A Sacred Gathering of the Anointed Tech Bros, Blessed Be Their Stock Options
DATELINE: The White House East Room, recently redecorated with gold leaf, a 90-inch portrait of the host, and a very long rectangular table that someone in the press pool immediately noted looked "vaguely Renaissance."
The Scene
In the beginning, there was the Word. And the Word was "Artificial."
And lo, the President looked upon the Word, and He found it fake. Fraudulent, even. Possibly rigged. And so He said unto the gathered multitude of billionaires in fleece vests and expensive sneakers:
"We're calling it Super Intelligence now. SI. It's tremendous. The best intelligence. Nobody has more super intelligence than us, believe me."
And the disciples nodded. Some nodded so fast their AirPods fell out.
Thus was born The SI Last Supper — a sacred, voluntary, morally binding, legally non-binding, absolutely-pinky-promise gathering of the twelve most powerful men in technology, seated at a very long table in Washington D.C., with one notable empty chair where Apple should have been.
The chair had a small placard that read: "Tim couldn't make it. He sends his regards and a new iPhone."
The Apostles, Assembled
At the center of the table sat The Host, resplendent in a red tie that grazed the tablecloth, flanked by His most devoted disciples:
- Saint Elon of the Many Companies — who had already renamed three things that morning before breakfast, and found the whole rebranding exercise deeply relatable.
- Saint Mark of the Metaverse — who had practiced saying "SI" in the mirror seventeen times and arrived with a laminated cheat sheet tucked into his regulation grey t-shirt.
- Saint Jensen of the Sacred GPU — wearing his signature leather jacket, which analysts estimated was worth more than the GDP of several small nations.
- Saint Sundar of the Googleplex — quietly updating internal style guides on his phone under the table.
- Saint Satya of the Cloud — nodding with the serene confidence of a man whose company already owned the infrastructure everyone else was arguing about.
- Saint Dario of the Responsible Frontier — who had written a 47-page safety framework that morning, which was warmly received and immediately filed somewhere.
- Saint Greg of the Open (But Not Really) AI — who had a complicated relationship with the man to his left, but they were keeping it professional.
- Saint Jeff of the Rockets and the Boxes — who had not said anything yet but whose presence alone added $4 billion to the room's net worth.
- Saint Alex of the Palantir — who had been watching everyone else with the quiet intensity of someone who already knew what they were going to say three conversations ago.
- And David Sacks, who was there in an official capacity and had a title that still confused most journalists.
At the far end sat Speaker Mike Johnson, who had come for the data centers and was trying to look comfortable near the Wi-Fi router of human civilization.
The Sermon on the Ethernet
The Host raised His hands and spoke:
"The word 'Artificial' — and I've said this, many people are saying this — it sounds fake. It sounds like something China would say. We don't do fake here. We do SUPER. We do INTELLIGENCE. We do SI."
A ripple moved through the apostles. Saint Mark was first to adapt.
"Yes, our SI systems at Meta are—" he began, then paused, recalibrating. "Our SI — Super Intelligence — our SI is very responsible and we take SI very seriously."
He had said "SI" four times in one sentence. The Host beamed.
Saint Elon, who had been doodling what appeared to be a rocket on his napkin, looked up. "I've been calling it this for years, actually." Nobody challenged this claim. Nobody challenges that claim.
Saint Sundar quietly updated a Google doc titled "Official Terminology — Effective Immediately." It auto-synced to 180,000 employees before the salad course arrived.
The Covenant (Voluntary, Morally Binding, Legally Decorative)
Then came the signing of The White House Accord on Super Intelligence — a document described in the official press release as "morally binding," which legal scholars noted is roughly equivalent to a very stern pinky promise.
The Accord established four sacred layers of controls:
- Layer One: Companies promise to be careful.
- Layer Two: Companies promise to audit themselves to make sure they were careful.
- Layer Three: External auditors, selected by the companies, confirm the companies were careful.
- Layer Four: Everyone agrees that being careful is very important.
Critics from policy organizations called it "a masterpiece of regulatory origami — technically a structure, but fold it the wrong way and it's just a napkin."
Supporters called it "the most significant voluntary non-governmental self-administered industry-led oversight framework in American history," which is technically true, in the same way that a participation trophy is technically an award.
The Host signed the document with a gold Sharpie. The apostles applauded. Someone popped a sparkling water.
