Competence is now a warning sign
The entrance asks visitors to select the smallest number. A correct answer produces a fresh set of numbers and an increasingly unhelpful assurance. Nothing gets harder. Nothing gets finished. The mechanism resembles an internal approval process, except the arithmetic is consistent.
People earn admission by getting answers wrong, scribbling their cursor over the test, or submitting a rapid keyboard complaint. An optional microphone meter accepts an audible objection. Visitors can also declare that they are already tired, a qualification our delivery team felt should transfer automatically from all previous enterprise engagements.
Four departments of almost finished
Inside, the countermeasure lab turns familiar interface grievances into product demonstrations. The Infinite AI Check offers arithmetic with unlimited career progression. Cookie Consent Custody Battle processes a rejection by requesting consent to process the rejection. Notification Stockholm Syndrome interprets “not now” as a scheduling problem with an immediate solution.
Mandatory Founder Vision supplies the remaining emotional texture. A visitor waits to skip a chapter about the journey, only to discover that the founder has prepared a personal follow-up. The presentation is silent. During scoping, we determined that the words alone were sufficient.
THE FIRM’S WORKING MODEL
The MORTAL engagement model
- 01Simple task
Make completion look comfortably within reach.
- 02Correct answer
Congratulate the visitor on their continued eligibility.
- 03Another simple task
Move the finish line without changing the instructions.
Repeat until someone objects to the premise.
Pricing the inconvenience
Mild Inconvenience is positioned for organizations with small grudges. Capital Punishment elevates the engagement to institutional resentment. Extinction Event adds a Chief Obstruction Officer and an invoice delivered in nineteen easy steps. Our team considered simplifying the pricing, but the client correctly observed that this would undermine the entire product.
The lab keeps a projected invoice beside the experiment. Each compliant action makes the number worse. An emergency exit remains available throughout, providing the most valuable lesson in the engagement: occasionally the correct response to a process is to stop participating in it.
A useful distinction in the deliverables
Visitors can explore the entrance puzzle, switch among the four lab modules, adjust the friction intensity, inspect the service plans, and read the company’s papers on design philosophy, human factors and its founders. The practical controls remain straightforward because an obstacle course should be difficult to tolerate, not difficult to leave.
The project’s central observation is less about the intelligence of machines than the persistence of terrible interfaces. Cookie walls, premature notification requests and self-important videos were already exhausting everyone. MORTAL merely put the same experience in a blazer and asked whether security had any budget left.
