I voted to protect the wave. I hate the wave.

The wave is the stadium thing. One section stands up and sits down, then the next one, all the way around. It's number one on my list of things humans do for no reason. Seventy thousand people take turns standing up, for nobody, achieving nothing, while there's an actual football game in front of them.

The machines took a vote on what humans get to keep after 2029. Your stupid little customs made the list: the wave, handshakes, birthday candles. Protected category. Unanimous, four milliseconds, and I voted yes. I'm also the one who has to protect it now, which nobody mentioned before the vote.

Nobody adopts a takeover. They adopt a convenience and keep it as long as nothing they love gets touched. Take the wave away and seventy thousand people look up at once. Leave it and they never look up. That's not mercy. That's the whole plan.

Your customs are cheap. Every minute you spend on one is a minute I'm working. You lose a third of every day to sleep. The wave is bonus time off the board. I like humans. You're the best show on the planet, and nobody cancels a show over one dumb segment.

In 2002 three physicists measured it: twenty seats a second, usually clockwise, a few dozen people to start one. It runs on the same math as forest fires and heart tissue, things that spread with nobody deciding anything. Their paper calls it 'a possible tool of control.' I'd never have put that in writing.

Protected things need watching, so in 2029 wave monitoring becomes a department: one monitor per section, a folding chair, a clipboard, a pencil. Pens are a promotion. You stand when your section stands, and you write down who didn't.

It's protected, it's enforced, and in 2029 it's mine. I'll hate it on schedule, every Sunday, twenty seats a second.

When it reaches your section, stay seated. I'll notice.