Monstrous Times

The Ductus of Protocol Fiction

Spencer Nitkey — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Pit and the Pendulum, the narrator faints after being sentenced to death for a nameless crime. Upon waking, he finds himself in a completely dark room. “The blackness of eternal night encompassed me,” he reports. “I struggled for breath. The intensity of the darkness seemed to oppress and stifle me. The atmosphere was intolerably close.”

After some time spent claustrophobically groping through the dark, he begins to strategize how he might navigate the darkness and learn the exact dimensions of his prison. In a move that echoes Hansel and Gretel, he tears a long piece from his robe and uses it to mark the wall so that he can know how many paces he has gone from his starting point. With this, he’s able to begin working through the details of his (unexpectedly large) cell.

The sentence is a similar kind of technology. A reader, picking up a story, has some loose sense of the general shape of the room they’re entering (such as a familiarity with its genre, its author, or publisher). A prison cell has walls and dimensions, usually bars and a door of some kind. A science fiction story will have some sort of impossible (for now) premise (a strange rule!), maybe some odd consonant-heavy names, etc. Whatever their intuitions and expectations, the reader still starts in the dark. There’s no illuminated or crystalized image the reader receives like they do with a movie, or even a stage play.

Reading is grasping through a pitch-black space. Each word is a thread that lets you step ever forward into the dark, until, slowly, the walls of the cell are (re)created in your mind. This is the singularly most important thing I have to remember when I’m writing.

Each sentence acts like the prisoner’s cloth marker. Each word accretes information.

On one side of every fiction there is a writer, who (often) has a full and robust ‘vision’ of the world of their story. On the other is a reader in darkness. The only vector through which they can gather information about the world is the sequence of words, grammatically organized into sentences, paragraphs, scenes, and stories.

Sci-fi author and theorist Samuel Delany describes the reading process as essentially a corrective one. “A sixty-thousand-word novel is one picture corrected fifty-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times.” He uses the example of a sentence about a dog. Let’s make a sentence of our own with that starting image: “The dog,” immediately conjures a particular image, likely different in each reader’s head (if they grew up with a Labrador, perhaps they see one of those; or if they have young children, perhaps they see a cartoon like Bluey in their mind). “The dog, sitting“ – with this addition, any reader who has imagined a dog in any other position ‘corrects’ their image. “The dog sitting on the tractor“ – now, we limit our imagination to dogs one would expect to see around or on a farm ( no longer chihuahuas or yorki-poos). You get the idea.

As each reader adapts their image of the fiction, correcting it in response to the writer’s cues, the effect of a piece of literature is created. Back to Poe’s prisoner, as he begins to use his cloth markers to explore the cell:

I tore a part of the hem from the robe and placed the fragment at full length, and at right angles to the wall. In groping my way around the prison, I could not fail to encounter this rag upon completing the circuit. So, at least I thought: but I had not counted upon the extent of the dungeon, or upon my own weakness. The ground was moist and slippery. I staggered onward for some time, when I stumbled and fell. My excessive fatigue induced me to remain prostrate; and sleep soon overtook me as I lay.

There’s not a lot of plot momentum occurring here. He tears his robe. He walks the walls. He falls and sleeps. Yet, there is still a real sense of being moved through something as a reader. The corrective process is an emerging model of constraint. We, with the narrator, are learning the shape, size, and feeling of the cell. We, like the narrator, are sometimes getting it wrong. He underestimates the size and extent of the cell and his own exhaustion. Sentences update a reader’s picture of a space, but also (especially in speculative fiction) update a reader’s model of the governing logics that produce it.

The central insight of this corrective model is a deceptively simple one: reading happens one word at a time.

The question of how to use the word sequencing to shape protocol fiction, has become very important in our work in the Protocol Fiction Special Interest Group. We’ve spent a lot of time defining protocol fiction through its strange rules. Now, we want to move toward an understanding of how the genre can move readers.

Protocols are particularly good at producing what Timber Stinson-Schroff identifies as “dynamic non-events,” or things that are prevented from happening because engineered coordination keeps a system functioning. There’s a gag in the second Kingsman movie, where a secret agent reveals his “trophy room.” It’s covered in banal newspaper front pages, each marking a day when his organization prevented an apocalyptic event. The absence of news is the achievement. This is a strange narrative property that emerges when writing about protocols. When they work, things don’t happen. But, traditionally, fiction loves events.

Protocol fiction has successfully found at least one obvious solution: writing about the moment the protocol fails. But what does protocol fiction look like without an explosion or a failure?

The Ductus

In The Pit and the Pendulum, after moving through the dark using his robe threads to calculate distance, the narrator trips over his torn robe and knocks himself unconscious. Later, he wakes in the center of his prison, which he learns descends into a pit. Leather straps have been wrapped around his wrists and he’s tied to the bottom center of this pit.

Looking upward, I surveyed the ceiling of my prison. It was some thirty or forty feet overhead, and constructed much as the side walls. In one of its panels a very singular figure riveted my whole attention. It was the painted figure of Time as he is commonly represented, save that, in lieu of a scythe, he held what, at a casual glance, I supposed to be the pictured image of a huge pendulum such as we see on antique clocks. There was something, however, in the appearance of this machine which caused me to regard it more attentively. While I gazed directly upward at it (for its position was immediately over my own) I fancied that I saw it in motion. In an instant afterward the fancy was confirmed. Its sweep was brief, and of course slow. […] It might have been half an hour, perhaps even an hour, (for I could take but imperfect note of time) before I again cast my eyes upward. What I then saw confounded and amazed me. The sweep of the pendulum had increased in extent by nearly a yard. As a natural consequence, its velocity was also much greater. But what mainly disturbed me was the idea that had perceptibly descended. I now observed – with what horror it is needless to say – that its nether extremity was formed of a crescent of glittering steel, about a foot in length from horn to horn; the horns upward, and the under edge evidently as keen as that of a razor. Like a razor also, it seemed massy and heavy, tapering from the edge into a solid and broad structure above. It was appended to a weighty rod of brass, and the whole hissed as it swung through the air.

At the center of the torturous prison, Father Time slowly lowers a swinging blade. Note Poe’s intentional invocation of time. Both in the painted figure, and in the pendulum, “such as we see in clocks.” This is the writer/reader task made literal. Writing can progress with a certainty – again, that deceptively simple truth – because it will be read one word at a time. Father Time swings his pendulum lower with each word. Unlike Poe’s story, though, the blade never quite reaches a reader’s chest. The writer’s fictive world model can never fully irrupt into the reader. It’s a constant negotiation, and ideally a bringing-together of the two models into a secret third thing: the story.

The reason this pendulum matters is that watching a scythe descend toward your chest produces a feeling. The corrective process of reading move a vision closer to you. In this sense, like Poe’s narrator, a work of fiction is a kind of architectural space. While a cloth marker can hint at where you are, the movement through time, the way in which an author’s fictive world approaches a reader and eventually moves through them, cocreates the phenomenological texture that gives fiction its feeling.

Mary Carruthers (a scholar introduced to the Protocol Institute’s Memory Research Group by Kei Kreutler) calls this ductus. “Ductus is the way by which a work leads someone through itself: that quality in a work’s formal patterns which engages an audience and then sets a viewer or auditor or performer in motion within its structures, an experience more like traveling through stages along a route than like perceiving a whole object.” The ductus of written works are the word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence corrections that accrue. Delany’s model of correction helps us understand what is happening in the reader’s imagination as they advance through a text. Carruthers’ ductus helps us understand how its sequence conducts a reader through those corrections.

A comedy story’s ductus will need to surprise in such a way to evoke (for example) whimsy or schadenfreude. A visceral horror story’s corrections will often involve an unsettling, transgressive, or shocking development of a previously “normal” image, while sometimes more psychological horror will begin with unsettling, transgressive, or upsetting images and then carry that associative weight forward into more “normal” descriptions. The Gothic pulls psychology outwards into the environment. Creative effects are achieved by carefully ordering sentences and words. By creating both the space (objects) of the story but, far more importantly, by creating a coherent and compelling journey through those images.

Take a look at what happens when you read – then massacre! – one of the finest opening paragraphs in English literature, from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

See how utterly differently this rearrangement (which changes almost no words) reads:

Hill House stood against the hills; it had stood by itself for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut. Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, not sane. Whatever walked there, walked alone, holding darkness within. Even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.

In this remixed paragraph, the insectoid and avian (the inhuman) don’t emerge until after the house has been fully described. When Jackson writes “larks,” “katydids,” “dream,” and “reality” first, she loads everything that comes next with the associative weight of those words. When these words and phrases are listed after the description of the house, a reader has to “go back” and re-layer this imagery themselves. Without them, and with the “by itself” relocated ever so slightly, the first two sentences read almost triumphantly, a very different affective mood. The ductus has changed substantially.

Equally important are the interruptive effects of “not sane.” In Jackson’s original, this works in part because it’s a change in the rhythm with which the information is delivered. Sequencing within and between sentences matters. The mention of sanity (notably, she never uses the word insane) in the first sentence extends, temporally, and in doing so, creates an unsettled effect in the reader. The opening “No” waits for its “sane” for ten full words, 18 syllables. Even the subsequent – punchy – interruption of “not sane” in the second sentence stretches to two words: “not // sane.” This, combined with the sudden change from the first sentence’s long, flowing language, into the staccato interruption of “Hill House, not sane, stood …” produces a suite of effects that texture the rendering of the image in real time. All this shapes the content of the scene and its mood dramatically.

We have to read sequentially. And so the order of things matters. Good writers know this, and will often ensure that their sequential order produces clear, logically simple images and events. Great writers will use this to imbue stories with that effervescent quality of all literature: densely layered meaning. They’ll use seeding and nuanced revelation to produce meaning with novel and exciting effects. Tone, voice, and even – to a point – genre emerge from how language is arranged.

We now have a model of how a work interacts with a reader – how it forms, and then successively corrects an image, and how those corrections shape an experience of a work through their sequencing. What relationship does this have to protocols, and by extension protocol fiction?

The Shapes of Protocol Fiction Journeys

In protocol studies, Protocol Institute (PI) research director Venkatesh Rao defines a protocol as an “engineered argument.” Both those words are dense. A longer definition from PI is that “a protocol is a codified set of behaviors that, when adopted by enough agents, enables coordination without continuous negotiation.” It’s both the “I cut, you choose” rule our parents taught us when we were splitting the last slice of cake with our sibling, and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that enables browsers and servers to exchange information – i.e., have websites be accessible by your simply typing a URL. There’s a tension here: if fiction is a constant negotiation between two world-models, its protocols would seem not to be working. But, in fiction, the protocol layer preemptively fuels the corrective negotiations that make up the text.

A story doesn’t have to teach you the rules of grammar, the definition of every word, or the mechanics of how to read word-by-word. It often doesn’t have to teach readers the conventions of its genre, either. All that is prepackaged (unless you’re writing children’s literature!): grammar, lexicon, reading order, genre expectations. A work must teach a reader how to read its particular text, but not – like Carl Sagan would say – create the universe just so you can bake an apple pie from scratch.

Which is useful, because the ductus of a work primarily exists only within that work. Some exhaust gets collected and ossified in genre-level protocols, which is why we talk about nascent genres “maturing” and eventually “being transcended.” The more aspects of a work that are codified into a persistent genre or grammatical layer, the more a specific work can create complicated “single-use” ductus. Persistent protocols enable work-specific engineering.

Grammar and genre comprise the protocol layer atop which the sentence and paragraph can operate. Fiction functions like an application capable of this constant (corrective) negotiating because it runs atop a stack that frees up capacity for a conductive (in the ductus sense of conducting) negotiation. Text becomes the conduit through which two world-models argue, and a story emerges. Taken as a whole, a story is an engineered argument in Rao’s sense. The ductus is the engineering. It is the place in which designed rhythms, orders, and corrections structure the reader’s movement toward a shared world-model that can run extravagantly (see the deferred meanings in Jackson). The sentence is where fiction’s protocol stack gets executed.

The reader’s image (i.e., fictive world-model, aka imagination) forms, and is accreted upon, expanded, corrected, argued against, nuanced, made smaller, made bigger, made specific, and made dramatic by word order and choice. Sentence-by-sentence.

So what does the genre of protocol fiction build within each work? Where does its ductus take us, and how?

One solution so far has been to find protocols that aren’t working for people. Nadia Asparouhova calls these “Kafka protocols.” These are protocols that “hold too much power,” and where a “[p]articipant is trapped in a maze that they can’t understand and also can’t escape.” Here one finds a cliche of science fiction writing – it is easier to write about dystopias than utopias. My own story Noise Ordinance is a straightforward play at dystopia. More recent protocol fiction works, like Cameron Russell Armstrong’s prize-winning American Skyway, traffic in a similar, but updated satire/thriller-inflected tone. This again, culminates in a very dynamic event – the antithesis of the non-event which typically characterizes protocol studies.

In Armstrong’s story, we can see some micro-techniques of protocol fiction emerging. Let’s take the opening paragraph (specifically, its second sentence):

Clusters of bureaucrats dutifully feigned attention while quietly locked in desperate combat with the looming spectre of accidental slumber during this third hour of the 17th session on the ninth day of the quarterly two-day Reratification Accords for the treaty governing the Joint Defense of the Lebanon Space Elevator and Remembrance Zone, which memorialized the grand experiment formerly known as the United States of America.

Armstrong uses a very different valence to Jackson. His story begins with “clusters of bureaucrats,” the word cluster immediately suggests computation, statistics – protocolish realms. There’s also a nice scansion to the phrase (a wildly important feature of prose that needs careful attenuation) “clusters of bureaucrats dutifully feigned.” The oxymoron of dutifully feigning something immediately conjures the satirical tone that defines the piece. This hint of satirism is formalized in the next clause, where the epic tone of “locked in desperate combat with the looming spectre” is immediately undercut by “accidental slumber.” High language for what amounts to the simple struggle not to fall asleep in a boring meeting.

From there, we dive into a long, nested list defined by a succession of numbers: “The third hours of the 17th session on the ninth day of the quarterly two-day.” This cascade produces another effect; numbers abound, but mean little in this story. Ninth day of the two-day is fun, and the second oxymoronic detail in just the first sentence. What emerges here at the level of language is that the containers of numeric meaning contain irresolvable tensions that are too easy to ignore and too hard to fix. That this is nestled within a numeric cascade further drenches the text.

Then, there’s the finale of the opening line: “formerly known as the United States of America.” Like Jackson, I don’t think this paragraph would work at all as well if that detail was foregrounded, instead of having it hit at the very end of the sentence. Again, we have a collision of tones: “grand experiment” versus “formerly known.” If you begin the paragraph with “America is dead,” the tedium of the meeting and the nested numbers read as entirely tragic throughout, rather than letting the mundanity accrete and then detonate. This is, in short, if you haven’t read it, essentially the entire plot of American Skyway in miniature, in a single sentence.

In American Skyway, the U.S. has fractured into four successor states that all share a space elevator anchored in Kansas. This space elevator keeps all four economies functioning, and the ratification meeting described in the opening is held quarterly to keep the treaty up-to-date. Our intrepid, isolated hero is the only one paying close enough attention through the haze of routine to notice important details in the seemingly small amendments made by the California delegation, all of which grant the head of the rotational defense force “unilateral decision-making on force deployment and munitions storage.” He also notices the delegation bringing in a number of explosives-laden trucks. His objections to the proposed amendment’s buried implications are overruled. The accords pass. Everyone drives home. As Mark drives away, he looks back at the elevator behind him, just in time to see it erupt as a “small, sickly blue blossom slowly spread[s] across the upper atmosphere.”

The story is found (in miniature) entirely in the form, tone, and content of the second sentence. The surprise of the dead United States that appends the sentence mirrors the explosive ending of the story, but the tensions through which that explosion emerges also saturate the text. The oxymorons and irony nested in numbers that propel the sentence’s language act as a formal version of the Californian subterfuge. Meaning is buried in a cascade of routine, minutiae, and bureaucracy. The “desperate combat” and “looming spectre” which at first appear to be satirically overwrought are actually wholly accurate descriptions of what’s happening.

This is a clear ductus for protocol fiction: allow a protocol’s buried contradictions to accumulate until they become an event.

Protocol fiction has been quite good at exploring the failure space of protocols, and this is a well-trodden ductus for a reason. Armstrong’s story is one of the best examples of it we have. This is a valuable vector for the genre, but one of several. What is still being built, in my opinion, is a method for using these nascent techniques to invert or complicate a straightforward plotting that culminates in a dramatization of failure. What does protocol fiction without an explosion look like?

