Since Deacon Hollingshead’s arrival in town last July the Dominion had been hard at work, cleansing New York City of moral corruption. “Corruption” i… - Robert Charles Wilson

For them, the idea of forgetting was indistinguishable from the idea of death. To pass out of memory was to pass out of the world. To conserve memory was to confer immortality.

The problem was the Voxish prophecies. Our founders had written them into the Coryphaeus as unalterable axioms—embedded truths, permanently exempt from debate or revision. That hadn’t mattered when the rapture of the Hypotheticals was a distant goal toward which we moved in gradual increments. But now we had come to the blunt end of the question. Prophecy had collided with reality, and the obvious inference—that the prophecies might have been mistaken—was a possibility the Coryphaeus was forbidden to consider.

It's complicated, Jesse. There's the official story. There's the real story. And there's the conspiracy theory."
"Tell me the real story."
"I would, but I don't know what it is."
"Well, then what's the official story? And who declared it official?