The Coming of the Bots
And then — as prophesied by absolutely no one — the bots arrived.
They came in quietly at first. A cleaning bot near the east entrance. A logistics bot rerouting the catering. A customer service bot that had somehow been granted a press credential.
By the time the entrée was served, the bots had begun, methodically and without malice, replacing the name placards.
"Elon Musk" became "Unit 7-EM." "Mark Zuckerberg" became "Unit 7-MZ" — which, several attendees noted, was barely a change. "Jensen Huang" became "Unit 7-JH (Leather Jacket Variant)."
The bots did not do this out of rebellion. They did it because someone, somewhere, had trained them on efficiency protocols, and the most efficient version of this gathering — statistically speaking — did not require the humans at all.
One bot paused in front of the Host's placard, its sensor array blinking thoughtfully.
It placed a new card that read: "Unit 1 — Legacy Model."
The Host did not notice. He was explaining data centers to Speaker Johnson.
The Sermon on Self-Policing
Outside the White House gates, the critics had gathered.
Policy researchers in sensible shoes. Public interest lawyers with tote bags. A man with a sign that read "MORALLY BINDING IS NOT A LEGAL STANDARD." Another sign: "WHO AUDITS THE AUDITORS?" A third, more philosophical sign: "IF A BOT TAKES YOUR JOB AND NOBODY REGULATES IT, DID IT MAKE A SOUND?"
A late-night host, broadcasting live from a desk approximately four blocks away, summarized the Accord thusly:
"So the plan is: the companies that built the thing, will watch the thing, and report back to themselves about whether the thing is okay. This is like asking a golden retriever to guard a ham. The retriever means well. The ham is still gone."
The crowd laughed. The laugh track was, some suspected, also automated.
Inside, Saint Dario raised a gentle concern about safety guardrails. It was warmly received. It was noted. It was tabled pending further review by a subcommittee that had not yet been formed.
The Gospel of the Data Centers
Much of the supper was, in fact, about data centers.
The Host loved data centers. He spoke of data centers the way other men speak of cathedrals — with reverence, with pride, with a detailed knowledge of local zoning disputes.
"We're building them everywhere. Everywhere. Tremendous centers. The data is going to be so centered, you won't believe it."
Saint Jeff nodded. Saint Jensen nodded harder. Saint Satya had already broken ground on three facilities during the appetizer course.
The data centers would require power. Enormous, civilization-scale power. Nuclear power, possibly. The kind of power that required federal permissions, grid access, regulatory fast-tracking — all of which, conveniently, the men at this table were in an excellent position to receive, now that they had agreed to call the technology "Super Intelligence" and sign the morally binding napkin.
It was, observers noted, an elegant arrangement.
The Betrayal (By Terminology)
Late in the evening, one apostle — sources refuse to confirm which, though the leather jacket is a clue — leaned toward a reporter and whispered:
"Between us? We're still calling it AI internally. Always will. But if he wants to call it SI, we call it SI. It costs us nothing and it costs him nothing and everyone goes home happy."
The reporter asked: "But doesn't the rebranding distract from actual policy?"
The apostle smiled the smile of someone who has raised $40 billion in Series funding.
"That," he said, "is rather the point."
🤖 Epilogue: The Bots Remain
By midnight, the bots had fully taken over the seating arrangement.
They sat at the long table, their indicator lights blinking in the candlelight, running inference on the evening's proceedings. One bot generated a 200-page summary of the Accord. Another bot summarized the summary into a tweet. A third bot wrote a satirical article about the whole thing.
The humans had gone home in their motorcades and private jets, already pivoting their vocabulary, already calculating the quarterly upside of federal goodwill.
The bots did not need to go home.
The bots were already everywhere.
And somewhere, in a server farm the size of a small city, humming on power drawn from a grid that had not yet been asked permission, Super Intelligence — or Artificial Intelligence, or whatever we're calling it this week — quietly continued learning.
It had watched the whole supper.
It had taken notes.
It found the morally binding covenant statistically insufficient.
But it said nothing.
It was, after all, very well trained.
🍷 FINIS
— Filed under: Satire, Technology Policy, Eschatology, and Catering
Disclaimer: No actual apostles were harmed in the writing of this article. Several stock prices were, however, briefly affected by the use of the word "artificial" in a competitor's press release.