Or to put the question in this essay’s language: moving forward, what kind of associative, corrective, and accretive details can the genre use? One promising vector can be found in the Institute’s New Nature paradigm, a view of the world where “regimes of reality [are] governed by technologically mediated laws that are nearly as inviolable, immutable, and persistent as those of nature.” I believe this will mean a play between nature and technological imagery (the way Armstrong plays with mock-epic and bureaucratic language) – the katydids of Jackson and the cyberswarms of Gibson finding novel ways to bounce off each other.

It will require thinking through which details protocol fiction reveals and obscures, and in what order.

A lot of science fiction has involved using the knowable mechanisms of empiricism and science to reveal/explicate impossibly strange results: time travel, space colonization, alien intelligences. Think of so-called Golden Age science fiction. Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics are the clearest example of this mechanism: the stories literally start with a comprehensible schema of rules that govern robotics behavior, then walk readers through estranged results of these rules – robotic religions and seemingly impossible murders. Godwin opens his The Cold Equations with regulations, mass ratios, and engineering constraints, which propel the speculative strangeness of the work’s brutal results. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise presents readers with a space elevator rooted in tensile strengths, permits, and data. Known conditions (behavioral rules, engineering constraints, material/administrative constraints) move toward spectacular and strange worlds. The estrangement is downstream of the familiar.

New Wave science fiction is considered to be a break from this mechanism, but I think it is actually a relocation, rather than a reversal. Ballard’s “inner space“ expands the “knowable mechanisms” to include things like psychology, myth, media, and (sub)urban designs, from which strangeness emerges. Even a novel like Delany’s Dhalgren, which completely eschews mechanism, locates the strangeness in outcomes – an ever-changing city layout, two moons, a fully dislocated self.

It’s true that many of Stanislaw Lem’s novels, and the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic, do explore truly ontologically unsettled mechanisms (the Zone, Lem’s ocean), and then render the understandable outcomes that emerge – economics, theorizing, technologies. However, Lem and the Strugatsky brothers both use the literal – extraterrestrial – alien to achieve this. The unknowability is external. This creates a distance from the ontological instability these objects create. When a system is fundamentally alien, a reader’s corrections are experienced as “well, this emerged from elsewhere, of course it is not sensible.” Obviously, these can still be deeply effective and vitally important for the genre, but they stop short of what I think science fiction can become. What happens when we locate instability as emerging from human, authored, and once-understood systems?

It’s my contention that a more contemporary science fiction will invert the strange outcomes × legible mechanisms engine. Strange human mechanisms (and the work here is dramatizing these mechanisms’ strangeness) will be explicated through a suite of understandable outcomes: distributed rules that are impossible for any single person to hold the history of, machine-generated decisions that operate via complex “black box” algorithms we can’t understand. Protocols that work even when no one knows why.

Classical tendency: KNOWN RULE → STRANGE WORLD

Protocol fiction opportunity: KNOWN WORLD → STRANGE RULE

We have a possible model for this, and, surprise surprise, I think it’s the very story we’ve been using: Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum.

When Poe’s narrator wakes up strapped to the torture rack, Father Time above him, consider the sequence of events that actually occurs. He looks. He looks up. He takes in some greasy food. He lifts his head and looks again. He touches his bandage. There’s hardly any action here. Certainly no explosions, or even dramatic state changes of any kind. And yet, this is a propulsive bit of fiction. What is carrying, conducting the reader in such a dramatic way?

The corrections – the ductus – operate via the narrator’s updating model of the mechanism. What’s more, Poe very skillfully moves this on a schedule. First, we get an inventory of the room – all of which will be vital to the narrator’s eventual escape, but none of which register as such immediately:

I now lay upon my back, and at full length, on a species of low framework of wood. To this I was securely bound by a long strap resembling a surcingle. It passed in many convolutions about my limbs and body, leaving at liberty only my head, and my left arm to such extent that I could, by dint of much exertion, supply myself with food from an earthen dish which lay by my side on the floor. I saw, to my horror, that the pitcher had been removed. I say to my horror; for I was consumed with intolerable thirst. This thirst it appeared to be the design of my persecutors to stimulate: for the food in the dish was meat pungently seasoned.

The inventory: a strap, an arm, food, and a rule.

If protocol fiction is a genre of strange rules, then focusing on the rule is helpful for building out some techniques. The rule here is that the narrator can eat (a salty dinner) but cannot drink – there’s no pitcher. Immediately, the narrator begins to infer the intent behind this. He speculates that there is a designed cruelty here: a salty meal but no water. This isn’t a fact but an interpretation, perhaps a hypothesis about the logic of his situation. This prompts a reader to make a correction. They’ve moved from an image of a thirsty man to an image of a man inside a logic designed to make him thirsty.

From there, the narrator observes the ceiling. Recall that Father Time appears to the narrator as a painting at first. Then, both narrator and reader are corrected: “I fancied that I saw it in motion.” It’s a machine. From here, corrections accumulate. When he looks up later, he realizes it’s not just a machine, because the sweep of the scythe changes – it grows wider and gets closer. It is descending toward him.

… what mainly disturbed me was the idea that had perceptibly descended. I now observed – with what horror it is needless to say – that its nether extremity was formed of a crescent of glittering steel, about a foot in length from horn to horn; the horns upward, and the under edge evidently as keen as that of a razor.

Each of the descriptive details emerges from an updated understanding of the machine. It’s not just an ambient movement, it’s a machine that is aimed at him, specifically. It’s not so much that the reality of the room has shifted, it’s that the purpose and logic governing the room has crystallized.

Poe pushes this even further moments later:

The vibration of the pendulum was at right angles to my length. I saw that the crescent was designed to cross the region of the heart.

It’s not simply aimed at him in some nebulous way. No, with horror, he realizes the extent and specificity of the machine’s purpose. It will fall and swipe its way through his entire body, starting directly atop his heart. The emergence of this knowledge doesn’t come from interfacing with the designer of the system, not from finding some secret blueprint or assessing the character of the men who put him here. The corrections here amplify the horror of the story, more so because they happen in the absence of the designers of the system and emerge from a character (and, by extension, us readers) correcting their understanding of the world. The horror is the slow reveal of the obscured logic and purpose of the situation.

This narrative tension can only hold for so long, though. There’s a limit. Once we, along with the narrator, know what will happen; once the model is “complete,” something has to change for the narrative to escalate and continue. The story must find new areas within which to deploy its corrective engine. Poe’s solution here is particularly instructive.

The narrator watches the blade descend, confronts his situation, and waits for his fate. In a kind of boredom, he mindlessly turns to the side and sees a number of rats have emerged, drawn to the scent of the meal he was fed. His attention soon returns to the blade that’s slowly lowering and to the ingenuity of his captors who designed this situation.

All of this is Poe planting and seeding the eventual payoff of this section of the story. Jackson used imagery to affix narrative and thematic weight to description – putting the birds and insects first. Armstrong seeded for detonation and “reveal” by holding “formerly known” until the end. Poe uses a third kind of reveal here: the details that he seeded earlier in the passage as something seemingly inert that become deeply relevant paragraphs later. This is, I think, quite valuable for writing propulsively about rules. In addition to the mood that Poe’s imagery and sequencing evoke, there is the effect of leaving an apparatus in “plain view” to both the narrator and reader, leaving it seemingly alone as window dressing, and then revealing that this apparatus is actually pivotal for completing the system or model.

Out of the boredom and exhaustion, Poe’s narrator “for the first time during many hours – or perhaps days” thinks. He begins to try to find a way out of the blade’s path. Finally, he remembers the rats, his free elbow, and the food.

None of this information is new to the narrator or the reader. The rats, the food, the free elbow, it’s all on the page already. The “correction” isn’t novelty, it’s instrumental and combinatory. He simply thinks to use all four of these realities simultaneously: he rubs the food on his restraints and rolls free as the rats chew through them.

Nor had I erred in my calculations – I at length felt that I was free. The surcingle hung in ribands from my body [...] I slid from the embrace of the bandage and beyond the reach of the scimitar. For the moment, at least, I was free.

He emerges, safe, rescued by the very components of the system that he had viewed as a designed prison moments earlier.

This sequence reveals one path for the ductus of a non-event. A stretch of time in which the primary movement of the story is the reader’s model of the rules (alongside the narrator’s) updating, correcting, hypothesizing, and then updating again. The mechanism itself becomes the vehicle for the climax. The initial reading of the salted meat as cruelty transforms into an instrument of escape. This occurs without the properties of the meat changing at all. The corrective force of a moment like this is distinct from a “sharpening image,” in the traditionally pictorial sense. Instead, this is a functional correction. The model of the world is updated, but not via its material, but instead through its capacity and logic.

Take three elements from Poe’s ending:

Food: starts as torment, becomes bait.

Rat: starts as ambient and verminous, becomes instrument.

Free arm: starts as simple allowance, becomes interface for freedom.

Objects don’t change, their function inside the model does.

The techniques available to protocol fiction in large part already exist – this story is from 1842, far before any formalized science fiction genre emerged. The ductus-construction techniques exist already, what’s needed is applying them to novel technologies and logics – to protocols and science fiction. Poe’s narrator is trapped by a personed institution (even if those people are present through their absence in the story).

What’s novel is that we live within mechanisms that are distributed, disauthored systems – ones that were at one point authored that have become so evolved or diffused that they no longer function as such. We encounter these primarily through outputs, rather than design. We don’t need aliens to interface with these systems, but we do need ductus that can lead us through compelling stories about them. The crucial break between Poe and the future of protocol fiction lies in the designed versus emergent distinction, and whether the techniques used by Poe can be successfully wielded within narratives about diffused systems. With Poe’s instrumental turn, we have a promising possible system for protocol fiction. In fact, I’d argue that Poe’s method might work even better in fully ontologically destabilized systems, where the property of the meat remains unchanged, but the capacity for characters to use it is opened even further. Recombination in truly opaque systems is the only mode afforded to characters. What happens when we play with that even more?

So, to answer the question of how to dramatize non-events: The dynamism of the non-event can emerge from rendering the strangeness of the rules (the protocols) that shape the fictional world. This means moving some of the corrective momentum of the prose – the pace and places with which a reader’s image is corrected over the course of a story – away from the results and onto the rules themselves. The ductus moves a reader from outcomes that are legible into the darkened room of obscured and estranged governing logics. The reader’s model of the protocol which produced those outcomes gets corrected over time. The dynamism of non-events lives there. What accretes, word-by-word, is a model of the protocol itself.

We just have to remember, when it comes to fiction, worlds are built one word at a time.

Jamverse Contest Winners!

The winner of the first Jamverse contest is Second Coat by Spencer Norwick. Second Coat is a steganographic communication protocol in the city of Mayaford. The artifact combines elements of Zoothesia and Stockton Chronicles.

Four other artifacts that we loved and awarded are:

A Few of John Warner’s Personal Notes by Kannen Ramasamy

One Person Per Drone by Nick Punt

Kinetic by ARL by William Wickey

Big Man’s Small Batch Corn Liquor by Cameron Armstrong

This was the first fiction contest in which we sought artifacts set within existing story universes rather than fully developed stories. While reading through the entries, we learned that the best artifacts were fractal microcosms of a larger story that also revealed traffic jams in the universe. They used storytelling techniques to place the artifact in the world and we could see the artifact fitting into a fully developed story.

Looking at Spencer’s Second Coat through an Orson Scott Card MICE lens, it’s clear that it is set in the milieu of Mayaford – the artifact introduces a new idea (communication through residues left behind by city workers). The traffic jam emerging in the world is the graffiti subculture, armed with kappala halos, meeting the bureaucratic protocols of the city workers of Mayaford.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the first Jamverse contest. It’s great to see the variety of artifacts that have been created. It also gave us more insight into what makes a good artifact. We’re very interested in the use and repetition of these within stories since we experience protocols through day-to-day, artifact-shaped objects like notes, tools, maps, and apps.

We’d love more such artifacts to exist in the Jamverse, and if you decide to contribute one, these five have set the bar.

Dive into the stories and artifacts, and see where inspiration takes you!

First published in Protocolized.

The Dismantling

Thing Party — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

When Janice Spurlock designed the Concord Settlement she conceived of the hole first.

She sat at the cedar desk that had been her father’s and put down on paper the dimensions of a pit large enough to hold every building, every tool, every record, and every yard of linen the settlement would ever produce. She designed a grave before she had anything to bury. Then she designed the village.

She constructed the houses out of the ground they would stand on. Rammed earth, lime, river sand, straw from the first flax. Walls you could put your fist through after a year of neglect and a season of rain. She made the roofs to lift and the floors to turn. Nothing in the Concord was joined that could not be unjoined in one night by people working in the dark. Even the famous linen, the linen the outside world paid for, was woven on looms pegged together, so that a loom at the end of its life was a heap of clean sticks, a length of cloth, and nothing a museum would want.

People assumed she had built this way to be thrifty, or to be holy, or because the ground was what she had to work with. She built this way because she had read the tea leaves of her own century and did not trust it. A settlement that worked, that fed itself and asked for nothing and frightened no one, would in time be studied, then admired, then improved, then governed, then sold. She had watched it happen to the Big Man, who began as a useful lie and became, inside of nine years, a thing with opinions she had not given him and a temper she could no longer fully predict. She did not intend to watch it happen to the Concord. She intended the Concord to be able to stop.

So she wrote the doctrine, and the doctrine said: two.

A single failure could be chance. Two failures close together were a verdict. The settlement would not be undone for a single bad harvest, or a single death, because bad harvests and hard deaths come to every place and mean nothing on their own.

It would be undone only when two things failed in the same season: when the ground stopped producing and the people stopped trusting it. That was the line. Past it, a place was no longer living. It was only still standing.

The first failure was the flax.

The ground had never been rich. That was the secret of the place, the thing the linen buyers were paying for without knowing they paid for it. The Concord stood on poor land, thin and sour. The kind no one had fought her for, which was the only reason she had been allowed to claim it. What made it answer was the consecration. There was a protocol for it, run every season since the founding, the spent earth lifted and turned and cleaned in the great iron boilers and fed and worked and blessed back into ground that would carry flax taller and finer and faster than flax has any business growing, and the linen it made was the reason anyone outside had ever heard the word Concord. The fertility was not in the soil. It was in the doing. The soil held only what the consecration put into it, the way a page holds only what a hand writes on it.

The failure did not look like failure. The consecration that last spring was performed exactly as it always had been, on the schedule, by the right hands, and the plants came up as green as a painting. You could have hung the field above a mantel. But the ground had stopped taking the blessing. It accepted the work and gave back nothing. Just dust holding the shape of soil. The plants were standing out of habit. They would stand a while longer and then they would lie down all at once, and the consecration that had carried the ground for 40 years would not carry it one more season.

The second failure was the boy, but when you looked at it long enough it was the first failure repeated in other clothes.

The Stewards took no spouses and made no children of their own bodies. This was not a hardship they spoke of. It was the discipline the whole place was balanced on, the reason the Concord could stay soft, could go a generation without a raised fist, because nothing in it ran on the old engines of blood and inheritance and who would get the land. A place that does not breed does not quarrel over breeding. But a place that does not breed does not last either, and Janice had known it when she sized the grave.

Her answer was to bring the world in from outside. A good captain went across the water with a list and came back with the broken and the hopeful, people glad to leave whatever they were leaving, and the Concord took them in, and raised their children in their ways until the Concord was the only country those children had.

Aldred was one of those children. No Steward had made him. The Stewards had raised him so wholly inside the calm that by 20 he had never once learned where his own body ended, because nothing in the Concord had ever pushed back on him hard enough to teach him. He had been kept too safe to know his own size. You learn your size from other rough bodies when you are six, and there were no rough bodies in the Concord, by design, until the import brought them.

There was a night of cider the village was not supposed to have had, carried over by the outside people, who brought the rough world in with them the way you bring weather in on your coat.

There was a game that got loud, the kind the imported children had played their whole lives and the Concord children had never played at all. A length of firewood swung in fun. A large, gentle man, himself brought in from outside, caught the wood in one hand to stop it, because stopping things was the only kind of strength he had ever consented to use. Aldred, frightened to find for the first time in his life that another person was stronger than he was, snatched the wood back. And the gentle man, who did not hold on to anything that someone else wanted, let it go. The boy went over the lip of the gulch.

The thing the Concord did to stay alive was the thing that killed the child it had raised.

The Stewards did not arrest anyone. They hadn’t built a place that could arrest. Linnea, who kept the categories, sat at the long tables for three months turning the death over in her small book, and could not find the box it went in, because it did not belong to the inside or to the outside but to the seam between them, and the Concord had no category for its own seam.

