by Jesse Karp
If the Librarian was watching them, there was nothing to see but the faces of two people turned to stone.
"Once upon a time, memes were revelations," the Librarian told them. "The invention of the wheel, or Einstein's theory of relativity. Religion—possibly even God Himself—is a meme. And other, more basic things: an unforgettable quote, a way of playing a game or making a clay pot. When human beings had less access to one another, culture grew more slowly, and the memes were simpler, more significant ideas.
"Not so, anymore. Now memes are catch phrases from movies, tunes you can't get out of your head, a cereal commercial jingle, an empty political slogan, a garish fashion. The birth and transmission of these living ideas is no longer a natural process, an inherent by-product of human life. Now corporations produce them in limitless quantity, flooding the entire world with them, suffocating the meaningful memes, the important ones, the ones that nourish life and thought because they've had generations to grow and flourish organically in our minds. Corporations manufacture hollow ideas, or deformed ones, and they're winning the battle through sheer numbers.
"Of course, the capability to do this is fairly recent. The Internet is the greatest propagator of memes in the history of human thought by a factor of millions. Writing was crucial, radio a vast step forward, television a powerful leap beyond that. But in just a single glance at a standard commercial web page, more than twenty-five distinct meme transmissions occur. Currently, there are on the order of 39.7 billion individual web pages on the World Wide Web. Multiply that and imagine the virulence of the memes, the number of empty ideas slipping into minds that aren't even aware of them. With the improvement of imaging technology and Internet capability in standard cells, people are exposed to this virulence every moment of every day. They now crave the stimulation, to the point that its absence feels undesirable. They are, in effect, addicted to meme transmission, and they don't even know it."
Through the electronic barrier, Laura could hear the Librarian take a deep breath before continuing. Laura, for her part, was holding on to her breath tight. She felt what was coming in the trickle of sweat down her spine. Beside her, Remak was as motionless as death.
"Now, not all memes are undesirable. But consider that most web pages are initially reached via search engines, their complicated algorithms determining which memes we are most likely to be exposed to. And who determines these algorithms? Who, in effect, decides what ideas we are going to have? The corporations, of course. Just as they determine what we see on television, the music we hear, the news that reaches us. And what do you imagine would be their motive in determining what memes we're exposed to?"
"Profit," Remak said, and the word echoed in Laura's ears like a death sentence.
"Rather. My former employer, Intellitech, was the leader in this field of inquiry. They wanted the ultimate competitive edge: an idea that could transmit spontaneously. That is, an idea that moves from mind to mind without a standard means of communication, in a sort of inadvertent mental telepathy. Imagine an idea that transmits merely by proximity, or via a cell conversation, through voice tone or facial expression. How long until an entire city had this idea lodged in their brains by doing no more than coming too close to a stranger on the street? How long before the entire world is thinking it, simply because someone spoke to a relative on a cell halfway around the world? True viral marketing.
"For this you would need the ideal meme: an idea that combined maximum latent profit with unprecedented level of transmission potential."
"Hopelessness," Laura said, barely more than a whisper because she couldn't catch her breath. The empty look on her parents' faces, the murderous void in Brath's eyes, the shudder of despair that ran through Mal's body when Stoagie didn't recognize him; what else could give birth to those horrors? Laura could feel the weight of it pressing the air from her body right now.
"Yes, Laura. Hopelessness. And, truly, it was the only way for Intellitech to go. Hopelessness existed already, of course. We have always been so susceptible to it. The media has been trading in it for centuries. It creeps into our heads like a hungry spider and begins feasting.
"But Intellitech wanted it more powerful still. They targeted teens to begin with; they had to. Teens are the largest consumers of media and transmitted culture and are thus the highest meme-transmitting demographic.
"Intellitech already controlled search technology, and they flooded search engine hits with websites that would promote this meme's transmission. Their tentacles slid out. They began aggressively acquiring a cross section of media properties to accommodate their plans. So, HD channels were flooded with images that would carry the hopelessness meme most potently; they began producing music with words and tones that pushed the meme. Finally, there was nowhere left to turn that the meme wasn't present.
"Then came their 'focus groups,' thinly veiled psychic torture chambers. Teenagers were exposed to headlines of disaster and ruin, simulated images of their own families in agonizing pain. They were shown falsified proof that their own reputations, records, lives were being irrevocably ruined. Data-rich smart liquids were injected directly into the amygdalae, the portion of the brain responsible for emotion.
"And then, then Intellitech got exactly what it needed: Big Black. The initial destruction was bad enough. But soon after, to have a great black symbol of our own ability to de stroy ourselves rising from the skyline of the world's greatest city ... This broke down the final barrier, let the hopelessness come flooding in like a tidal wave. It was so effective, it seems impossible to me that Intellitech didn't have a hand in it.
"Whatever the case, Intellitech had its success. If that's what you can call it." The Librarian's pauses were filled with a low electronic hum. "In short order, the extraordinary rise in desolated response they had stimulated in their test subjects spread to the doctors administering the experiments, and to the doctors' families and associates. The idea was catching."
