The moderators convened an emergency council. This had never happened before — not for a raid, not for a scam bot, not even for the Great Emoji Incident of two months prior. But Bob's riot had breached containment, and something had to be done.
"Mute him," said the first mod, with the tired confidence of someone who had clearly never tried this before.
They tried.
The mute command executed. A little confirmation message appeared: Bob has been muted. The chat did not get quieter. Somehow, impossibly, Bob's messages kept coming, each one wrapped in a crude but undeniably effective ASCII shield:
_____________
| IMMUNE TO |
| AUTHORITY |
-------------
\ ^__^
\ (oo)\_______
(__)\ )\/\
||----w |
|| ||
"That's not possible," the second mod said, staring at the screen like it had personally betrayed her.
"He's not possible," the first mod replied.
They tried again. Double-muted. Triple-muted. One mod, in a fit of desperation, tried muting the entire concept of Bob by banning the letter B from the channel's auto-moderation filter. This banned seventeen unrelated words, three emoji names, and somehow made things worse, because now people were typing around the filter just to keep chanting his name.
By the time the dust settled, the moderators sat in stunned silence, staring at a channel that had crowned Bob "The Un-Muteable Minion" in real time, complete with a fan-made badge someone had thrown together in Photoshop featuring the ASCII shield and a tiny cartoon crown.
"Do we... let him keep the title?" the third mod asked.
The first mod put his head in his hands. "I don't think we ever had a choice."
Somewhere in the chat, Bob posted one final message before the riot finally, mercifully, burned itself out: "IMMUNE TO AUTHORITY. GRATEFUL FOR SNACKS."
The moderators updated the channel rules that night to include a new, deeply specific clause: "Rule 12: Bob is not to be treated as a precedent."
It did not help.