58 pages • 1-hour read
There Is No Antimemetics Division
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Part 3, Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, emotional abuse, and death.
Part 3: “Five Five Five Five Five”
Part 3, Chapter 1 Summary: “Case Hate Red”
Adam lives on as a successful concert violinist but feels that something is missing from his life. He becomes aware of that void only during quiet moments, so he tries to stay busy to distract himself. Occasionally, a black slug falls out of his eye, and a new one grows in its place. He incorporates slug extraction into his grooming routine.
On the last day of his tour with the New English Symphony Orchestra, Adam feels listless. On his way to the final rehearsal, he reads about a new viral trend in which people paint a black rectangle over a surface and recite a chant in a language Adam doesn’t recognize. Unable to understand the trend, he dismisses it. The rest of the orchestra is similarly listless, leading the conductor to comment that they all need their eyes fixed. Adam is unsure what he means. That evening, the performance starts well, but Adam stops when he observes that the whole orchestra is staring angrily at him. Alien creatures that only barely resemble humans have taken their places, causing Adam to quietly panic. He starts to retreat. The creatures follow. When they break his violin and attempt to fight him, Adam runs away into the concert hall’s upper floors.
Adam hides in a bathroom, believing that he has escaped the creatures. He sees that the bathroom mirror has been painted over with a black rectangle, per the viral trend. Adam can feel heat and sound emanating from the rectangle. He retreats from the bathroom and realizes that he saw another black rectangle in his dressing room. He wonders why it didn’t register before and then realizes that the viral trend has existed for as long as he can remember. In the video that explains the trend, something is supposed to climb out of the rectangle. He tries to control his thoughts, suspecting that he may be experiencing a mental health crisis.
After leaving the concert hall, Adam perceives strange things on the roads, from tall, monstrous figures to endless screaming. People call attention to Adam using the strange language from the viral trend. Adam remembers that someone is supposed to come and save him, but she died a year ago. The crowd from the concert hall apprehends him and prepares to “correct” either his fingers or his eyes.
Part 3, Chapter 2 Summary: “Unthinkable”
The creatures pin Adam down and use a chisel to enter his mind. They belong to a hive-mind entity whose name is represented by an ideogram pronounced “Va.” Va systematically feeds on the minds of people who are “awake” and can understand the world they’re in. They penetrate his mind and heavily redact the novel’s text, erasing anything in his mind that inspires joy or hope. Adam resists their effort, following a narrow sunbeam in his mind. As he escapes, another slug falls from his eye.
Adam wakes up in a school corridor and discovers that two fingers are missing from one of his hands. He can’t recall anything after the start of the concert and doesn’t know how much time has passed since then. He follows the same light that saved him from Va to the library and reads an encyclopedia. The information he reads brings him relief, but then he finds that he can’t retain any of the information once he finishes reading. He speaks to the light that led him there to ask it what it is. He soon realizes that it’s U-4987, or Sunshine.
As Adam leaves the school, he observes the ruin of the world outside. In the sky is a bright object that he knows isn’t the sun. Adam follows the main road until he reaches a valley with a giant sarcophagus built over a city center, containing all of incarcerated humanity. Beside the sarcophagus is an equally large and thin dark entity. Upon seeing the sarcophagus, Adam remembers what became of the world. He flees from the sarcophagus.
Adam finds his way to a hypermarket and collects supplies and survival equipment. He rests in the hypermarket’s back room.
Part 3, Chapter 3 Summary: “Blood/Brain”
Adam goes on a trek led by Sunshine and observes that day and night no longer exist. The object that has replaced the Sun is a red-black eye that constantly sits on the horizon. Adam sees other sarcophagi all over the country and tries to avoid them. He doesn’t know where Sunshine is leading him, but trusts that it will guarantee his survival. During his journey, Adam realizes the extent of Va’s dominion over the world.
Adam reaches the ruin of UO Wyeleigh. He initially doesn’t perceive anything there because of the memory bomb’s radiation effect around the site, but Sunshine leads him through the threshold that prevents him from perceiving it. Most of the building remains intact because the bomb exploded cognitively rather than physically. Sunshine directs Adam inside. Adam wonders if it’s the place Va escaped from and realizes that it is. He finds the first corpse from Va’s assault on the facility years earlier.
Adam feeds Sunshine by reading an autobiography he brought with him. Nevertheless, Sunshine doesn’t answer any of his questions about the facility. Adam continues his exploration, finding more corpses and the containment units with several Unknowns still inside. He’s drawn to investigate a vault in the lower levels. He finds several corpses, including that of a woman, around which the others are arranged. The woman is holding an autoinjector pen that she didn’t have time to use before she died. Adam examines her security pass and sees that she’s Marie Quinn, the site director. He thinks their shared last name is a coincidence, but continues to wonder why Sunshine led him to her. Sunshine then shows Adam all the memories it stole from Quinn. Among them are memories of Quinn and Adam together.
Adam doesn’t initially recognize what he’s seeing as part of his life, but then he sees the moment that Quinn and Sunshine redacted his memories of their marriage in the containment unit. Adam is in denial about what Quinn thought she could achieve by doing this. He takes Quinn’s pass and nearly destroys it, but then he realizes that she redacted his memories so that he could continue her plan after her death. He resolves to use the pass to find out what that plan is.
