Chapter 418 The Great Meme Flood of 2017
“I knew I should’ve expected the unexpected from that brat, but he really exceeded every bit of my imagination,” Herschel Rothschild said. He had been paying close attention to the world leader summit and knew that Aron’s proposal at the end of the first round had effectively killed every other proposal made and stomped it into a mud hole to boot. Sure, they might still pass, but with an imperial government, they would be less “rights” and more “privileges”.
An emperor’s majesty could not be defiled. So things like absolute freedom of speech, voting, assembly, bearing arms, and so on would definitely have limits to them and could be revoked for violations of lese-majeste or even on a whim.
“What do you mean by that? Couldn’t you have predicted this?” Virginia asked her husband.
“What I expected was for him to continue using Romero as a puppet leader while he ruled from the shadows. Kind of like what we do. We have a huge influence over the government and can do almost anything we want, but very few people know about us. And those that do are ruthlessly stamped out and labeled ‘crackpot conspiracy theorists’.
“That gives us all the benefits of power without the public scrutiny that usually accompanies it. But that brat...” Herschel sighed and shook his head. “What that brat did is the equivalent of flipping over a rock and shining a light on what normally lived under it. It’s obvious that he wants to be the emperor. After all, can you imagine him giving up power? And he definitely has the assurances needed to succeed in forcing his proposal through the summit.
“He just singlehandedly turned the entire summit into an absolute joke by saying a single sentence.” In Herschel Rothschild’s mind, the question wasn’t if Aron would become the emperor of mankind, but rather how he would make it happen.
“He’s definitely not like us,” Virginia said. “If you, dear husband, were to take over the government by force, you’d definitely face a rebellion that would eventually knock you off your throne, making all of your hard work and planning useless. But Aron, on the other hand, doesn’t have that problem. He has everything he needs to force his way through all opposition to his rule.
“Let’s count his advantages.” She raised her hand, counting on her fingers as she continued, “He has a military force that nobody can beat in a straight-up fight.”
She raised a finger.
“He has the technology advantage in every sector.”nove(lB(1n
Another finger was raised in the air.
“He himself is no ordinary person. It’s like he’s individually capable of fulfilling any role he needs filled at any time.”
A third finger was raised.
“He grew in the shadows behind the scenes and I’m fairly certain he hasn’t even revealed half of what he’s capable of.”
A fourth finger was raised, then Virginia tilted her head in thought. “Those four things are enough, anyway. Trying to figure that boy out is just gonna give me a headache anyway.” She put her hand back down. “So the question becomes: why should he remain in the shadows when he’s already been outed? After all, it’s hard to rule from behind a puppet if you’re constantly shining the limelight on yourself by your own actions.”
Herschel raised an eyebrow, as what she had just said made perfect sense to him. As he started thinking things over from that angle, he finally understood the work that Aron had been putting into place and all the groundwork his daughter’s boyfriend had laid beforehand. Everything he had done, from the time he first contacted Rina and offered to help her in the internal family power struggle to the proposal of his investiture as the emperor of a united world empire had all been one long plan. A plan that had been implemented step by step until Emperor Aron Michael became an inevitability.
He shuddered at the thought. Just how had a normal, average brat like Aron go from being a chronic underachiever to the de facto dictator of the entire world in a three short years? Especially since he didn’t need anyone else’s support to install him as the leader of humanity!
......
As Herschel was cooking his synapses imagining himself in Aron’s place, the world was having a completely different meltdown.
During the beginning of the summit meeting, there were a number of different reactions to the proceedings. Some people were busily trolling the crowd, others were holding serious discussions on the merits and flaws of the proposals, and still others were busily roasting the leaders who made exceptionally stupid proposals.
Things like allowing child labor and lowering the age of consent—where the person who proposed that claimed it would be “specific to schoolgirls”—were particularly harshly roasted. Others, like instituting a lottery selection for political office, animal personhood and enforced veganism, the loosening of antitrust legislation to allow for the formation of megacorporation monopolies, and so on, were also heavily criticized and the proposers viciously mocked.
But everything came to a screeching halt the moment Aron stood and proposed the formation of an imperial government to rule mankind. For a full four minutes, practically every human being on the planet entered an involuntary stare state at the absurd audacity of the proposal.
Then the memes began flooding the internet. First thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions, hundreds of millions, and finally, billions of people were discovering the possibility that the future would be grim, dark, and know only war.
The meme flood lasted a full ten minutes as the assembly hall in the UNHQ drowned itself in pure, unadulterated chaos. In a weird turn of events, the internet actually calmed down faster than the chaos in reality. People had come to their senses and begun expressing themselves in words, rather than memes. Some agreed with Aron, some cursed him, and others just wanted to watch the world burn and were taking part in “serious” discussions as opponents of whichever side the topic starter supported.
Essentially, the internet had become something of a homunculus of humanity at large, simultaneously displaying every facet of human nature there was.
