Immemorial

This story and the next story both really show off the weakness of using short stories as chapters to me. I wish the events had been rearranged into more classical chapters so we could get to know Morgan and Adam before things happen to them.

We get more information about the dwindling population of the antimemetics division, Morgan pieces together information from clues laid out by Quinn, the antagonist shows back up again. We’re told about antimemetics wars in the past, possibly multiple antimemetics wars that we’ve forgotten about time and time again. The end of the story sets up U-2200 who we’ll meet later in this section.

Where Have You Been All My Life

Again, I wish we’d been able to meet Adam before this story, but I generally do like this story. Adam comes home to find that Quinn has forgotten him, her familiar Unknown having eaten memories of him. Adam has been able to piece together that Quinn is in the middle of an antimemetics war, one that she doesn’t even remember fighting. A lot of the middle stories are about Quinn reconstructing information, I’m amazed she so rarely gets things wrong. Makes me kind of want an antimemetics Sherlock Holmes story. We get a little bit more information about the familiar Unknown “Sunshine.” We also get to see Quinn as a junior agent, which is cool.

Case Colorless Green and Your Last First Day

I like these two story on their own, they remind me of the siege of Nerv in End of Evangelion. I’m unsure about how I feel about their placement in the ‘novel.’ We find Lee again following his appearance in Introductory Memetics. He’s asked by Quinn to accompany her while she goes to check on U-3125, however in remembering U-3125, the war that Adam picked up on, and the things that we as the reader have seen building over the course of the novel, she invites the destruction of the antimemetics division and herself. The dwindling population of the antimemetics division is reduced to 30 people, then down to zero. Is the bomb she sets off a real bomb, or an antimemetics bomb like Hilton set off in Unforgettable, That’s What You Are? Quinn is finally wrong in a big way, her reconstruction of information too grandiose for the reality she finds. Or will there be a later twist that she was actually correct, that what Hix built and what she finds here are somehow compatible?

Quinn’s God

Again, the placement here feels odd. We’ve just seen Quinn presumably either killed or mindwiped by a bomb in the basement of UO Wyeleigh. Why are we introduced to the god of forgetting how to ride a bike now? It feels like this should have come between Immemorial and Where Have You Been All My Life. Maybe we’ll get answers in a later chapter. I like U-2200’s personality, urging Quinn to walk away from work for a while and unwind before coming back to the problem, and Quinn predictably refusing. I wonder if U-2200’s “you can trust Adam” is more a message for us as readers than it is for Marie. Maybe Adam and U-0055 will find a way to undo the bomb from Your Last First Day.

Ojai

My big complaint about this one is just that it’s clearly a transition story between sections 2 and 3, and not really strong enough to stand on its own. Once again we get introduced to a character who promptly dies or is taken over before the end of the story, James Bess with the memetics division. He comes to stop what appears to be a religious or cultish meme from spreading, but gets more than he bargained for when ‘Red’ turns out to have the dead lights from Stephen King’s It inside of him. It seems like Red and U-3125 are working together, Red spreading the meme and U-3125 spreading the antimeme to cover up Red’s traction. I thought they had opposite motives, Red wanting to take control of humanity, U-3125 working to invade our reality and destroy humanity. What is the endgame, if there is one?

It seems like section 3 will be the rest of the book, so aim to try to finish by next Wednesday.