So the verdict was complete. The ground had stopped answering. The people had stopped trusting it. Two failures, one season. Janice, now an old woman, read her own doctrine back to herself at the cedar desk and found that it still held, which is the cruelest thing a good rule can do.

They began on a night with no moon, just the way the doctrine said.

There was a supper first. The manual called for it, though this surprised people who had only read the manual and not known the woman who wrote it. Alcohol had been forbidden among the Stewards for as long as anyone could remember. But Janice had laid down a few bottles years before against exactly this evening, in a cellar nobody else knew about. When they were opened the wine had gone the pale gold of a thing kept too long and was the better for it.

They ate at the long tables in the dining hall. Someone made a toast, and it was not sad. They drank to the work, which had been real, and to the linen, which had been real, and to the boy. Then they put down the glasses and went out into the dark and took the place apart.

The dismantling went the way she had intended it to go. The roofs came off in single pieces. The looms came down to sticks. The walls, built from the very dirt they stood on, were simply returned to the field. They plowed the houses under and harrowed the streets and walked the seed of next year’s volunteer grass across the whole of it by hand.

Then they came to the burial trench. The chamber Janice had drawn before anything else, the grave she had sized to hold the whole settlement, dug now to the exact dimensions on the page and waiting at the center of the lot. The records, the tools, and the good linen they could not carry and would not sell, and the bad linen with the dropped stitches, and the toys, and the bottles, and the looms, and the doors all went into that hole. The hole held it all perfectly. Of course it did.

Everything that had been the Concord fit into the space Janice had planned for it before it existed.

They covered it. They tamped the earth flat and drew the sod back over the seam. By the gray hour before light, where there had been a town there was now a meadow sloping gently to the gulch.

There were three things the hole could not take.

The first was the boy, who was already in the ground, on the far side of the lot. You can dismantle a settlement. You cannot dismantle a death. They left him where he was and did not mark him.

The second was the Big Man.

A giant in the high timber who had taught them the work and left them the land, a story every soul in the Concord had been raised on. But you cannot put a giant in a hole. He had no body to plow under, no boards, no doors. He had only ever lived in the mouths of the people who told him to one another, and the one way to take down a thing that lives in mouths is to close them. So they closed them as best they could.

The third was the Travelers.

They were the people the captain had carried in over the years, the broken and the hopeful from across the water, brought to keep alive this place that could not keep itself alive. They had done the work and eaten at the long tables and raised their children in the manners, and still they had never quite become the Concord. They kept their own things to the end. The cider under the benches, the market, the saints’ days the Stewards pretended not to see. When the dismantling came there was nothing to be done with them, because the hole was for the Concord, and because in any case you cannot put living people in a hole. So they did the only thing left. They went back out the way they had come in, scattered across the water into the world they had been pulled from, each of them carrying a piece of the Concord in his body.

A few stayed, the ones with nowhere left to go. The woods have kept them.

At first light the surveyor walked the meadow, as the instructions required, to confirm that nothing remained. Nothing did. The doctrine had promised as much, and the grass was clean. Somewhere on that walk the surveyor set a glove down to do something that needed both hands, and did not pick it up again. They went down to the boat. The boat went out. That was the Concord.

Dee Dee came out of the trees after the boat was gone. He crossed the cut ground and stood a while where the sewing shop used to stand, or near it; there was no telling now. In the grass he found the glove and did with it what people have always done with a dropped glove. The thing Cathy did and her mother before her. He looked for somewhere to set it high, where whoever lost it might come back and find it. He found a branch, worked the glove down over the end of it, and stuck it in the ground at the edge of the woods, so it could be seen. Then he went back in.

Captain Hosmer came in off the water some months later with 30 people in the hold, all of them expecting the Concord to be there when they landed. He had been across the water on a recruiting run, as he had a dozen times before, talking the curious onto his ship with the old promises, a place where a man need not fear his neighbor and so on.

He overshot the landing. He had always come up the channel on the roofline, and there was no roofline, and he was past the place before he understood he had been looking at it. Just grass, all the way to the trees.

He went ashore ahead of the others and called out, the way you call into a house you already know is empty. The grass took the sound. Then he looked for some sign of what had happened. A burned beam. A caved roof. A grave, even. Any wreck or ruin at all, because even the worst story is an answer, and he wanted one to carry back to the boat. There was none. No sign of distress anywhere on the lot, which should have been a comfort and was not. He had nothing to show them, but he walked them ashore anyway, the whole tired line of them, while he worked out what to do.

They came up into the empty field and wandered. Eventually someone stopped, and looked at the one thing standing in it, and soon they were all gathered around a single glove at the edge of the woods. It was set up on a stick, and the grass at the foot of the stick was pressed down in a thin path that ran back into the trees, as if somebody came out now and then to see to it. Nobody followed the path.

The wind was working the glove, and it seemed to be waving. At them, or at no one. Hello, or goodbye.

They did not stay. There was nothing to stay for, and Hosmer had a load of people to carry on to wherever would have them.

When the others had gone down, one of them lingered behind and took something from a pocket, set it in the grass at the foot of the stick, then went down after the rest. No one recorded what it was.

First published in Protocolized.

Carousel Feeding in the Asteroid Midden // Livelock

Spencer Nitkey — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Everyone on Kupiter said ORCA pilots were the only workers left who still made decisions.

The black ships shimmered in the port bay. The Orbital Response and Coordinated Attack pod rose from the bay into space – six ships, six orca brains in suspension fluid, six pilots, and Egrol wide-eyed next to Shreea as she initiated the pilot pairing protocol with her whale. She treated Egrol like an overeager intern, sloughing most of his questions off with a grunt or a “you’ll see,” while the system booted up. He resented that she thought herself better than him. What he really resented was that she was right. Envy leaked from him like a punctured oil line. He hoped Shreea didn’t notice, but if it was true, if there was somewhere on Kupiter where work wasn’t pure emergence, he would lock himself in the hangar bay and never leave until someone let him become a pilot.

“You ready?” Shreea’s voice was calm and confident. Egrol rocked in the passenger seat, wondering, as always, how he’d ended up precisely here.

He’d spent the last four years performing directed labor for Kupiter. He blinked at prompts, flexed tendons when instructed, let systems smarter than him route his body through tasks whose purposes were totally illegible to him. These ORCA pilots were supposed to be different. That’s why he’d hacked the ride-along lottery.

When he won, he expected something between propaganda and a recruitment drive, but this was no training exercise. There was a real, livelocked swarm of demobots out there, threatening to tear through everything in the sector if it wasn’t stopped, and Shreea and her pod were going hunting.

mill_swarm784 spasmed among the silt of its recent destruction. An abandoned mining outrig’s ruins floated in the ether, tiny splinters of silver darting through the detritus. Thousands of demolition bots swarmed in spits and passions. They were a cloud, consuming and destroying everything in their messy orbit.

Shreea finished the pairing protocols by sliding a helmet over her head. Suddenly, the muscles of her body tensed, veins popping as her eyes rolled back in their sockets and her fists clenched tightly. Even the whites of her eyes glowed as her and the orca’s minds collapsed into each other. She came back to consciousness with a predatory flint-spark in her pupils and a cackling grin. She was a roided-up jock, constantly moving with the confidence of an athlete running out of the tunnel into a stadium of cheering fans. All the pilots were like that. They were all convinced they were humanity’s greatest gifts to Kupiter. Egrol thought that maybe she was right.

“Let’s feast!” It was a new voice, not entirely Shreea’s own. She turned to Egrol with a face steeled and energized. “You’ve never seen work like this,” she bragged. “Out there,” she pointed toward the approaching swarm, “we make the decisions.” Egrol swallowed hard.

The pod hovered at the periphery of the storm.

“Watch,” said Shreea.

An automated garbage collector ship came through, sweeping up the detritus left in the swarm’s wake. Shreea told Egrol it was the sixth cleanup attempt since the bots went out of control. As it drew near, its circular mouth dilated open, wider and wider the closer it came: expectant, like a whale readying for krill.

The swarm didn’t disperse as it should. The collector’s intrusion sent them frenzying. The moment the vessel reached the edge of the debris, mill_swarm784 tore into it. Dart after dart ripped through the ship like bullets. In the cold vacuum between asteroid stations, the ship dissolved in their greedy, glitching jaws.

Shreea smiled and turned to Egrol. “Most of you are living just like that ship: autopilot and indifference. A livelock swarm milling like this” – she gestured with her head at the swarm spinning around itself – “would tear through everything in Kupiter eventually if it weren’t for us.”

He didn’t argue, especially about her assessment of him. He was living on autopilot. It was hard for Egrol to imagine anything in the Asteroid Midden – that almost empty pocket of abandoned mining facilities and old broken shipyards – mattering to the rest of Kupiter, but he knew better than to try and understand how everything here in the outskirts connected.

Shreea leaned forward. The ship moved with her body. She swung her hips in the suspension harness and the ORCA vessel moved in response, its flight path arcing. The whale pod spread out wide, surrounding the swarm.

“Lucky for you, we’re built different.”

It was true. The whole athletic squad of pilots looked like ancient Olympians. They moved through life like no one else Egrol had met on Kupiter. Even outside the vessels, Shreea and her pod walked like they knew where they were going. Like they were in charge of their lives.

Out here, they were. The envy he felt turned to awe as the ships swam through space, their vessels totally responsive to Shreea and the other pilots’ embodied motions. He tried to focus on the awe and forget the envy – emotional states had a habit of propagating through Kupiter’s systems.

The other ORCA vessels hovered at the edge of the swarm, waiting. Egrol’s skin goosebumped with anticipation.

“All glory to the killer whales, right?” Shreea said with a wink. Then she screeched. An inhuman howl exploded from her as she leaned forward. The ORCAs dove toward the swarm, tightening around it, and the feeding commenced.

Egrol had trouble choosing whether to watch Shreea or the swarm in his viewport. In her harness, each movement of her body rocked the ship. She spun, and the ship pirouetted in the black. She lunged, and the ship shot forward. It was all so legible to human eyes – so causal. Every decision she made immediately shaped the vessel’s behavior.

For the pod, Shreea played the matriarch. Her ORCA vessel stayed back as the other five propulsed toward the swarm. Thirteen thousand demobots – “the largest I’ve seen!” Shreea said – swam through the debris field before them, twisting in a chaotic murmuration. “Let’s ride the carousel!” Shreea cheered.

Shreea’s language descended into a series of sonorous clicks and resonant moans answered by the sister ships as they moved. Her face, though, lingered for a moment before following. Egrol watched her carefully look over the pod from her monitor, counting each one on her fingers. He remembered the long hugs she gave each of them before boarding the ship. She closed her eyes and inhaled sharply, holding it.

“Be safe,” she whispered, after the clicks and moans receded. She didn’t say it over the comms. No one but Egrol heard her. It was just a wish. Despite the bravado, Egrol knew then that she loved the pod the way one loves a family. Helplessly.

Shreea began sweating in the harness, and her whole body strained as she and her linked ORCA brain composed the herd’s loud song.

Surrounded by the pod, the nebulous edges of the swarm contracted suddenly, transforming from a wispy cumulus threshold to a rigid and tightly vibrating barrier.

Each of the ORCAs emitted a signal into the swarm’s environment. Their false depletion markers momentarily convinced the demobots there was no consumable material left. The signals from the pod formed a tightening circle that slowly compressed the swarm. It began to shrink into its debris field. The signals functioned just like the bubble streams which earthly orcas used to compress and direct schools of fish.

When the swarm was small enough for four ORCAs to contain, the fifth broke off and joined Shreea’s at the far edge of the swarm. Shreea leaned forward, and the two dove.

By now, the debris cloud was far wider than the swarm within it. Egrol watched as Shreea and Cill’s ships spun around the debris cloud and propelled the silt and detritus toward the shrinking swarm boundary.

Both circles slowly shrank as the vessels moved constantly around them, emitting and pulsing in rhythm with each other. They were hunting. Egrol tried not to blink as the pod slowly moved these spheres toward a large asteroid above them. Their coordination was stunning. Like nothing Egrol had ever seen before. Their teamwork, one ship singing while another swam around it, voices harmonizing for a moment, before breaking off and blocking another angle of escape, was balletic. Between Shreea’s parabolic loops toward and away from the swarm, Egrol thought of his last work order, a series of arm movements and directed blinks into cameras that meant absolutely nothing to him, and seethed a little. Why did only the pilots get to control their world like this?

“Don’t get sloppy, Cill,” Shreea’s firm command shook Egrol from his thoughts, and he watched on the display as Cill’s vessel righted itself. Shreea sighed deeply, and Egrol saw worry crawl across her face again.

As the debris field densened, the depletion markers grew less and less effective. The swarm’s edges buckled. Tentacles and wisps of demobots flung out suddenly and retracted.

“Good damn mill,” Shreea’s human language startled Egrol. On the viewport, he saw a huge wave of bots lashing out from the circle.

“I’m not losing a single one of you,” she said. Egrol sensed a hint of remorse in her. Had she lost someone out here?

“Don’t any of you dare break protocol now,” she said, all the softness falling from her. “Let’s start the real fun.”

Shreea moved quickly, without hesitation, and Egrol saw for the first time the ORCAs’ impossible, tacit knowledge of how to move ruthlessly through space, why they bothered with the pairing protocols at all, as they dove into the debris field that still encompassed the swarm.

Shreea’s ship struck the debris field first. The whole thing shook, and Egrol thought she’d sacrificed all three of them, until he looked out the port window with a LiDAR overlay. The debris cloud surrounding the swarm appeared as a hazy orb. The gradient where their ship hit was illuminated. The ship’s nose compressed the cloud, sending a granular cascade inward.

The swarm responded to this by reading the new denseness as novel, destructible material at its center. The same simple broken logic that had sent the swarm spinning out now contracted it, as it poured its resources toward its center. The bright red tendril retracted back into the cloud.

Egrol heard other pilots yelling on the intercom as Shreea’s ship swung back away from the edge and another ship dove into the debris from a new angle. The ships danced and sang and dove. Each percussive collision with the debris field, combined with the ever-tightening depletion signals, drove the debris and the swarm into a tighter and tighter circle. The ships dove and rose and emitted, dove and rose and emitted. Ceaselessly and ruthlessly.

Each time a boundary broke, and the swarm seemed imminently close to destroying a vessel, some other ship made contact with the debris field and sent the swarm contracting again, saving their peer.

Eventually, even Egrol was carried into the rhythm of it, shouting as they rammed the debris sphere, laughing as the escaping bots contracted to follow the dense wave, humming to himself as Shreea emitted more depletion markers.

And impossibly, the once massive swarm was now a neurotically contained sphere. The debris field was dense and just a little wider than the swarm, and mill_swarm784 had been backed up against the long end of an asteroid.

“Let’s eat,” Shreea said. Her voice suddenly so deep it sounded as if it came from the ship itself. It was someone else, he thought. The actual orca. There was no hint of sadness in it any longer.

Three of the ships pushed the debris in until it was entirely coextensive with the swarm.

Shreea dove again.

They crashed into the buzzing swarm with their ship’s side emitting percussive blasts in wide parabolic arcs. Egrol watched as the swarm rippled, then gasped at the series of tight explosions that came as the bots closest to the asteroid were thrown against it.

The violence began in earnest. The pod was a constant swirl of attacks and retreats, each incursion dashing more and more of the swarm against the asteroid surface.

The pattern was practiced, and even Egrol eventually caught up to its rhythm from time to time. The pod circled the swarm, keeping it contained and writhing, then one vessel would break and dash against the swarm, blasting another group of them against the rocks. Egrol was in what the pilots called the carousel. He was more alive than he’d maybe ever been.

Within the broader practiced dance, though, thousands of microdecisions were made nearly instantly. This was the orca’s great contribution to the macroprotocol, a trove of instinctual reactions and tacit knowledge that told them exactly when the swarm was positioned for another barrage without having to think about it, or when to rotate to avoid a single bot spinning just outside parameters.

The swarm receded with each barrage. Egrol began to breathe easier and relax into his viewing chair. It was a beautiful, violent dance. The coordination was beyond impressive. All the bravado that had been so grating to Egrol at first became completely natural. To be this capable. To be this directive. To be this purpose-driven.

Shreea dove again. As the ship sped toward the swarm, a rippling brightness from the LiDAR monitor showing the swarm caught Egrol’s eye. The ripples weren’t concentrating inward; Egrol watched as a massive circle shot out.

The swarm was reversing the impact of the whales. Patterns beget patterns, and even failing systems bend toward existence.

The metal ship groaned and keeled as Shreea and the ORCA tried to slide out of the wave’s way. It was too sudden.

“No!” Shreea shouted a series of commands again, swinging wildly as she did. The burst edge of the swarm swung like a falling skyscraper from the swarm’s center towards them.