Part 3, Chapter 4 Summary: “U-3125”
Adam enters U-3125’s containment unit and watches Quinn’s video recording multiple times for answers. In a second video that she recorded moments before her death, she names Vault B30-000 as the unused vault that Ed Hix built to develop the countermeasure against U-3125, which she calls the Irreality Amplifier. She explains her plan to activate the amplifier and then prepares to discuss her contingency plan. However, when she realizes that her contingency plan will allow U-3125 to dominate the world, she ends the recording.
Adam makes his own recording on the computer, addressing Quinn. He acknowledges that everything she predicted turned out to be right and that he’s likely the last survivor of humanity. While he posits that Organization staff members may still survive in insulated bunkers, he doesn’t know how to convince them that he’s on their side. He also posits that other Division facilities may remain invisible to most people, just like Wyeleigh. He refers to the original Division headquarters at UO Stanmoor, which was destroyed many years earlier, and declares his plan to investigate it. He admits that he’s scared and that he wishes Quinn were still around to save him.
Just before Adam leaves the protective antimemetic field surrounding Wyeleigh, a man calls out to him. The man claims that he has been tracking Adam for days, but lost him two days ago. Adam sees that the man is young and is bleeding from gunshot wounds. The man urges Adam to give up. Adam realizes that the man can’t see into the antimemetic field. Adam prepares to shoot at him with Quinn’s disintegration ray. The man reacts, prompting Adam to realize that he’s Red. Sunshine attacks Red with memories to distract him. This gives Adam a chance to fire, and he kills Red.
Adam can no longer sense Sunshine’s presence, making him wonder if Sunshine died in the process of fighting Red. After erasing Red’s remains from existence, he sets out for Stanmoor.
Part 3, Chapters 1-4 Analysis
Part 3 begins by redefining the novel’s status quo, shifting the genre focus away from speculative thriller into the realm of dystopian post-apocalyptic science fiction. The first chapter of Part 3 presents the apocalypse through the lens of normalcy. Adam thinks he’s living in a normal world, which only strengthens the idea that U-3125 has normalized the dystopian conditions of its dominion. Representing the normalization of U-3125’s tyranny is the black slug, an uncanny element to which Adam’s reaction only makes it stranger. He incorporates slug extraction into his routine, much like shaving. Another black object, the viral black rectangle, represents the normalization of censorship and its weaponization as a tool that sustains U-3125’s power over the human world. Adam consequently accepts that redaction and censorship are normal in the society he lives in, unable to remember a time when he lived differently. Even if Adam doesn’t realize that something is wrong with the society he lives in, the impact of U-3125 is clear in its emotional impact on his life. Adam is listless, even if he’s doing work he loves. His body senses that something is missing, even when his mind can’t identify what it is. What becomes clear is that the more he manifests his awareness of the uncanniness of his life, the more the world responds. The collective hive-mind of the world becomes increasingly hostile toward Adam’s presence.
In addition, the novel also reveals another name for U-3125, or the escapee: “Va.” The fact that U-3125 goes by many names underscores both the danger and intangibility of the entity as a concept. To know Va by a single name would mean that one can grasp the idea that Va represents. The novel demonstrates this in earlier chapters through the character of Quinn, who comes to embody the ideals of the Organization. Va, conversely, can’t be known in the same way. Its natural reaction to being known is hostility and the impulse to control its beholders. The world in Part 3 is the result of that impulse. All of humanity is siloed away in sarcophagi, feeding Va’s power through their capacity to know. U-3125’s version of the world thematically supports The Limits of Protective Censorship by suggesting that redaction can benefit only powers that seek to exploit humanity’s ignorance rather than protecting humanity from those same exploitative powers.
Adam is an extension of Marie’s embodiment of the Organization’s ideals, partly because he lends his surname to Marie as the Organization’s director. When the novel refers to Quinn by her surname, it’s implicitly referring to her and Adam as a collective unit, even if he isn’t privy to the Organization’s workings. He’s the appropriate person to continue Quinn’s legacy in the wake of her death because he carries with him the implicit memory of her work in the Organization. Further evidence of this is the reappearance of Sunshine, which transitions from a symbiotic entity in Quinn’s life to a guide for Adam in his journey. Sunshine even protects Adam from Red, suggesting that it shares Quinn’s intentions for sending Adam to carry on the work of resisting U-3125.
The quiet trust that Adam places in Sunshine thematically reflects Knowledge as a Form of Hope. Although he doesn’t recognize Quinn in the memories that Sunshine shares with him, Adam eventually comes to trust that they’re proof of an authentic connection between them. The memories fill in the gap in Adam’s memory of what is missing from his life. When he leaves the new recording on the war-room laptop, Adam speaks directly to Quinn and even allows himself to be vulnerable about his feelings, signaling his implicit trust in their relationship: “You saved my life […] I’m still here. I wish you were here” (209). As the novel reaches its final chapters, Adam’s decision to place his trust in Sunshine and Quinn will lead him toward resolution.
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