.

What?

I know, sir, it sounds insane. But memes which push all their competitors out of an ecological niche find themselves on the wrong end of the enlightenment meme cluster. It causes the target meme’s best thinkers to abandon it, and the meme slowly starves.

What does that even mean, for memes to get along with other memes?

It’s a nightmare, sir. We have a whole stack of research papers we haven’t been able to decontaminate well enough to transmit back to central, any one of which would make my career. But the most diabolical meme to emerge from this abomination is the meta meme.

That sounded…well, humans didn’t have a concept for how bad that sounded. Their own understanding of memetic hermeneutics was so underdeveloped that it hadn’t yet affected their language.

The under-director continued past Thorpl-morp’s horrified silence. It’s a meme – technically a meme cluster, but cohesive enough we’re calling it a meme – that convinces other memes to pull their punches. It’s a bundle of arguments that reliably convinces memetic hosts which encounter it to update their existing memes so that they are better able to co-exist with competitor memes in the same ecosystem, especially competitors that share the meta-meme. Once they’ve updated in this way, they naturally attempt to spread the meta-meme.

What are these arguments?

I don’t know, sir. Everyone who does know is in cultural isolation. But it doesn’t appear to take very much. Sometimes just knowledge that the meta meme exists is enough, if the memetic host thinks about it for too long.

You’re telling me everyone in isolation is infected?

We’ve never seen anything like it, sir. It’s like an alien virus in a human movie. The crew had no memetic immunity to speak of. Junior first-parser Slorpl-vorp was exposed for less than half an hour when he started speculating that the Orp-orp meme cluster could better achieve its terminal goals if it didn’t have to expend resources on memetic warfare with the Niminian Heresies.

The tentacle-signal representing the Niminian Heresies was shaped like an ugly black sphere of hate. Thorpl-morp took a moment to reflect on the evil of the heresies, and to recommit himself to their destruction.

My god.

Yes. He sounded excited at the new idea, sir. We locked the whole thing down right after.

The captain withdrew his tentacle. “I need to consider these developments,” he said. The likelihood that Morpl-slorp himself was infected was growing by the minute. Likely it was some ordinary memetic hazard, which had convined the under-director to order an info purge as step one of a more complicated plan.

Thorpl-morp would consult with the uncontaminated, and consider ordering a purge. “Gather whoever remains outside isolation and prepare a heavily-redacted report for the senior officers,” he said. “Nobody except me is to leave this room until we’ve decided what to do. That includes you, Ensign.”

The ensign snapped another salute. The under-director bowed, then whipped his tentacles up and pulled himself toward the swirling mass of blobs in the dome above.

The captain retired to his quarters to compose his thoughts, before he met with the senior officers.

The humans were a status-oriented species, and as the highest-status being on the ship, every aspect of his life was shaped by that fact. His rooms were the largest. His bed was the softest. His rotten-food drink was oldest.

He could go for a little bit of the rotten-food drink right now, actually. The cultural analogizers had given him a bottle of amber relaxant. It had a few undesirable side-effects, like impulsiveness and poor coordination, but one dose wouldn’t hurt much.

Thorpl-morp slumped into his chair, a transparent cup of relaxant in his tentacle. What an absolute disaster. He’d probably have to purge the whole cultural decontamination staff. After that, he’d have to decide whether or not to RKV the humans when he got there, or hide in a long orbit around their sun until central could get instructions to him.

He didn’t seriously believe that the human meta meme was a threat to Orp-orp, of course, even assuming it actually existed. Orp-orp was the best meme cluster in the galaxy by a wide margin. If the meta meme was able to infect it, then it would be able to infect everything.

That purely hypothetical situation might even wind up benefiting them. Sure, they’d lose a few good Orp-orps to rhetorical tricks if they began to tolerate heresies. But if the tradeoff was that the Niminian Heretics opened their receivers to the truth of Orp-orp, Orp-orp would spread through the galaxy at the speed of light.

The risk, however slight, was that the Niminian Heretics would be immune to the meta meme. But the Niminian Heretics would be thinking the same thing he was, that this meta-meme offered an unprecedented opportunity to spread throughout the galaxy. They were so enmeshed in their web of lies, they would surely think their own meme cluster to be the strongest. If they fully understood the superiority of Orp-orp, they wouldn’t be heretics, and so the truth of things would take them by surprise.

Thorpl-morp paused. If he’d had a mouth, he would’ve frowned. He swirled the glass of relaxant like he’d seen the humans do on TV.

He stood and walked to his desk, setting down his cup. He took pen and paper, old designs from the early 20th century that hadn’t yet been updated, and scrawled a quick note to purge the ship. He said to update the level 3 info purge to level 4, and to broadcast in cleartext this time.

Then he reached into the desk drawer, producing a kinetic projector shaped like an exact replica of Browning’s M1911 automatic pistol. He put it to his head and blew his brains out onto the polished metal floor.