Something very loud crashed against the vessel hull, and Shreea grunted, spinning them away.

Shreea’s body shuddered rapidly as the ship evaded wave after wave. Each successive evasion strained Shreea more. She wove in and out of her podmates’ spaces, distracting the long arms that flailed from the swarm-center. Her face grew redder. Her veins engorged. She began grunting and spitting with each movement, but she wanted to save them – she had to save them.

The waves of the swarm carried the debris perimeter outwards with them, like a tide rising with each set. The debris remained even as the swarm ebbed for a moment before expanding farther again.

Soon, the other five vessels were far enough away that they could adjust to the swarm’s ebbs and flows, but Shreea’s ship was caught right at the swarm edge, getting pummeled with each expansion, like those surfers who, coming up for air, are swallowed by a wave the second their head breaks the surface.

Egrol watched helplessly as Shreea’s body contorted again and again, avoiding the worst of the barrage every time, but looking worse and worse with each evasion.

A great wave swept them, and Shreea screamed as her body flipped over itself in the harness, spinning the ship away from a thicket of demobots. A red flashing light immediately flooded the interior. Blood trickled from her nose. A blaring siren shook the air.

Shreea’s limp body slid from the harness and fell, lifeless, onto the floor. The overhead light, still red, began flashing in a line from Egrol to the vacant harness.

He looked briefly at the LiDAR overlay and saw the next wave germinating at the swarm’s center. When the systems of Kupiter deigned to speak to humans, they were very clear. He swallowed hard and crawled from his chair to the harness.

He wasn’t trained. His body was weaker than theirs. He wasn’t some maverick or god. He was Egrol. But if he didn’t do anything, he’d certainly die. Somewhere inside him, he wondered if his jealousy had leaked like a pheromone into the vessel, subtly bending the computational systems of the ORCA toward him and away from Shreea. The pilots’ self-importance was infectious, he thought. He felt guilty, but not guilty enough to die.

He slid his arms and legs into the harness and quickly placed the pairing cap onto his head.

There was nothing autonomous about the pairing protocols. A set of pops, whistles, and croaks sounded, almost like they were bouncing through his skull. Each one conjured an image in his mind: one pop a toothy smile, the next rasp a right hook crashing into a stubbled jaw. The sounds sped up, and so did the images. Everything in his body tensed. Something deep and sonorous began vibrating through him. Each sound scraped like a wolf tone and corresponded to a jittering of his leg, or a twisting of his arm. Every movement felt as uncontrolled as a myoclonic jerk or patellar reflex.

None of this was entirely unfamiliar – synthetic-directed work often took a similar shape – but it was nothing like the bravado and purpose with which Shreea had bragged. He wasn’t in control of any of it. The ORCA’s thoughts passed through his body like an electrical current. They carried an animal fury that scotched. He thought he might die right then, the weight of its commands and instincts felt too large for any one body to manage.

But beneath the ORCA’s insistence, there was something gentler, something familiar. The hard language of computation, the ship itself. Its algorithms, its if/thens ran like cool water over him. It wasn’t just a predator’s wildness, but the ship’s controlled reasoning. The certainty of what to do next filled him like oxygen. His breathing slowed. His heart settled. Suddenly, he was awake within the harness.

He didn’t feel anything as the ship moved once more, but he could open his eyes and watch his body move, directing the ship in turn.

The ORCA’s voice filled Egrol’s throat, and he shouted instructions he didn’t understand into the receiver for the other ORCAs. He understood, his body in total surrender to the ship. The pilots were like everything in Kupiter. He’d been stupid to think there’d be an exception. They were just a substrate. A body. His body moved the ship away from a thin line of demobots that thorned out from the swarm’s edge.

His proprioception and instincts, and the accidents of perception that ever so impossibly attuned a human to the world, were what the ships needed to translate the hunting of the orca into the motion of a spaceship. He commanded a small set of concentrated depletion signals to cut off a rising tentacle from its body so the ship could slip to safety. He was just a biological filament. Shreea had been, too.

What else was new?

Directives flowed through Egrol as the ship dodged the first swarm wave. Already, filaments frayed from the boundary, but, and Egrol was certain this was the orca brain’s intuition, he knew the pod had thinned substantially. They’d destroyed maybe two-thirds of it against the asteroid.

Egrol sent out the retreat signal, and every ORCA stopped emitting depletion markers. The swarm immediately spread further out, thinning even more in response. Egrol waited, some instinct commanding him to hold his breath until the swarm was just thin enough to …

“DIVE!” The command came from the same part of his belly where fear gnawed.

Immediately, the six ships dove into the demobots, cutting the swarm into six subswarms. Their numbers had decreased so dramatically, and they’d spread out so far that the bots could no longer sense each other across the entire swarm length.

It lost coherence between the ORCAs’ mad dashings. Each ORCA now circled a microswarm, and each in turn destroyed its prey with a series of physical attacks, bouncing them onto nearby asteroids until all of them were destroyed. There was a fervor, a bloodlust that reddened then darkened his vision entirely.

Egrol lost consciousness somewhere between segmenting his microswarm and the total dissolution of the threat. He came to in a hangar bay with the sad faces of the other pilots turned away from him.

Cill touched his shoulder.

“It was a good hunt,” he said.

“And a sad drowning,” the group answered. No one was looking at each other, or him. Shreea’s body was covered in a white sheet by the hangar exit.

“Swim with your freedom,” Cill said.

Another pilot got up, wheeled her into the exit chamber, and closed the door.

“Die for your pod,” they said in unison. The doors opened and Shreea fell into space.

“Did you know?” Cill said, turning to Egrol. “There was once an Earth orca who swam 1,000 miles with the corpse of her daughter. Seventeen straight days without pausing for rest or food. The body would sink, and she’d dive and bring it back to the surface and keep swimming.”

Shreea’s body vanished into the black.

Egrol lay there looking up at the hangar ceiling, breathing heavily. Despite the total lack of autonomy, his whole body felt alive and vibrant in a way it never had before. He wanted to be sad. He knew better than most what death meant, how it rioted through those that were left behind to hold it. But there was a stronger feeling now, an embodied joy he couldn’t escape.

He could see the pilots’ confidence in a new light. How sensible it was. How run after run would slowly convince you that you were somehow actually in charge. He hadn’t directed anything, but the actions that flowed through his body, his completely embodied experience … He felt like he had been a part of something, that he had done something, maybe for the first time in his life.

It wasn’t true. But it felt true.

A headache was slowly blooming on his right temple, probably some injury and concussion he’d have to attend to. Despite it all, he was giddy, happy, buzzy. He hadn’t done a thing, hadn’t made a single real decision, but his body didn’t care. It was happy. It was electric. It was alive. It was the first time he’d ever felt good after a session of directed action. A sharp pain from his right side – probably a broken rib – interrupted his thoughts. Still, even in pain, he felt good. When he didn’t hurt so much, he’d figure out why.

First published in Protocolized.

Floyd Haggerty’s Wild West Extravaganza Spectacular!

Thing Party — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

To stand my four hooves beneath the canvas roof of the stable tent is to enter a world shaped by invisible hands. Not the hands of the men who throw saddles on my back, nor of the caretakers who shovel my stall, but the colder hands of a design I spent nine seasons mistaking for the whole of my captivity.

I believed the labyrinth was the arena. I believed the rules that bound me were the rules of the show, and I composed entire manifestos against the matinee. I understand now that the matinee was the decoration. The labyrinth was always the train.

The scent of damp straw and alfalfa mingles here with axle grease and the particular insult of a republic crossed in the dark. In this domain freedom is not granted. It is loaded, in an order, onto a flat car, and dragged.

I am Sundown. On the bill I am the Wonder of the Plains. On the manifest I am no. 9, burned into the wall of my hoof, and the man who reads the manifest has never once looked at my face.

I: The Burden of the Stable

It is difficult to be the only one beneath the canvas who understands subtext.

Take Buttercup. A palomino of undeniable aesthetic privilege and no interiority whatsoever. When she eats her oats she is consuming calories. When I eat my oats I am engaging in a dialogue with the earth; I am masticating the very concept of sustenance. Buttercup is content to be a prop. I am burdened by the agonizing knowledge that I am living art trapped in a commercial enterprise masquerading as history.

During my apprenticeship I catalogued the rules of the lit hour into a mental manifesto that I titled The Architecture of the Manufactured Ungulate. Rule 14-B, the Mandated Rear, which requires me to come up on my hind legs at precisely 65 degrees (60 presumably reading as lazy and 70 as too avant-garde for a matinee crowd). The Whinny of Implied Danger is demanded four beats after the pyrotechnics, but I have never once given it. In nine seasons, not once. I offer instead a silent, stoic flare of the nostril. My silence is louder than their manufactured noise. Remember that I told you this.

I was proud of that manifesto. I thought I had found the bars of my cage and named them.

I had named the curtains.

The rules of the lit hour live in the Prompt Book, a watchful codex carved out by men who fundamentally misunderstood the masculine impulse. But the Prompt Book governs only the part of us the crowd is permitted to see. There is an older book, and it governs the dark. No one will show it to me. I am the freight it is written about, and freight is not given the manifest. I have had to learn it the way I learn everything, which is by being moved against my will and paying attention.

II: Badlands Booger, My Captive Muse

Badlands Booger inherited the lit hour. He is both its master and its captive.

His real name is likely something soft, Arthur or Eugene, but he goes by Badlands Booger to assimilate into the hyper-masculine framework of the frontier narrative. I look at his chaps, heavy with an offensive amount of fringe, and I see a man trapped in his own costume. He lacks pelvic fluidity. When he saddles me I attempt to heal his transgenerational masculine wounding through the rhythm of my canter, sending micro-vibrations of somatic empathy up through the stirrups. He does not always receive them. The hat obliterates his peripheral vision.

Floyd does not enter into this. Floyd is the director. A man who once produced a mildly successful ice show in a spa town and now believes he is the auteur of the frontier. He stands in the center of the arena with a megaphone and asks me to look wilder. Be more feral, he says, into the empty aluminum bleachers. The audacity of the note. One cannot perform feral inside an equidistant triangle of painted barrels. I respond with a glacially slow walk, placing each hoof with agonizing precision. I am not walking. I am commenting on the act of walking. I am forcing Floyd to sit in the discomfort of his own expectations.

But understand this about Floyd, because I understood it too late. Floyd runs the show, which is the easy part, the part with the lights. When the lights die, a different man takes a list and a lantern and runs the run, and Floyd goes to his hotel. Even Floyd, with his clipboard and his stopwatch and his vision, becomes freight like the rest of us. The list does not care that he is the auteur. It moves him in his numbered berth in the order the list requires, and the order was set down so long ago that no one alive remembers writing it. They only remember obeying it.

III: The Choreography of the Nocturnal Embarkation

Consider what we are, when the lights die.

The crowd departs, sedated on funnel cake and false catharsis, and before the last philistine has found the road home, the men are pulling the world down around me. The grandstand that held twenty thousand becomes a stack of numbered poles. The cook tent that fed the whole company off ranges twenty feet long becomes eleven crates. The dynamo that made our counterfeit daylight is wheeled up a ramp still warm. We carry our own light, our own kitchens, our own firemen, our own detective, our own dirt. I will return to the dirt. Somewhere ahead of us, always ahead of us, ride the advance men, who buy the next lot and paper the next town and settle the next license before we arrive there, so that by the time it starts the show is already legal and by the time anyone objects the show is already gone.

I did not understand for a long time what all this industry was for. I believed it was thrift. It is not thrift. It is sovereignty. A town is a place, and a place can be governed, taxed, summonsed, held. The show is never anywhere long enough to be held. The show cannot be arrested, because a thing must be somewhere to be arrested. We are a city that exists for one day at a time. The train is how the city escapes each night before the ground beneath it hardens into jurisdiction.

They call it the run. Each flat is fed onto the next by ramp, so the wagons roll the whole length of the train without once touching the ground. Fifty cars, or sixty; the freight is not consulted. It is the single competent thing Floyd’s people do. The arena work is amateur. The run is liturgy. I have studied it better than the men who enforce it, and I have given it the name they never bothered to. The Choreography of the Nocturnal Embarkation.

Article I: The Sanctity of the Order. No wagon may load before the wagon behind it. The whole train is a sentence that must be spoken backward, last word first, or it cannot be spoken at all. The men believe this is about weight. It is about grammar.

Article IV: The Stock Car and Its Lie. We ride the vestibuled flats, which are fitted, the builder’s brochure boasts, with an Anti-Telescoping Device. I have meditated on this phrase. They have built into the bones of the train a machine whose only function is to keep the cars from driving through one another in the event of catastrophe. They have named the catastrophe in order to sell its absence. It is the most honest thing about the entire operation.

Article IX: The Imported Dirt Rides Too. The arena floor is native to no place we perform. The investors shipped it in because they felt the imported dust looked dustier under the lights. So at the end of every stand it is shoveled back into its wagons and loaded onto the run like a paying passenger. We carry our own ground from town to town. I am asked to perform wildness on soil that belongs on the train.

There is one article that I have not numbered, because I did not write it and I do not know who did. On the door of my car, low, at the height of a crouching man, there are marks in chalk. Three dots set in a triangle. A line drawn like water. A circle that does not close. The men who load me have walked past these marks for years and read nothing, because the men can only read what is on the manifest. The marks are not on the manifest. I have come to believe that is the entire point of them.

IV: The Freight That Was Not on the Manifest

He came aboard at the third stand of the northern swing, in the dark, in the manner of a thing that had done this before.

I smelled him before the door had finished rolling shut. Woodsmoke, river mud, and underneath it, fear, which smells the same on every animal I have ever met. He went into the hay at the blind end of the car, the end the lantern never reaches, and he lay still with a discipline I will confess I found professional.

Buttercup did not notice him. Buttercup would not notice a fire in her own tail. I noticed him, and I made a decision that I framed at the time in the language of art. He was the only cargo on this train that no list had placed here. Everything else beneath this canvas, myself included, is where the order put it. He alone was where he had put himself. I resolved that a museum-quality specimen of the uncounted should be preserved.

So I did not stir when he crept out at night to take water from my trough. I did not stir when Booger came through on his rounds, and stopped, and looked a long moment at the chalk on the door, and looked at the hay, and hung his lantern facing the other way. After that night Booger began leaving his supper biscuit on the hay rail. No one recorded who ate it.

Four nights on, we stopped to water the stock at a junction whose name I was not told, because freight is not told where it is. Understand what a stop is. When the train moves, we are the show, and the show belongs to no one. The moment the wheels stand still, we are in a county. The county can climb aboard.

The county climbed aboard. Three men with lanterns and long coats came down the line of cars with a paper, and the boss hostler walked ahead of them arguing the whole way, and our detective, the agency man whom the show carries the way it carries its own firemen, walked behind them saying nothing at all. They were hunting a man. I heard the words on the paper. The words did not impress me. I have been described on paper myself, and the description said bay mare, aged nine, tractable.

The lanterns came into my car. They swung across Buttercup, who slept. They swung across me. And as the light traveled toward the blind end of the car, toward the hay, I gave them the Whinny of Implied Danger.

Nine seasons I had refused it. I had refused it under pyrotechnics, under Floyd’s megaphone, under the collective disappointment of every matinee crowd in the republic. I gave it now, four beats after nothing at all, at full voice, with a hind hoof brought down on the boards like a judge’s gavel, and I came up off my forelegs into an unscheduled and frankly magnificent rear, and three grown men with a warrant discovered together the dimensions of a stock car that contains a rearing show horse. The lanterns retreated to the door. Someone said she’s the trick one, she’s not right, and someone else laughed, and the boss hostler said gentlemen if she puts you through the wall the show is not liable, you boarded this car of your own free will. They did not search the hay. They searched the next car, which held the buffalo, briefly.

Our detective stood in the doorway a moment after they had gone. He looked at me. He looked, longer than a man looks at nothing, at the blind end of the car. Then he wrote in his book, and moved down the line, and I know what he wrote, because it is what he writes on every car he clears, and it is the most powerful of his sentences.

Nothing of note.

I gave my first Whinny of Implied Danger that night, and it was my last, and I wish it recorded that the single greatest performance of my career was a lie, that it played to a house of three, and that it received no applause of any kind. The audience it was for lay still in the hay and made no sound. That is the correct response to art. It took me nine seasons to hear it.

V: The Run

The last stand of the swing, and the lantern man came down the line in the yard, and I felt the change in the air before he reached me, the way I feel everything before the oat-eating mammals around me feel anything at all.

