Book of the Day

From the review

Marion Wheeler starts her shift by reading a note in her own handwriting that she has no memory of writing. That's the job. She runs the Antimemetics Division of a secretive containment agency built to catalog and contain the impossible, and her caseload is the one thing containment can't touch: ideas that erase themselves, and anyone who notices them, from memory the instant they're noticed. The note on her desk tells her what she did four hours ago and what to do next, because those four hours are simply gone. She reads it, gets up, and gets on with her day like this happens every day. It does. Here's the world-rule, and here's what it costs. An antimemetic entity doesn't creep or lurk. It doesn't need to. The moment you look straight at one, your brain instantly files the whole encounter under nothing worth keeping, and a paragraph later you've forgotten there was ever anything to be afraid of. qntm doesn't just state this rule, he detonates it inside a scene where an agent stands three feet from her partner, screaming his name, and he genuinely cannot hear her: some part of him has already decided she isn't in the room. I put the book down after that one and sat with it for a minute, honestly rattled. Once you know how an antimeme works, you start distrusting your own blank spots, wondering what you've already lost this week and filed under nothing.