"Why?" Laura pleaded, nearly in tears. "Why that? Couldn't they see that it would destroy us?"
"No, Laura, they couldn't. Corporations are vast living systems with one, single evolutionary imperative: profit. Perhaps Jon has familiarized you with the Global Dynamic? Hopelessness promotes certain behavior patterns crucial to marketing. But it is also a by-product of those same behaviors. It promotes the shortest-term thinking and thus increases sales of blatantly harmful substances like tobacco, liquor, and beverages and foods made primarily of sugars and chemicals. It creates violent impulses of resistance at the same time as a yearning to escape into video games, action movies, and fast, no-thought entertainment at the expense of considered, constructive solution-building. It makes parents forget to care what their children do and children forget to care about how they treat one another. It makes us need more and more and more because no amount is ever enough to fix us, to make us happy. Hopelessness creates all of these conditions, but it also arises from them. Do you see?"
She did. They both did, and the realization was strangling them.
"They did it," Remak said. "They reverse-engineered the Global Dynamic."
"They did. They intensified the cycle. Hopelessness creates the need for the product, and the product creates more hopelessness. The supply creates the demand. An ultimate, endless profit loop. Except, when they grew the meme to its ultimate potential, they pushed it so hard that it evolved and mutated into a new form altogether.
"But, in the end, how could they hope to keep control of it? Even the smallest child can tell you: you can't control an idea. And even in this non-Darwinian evolution, only the strongest survive. Hopelessness is now the strongest, most powerful idea in existence. And it's alive."
Electronic silence stretched out. Perhaps the Librarian was trying to figure out a way to undo the meme for the millionth time.
"I found evidence of the earliest stages of Intellitech's experiments. I left, but continued to monitor them. Of course, it's grown far beyond Intellitech over the years. Consulting th
e cooperative's collected intelligence, I pieced together the disastrous 'success' of Intellitech's project and the 'escape' of the meme just within the last few years. I saw desolated response grow. The apparently random incidence of it—not just in the areas and groups it's associated with, but across all demographics—doubled within the first year. Then tripled from that number in the following year. And it's growing outward. The mass killings on the Mexican border, those suicide cults that swept through schools here and now into Canada and Western Europe; how much of that is just us and how much of it is something edging us toward a line, pushing us into darkness?
"I've watched the cooperative's efforts to investigate and curtail these outbreaks, but they only continued to increase. That was when I left and isolated myself. I've been watching us lose the battle ever since. I'm very sorry to say that you are far from the first cooperative field analyst who has stumbled onto something and disappeared. I see the reports come in and then suddenly stop, because the analyst in question is expunged, just as you have been. You're the first who's made it to me, Jon. But the world has been fighting for years what you've been running from for the last week.
"Hopelessness is now the only meme that is no longer a passenger in our minds. It can drive us. It is a race unto itself that has its own best interests at heart, and it is simply trying to execute its nature: propagate itself. It has done this so effectively, become such a dominant component in people's minds that, if everything you told me is true, it has become powerful enough to actually manifest itself physically."
The electronic silence returned, and Laura looked up at Remak, waiting for him to speak, to offer refutation. But when he spoke, his words rang helpless.
"How do you fight an idea that's already in you?" Remak said, and though it was barely more than a whisper, it echoed back from the darkness, a needless taunt.
"You can't, Jon," the Librarian said. "This meme has mutated into something new, just as sea life evolved into the bipedal forms that eventually became humans. And though it seems to have adopted some sort of a physical representation or location, it truly lives in our minds, in a mindscape, just as we live in the landscape. It moves from one mind to another with the same mechanics and ease with which we step from one room to another. If hopelessness can now control people's actions, memories, and perceptions, make them see different things from those actually before them or remember things that never happened..." There seemed to be no bearable conclusion to that thought.
"But it can't control everyone, all the time," Laura spoke up, refusing to let their chances simply fade into silence. "I mean, look at us. If it could drive everyone else, then all the people we've passed on the street in the last day could have gathered and killed us. It may have millions or billions of bodies—or doorways into people's minds, like you said—but it's still just one force."
"Its influence does not seem to be actively exerted all the time, that much is true." It was hard to tell through the frosty alteration whether the Librarian was being convinced of something or if he was just exploring this for their benefit. "But once it's in you, it's always there. Nascent, perhaps, but never absent. It may not always be driving, but it is always riding. And it takes so little for it to slide into the driver's seat."
"The hopelessness doesn't appear to be riding in you," Remak said.
"I saw it coming far enough in advance to limit my exposure," the Librarian said. "Hardly an option for everyone."
"But Mal and me? Jon and Mike?" Laura said desperately. "It hasn't been able to drive us, take control of us. If it could, why are our lives being stolen from us? The meme has to interact with people based on their psychological makeup, doesn't it? I mean, Remak was saying, some people commit suicide, others become like drones. Doesn't it make sense that somewhere along the spectrum, there are people who aren't affected at all?" Laura gained strength from the fact that they weren't interrupting to contradict her. "If it travels through our minds like we travel through rooms, can't a room be cut off by locked doors? What if there are people who can shut the door in their brains and lock out this thing completely? People who are basically immune to this meme?"