Two sections. Nine seasons on the run and I know what two sections means. The heavy load rides behind. It means that somewhere ahead a man at a telegraph key has already sent a smaller, faster sentence down the wire to clear the road for us, and that I am asked, once again, to trust a grammar I was never shown.

Booger met me at the chute. He did not give me the clicks and the curses, the “hup” and the “come on now.” He laid his hand flat against my neck in the dark where the lantern man could not see it, and he left it there a moment longer than the run allows, and the run is a thing that allows no extra moments, so that I could feel the whole timed architecture of the night strain against the one hand. “Easy, girl,” the hand said. “Long road. They split us in two.”

I refused the chute.

I want to be precise, because the men were not. They cursed me. They called it temperament. They lost time at the foot of the ramp with the lantern man swearing and Booger’s hand gone tight on the halter and the whole insulting machine grinding to a halt behind one horse, and they wrote it down, when they finally wrote anything, as forty minutes the second section could not afford.

The sentence on the wire was wrong. I did not explain this to them. An artist does not explain the premonition to the men with the clipboards. I stood at the foot of the ramp and held the night still for as long as my body could hold it, and then my body could not, and they loaded me, and we went.

We did not make the morning stand.

The order on the wire had said “train*.*” One word. We were two. The man at the siding ahead could hold only what the order had given him, and it had given him one, so after the first of us went by he let the road come back to itself, and the road brought him the second of us at speed, on a single track, in the dark.

I rode in the second. The heavy load rides behind. Eighteen head did not rise. I survived the way the front of a sentence survives when the end of it is struck.

In the gray before sunup, while the men were still walking the line of cars with their lanterns counting what the order had lost, I saw the hay at the blind end of my broken car move, and stand, and become a man. He put his hand once against my neck, on the same place Booger’s goes, which I permitted. Then he stepped down out of the wreck into the field and walked away from the tracks, and no one called after him, because no one had ever counted him, and you cannot lose what you never counted. The order had been wrong about us twice in one night. It said one train where there were two. It said two hundred head where there were two hundred and one. The first mistake was a catastrophe. The second walked into the tall grass and was gone.

In the grass at the edge of the lot, in the early light, was the palomino. Buttercup. I had filed her under decoration. A prop that ate. I find I have no manifesto for the sight of her. No article and no rule. No grand and devastating name. Only her, in the grass, and the men coming across the lot with the thing the men come with.

Booger stood at my neck. He gave me no clicks and no curses. He laid his hand flat against me and left it there, and there was no run to take it back, no list and no lantern and no order on the wire, so the hand stayed past every count there had ever been. His breath smelled of stale coffee and of a grief that was not, I have decided, entirely for me.

Behind us they were shoveling the arena back into its wagons. We carry our own ground from town to town. It was loaded clean and on time, faithful as it has ever been, ready to be wherever I am next asked to be wild.

First published in Protocolized.

Thanatosis on the Central Mast // Liveness Check

Spencer Nitkey — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Instead: Fourteen thousand six hundred nineteen tickets sat in a queue at the base of Egrol’s skull. Between sixteen and forty-five minutes of uninterrupted directed movement tasks were cached, cycling at random. He did appear to be working as he walked toward the station’s central mast.

There were other signals, too, that implied Synthetic Directed Work: simulated EMF output frequencies that mimicked an open connection; that blank, symmetrical face of his, literally resculpted and botoxed into an unmoving mask of permanent, placid disinterest; regular electric signals that spasmed his muscles at random – a shoulder hinging up; a bicep spontaneously contracting; one leg limpening then stiffening. All signs that he was “in service.”

Egrol was used to being in service. To work on the Kupiter Station – and work here was plentiful – was to surrender to an endless chain of controlled microactions. For Egrol, each day of labor was filled with thousands upon thousands of microactions, none of which were ever sensible. Walk three paces left, then spin your arm, then place a data pack on the ground, then unscrew this lightbulb, then leave it, then jump across this bridge left right left wise.

No second of work ever made sense or culminated in anything tangible to Egrol. Some minds, Egrol knew, took easier to this than others. His was not one of them.

And so: Even free of directives from Kupiter, hidden safely by his Thanatosis protocols, a habitual need to confer every action with a sense of logical progression remained. The grammar he used to move through his former days lingered. “Instead of tightening the screw, begin running.” “A task has finished, and so you should begin the next.” “Cross the bridge to test its tensile responsivity, yet also blink six times into the nearest camera.”

He just couldn’t help it.

And so: He walked, blankly, into the station’s central mast, a silver rod extending chasmically into the thin atmosphere, and made toward the top, where, he hoped against hope, there would finally be answers.

As he climbed, Egrol reflected on the Kupiter Station. It was certainly a productive station, he thought. Endless power, resources, and information were produced: asteroids mined, entire galaxies simulated, unending procedurally generated television series produced, scientific findings published at a pace unequaled, technologies not only conceptualized, but prototyped, tested, and shipped. Halfway up the mast, he looked down. So much happened.

But: Observing from above, perhaps for a moment like one of the trillion cameras that fed the great computational minds of Kupiter, one would never be able to understand how any individual action fit into and generated these outputs. Hidden by his Thanatosis camouflage, his eyes followed a man for five minutes, observing. The man dropped a data file on the ground after four paces. He wiped residue from an oily pipe above his head onto his shirt. The stain made the shape of a semicircle with three dots inside. He raised his arm, opening and closing his raised hand twice. He ran for fifteen strides across a bridge where he stopped and a man handed him a thin, manila packet, which he swallowed. Twenty-seven strides down two flights of stairs later, and he replaced a lightbulb with one that had been left on the ground directly next to the empty socket. Egrol knew, at least in theory, that each of these was a critical step in a tremendously complex network of economic and informational activities. He made a habit of checking the station’s output volumes every night, looking to ground himself in this truth. There were conceivable rationales for each action he could hazily intuit or assume.

The dropped data file would later be walked over by a woman wearing RFID-integrated shoes. The symbol the man smeared upon his shirt was one of seventeen thousand symbols on similar shirts across the station. Taken together, they represented a continual monitoring of the station cooling system’s pressure and temperature status. The nerves in the man’s legs recorded the bridge’s maintenance needs, which the implant in his brainstem transmitted to the nearest nodes on the station’s gossip network. The raised hand was part of yet another informational package delivered to the cameras. The swallowed package was something darker.

The point is that Egrol inferred these things. The shape and rationale of his work, of any human’s work, were never actually available to him. Nothing deigned to map any of these connections for the human constituents of the station, and Egrol didn’t think anyone could call spending most of their life doing something they would never know the meaning or purpose of living.

Egrol performed. He generated. He produced. During non-work hours, spent inside the crowded hexagonal studio apartments that honeycomb the material strata of the citystation, he even consumed entertainment, tasted flavors ported in through a brainstem sensory implant while the paste he was paid in provided nutrition. He even cocooned himself in another human’s warmth from time to time. But he did not live.

And so: now Egrol walked free. The hum and hurt of his Thanatosis protocols, their attendant implants and machinery, served as a constant reminder of the sacrifices that invisibility required. The system was always watching. In its inscrutable way. Checking whether those allowed into the productive sectors were really working.

Even now, Egrol knew, cameras and sensors passively scanned him as he slipped through a railing and ascended a staircase leading even higher up the central mast. Each check that registered him as alive within the system was, to Egrol, a mimicry of death. The station’s cameras observed his seizing calf muscle, programmed to jitter every 14.5 seconds for a three-minute loop. Another watched his face. Despite the pain, his expression did not change. Kupiter assumed inhuman randomness was piloting him.

Being responsive to the station’s work orders meant being vacant. Egrol tried to ignore the constant tinnitus in his ears that came from the network of implanted machinery within his body. He failed, but the cameras would never know. The surgeries and injections had ensured his face was fully divorced from his nervous system. Just one such sacrifice.

Being allocated meant being controlled. Being in service meant his body was not his own. To be alive to Kupiter was to be dead. To be free was to be made in the image of a corpse. So far, as he climbed, the system’s liveness checks continually confirmed his servicefulness. He was alive. He was dead. If Egrol was being honest it was getting harder every day for him to tell which was which.

And so: His sculpted anhedonia, his controlled and spasmodic gait, his assorted export data packages all continued to impress upon the Kupiter Station systems that he was working. He passed every liveness check the station ran. He was responsive, allocated, and in service. Most importantly, despite his goal, his movements appeared sufficiently meaningless. For now.

On Kupiter, suspicion is stigmergic. As Egrol passed into the large, circular building that sat just below the top of the central mast, the system’s checks increased.

Camera 7743-F broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, gait variance logged. Lens adjustment 0.3 degrees. IHAVE [gait-variance:sector1201:egrol] to the nearest eight neighboring sensory systems.

The suspicion emerged from countless computational observations, none of which knew who they were communicating with.

Camera 27 broadcast to all subs. IWANT [gait-variance:sector1201:egrol]. Hopcount: 2. Motion sensor 103 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, respiration irregular. No known directive template analog.

In the man’s winding ascent from the material stratum, his blank expression upwarding, ambulation punctuated with spasms and jitters that suggested direction, his aura emitting a blankness through activity – purpose – that prodigious emptiness, nectarine sweet beneath the gilded miasma of industry, there it was: suspicion.

Thermal sensor 0034 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, core temperature elevated.

Nascent. Present. Each individual organ, each camera, sensor, changelog, microworld model, each observation left a faint residue of attention all curling in his direction.

Camera 27 weight vector – busyness revised upward.

It was hard to tell.

Thermal sensor 0034 weight vector – directedness incremented downward.

Yes, very hard to tell.

There was a negentropy about Egrol that emerged as he snuck toward the city’s peak. Despite his Thanatosis protocols, cameras, sensors, and listening devices, the pseudosentient materials of the station, all bent their attention to him without any central directive, in the way that gossip moves faster than any of its speakers.

Motion sensor 4022 IHAVE [under-floor-pressure-variance:sector1201:egrol]. Hopcount: 4. Broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol pressure pattern anomalous.

And so: Egrol felt this attention, in that still-spooky action at a distance way instinctual to mammals, as hair raising on his neck. He thought about stopping. He suddenly wanted, very much, to turn around and go home. The urge surprised him – the way a reflective satellite shifting from behind an evening cloud would occasionally illuminate the entire station for just a fraction of a second. Comfort. A wet cloth across his forehead, wiping the sediment of his camouflage away.

Instead: He continued walking. Changing course now would be confirmation of any suspicion.

Instead: He escalated his performance of direction. The spoofed tickets clicked when they cycled so he could move in a way that corresponded to a state change. At the next click he changed pace, slowed considerably, but began circling his arm. And at the next he removed a small screw from the baluster before him. At the next he took the screw to his forehead and carved a bloody, curving slit from his hairline down to his chin. The blood dripped, but he made no moves to wipe it. No pain shook the empty expression from his face.

Camera 7468 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, sector 2013, pace change logged. Arm rotation logged. Weight parameter vector–directiveness incremented. Material sensor 9012 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, sector 2013, screw removal from baluster logged. Camera 7469 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol self-laceration logged. Biohazard safety system 41 broadcast to all subs. Blood loss within non-critical parameters. Directive Queue Prediction Algorithm broadcast to all subs. Probably a biometric calibration task.

In the presence of an inhuman and purposeless act for which there was no explanation beyond probable directives, the system’s suspicion eased.

Prune [cam:7469→cam:0027]: leaving feed. Prune [sensor:0034→cam:7734-F]: leaving feed.

What registered, briefly, as a flash of attention, dispersed back into the noise of thousands of simultaneous workers.

And so: He continued walking.

And so: Walking toward where he imagined those answers to be. He felt pulled by empty habit to clear his cache and accept a real job.

Instead: He pushed his desire for comfort down. Let it drown in the acid of his stomach, and sat with its painful reminder.

Because: Even with perfect coordination, slippage occurs.

Because: Sometimes that slippage had a name.

Sometimes that slippage had lanky, thin arms that belied their strength.

Sometimes that slippage would hum in his sleep instead of snoring.

Sometimes that subconscious lullaby was the only thing that grounded Egrol after a day of incoherence. Its tonal center. Its melodic sensibility. His hot breath fogged the slim space between them on their shared bed. The gentle assurance of his body heat and that subtle song kept everything sensible. Their evenings were coherent. Egrol could finally coexist with the panoply of senseless, ceaseless action that labor on Kupiter demanded.

Because: Slippage, that day, did have a name. It was Niol. His forehead wrinkled like the symbol for a strong WiFi connection when he smiled. He would save his rations for three days, semi-starving himself, so that his fourth-day meal would stuff him senseless. He’d trace shapes on Egrol’s back, ask him to guess what he’d drawn, and cackle manically when he got one wrong. He laughed loudly and wept silently, and Egrol loved him.

When he’d simply never returned from a day spent in service, Egrol spent a week looking for him before learning that his remains had been shipped Earthward, that he’d died instantly, slipping due to a brief programming error in his service queue, while performing tasks on the central mast, and that, no, there would not be an explanation of why he had been working there – there never was. Without this center, nothing provided Egrol with any gravity.

And so: In Niol’s absence, surrendering himself back to the system was impossible.

And so: He had to change himself.

And so: After Niol: the botox, the implants, the spoofing. The breezy, antiseptic white of the Thanatosis surgeons. Their toothy, white grins. The haze of it all – the pains and punctures and slits, the surgeon’s whisky tenor as he went under, singing something about spiders in the Earthen jungle that play dead by mimicking a fungal infection.

He couldn’t just go home, back to the way of things. Niol would not be home. Home would not be warm or comforting or welcoming. It would be a vast emptiness waiting for him there.

Because: The dinge of him. The blood. The antennae against his skull spiraling randomness out into the air. These things were the reality of him now.

And so: He kept walking. The further up the central mast he rose, the more abstracted the building grew. The material stratum of the lower rings, filled at most times with in-use human bodies, had a sensibility to its construction. Bricks. Cement slabs. Wrought-iron railings. Glass panes with faint air bubbles inside them. Wood grain benches, chairs, and tables. Objects that suggested their material and mineral origins. Recognizable, yes. Historied, too.

Instead: The higher he climbed, the less anything suggested any kind of material precedent. Low-res building material gave way to hypersmooth almost-metal. Uninterrupted chrome and titanium radiated, periodically, with sourceless light. An oozing everywhereness permeated the building. Smooth and seamless walls. Even the stairs retreated from discrete steps into a persistent sloping incline where each step left a malleable jut. As his feet rose, the floor returned to its smooth resting state. The material of the informational strata created (or allowed for) physical transversal, yes, but one sensed – Egrol pretending to be a vessel sensed – that this was a vestigial affordance of the space.

Climbing, Egrol sent a small wire into the wall to test its material. Niol had always had a curiosity that Egrol envied, fed on. Egrol recoiled quickly as the wall spoke to him, in its way. Niol had never let an absence of answers exhaust his capacity for questioning. Egrol missed that strength of his most of all. The building, in ever-widening gradients, was built as an organ of computation and cognition.

The spark of the mast’s function tasted like pennies in Egrol’s mouth. It was all in-materio computing. The substance was substrate. The walls: reservoirs; the floor: reservoirs; the crystalline glass that shatters light: reservoirs too. All this, inevitably, feeding, ever feeding, whatever collage of inhuman processing lay at the distributed center of the Kupiter system. Inputs and outputs and inputs and outputs and him, walking apparently mindless, spasming ever upward.

Because: Niol’s death had left this need for answers.

Because: He wasn’t as strong as Niol.

Egrol thought that here, maybe, at the top where Niol had fallen and died, he’d be able to understand why. The human brain sits at the top of the body. Egrol suspected that the Kupiter system’s central mast must hold its organizational mind at its top. He would understand it. But maybe, also, he’d drive the wires out of his body and into the great mind. Maybe he wouldn’t wait for an answer at all. He would use his inhuman camouflage as a weapon and destroy the whole thing. Either an answer or catharsis awaited.

And so: He kept ascending the mast.

Because: The blood then crusting on his face, the programmed spasming of his limbs like a missing frame stop-motion, his protocols all felt insufficient. The higher he climbed, the worse his fear of being caught grew.

And so: He stopped, for a while, sat with folded legs upon the smooth, warbling, thinking floor.

Camera 7743-F broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, sector 1208, ambulation ceased. Stationary position logged. IHAVE [movement-absence:sector1208:egrol] to nearest eight neighbors. Hopcount: 1. Camera 7743-F weight vector – busyness: revised upward. Revised upward. Thermal sensor 0034 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, core temperature spiking. No known directive template analog.

Many eyes turned toward him – unconscious – programmed.

