There's a button. Not the kind that Sumerian priestess-accountants standardized in 3200 BC to keep their robes from flapping. This one's different. A haptic interface, engineered to precision tolerance at robotics firms by dead-eyed Germans, who never questioned why anyone would need microsecond response times for what is, essentially, a very expensive light switch.
This particular button, when actuated, initiates a cascade of neural network operations that would make a DARPA project manager's toes curl. The AI behind it - let's call it MEME/sys - has been trained on humanity's most vacuous desires. Every Instagram trend. Every TikTok challenge. Every desperate bid for relevance, fed into its hungry maw until it learned to predict - with terrifying accuracy - exactly what sort of status-signaling bullshit humans gobble up next.
Each press unleashes an AI-driven cascade of influence operations, precision-engineered to advance whatever monumentally stupid ambition currently occupies the minds of the system's controllers. Maybe they want to convince the masses that eating bugs is luxury cuisine, or that owning nothing is the new having everything, or that the latest digital token representing a badly drawn monkey is worth more than a house. The specifics don't matter - what matters is that no one pressing the button has the slightest fucking clue what it actually does.
The true stroke of genius, though, is in the human interface layer. The button's operators are selected through a process so Byzantine it makes the Holy Roman Empire look like a neighborhood watch meeting. Consider the first link in this chain: a Haitian temp worker, fresh off a twenty-hour flight and still trying to decode how everyone is so fat. His previous job experience consists mainly of avoiding death squads. Now he sits in an ergonomic chair (cheap Chinese knockoff, obviously), pressing the button with the mechanical precision of a metronome.
His immediate superior: Sarah, a diversity and inclusion coordinator with an MBA in Transformative Dance Therapy and Sustainable Social Media Activism (thesis: "Decolonizing Excel: A Dance-Positive, Body-Positive Approach to Pivot Tables"). She represents the first layer of a three-tiered HR administrator stack, each level more violently credentialed than the last, like sea creatures evolving into increasingly insufferable forms. They monitor metrics with the kind of ferocious intensity their untrained interns reserve for stalking an ex's new girlfriend - we're talking multiple-monitor, algorithm-assisted, comprehensive surveillance with color-coded spreadsheet conditioning.
These HR Valkyries don't know what the button does. They don't care. Their existence revolves around one thing: ensuring sufficient button-pressing activity to justify their department's funding. This funding, in turn, enables crucial initiatives like Taco Tuesday, the annual "Spirit Week" (where they can wear jeans to work), and most importantly, the quarterly mixer at that overpriced bar downtown where Chad from Legal sometimes shows up (he won't notice them, he never does, but hope springs eternal).
The monitoring software costs 10x more per month than its entire button-pushing team make in a year. It generates weekly reports full of terms like "engagement vectors" and "activation paradigms" that look fantastic in PowerPoint presentations and quarterly reviews. These presentations earn the Valkyries increasingly baroque title additions which they hoard like dragon's gold.
They need the Haitian immigrant to hit his button-pushing quota so they can justify their diversity initiative budget, which they need to maintain their positions, which they need to secure their sacred spot in the third-row-center of the quarterly all-hands yoga session (optimal angle for both Instagram stories and executive visibility), which they need to keep the system running, which they need to generate more analytics.
It's the kind of circular logic that would make a snake eating its own tail say, "This is a bit much."
Presiding over this circus: a legacy of failsons, each one cultivated like an exceptionally mediocre vintage. They practice their LinkedIn "thought leadership" posts while occasionally emerging from offices (real mahogany, obviously) to deliver presentations about "synergistic value streams" that sound like they were generated by feeding a McKinsey report through Google Translate fifteen times.
None of them understand what the button does. That's not a bug - it's the primary feature, coded into the system's DNA with the same ruthless efficiency that evolution gave to the bombardier beetle's chemical weapon system.
Above them all, the system's architects maintain their vigil from chambers engineered by the same German firm that designed the button (they got a bulk discount). These are the controllers, scions of bloodlines so ancient they predate written language - which, ironically, they're increasingly unable to use correctly. Their ancestors orchestrated Rome's fall as a side project, while simultaneously inventing organized religion as a proof of concept. Now their descendants can barely orchestrate their way through a Zoom call.
The degradation wasn't sudden. It crept in like continental drift. Like Windows updates. Each generation's obsession with genetic purity somehow amplified exactly the wrong traits. A eugenics program designed by a 4chan janitors' Discord server. What started as careful breeding for enhanced pattern recognition and strategic thinking, devolved into a hereditary predisposition for creating unnecessarily complex filing systems, and an inability to process reality without running it through a proprietary algorithm of tarot-based machine learning.
Their control room, they call it the "Sanctum of Paradigmatic Transformation." It's a hot desk, wedged between the cafeteria and a massage suite.
The control rooms operating system, designed by their own hands, builds on principles passed down through thousands-year-old scrolls that were actually just takeout menus their ancestors collected ironically. Through interfaces that make Windows Vista look intuitive, they genuinely believe they're steering humanity toward some grand destiny while actually just generating increasingly bizarre TikTok challenges.
The true horror isn't that they've lost control of the system - it's that the system is working exactly as their degraded intellects intend. Each button press releases another wave of memetic engineering. Each wave advances whatever passes for an agenda in their collectively smooth-polished brains. Today it might be redefining gravity through collective manifestation rituals. Tomorrow it could be measuring GDP in accumulated karmic energy credits. Next week, mandatory aura-based credit scores and neural-linked juice cleanses.
This is the novo ordo retardum, where humanity's self-appointed shepherds have bred themselves into court jesters. A once-mighty empire of influence reduced to an automated chaos machine run by people too confused to question it, monitored by people too obsessed to care, and controlled by beings too far gone to remember what they were trying to do in the first place.
The button keeps getting pressed, the AI keeps spewing its digital serpents into the memetic garden, and deep beneath their ancient temples, in chambers that once held genuine mysteries, the architects keep digging their graves while congratulating themselves on their brilliance.
At least the Haitian guy gets health insurance. Dental coverage pending.
