Marie Quinn’s decision to redact all living memory of her relationship with her husband, Adam, is a minor event in the scope of the wide-scale war the Antimemetics Division wages against U-3125. Adam, after all, is a nonparticipant who has no real knowledge of what his wife does on a day-to-day basis, let alone the life-threatening issues that her work entails. At the same time, this decision indicates Quinn’s leadership and what she’s willing to sacrifice to win the antimemetic war. The sacrifice of her relationship with Adam pays off when he fulfills her plan in the wake of her death. Thus, the novel pushes the idea that nothing is off-limits to leaders in defeating existential threats. Anything can contribute toward an advantage in war, including the elements of one’s life.

Adam isn’t the first person whom Quinn is willing to sacrifice for an advantage, nor is Quinn the first person to use others as a means to an end. In the third chapter of Part 1, the novel introduces Andrew Hilton, the founder of the Antimemetics Division, on the last day of his life. Hilton signed a clause to fatally reverse his aging process, allowing Quinn to extract information from him. This sets a precedent for Quinn to follow. Rather than dying on peaceful terms, Hilton consigns his mind and body back to the Organization, eventually leading to his violent death during the fight against U-3125. The irony of Hilton’s self-sacrifice is that it forces Quinn to redact the information she learned from Hilton, using amnestic drugs to prevent U-3125 from taking over her mind. Hilton’s death is moot because Quinn doesn’t retain any of the things he revealed to her about the history of the Antimemetics Division, and especially about the memory bomb that she finds hidden at UO Wyeleigh.

In addition, Quinn’s employees become casualties in the antimemetic war, though their deaths have little impact on her efforts to reduce her Division’s mortality rate. In the first chapter of Part 2, she takes Oli Morgan to examine the memorial behind UO Wyeleigh, an event that leads to Morgan’s death. Despite Quinn’s emphasis on the talent that Morgan brings to the Division, she forgets the incident during her escape from Red and the pillar of spiders when she steps through the threshold of the memorial’s antimemetic field. In another incident, she brushes off Simon Lee’s near-death experience with Adrian Gage, indicating that Lee’s work regularly brings him into contact with antimemetic Unknowns. She relies too heavily on Lee’s ability to resolve the issue of defeating Gage himself without considering measures to help him resist Gage’s antimemetic abilities.

One of the biggest casualties of Quinn’s war against U-3125 is Quinn herself. Throughout the novel, she’s conscious that her heavy intake of mnestic and amnestic drugs will have a long-term impact on her nervous system. While evading U-3125’s assault on UO Wyeleigh, Quinn uses a Class Y mnestic drug that severely affects her memory, making her momentarily believe that it’s her first day on the job. Just before she dies of brain damage, she reflects: “I’ve survived too long. I forgot which universe this was. For a while there, I thought, maybe… this was the universe where we win sometimes” (142). The resignation in her statement underscores her misguided belief that every act of self-sacrifice has a purpose in the grand scheme of the universe. Instead, this unsustainable strategy contributes to the Division’s loss against U-3125.