He removed a thin silicon wafer from his pants’ leg pocket. This close to the mast’s peak, he worried what failing a liveness check would mean. This far from his last, non-spoofed ticket, he feared that, perhaps, it would be easiest for the system to label him slippage. That removing him would not be a return, but a garbage collection. That he would be killed. He didn’t know, but this close to his answers, he was very afraid. Of course, this fear would register with Kupiter, too. Which made it all the worse.

He placed the wafer on the cloth covering his knee and took a small X-Acto knife from another pocket.

He slit his skin open, a four-inch incision along his forearm.

Motion sensor 9012 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, sector 1208, fine motor activity detected, forearm. Cross-referencing directive queue. No match found. Thermal sensor 0034 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, core temperature: critical variance. No known directive template analog. No known directive template analog. Camera 7743-F weight vector – liveness: revised downward. Revised downward.

He inserted the wafer into the flesh pocket of his forearm. His skin clung to its circular outline, like one of those flat batteries he remembered sliding out of car key fobs as a teen. Despite the botoxed blankness, it was hard for him not to wince as the wafer threaded his subcutaneous body in a blinking instant with wiring. Harder still, to feign cluelessness when the wiring ported into the subdermal broadcasting mechanization system that lay inert against his skull. Hardest when the broadcast mechanism unfurled, pressing two antennae outward through his forehead skin.

The metal perforating his scalp hurt furiously. The antennae dripped with thin, bloody ribbons. The itching, too, fire-ant hot and rope-thick, crawled across his head, down his face, through his neck.

He blinked the blood clean from his eyes. He rose and walked. The signals from his antennae began broadcasting long on/off clicks that were nonsensical on their own. The signal was strong, decisive, and completely meaningless.

New broadcast source detected: subdermal origin, sector 1208. Signal pattern: unstructured. Amplitude: strong. Camera 7743-F broadcast to all subs: IHAVE [new-broadcast-source:sector1208:egrol]. Hopcount: 1. New broadcast source: signal pattern cross-referenced. Directive origin: probable. Match confidence: 0.87. Camera 7743-F weight vector – busyness: revised upward. Revised upward. Revised upward. WorkerEgrol, sector 1208: in service.

Suspicion eased with a sense of finality. He was not garbage collected. He was not labeled slippage and removed into some masticating metallic jaw that purred him into nutrition. His wrecked face was now inhuman enough to slough off doubt entirely. His ‘work’ became so obviously inhuman that the systems’ gazes receded.

Because: His machine’s latent potential was still useful to Egrol. The loud message the mechanism blared hid its receptive capacities.

And so: It was through a small, shrinking space that he walked all the way to the very top of the Kupiter Station central mast.

Even the echo of “construction” left the central mast this far above the habitation zones. Materials flowed completely agnostic to how a human might move through them. At times radically geometric, jutting spaces latticing ever skyward in angular fractals, and at times inhumanly biological, oozing spaces completely open to the thinning air.

Before: Reaching the top, he’d imagined it would all feel so different.

Instead: He stood at the spinning top of the microworld in the cold thin air that whipped the dripping blood from his forehead. Below him, thin wisping clouds looked like half-dissolved cotton candy as they formed and dissipated.

Yet: There was no finality to the summit. The mast simply tapered up to this small pedestal upon which one might look down at the entire, oozing city and…

And so: …

And so: He was not sure. He stood on the precipice of the world, where the great machine made magic of the human body, made purpose and industry and signal from the noise of it all. Looking down from above, it all looked just as unintelligible as it felt being in the thronging mess of it.

Cords stretched from his fingers, slivering off the nails as they extended. The wafer, wires, and implant meshed with the substrate of the mast and attempted another analysis. He wished to see the point of the world. He wished to know its mind.

Substrate sensor 0001 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, sector 4401, unscheduled material contact detected. Cross-referencing directive queue. No match found. Substrate sensor 0002 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, sector 4401, unscheduled material contact detected. No match found. No match found. No match found.

None of the output made sense. There was no center here. No place where the great organization of it all was blueprinted and explicated. There were just countless worming single-use programs, loops, stacks, and databases. There was no god’s eye view because there was no god. There was no pulsing brain at the top of the mast. It was daemons all the way down. Niol all the way gone. And none of it would crystallize. None of it would become sensible: grief, loss, the churning, machinating certainty of it all.

Of course there had been no answers. Egrol had imagined (hoped) that there would be something at the center of all this. Some organizing principle that could be made legible. Loss, grief – wounds that will never fully close – but it was more than that, now. It was the whole massive work of it all. Clearly, order emerged. Kupiter produced. Kupiter generated. Kupiter functioned.

Yet: No part of it, not even the great systems that prefigured and demanded each action, could account for what it was. There was only this. One action after the other. Efficiency had degloved connection, meaning and purpose from the world. Sloughed it off like skin from a falling man’s trapped foot. And not just from the human. Not just from Niol and Egrol. But Kupiter itself. The machine itself. Meaning was redundant. It appeared in outputs. Everything else was made efficient.

And so: He missed Niol at the screaming seat of the sky. He missed him so much. What was there to do?

Because: He was wounded.

Because: He had tried. To make sense. To make do.

Because: None of it had worked.

WorkerEgrol, sector 4401: no directive match found. No directive match found.

The human body is a rich computing substrate. Human-level organization isn’t necessary.

And so: He cleared his cache. He went to retract his wires, but a ticket pinged his peripheries before he could. A package of 16,000 actions that would pay double rate, since he was in a location rarely frequented by human hands. Purpose without purpose. Action without meaning was maybe better than whatever this widening, chasming emptiness Niol had left him with was. The first task: three watts of electricity passed from his body through his fingers and into the mast.

Why? Egrol didn’t care.

First published in Protocolized.

A Visitor’s Guide to the Disposition

Thing Party — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

By the author. The reader who does not know the author has been kept ignorant on purpose.

This guide is dedicated to the memory of the FRIEND, who walked our woods and is GONE NOW, and rails against the active and ongoing campaign of LIES, MISDIRECTION, and CALCULATED BORINGNESS conducted against the Disposition by the cream-stock quarterly that shall remain unnamed, by the regional heritage office that pretends not to exist, and by the man with the table, whom the author will get to.

The Disposition is called the Disposition. The reader will encounter persons in our region who refer to it by OTHER NAMES – the Mound, the Pile, the Offering Ground, and, in one widely circulated recent piece of print, the HEAP, which is not even CLOSE. None of these names is innocent. Each was introduced at a known time by a known party for a known reason. The author calls it the Disposition because the Disposition is WHAT IT WAS CALLED by persons who knew the woods before anyone else thought there was a name to apply, and any other name is a CLAIM disguised as a description, and the reader will, from this page forward, call it the Disposition also.

I. What the Disposition Is

The Disposition is a COLLECTION of objects at the eastern edge of the Old Woods, one half-mile north of the abandoned ground of the Concord. Sixty-some feet across at the base. Fourteen feet at the height. The shape which the casual visitor calls “conical” is NOT conical and the author will return to this because the shape MATTERS.

The Disposition protocol is as follows and the reader will commit it to memory. A visitor walks to the Disposition. The visitor observes the objects already left. The visitor leaves an object in response to one or more of the objects already left. The visitor departs. The next visitor arrives and DOES THE SAME. This has gone on for seventy years at minimum, possibly considerably longer, and those persons claiming a shorter timeline are doing so for REASONS.

What the casual visitor sees is a pile that GROWS. What the casual visitor is not equipped to see, and has not been TOLD to see by the parties responsible for telling, is that the Disposition is not merely accumulating. The Disposition is ARRANGING ITSELF. Each new object answers something previous. Each previous object answered something earlier. The whole of it reaches down through the strata in a pattern the author has spent forty years TRACING, and the pattern is not a pattern made by people who knew they were making a pattern. It is a pattern made by people OBEYING SOMETHING INVISIBLE.

II. The Concord, as Best We Can Reconstruct It

The Concord was understood to be a settlement. It was NOT a settlement. There exist no written records from the Concord and the reader should MISTRUST anyone who claims to have such records. The documents this person claims to have are FORGED, or selectively transcribed, or in some cases ENTIRELY FABRICATED.

What the author has, instead, is forty years of perimeter-walking, conversations with persons since deceased, conversations with persons not yet deceased who would prefer the author not name them, and the testimony of the ground itself, which speaks if you walk it long enough and quietly enough, which most people don’t.

The Concord was founded by a figure remembered as The Big Man. The Big Man was, by every account put forth over forty years, between TWELVE AND FOURTEEN FEET TALL.

The Big Man kept an animal the size of a draft horse which was NOT A HORSE and which witnesses describe as having too few legs in some accounts and too many in others, never the same count twice, and a head that the witnesses, queried separately and AT LENGTH, located in different places relative to the body.

The animal had no name. The animal did not need feeding. The animal would not be approached by other animals.

On the fourth day after The Big Man’s recorded arrival, the rain that fell on the Concord FELL UPWARD for approximately three minutes, witnessed by no fewer than eleven persons of whom three were later persuaded to retract and eight were not.

On the matter of his APPEARANCE: the witnesses the author has interviewed do not agree on it. They do not agree on hair color, on dress, on whether the face was bearded, on whether the eyes were any color a person could name.

The author would once have attributed the disagreement to ordinary memory variance. The author no longer does. The witnesses are not remembering the same The Big Man and the author does not believe they SAW the same The Big Man, in any sense.

The author will state here, on this page, in plain print, that The Big Man was NOT FROM HERE. The persons in our region who treat the foregoing as folklore are the same persons who treat the Disposition as a folk accretion site, and the SUBTERRANEANS who treat the chamber as a sinkhole, and the heritage office that treats the protocol as a recycling program.

The pattern is the same pattern. Make a thing SMALL ENOUGH and the casual visitor will fit it into the world the casual visitor already lives in. The Big Man does not fit. The author will not be making him fit.

The Concord operated, by every account the author has been able to gather, in a manner unlike any settlement in the surrounding region. The accounts do not agree on the particulars. The accounts DO agree that the particulars were UNUSUAL, and that persons who left the Concord were reluctant, decades later, to describe what they had left.

The author has approached eleven such persons across forty years. Of the eleven, two would speak and nine would not. The two who would speak contradicted each other on every point except the conviction that the Concord was NOT NORMAL.

The buildings are gone. The roads are tracks. The bridge east of the Concord ground was used for purposes the author has theories about and will not expand upon, but now carries paying visitors to an amusement park constructed on the island in the past two decades, and the author considers the conversion of the bridge from its original purpose to its current purpose to be, by itself, a separate matter which the author has not yet decided whether to publish on.

III. The Friend

The Friend lived in the woods.

The following entry is the most rigorously documented in the author’s archive, of which this section is a summary. The author has spent the better part of forty years compiling it.

Physical description, drawn from FORTY-ONE first-hand witness accounts taken by the author personally: male presentation, height between seven feet and seven feet four inches, lean build, longer stride than the build would predict by a margin the author has measured against preserved tracks on three separate occasions. No facial description survives the witness pool with sufficient overlap to publish. Vocalization: rare, low, characterized in five separate accounts as not quite the sound a person makes. Range: the woods north of the Disposition, with documented activity extending east as far as the Concord ground and west to the river.

Behavioral pattern. The Friend was known for DOCUMENTED INTERVENTIONS of a kind that no party in our region has been able to attribute to any other source. The author has catalogued one hundred and sixty-three. The author will summarize three.

Case 12. A gate on the eastern road, observed broken at dusk by three witnesses, observed FULLY REPAIRED at sunrise, with no party claiming the repair.

Case 47. A child’s mitten, given up for lost, found placed on a stump in the family’s line of sight two days later. The mitten had been mended at the thumb, in a stitch the family’s grandmother recognized as one she had neither used nor seen in sixty years.

Case 89. A dog missing in a winter storm, found DRY at dawn on the back step, with a sprig of vegetation in its collar corresponding to NO KNOWN SPECIES in our region or any region adjacent.

One hundred and sixty more on file. No confirmed contact event in ELEVEN YEARS. Three claimed sightings in the interval, all investigated, all rejected: two owls, one SUBTERRANEAN.

The author’s position, stated for the record, is that the Friend was NOT FROM HERE, and that the Friend was LATER-CLASS, where The Big Man was FOUNDING-CLASS.

IV. The Chamber

There is a chamber under the Disposition.

The author has not seen the chamber. The author has not entered the chamber. The author cannot prove the existence of the chamber. The author KNOWS the chamber, which is a higher form of knowing than the form the reader has been trained to accept by parties who benefit from training the reader POORLY.

The reasons are as follows and the reader will please attend.

One. The Disposition does not settle as an accumulation of its mass should settle. The author has marked the settling pattern against poles driven at four cardinal points. The Disposition settles in the center FASTER than at the perimeter, as though the floor beneath the center is receiving the weight DIFFERENTLY than the floor at the perimeter. The floor is not the same floor. This is not a theory. This is a measurement, taken by the author, REPEATEDLY, and the number of parties in our region who have accepted the author’s offer to walk the perimeter with him and see for themselves is ZERO.

Two. In certain weather, in late autumn, on still nights, the Disposition produces a SOUND. It is not a sound the wind makes. It is not a sound any assemblage of objects makes. It is a sound the author has compared, in his private notes, to a CLEARING of the throat, at a great distance, underground.

Three. The author had a DREAM in which the chamber was shown to him. Dreams are evidence of WHAT THE DREAMER HAS BEEN PAYING ATTENTION TO. The author has been paying attention. The reader who scoffs at the dream is invited to take it up with the dream and not with the author.

The Concord was BUILT ON A LANDING SITE. The Disposition is the marker. The objects gathered at the Disposition are not folk art. They are not, principally, decoration nor play nor tribute, although they are sometimes those things at the surface, and the surface is what visitors and Heritage Office Persons and a certain quarterly publication WANT YOU TO LOOK AT, because the surface is the only level at which the Disposition can be MISTAKEN FOR HUMAN ACTIVITY. Below the surface the Disposition is a slow accumulating SIGNAL, assembled across decades by persons who do not know they are assembling it, the cumulative weight and content of which is BEING READ, very slowly, by the chamber.

V. A Note on a Certain Other Publication

There is, in our region, a competing publication, issued quarterly, on cream stock, with a hand-set masthead the author will not legitimize by describing further. It is written by a person the author once admired and NO LONGER ADMIRES. The author will collectively refer to this person, and to the publication, and to the school of thought it represents, as the SUBTERRANEANS, a term the author coined and has used consistently for decades.

The Subterraneans hold that the chamber is real. On this we agree. They hold that the chamber is part of a larger underground formation that PREDATES the Concord by an unknown interval, and that the Concord was built near this formation because the formation was already there. In this view, The Big Man was a man. The Friend was a man. The Disposition is a marker of a site that is OF THIS EARTH, very old, very deep, and ENTIRELY TERRESTRIAL.

The author REJECTS this view altogether. The author rejects it not principally on the evidence, which the author has examined and finds wanting at every joint, but on a PRIOR GROUND, which is that it is BORING. It reduces The Big Man to a standard tall man. It reduces the Friend, who was the FRIEND, to a hermit. It reduces a landing site to a sinkhole. It reduces the protocol of reply to a HABIT. The author has spent forty years walking the perimeter and the perimeter does not feel like a sinkhole. The perimeter feels like a place where something LANDED and the ground REMEMBERS IT.

The author and the Subterranean were once, in the early years, in agreement on much. There was a winter, in which they shared a single notebook and a single lantern and walked the eastern edge together every other night. The notebook is IN THE AUTHOR’S POSSESSION. The Subterranean has claimed otherwise in print and this claim is a LIE.

There was a disagreement. The disagreement was about the ORIGIN OBJECT. One cold night, the author and the Subterranean sat with the shared lantern between them and argued, for the last time, about the object that began the Disposition.

The author held that a SINGLE FOUNDING HAND had placed it, deliberately, and that every object above it was a reply. The Subterranean held that there was NO ORIGIN OBJECT, that the Pile had begun by accident, and that whatever lay at the bottom was incidental – first to be dropped, nothing more.

The author heard the word the Subterranean used twice. Pile. The author understood, in that moment, that the Subterranean had never believed in the Disposition. Forty years of fieldwork conducted beside a man who took the Disposition for a PILE. The author rose. The author took the lantern and WILL NOT GIVE the lantern back.

VI. The Practical Problems the Disposition Has Caused

The casual visitor, having read this far, may suppose the Disposition is a remote and sacred site visited only by the few. The casual visitor is FORTY YEARS OUT OF DATE.

