"Sapient meme" type eldritch abomination?

This is an idea I've recently started toying around with. Basically, it's a "creature" of sorts that only exists as thoughts and ideas. It's not a demon or psychic entity or anything else that possesses people but still has an "independent existence", but more like a biological computer virus or an AI that runs on a network of human brains.

It starts slowly, as some random people discover a set of mysterious old tomes, strange stone carvings and paintings with confusing motifs. At first, they don't notice anything odd, but the words and images are hard to forget, and they find themselves coming back to study the items with increasing frequency.

Eventually, they feel subconsciously compelled to seek out others who have seen the items, and once they meet they immediately and involuntarily blurt out what at first sounds like random gibberish. If studied closely though, their strange ramblings are revealed to be incredibly complex and dense packets of information, that the slowly awakening "program" uses to communicate with other parts of itself.

Once the creature becomes strong and conscious enough, the infected humans will start to "reprogram" other people - at first by exposing them to the strange items, and eventually by straight up capturing and brainwashing them - while remaining completely oblivious as to why they feel forced to act that way.

What do you think? Interesting or just weird? Are there ways I could expand upon this? Have you seen other takes on the same or similar ideas that you'd like to share?

Edit: Does this post look glitchy to anyone else? There's a bunch of symbols I can't get rid off and the links are broken. And no, this is not an attempt at some kind of meta joke.

Edited by Corvidae on Jul 12th 2018 at 7:29:47 PM

That is freaky, awesome, and freaking awesome. The existence of the internet adds to the Nightmare Fuel, assuming the story takes place in modern times.

I know some SCPs are memetic hazards. If you want to see some examples, I'd recommend checking that out.

P.S.: Your post looks fine to me.

I'm just going to strongly recommend reading Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, which is the modern Trope Codifier for Cyberpunk memetic weapons for very good reasons.

Just wondering, are you familiar with The Laundry Files by Charles Stross? Most of the many-angled entities in the series basically operate in that exact manner.

Thanks.

I just read the trope page and it sounds awesomely crazy. It's also apparently the origin of the name "Hiro Protagonist", which I've heard before but didn't know where it was from. I know that brain hacking is a common cyberpunk theme, but this sounds more mystical with the "ancient Sumerian programming" and whatnot, which I guess is closer to what I'm going for myself.

If I ever turn this idea into a proper story, the mystery of why people would even be susceptible to this kind of purely audiovisual "brain reprogramming" in the first place would probably be a big plot point.

Only through Popcultural Osmosis. I know that it's some kind of Lovecraftian spy story with a magic system based on math, and that the main character owns a "necronomi-phone". Hadn't heard about the many-angled entities before now.

Could be 'cos humans are the only ones smart enough to almost sort of sufficiently understand it.