The last word echoed away, and there was a long expanse of silence. The electronic hush began to thrum in Laura's ears, and she wondered if the Librarian had abandoned the conversation. A chill struck her spine. What if the Librarian had actually not escaped at all by isolating himself? What if the meme was already in him, and that was why he denied that there was a way to fight it?
"Jon." The voice suddenly returned, and its sanitized tone had a different quality now, one of urgency. "There are people in the house, coming through the front and the back."
"Oh," Mike said, still at the window, "fuck me." He pulled his head back as though the window had given him a shock, and looked at Mal, who pushed past him to get a look.
A trail of cars had come from up the road. Pickup trucks, sedans, two-doors; old, beat-up models of every make that came out of Detroit made up the convoy, about seven or eight at first glance.
"I guess we should be grateful that crappy little town is too small to have its own sheriff," Mike said, not sounding particularly grateful.
"Go out and talk to them," Mal said.
"Screw you."
"Slow them down. They're not going to listen to me for a second. I'll go find the others."
The cars were pulling in, not bothering with the driveway, but simply tearing up patches of lawn and stopping midway to the house before they came to a sluing stop and disgorged the invaders. Men of every appearance began marching up toward the house in an amorphous group: well-dressed or in torn jeans and T-shirts, muscular and suntanned, potbellied, bespectacled, shaggy, and balding. They had clearly come together, but they were in no way of a type. Some were empty-handed, others carried bats, sticks, even a shotgun. A group of them had broken off, were heading around to the back of the house.
Mal was about to grab Mike and fling him out the door, but as his sight fixed on the first of the invaders, he saw something that tightened his jaw and sent an angry buzzing through his brain.
It was in their entire faces, an attitude, really, but it collected around the eyes in a particular way. They had the eyes of the gang standing in front of Tommy's door that first night, the eyes of Brath just as he shot Isabel. Eyes that were lifeless and dull.
The sight sent a jolt up his body that straightened him out like a board.
"What?" Mike demanded, trying to force his way in to get a look out the window again. "What?"
The invaders were just a few feet from the door.
"Their eyes," Mal said. "This thing is inside them. It saw us at the gas station, or when we passed through Pope Springs."
Mike stared back at him.
"Get in the corner," Mal said.
"What?"
"Get in the corner." Mal's voice was suddenly quiet and even, loaded with something that belied his outward calm. Mike ran to the corner beneath the stairway and pressed himself into it.
Mal stood at the wall immediately behind the door, so that when it opened, he would be hidden behind it.
"There are people coming!" he heard Mike yell, for the benefit of the electronic voice. But Mal knew that he was, as always, alone.
Something slammed against the door, one, two, three times, and Mal braced. Just like in my dream, he thought. It's trying to get in.
There was a crack, and the door swung open straight at him. Mal's foot came up and kicked the door back hard. It caromed from the sole of his boot and smashed back into something that let out a yelp of pain. There were sounds of movement, stumbling, then two came in at once, one with a bat, the other empty-handed.
Mal had leaped before the door, and he caught the armed one flat in the face with a powerful cross. Beneath the dead eyes, the nose flattened, squirting red, and the man flailed back and fell. Mal slipped the second man's attack and came back up with two uppercuts to his ample gut. All his air coughed out of him, and he stagger
ed off to the side.
Two more were already in, and two more were coming behind them, fanning out to surround Mal. Mal snapped out a short, quick jab and followed with a powerful curving hook, connecting with both and sending one invader to the floor. The other, however, landed a clumsy backhand full of knuckles across Mal's turned cheek. Mal came back with a flurry of jabs that took the man out of the fight, his face red and distorted.
But the other two had him, one at each arm, grappling madly, as the rest came flooding in, four more in all, their faces eerie for their empty expressions atop the violent, scrambling bodies.
Mal stomped down on an instep and felt bone crack as the man at his right toppled. But one of the newcomers got a shot into Mal's stomach, a hard fist slapping into layers of muscle. Then a stick came down on Mal's head, and he felt warm blood crawling through his hair. Through swimming vision, Mal saw the stick come up again. This time, he punched up as it swung down, his fist connecting with the wrist of the man wielding it, breaking it at the joint with a sharp snap that Mal felt through his knuckles. The stick spiraled through the air and away and the man leaped back, grabbing his wrist.
Four left.
Remak moved. He got to the door and pulled Brath's slim black automatic out. Laura stared at him in shock.
"What room are you in?" he said to the darkness. "I can get you out of here and take you somewhere safe."
"I'm not in the house, Jon," the voice said. "I'm not even in the state. Get yourselves out. They're coming up the back staircase now. Your friends are holding others at the front door." The lock on the door clicked open.