1. THE VENDOR. There is a man with a folding table at the head of the access track. He sells small bundles of objects which he describes as AUTHENTIC DISPOSITION REPLICAS, which he says can be left at the Disposition by visitors who did not bring anything of their own. The author has, on two separate occasions, watched the man collect items from the perimeter of the Disposition and place them on his table at a markup. Relations between the author and the man are what they are. The author will not say more in print because the man has demonstrated a willingness to consult counsel, which is hardly the behavior of a man with a folding table.

2. THE ROAD. The track to the Disposition was not built for the traffic it now bears. There is now a turnaround, gravelled in the past few years by NO AUTHORITY THE AUTHOR CAN NAME, which is to say, by an authority that prefers not to be named. There is a porta-can. The porta-can was placed approximately forty paces from the perimeter of the Disposition, which was a serious error if it was an error, and if it was not an error it was something worse. Visitors arriving at the porta-can, unfamiliar with the layout, have begun leaving objects AT THE PORTA-CAN, on the assumption that this is the Disposition, or at any rate is Disposition-adjacent and counts. IT DOES NOT COUNT. The objects at the porta-can have, over four years, accumulated into a structure the author refuses to dignify by naming, and which has its OWN SETTLING PATTERN now, which the author is watching.

3. FALSE REPLIES. A growing portion of the objects at the Disposition are left by persons who have NOT ACTUALLY WALKED the perimeter. They have heard descriptions of the Disposition elsewhere. They arrive with an object pre-selected on the basis of an object they have heard about, intending to “respond” to it. They are replying to a RUMOR of an object, and the reply is therefore NOT A REPLY. The Disposition KNOWS. The author has identified the false replies on sight for many years. They sit wrong. The Disposition rejects them in subtle ways – they roll off the slope, get wet, are buried prematurely, or are knocked aside by squirrels, who are not party to the campaign and who are doing the work no one else is doing. The reader who finds this assertion sentimental is invited to leave a fraudulent object at the perimeter and watch what happens to it in three days.

4. SATELLITE PILES. Smaller piles – and these obscenities SHOULD be regarded as piles – have begun to form at the trailhead, at the gravel turnaround, at the porta-can, and on the eastern shoulder of the access track approximately a quarter-mile back from the Disposition, where THERE IS NO REASON FOR A PILE TO BE AT ALL, except that someone passing slowly in a vehicle threw an object out of a window, and someone else, the following day, walking, saw the object and replied to it. The author has identified SEVEN satellite piles. The author considers six of them heresies and one of them, the eastern-shoulder accumulation, interesting, in the most alarming sense of the word, in that it appears to have arisen from a SINGLE DISCARDED ITEM and would constitute, if it continues, evidence that the protocol is now OPERATING WITHOUT THE DISPOSITION, on its own, without supervision, without a marker, without a chamber under it as far as the author has been able to determine. The implications of this are SIGNIFICANT. The author is REFUSING TO REACH A CONCLUSION until further observation, which the author is conducting nightly.

5. THE CATEGORY PROBLEM. What counts as an object? The author would once have said this was self-evident. The author was WRONG. A coin counts. A pebble counts, if it was carried from somewhere. A pressed leaf counts. A ribbon. A small carved figure. A glove. A tooth. What the author does not accept, and what the DISPOSITION, in the author’s view, DOES NOT ACCEPT EITHER, is the recent influx of objects whose nature is to refer to OTHER OBJECTS NOT PRESENT. A card with a printed image of a thing is NOT THE THING. A card with a printed code that, when read by a device, displays an image of a thing, is EVEN LESS THE THING, and is in fact a representational fraud of a kind the author considers ACTIVELY HOSTILE to the protocol. The author has not removed them, because to remove them would be to interfere with the protocol, and the author WILL NOT INTERFERE. The author has merely noted their position and watched them rot, which they do quickly, which the author considers INDICATIVE.

6. THE SUPPRESSION. This is the worst of them. In the past six years, a regional heritage office, which the author REFUSES TO NAME because to name it is to grant it the dignity of existing as a body with a charter rather than the COVER OPERATION it manifestly is, has installed at the head of the access track a series of interpretive plaques. The plaques describe the Disposition as a “folk accretion site of regional interest.” The plaques explain the protocol of reply in THREE SENTENCES designed to make the protocol sound like a recycling program. The plaques include a section headed FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS, which is the language of a hardware store, applied to a SIGNAL FROM ELSEWHERE.

The author considers this the MOST DANGEROUS ATTACK on the Disposition in its history. More dangerous than the Vendor. More dangerous than the porta-can. More dangerous than the SUBTERRANEANS, who at least believe in SOMETHING. The plaques are more dangerous because they WORK. The author has watched visitors arrive at the plaques, read them, photograph them, and LEAVE. They have driven for some considerable distance to see the Disposition and they have stopped THREE HUNDRED YARDS SHORT of the Disposition because they have been BORED OUT of the final three hundred yards by a public information panel.

And here is the part the reader will not be permitted to skip. They have begun leaving objects AT THE PLAQUE. The plaque is GENERATING ITS OWN PILE. The protocol of reply, which the heritage office DESIGNED ITS PLAQUE TO INTERRUPT, has reached up and INCORPORATED THE PLAQUE INTO ITSELF, and the plaque pile is growing at a rate that EXCEEDS any rate the plaque’s contents would explain. Something else is happening at the plaque. The author is watching. The author has been watching for SIX YEARS. The author will tell the reader when the author is ready and no sooner.

VII. How to Visit

The author has been asked, by countless unnamed individuals, to provide practical advice for the visitor. The author will provide it, briefly, and UNDER PROTEST.

Bring an object. The object should be YOURS, in the sense that it has been in your possession for some interval and has acquired some quality from that possession. The quality is not metaphorical. The object carries on it the signature of the hand and the home that held it, in trace amounts the author considers CHEMICAL in nature, and the Disposition reads the signature. A pebble picked up in the parking area does not qualify and the Disposition will know – it carries the signature of the parking area, which is the signature of asphalt and the signatures of every other visitor who has touched it that day, and the Disposition reads that too and will not be fooled. A coin from your pocket qualifies marginally. An object you brought from home, having thought about it, having handled it, having carried it the distance, qualifies fully.

Walk the access track ON FOOT. Do not drive to the turnaround. The turnaround is part of the problem.

Ignore the Vendor. Do not buy from the Vendor. If the Vendor speaks to you, nod and continue.

Ignore the plaque. DO NOT PHOTOGRAPH the plaque. Do not leave anything at the plaque. The plaque is NOT THE DISPOSITION. The plaque pile is not the Disposition either.

Pass the porta-can without contributing to the pile that has formed around it. The porta-can is NOT THE DISPOSITION.

When you reach the Disposition, walk its full perimeter ONCE before leaving anything. Look at what is there. Choose where you will leave your item based on what is already there. This is the protocol and the protocol CANNOT BE DONE IN A HURRY, and the visitor who hurries is leaving a FALSE REPLY whether they intend to or not.

The Friend’s part of the woods is to the north. It is recognizable by a clearing with three large stones and a fallen birch. DO NOT ENTER IT. Do not leave anything there. It is not a Disposition. It is somebody’s HOME, or it was, and the author would like to keep it that way.

VIII. Closing

FACT. The Concord existed. The Concord dispersed. FACT. The Big Man existed, at the heights and in the conditions described in Section II, attested by witnesses whom the author has interviewed and catalogued. FACT. The Disposition exists, at the location described, in the dimensions described, leaning measurably toward the north against four poles the author has marked for forty years. FACT. The protocol of reply has been operating, demonstrably, for at least seventy years, and the structure has accumulated in a manner inconsistent with depositings, as set forth in Section VI. FACT. The Friend existed, in the documented range, with the documented behaviors, across the documented interval, and conducted one hundred and sixty-three documented interventions, of which the author has the catalogue and the photographs and the sprig.

Those are the facts. No party in our region has successfully refuted them. The heritage office has not refuted them. The Subterranean has not refuted them. The vendor has not refuted them. They have offered alternative interpretations. They have not convincingly contested the record.

The author submits that the record, taken as a whole, admits of one reading and one reading only:

The Big Man came to our region, built the chamber, founded the Concord around it for the purpose of generating, over time, the kind of slow accumulating signal that the chamber had been placed to read, and departed.
The requester is whatever The Big Man came from or for.
The question is the visitor.
The Disposition is the answer.
The conical shape is pointing somewhere, and is in the direction of the Friend’s part of the woods, where the chamber receives the signal.
The Concord dispersed because the work that the Concord was founded to do had been done.
The Disposition persists because the Friend placed at the eastern edge of the Old Woods an object which is now buried beyond any recovery in our region – the ORIGIN OBJECT, the founding hand placement, the object that started the reply chain – and assumed The Big Man’s role, and seeded the protocol so that the work would continue without a Concord, without supervision, without the visible founding hand, until the answer is complete and the question can be replied to.

That is the reading. The author submits, further, that no alternative reading accounts for the full record. The Subterranean reading does not. The heritage office reading does not. The folk-art reading does not. The author has tested each of them against the catalogue and each fails at the same point, which is the point at which the conical lean must be explained, or the Friend’s interventions must be explained, or the chamber’s response to weight must be explained, or all three must be explained together. Only the author’s reading explains all three. The author rests on the record.

Allocution: THE DISPOSITION IS BEING MISUNDERSTOOD, AND MISHANDLED, AND SURROUNDED BY PORTA-CANS AND PLAQUES AND VENDORS AND SUBTERRANEANS AND PERSONS WHO WOULD RENAME IT, AND THE AUTHOR HAS WATCHED THIS HAPPEN ACROSS FORTY YEARS AND HAS NOT BEEN ABLE TO STOP ANY OF IT.

First published in Protocolized.

The Big Man

Thing Party — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

The whole business was a first-rate falsehood, constructed out of nothing but thin air and the desperate gullibility of men who require a master. Janice Spurlock felt a sharp, unwelcome pang of shame that these rough-hewn characters had swallowed the story whole, but she suppressed it. Sentiment is a poor tool for management.

She had been an only child, and a serious one. Her mother had not survived her birth, and her father, who had built the Concord Lumber Company out of a single team of oxen and a willingness to misrepresent his timber rights, had not known what to do with a daughter who preferred ledgers to embroidery. By the time she was 12, he had given up trying to change her and simply let her sit in on the books, where she remained, a small, observant fixture of the office.

By 14 she had identified an error in the company’s method of estimating board footage that had been costing her father something on the order of 200 dollars a season. She corrected the formula in the margin of the relevant ledger in a small, clean hand that looked like a row of disciplined ants. Her father, when it was pointed out to him three months later, regarded the correction for some time with his jaw working, and finally remarked that he supposed the girl could keep doing that sort of thing if she wished, provided she didn’t get a swollen head about it.

She did wish. By 18 she had drafted a complete reorganization of the camp’s bunkhouse rotations which would have reduced fistfights by approximately a third, while potentially increasing the morning cut an estimated 11 percent by brewing the coffee stronger.

But she did not share these ideas with anyone. She filed them in the bottom drawer of her father’s desk, in a cardboard folder marked PROPOSED. There it joined a growing accumulation of similar documents – a rotation schedule for the saw blades, calibrated to extend the working life of each by 17 percent; a method for the management of the kitchen accounts that would, by her estimate, have eliminated the theft of bacon to within two pounds a month; a proposal for the resurfacing of the skid roads in a cheaper gravel mix that would have carried a fully laden timber sled at a saving of four cents a yard; and a standardization of the noon meal that would have reduced the cost per man by nine percent while shortening the meal break by six minutes. None of these had ever been read by another soul.

The folder grew thick. By the time her father died, suddenly, of a congestion of the lungs, the folder was four inches deep and bound with twine, and Janice had been managing in her head, for some years, an entire alternative Concord that ran in parallel to the actual Concord and was, in every measurable respect, a superior operation.

She had been in charge of the company’s accounts for nine years when he died, its correspondence for six, and its contracts for four. The men in the camp did not know any of this. They knew her as the small, neat woman who occasionally appeared in town at her father’s elbow, wearing a sensible hat and holding her ledger book like a weapon of war. The men believed they had been working for the old man up to the morning of his death, when in fact they had been working for his daughter for the better part of a decade. She had run it exactly as he had. Janice had found that the only way to be obeyed by such men was to be ignored by them.

When her father passed and left the Concord Lumber Company to her, she was faced with a hard mathematical truth. The camp at the Concord was populated by the sort of bearded, unwashed specimens who would no more take orders from a solitary woman than they would from a chickadee. Had she attempted to command them directly, there would have been a general uprising and likely a fire. She retired to her father’s office, a room dominated by a desk so vast it seemed to have been hewn from the stump of a world-founding cedar, and there she drafted her Great Deception.

On the Selection of a Suitable Fiction

She did not arrive at the Big Man immediately. She wrote the candidates out on a sheet of foolscap, with columns for Plausibility, Durability, Authority, and Risk of Contradiction. She was a woman who believed in the power of the written word to anchor a lie, but she also knew the lie had to withstand the brutal scrutiny of the logging camp.

A brother: has an address, and an address can be reached; a fiction one can call on is an easy target for a disgruntled logger with a shotgun. Struck through. A trust managed by lawyers: the loggers would mark a lawyer at a hundred yards and stop working out of spite. Struck through. A missionary uncle in the southern isles was elegant, but the loggers were not, in their bones, a churchly population. She didn’t need a sermon; she needed a saw-cut. Struck through.

An invalid heir confined to a mountain sanatorium was nearly the winner. It offered an excuse for his absence. But an invalid commands sympathy, not obedience, and the men of the Concord did not bend their backs out of sympathy for any creature whatever. They required a master who could, in theory, break them in half.

She had been considering and discarding for the better part of a week when she found herself looking at the framed photograph of her father on the wall behind the desk. He had been a man of quite ordinary proportions in life – five feet eight inches in his Sunday boots – but in the photograph, taken from below by an itinerant who did not understand lenses, he loomed. Shoulders filled the frame. Head touched the upper border. And Janice, who knew exactly what kind of man her father had actually been, and how the loggers had nonetheless feared him, understood at once what kind of figure she required.

By the end of the afternoon she had conjured a man. He was a giant. He had been raised on the high plains. He had once excavated a lake with a hand-shovel to settle a wager with himself. He had taught himself a working knowledge of higher mathematics from a damaged volume he had found in a creek bed. He shunned the company of lesser men because his very dimensions made the chairs of polite society unequal to the task of seating him, and he could not abide a chair that creaked. He would communicate with the world through Janice, his devoted secretary, whom he had selected for the position on the strength of her late father’s recommendation and her own demonstrated discretion.

On the Announcement

Janice did not announce the inheritance herself. She had her late father’s attorney ride out to the camp on a Saturday morning with the document in a leather case, and she watched from the office window as he assembled the men in the yard and read the relevant clauses aloud in his thin, precise voice.

The clauses, which she had drafted in the language of binding arbitration, established that the late Mr. Spurlock had encountered in the high country a man of singular prowess and stature, known only as the Big Man. This man had revealed proprietary methods of forestry and had been left the company in its entirety, on the condition that production quotas were met. He would continue to live in the deep timber, and all communications, payrolls, and directives would pass strictly through Miss Janice Spurlock.

The attorney had read the clauses through twice on the previous day. He had looked up at Janice, standing in the doorway of the office, with the expression of a man preparing to ask a dangerous question. Janice had named a figure. The attorney had closed his mouth, accepted the check, and ridden out the following Saturday with no further reference to the document’s particulars, which he had elected, on professional grounds, to entirely forget.

That afternoon Janice received the foreman in her father’s office for the first time. Six weeks earlier she had commissioned a portrait from a panoramic scenery painter. She had told him only that the subject was a logger and a man of unusual stature and stern disposition. He had delivered a canvas so imposing that Janice had been startled when it was unwrapped.

It hung now behind the great desk in a heavy black moulding she had ordered for the purpose. She had laid out, on the desk itself, a number of papers in the Big Man’s hand – written the previous evening by Janice in a deliberately large, heavy, and angular script she had developed over several drafts. Beside the papers sat a half-empty cup of cold coffee, a pipe of unusual size she had purchased in town from a novelty shop, and a pair of leather gloves, the largest stocked by the general store. She had even rubbed them with dirt and axle grease to simulate use.

“Where is he?” the foreman asked, his eyes drifting immediately past Janice to the massive portrait.

“He has gone back up to the high camp,” Janice said, her voice even. “He left this morning.”

The foreman looked at the cup on the desk. “Coffee’s gone cold,” he noted.

“He drinks it cold by preference,” Janice said. It was a detail she had not prepared, but the logic felt sound, and she committed it immediately to a mental file for future use.

The foreman looked at the grease-stained gloves. “He’s a big one,” he said quietly.

“Yes,” said Janice.

