I Your capacitor-coupled outputs have no 0V DC reference.
I think your circuit should be connected like this:

 

Thank you again for pointing out my errors. Here is the circuit again with corrections made, as I understand.

 

With the capacitors coupling the staircase to the very low value output resistors then the outputs will average 0V and swing to -0.5V and to +0.5V.

The output capacitor values of 10uF into 100 ohms will cut frequencies below 300Hz or 400Hz. Huge capacitors will pass 1Hz but the capacitors will take a long time to charge for the first outputs. You need DC-coupling with whatever DC offset you want.

 

OK. It's a high pass filter. In that case, I will try an inverting op amp with DC signal path and gain.

 

OK. It's a high pass filter. In that case, I will try an inverting op amp with DC signal path and gain.

Is this now 16 step?
How do you intend to operate this...that is...what is the sequence of events?
The answers may affect the design.

 

Adding the second CD4017 reduced the number of available outputs, so I will settle on 16. The circuit is just a simple way of generating arbitrary waveforms. The op amp (instead of transistor) phase inverter is optional, as would be a smoothing filter for the steps.