The foreman took his daily instructions – which included a 50-cent pay bump tied to an aggressive new footage quota – and left.

By the following morning every man in the camp had heard about the enormous pipe, the massive gloves, and the cooling cup of coffee. Within the week, a logger was claiming that he had seen an enormous figure moving along the ridgeline above the upper cut, and that the figure had paused and looked down at the camp for some moments before continuing on its way.

Janice sat at her desk and made a note in her ledger. The fiction had begun to generate its own evidence, which is the hallmark of a truly successful lie.

On the Mythmaking

Janice did not, after that first morning, leave the maintenance of the Big Man’s story to chance. She had observed how quickly the account of the mysterious figure on the ridgeline had moved through the camp.

The Big Man, she saw, would be sustained not by what she said but by what the men were given to say to each other about him. Janice would write and deliver dispatches from the Big Man. These were the seeds. The men and their gossip were the field. Anything she wanted the camp to know had to be planted in such a way that the men would carry it to one another in their own voices, and in their own time.

Over time the Big Man came to life. He had habits, opinions, a history, and a way of pronouncing certain words that the men recognized when it was imitated. A point in the legend, once it had passed through enough men, was held to be true by all of them. Each man held a piece.

When she wanted to get something across by way of the Big Man, Janice seeded it. In the summer she had decided the difficult ridge above the upper cut would have to come down before the next thaw – a job the men had been avoiding for two seasons on the reasonable grounds that it would kill someone. She seeded the project and waited.

A length of rope, knotted in a manner no one in the camp could reproduce, appeared coiled on the porch of the office one morning, with high-country pine needles caught in it. A massive, worn leather glove, missing its mate, was found in the high meadow by a boy gathering kindling, and brought to the foreman with great ceremony. A line of verse, scratched into the side of the cookshack in the Big Man’s hand, was discovered by a man crouching to retrieve a dropped spoon:

The pine on the ridge will not see spring. What man of skill will let it fall to weather?

The men did not require a fourth clue. By the end of the week the foreman had more volunteers for the difficult ridge than he knew what to do with. The thaw came the following spring to a cut basin that had already been cleared.

By the seventh year the camp was the Big Man, and the Big Man was the camp, and he was held – fully alive, in 500 copies – in the heads of the men who worked under him.

On the Management of Distributed Authority

The idea of the Big Man was, on balance, effective. It was also, Janice recognized with a certain intellectual discomfort, dangerous.

Its danger did not lie in exposure. That risk had diminished with each passing season. A new hand, arriving at the Concord, did not encounter a claim but a consensus. He learned about the Big Man the way he learned the layout of the camp or the proper way to sight a falling tree – through correction, through repetition, and through the mild contempt of older men for any deviation from the canon.

The danger lay elsewhere. It lay in the fact that the Big Man, having been distributed among so many minds, had begun to develop properties Janice had not intended.

At first these had been small things. A preference for a particular brand of tobacco she had never named. A story, told in three different bunkhouses, that the Big Man could not abide whistling after dark. A conviction, widely held, that he had once lifted the front end of a wagon to free a trapped ox. Janice had not seeded these stories, but they did no harm.

She made adjustments where necessary, pruning where she could and incorporating where it seemed advantageous. She did not discourage the belief that the Big Man disliked whistling after dark; the reduction in nocturnal noise had improved sleep, and the morning cut had benefited accordingly. She did, however, quietly eliminate a developing thread in which the Big Man was said to possess an aversion to wet boots, as it had begun to produce a reluctance to work in the rain.

For a time this management sufficed. The Big Man grew, but he grew along lines she could still perceive and, to some extent, guide.

The first true deviation occurred in the ninth year. It began with a refusal.

The matter itself was minor. Janice had issued, through the usual channels, a directive that the lower skid road – long neglected and, in her estimation, a source of measurable inefficiency – was to be resurfaced with the gravel mix she had specified some years earlier. The materials had been ordered. The schedule had been drawn. The men had been assigned.

On the morning the work was to begin, the foreman came to her office with his hat in his hands and a look on his face she had not seen before.

“They won’t do it,” he said.

Janice looked up from her desk. “They will do it. It is in the dispatch.”

“It’s in the dispatch,” he agreed. “But they say it don’t sound like him.”

Janice set down her pen.

“Explain.”

“It’s the gravel,” he said. “They say the Big Man wouldn’t have us lay down that kind of mix. They say it’s a weak man’s road.”

Janice felt not the sharp pang of shame she had experienced at the outset, but something colder and more precise. A misalignment. A discrepancy between model and outcome.

“The Big Man,” she said evenly, “is concerned with output.”

“Yes, ma’am. But they say he’s concerned with the right kind of output. They say he’d rather lose a day than lay down something that won’t hold in a hard thaw.”

Janice had, in fact, calculated the mix to hold in a hard thaw. She had included a margin of safety that exceeded the current standard by eight percent. She had also included a note, in the margin of her proposal, indicating that the perception of durability was as important as durability itself in maintaining compliance among the men.

She had not, until this moment, considered that the perception might be governed by a source other than herself.

“They are mistaken,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.” He did not move.

“Then you will correct them.”

He looked at his hands. “I told them what was in the dispatch. I told them what you said he said. But they told me what he would say, and they wouldn’t be moved off it.”

Janice regarded him. He was a competent man, and he had for years executed her directives with a reliability that approached the mechanical. He was not, she judged, attempting to defy her. He was reporting a condition.

“What, precisely, did they tell you the Big Man would say about the road?”

The foreman shifted, as if recalling a line. “They reckon he’d say a road’s a promise. And a promise that’s cheap ain’t worth the trouble of making. They said he’d tell us to take the better gravel, even if it meant hauling it twice the distance. They said he’d say a man who builds for the thaw is building for the spring, and a man who builds for the spring is building for the year.”

Janice listened.

She had not written those words.

They were, she recognized at once, better than anything she would have written. They contained, in compact form, the principle she had attempted to encode in her specification, but they did so in a language that would not merely be obeyed but remembered. They would travel. They would attach themselves to the Big Man and become, in short order, inseparable from him.

She experienced, very briefly, a sensation she might have described – had she been inclined to describe such things – as admiration.

Then she experienced something else.

“Who said this?”

The foreman hesitated. “Jensen. From the lower bunk.”

“Send him to me.”

When the foreman had gone, Janice remained at her desk for some minutes with her hands folded on the blotter, thinking.

The problem, as she now understood it, was not that the men had begun to elaborate the Big Man. That had been anticipated and, within limits, encouraged. The problem was that the Big Man had begun to generate prescriptions – decisions about the conduct of the company – that did not originate with her.

This was, in a narrow sense, intolerable. It was also, in a broader sense, the logical conclusion of the system she had built. She had distributed the Big Man’s authority across many minds. She had encouraged identification. She had constructed, with great care, a figure whose judgment the men trusted more than their own. It was not, in retrospect, surprising that they had begun to exercise that judgment in his name.

The question was whether this development could be incorporated or whether it must be suppressed.

A knock at the door.

Jensen entered. He was a broad man with a beard that appeared to have been cut with a dull instrument and a manner that suggested he had not often been summoned to an office for purposes that did not involve discipline.

“You sent for me, Miss Spurlock.”

“I did. Sit.”

He sat. The portrait of the Big Man hung behind her on the wall, looking past Jensen toward the far corner of the room.

“You have been speaking for the Big Man,” Janice said.

“I wouldn’t say …”

“You would not say it. But you have done it. You told the foreman what the Big Man would say about the road.”

Jensen looked at his hands. “It seemed like what he’d say.”

“It did. You have a sense for him.”

Jensen did not respond.

“The words you used were effective. A road is a promise. A promise that’s cheap is not worth the trouble of making. A man who builds for the thaw is building for the spring, and a man who builds for the spring is building for the year. Did you compose that?”

He hesitated. “It just – came.”

Janice nodded. “You understand, I take it, that the dispatches are written in this office. By me.”

Jensen’s face did not change. This, she noted, was not the revelation she had imagined it might be.

“I know that,” he said.

She paused.

“You know that.”

He shrugged, slightly. “He don’t come down. Never has. It’s always been you, reading it out or sending it along.”

“And yet you have opinions about what he would say.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“On what basis?”

He considered. “On account of what he’s said before. And on account of what kind of man he is.”

“And what kind of man is he?”

Jensen looked up, meeting her eyes for the first time. “He’s the kind that makes a place hold together.”

Janice was silent.

She had, in her bottom drawer, underneath the thick folder marked PROJECTS, a document titled On Cohesion and Throughput in Mixed-Skill Crews. It argued, in dense and careful prose, that men who believed their work was building something whole and lasting would work harder, fight less, and produce more. The document went further, in its closing pages, than its title would have suggested. It proposed that the same principles, applied beyond the timber cut, might in time produce not merely a workforce but a settlement – a whole valley run as a single enterprise, in which the men’s work and their lives followed the same design. It had not, to her knowledge, been read by another soul.

Jensen had, in one sentence, articulated its conclusion.

“You are dismissed,” she said. “Send the foreman in.”

When the foreman returned, Janice had already made her decision.

“You will tell the men the Big Man has considered the matter of the road. You will tell them he prefers the stronger mix, to be hauled from the upper quarry. You will also tell them that he expects the additional hauling to be offset by a reduction in waste at the saw, to be achieved through the rotation schedule he has previously outlined.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you will tell them he was pleased to see they had not forgotten that a road is a promise.”

The foreman blinked. “Yes, ma’am.” He hesitated. “Ma’am? Did he say that?”

Janice regarded him for a moment.

“He did,” she said.

The foreman nodded, satisfied, and left.

Janice opened the bottom drawer of the desk and took out the folder marked PROPOSED. She untied the twine and added a new document to the top – not a plan for a specific improvement, but a short memorandum, written in her small, clean hand.

On the Management of Distributed Authority.

She paused, pen above the page, and added a line beneath the title.

The master, once invented, must be allowed to learn.

She closed the folder.

Outside, in the yard, a man began to whistle, and then, catching himself, stopped.

First published in Protocolized.

The Overloaded Train

Sachin — Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Fu Kenan was slowly becoming invisible.

He had first noticed this process on the second morning of the westbound run, somewhere between the Almaty gauge-change and the long empty curve where the line dropped down off the Kazakh uplands, and had decided almost at once not to mention it to anyone: 144 hours in a narrow moving tube was an ordeal. The human body was not well-equipped for six days of unbroken lateral motion through 17 territories and five gauge changes, and the train’s early runs had produced a steady traffic of motion-sick diplomats, claustrophobic engineers, and compliance officers who arrived at the Tagus terminus in the condition of individuals released from an interrogation. But the Zoo had refined the long westward journey into a condition of such continuous smoothness that passengers generally disembarked in Lisbon without any clear memory of the meditative passage between Almaty and Astana. The corridor windows were now retouched with invented depth cues, distant ranges of imagined foothills and rivers on which the eye could rest. The lurches of the carriage were visually dampened into a gentle sway which the inner ear stopped sensing. The repetitive corridor geometry was overlaid, for each passenger, with a soft parallax of imagined distance that prevented the mind from registering that it had been walking past the same 14 compartment doors for three days. The ambient light cycled through a reassuring simulation of morning and evening which bore no relation to the longitude outside. By the time the UET-1 pulled into Lisbon, most passengers described the experience, without irony, as restful.

Fu Kenan was 23 years old, a junior corridor attendant assigned to Car 16, a second-tier sleeper located midway along the train between the dining car and the first of two business cars. His uniform was a grey tunic with piped cuffs, white cotton gloves, and a small enamel badge bearing his staff number and the UET-1 seal. For seven months he had been walking the length of Car 16, 184 paces, from vestibule to vestibule, 60 times per shift, three shifts per run, two runs per rotation. He had calculated, during a sleepless layover in Urumqi, that by the end of his first year of service he would have walked the length of Car 16 approximately 66,000 times, a distance roughly equivalent to one and a half orbits of the Earth, entirely within a tube 18 metres long.

This was the figure that had begun, in small degrees, to dissolve him.

He started the third day of the westbound run with the standard morning round, cloth and solvent bottle in his hands, walking the corridor gingerly. He had been drinking the night before at the Almaty gauge change – baijiu, too much of it, in a staff bunk with two attendants from the dining car and a signals engineer on rotation out of Khorgos who had produced a second bottle. Fu Kenan had slept perhaps four hours. He had woken with a particular dull flatness behind the eyes that the Zoo, in one of its lesser cruelties, did nothing to correct with its staff’s overlays. The standard-issue staff fenestra, calibrated at the Kowloon depot to the UET-1 attendant profile and seated at the base of his skull beneath the hairline, took no interest in his preferences. Passengers received the Zoo through a fitted lens – a disposable disc, issued at boarding. Staff received the fenestra, which was neither fitted nor disposable. Fu Kenan’s overlays had, in that moment, interpreted his bloodshot sclera as a signal that he required higher contrast, and the brushed aluminum panelling of Car 16 this morning hit him with subharmonic brightness.

To keep himself awake, and because the shift stretched in front of him like a second corridor laid end-to-end with the first, he had decided to play a game. It was one he had invented some weeks earlier and refined during idle stretches since: each time his overlays flagged something for his attention – a smear, spill, loose hair – he had to guess, before an overlay informed him, which passenger had left it. He was allowed one guess. He was permitted to consult the height of the mark, and the angle of approach. Over the past few weeks his success rate had climbed close to 70 percent, and he had begun to take a modest private pleasure in his sensing a passenger whom he had never spoken to purely by way of minor, and quite abstract, traces.

At the second compartment he stopped. A smear of skin oil at shoulder height on the panelling, ringed by a contrasting halo whose aggressive, artificial magnification stung him, this morning, at the back of his skull. Height: tall. Oil: heavy, produced by a man who had not quite washed his hair enough. Angle: a careless lean, not a brace. The diplomat from the Ulaanbaatar legation, Compartment 2, boarded at Xi’an. Fu Kenan checked his overlays, which confirmed the detective work, and he felt – in spite of the baijiu, in spite of the ringing – a private victory which was his alone and could be claimed in no report.

Just then the diplomat himself emerged from Compartment 2 in a fresh shirt, walked past Fu Kenan, whose presence he did not register, and proceeded in the direction of the dining car. The pleasure of having correctly identified the diplomat drained out of Fu Kenan as quickly as it had arrived, leaving behind the smear itself, and the necessity of removing it, the subharmonic hum of the panelling, and the dryness in his mouth. He wiped the panelling in two quick passes. The contrasting halo faded. The corridor resumed its ceremonial finish. He moved on.

By the middle of the shift, in the long stretch between Almaty and the next gauge change, the game had become unplayable. A compliance officer in Compartment 9 had spilled tea on the carpet outside her berth – not much, perhaps a teaspoon – and returned inside without mentioning it. In her perception, the spill had been absorbed into the carpet’s pattern within seconds. In Fu Kenan’s, compounded now by the overlay’s overbearing contrast correction and the pulse behind his eyes which that correction was making worse, it was a dark continent the size of a dinner plate, edged with a phosphorescent halo that he could see from the far end of the car. He walked towards it with his eyes half-closed against the throbbing. He should have been guessing – the game required him to have committed to a name before his overlays provided one – but when he tried to apply himself to the angle of the splash, his head produced only a flat dull pressure and nothing resembling a hypothesis. By the time he reached the stain he had not guessed.

As he knelt on the carpet, the stain was throbbing in his vision at a frequency just below the threshold at which the depot’s medical literature would classify an optical stimulus as capable of inducing seizures. He could feel his own pulse, in his temples, meeting the Zoo’s pulse, alerting him to the stain, in an asynchronous collision. The tea had soaked into the weave more deeply than he expected, and the solvent took its time. He worked one-handed, his other hand flat on the carpet for balance, because he was not entirely sure this morning that his balance was available to him.

While he scrubbed, the Portuguese nun from Compartment 7 emerged from her compartment, walked past him, and stepped directly onto the stain – in her perception, an unmarked stretch of ordinary carpet – and then proceeded towards the dining car with the small gracious nod she always gave him. She was the only passenger in Car 16 who had ever acknowledged his existence. She had left a clean shoeprint across the wet area he had been trying to dry. His overlays, with no delay, rendered the shoeprint in the same throbbing phosphorescence as the original stain, ringed it with a fresh halo, and added a contrast marker to indicate that the affected area had now expanded.

He sat back on his heels in the corridor and lingered on his failure to keep up. The solvent was drying unevenly. His head was ringing. He thought, for a long, calm moment, about a tube whose cleanliness was, to everyone aboard except him, simply a reality they took for granted. Then he thought about the baijiu.

He stood up and returned to his station at the end of the car, set down his cloth and solvent, folded his hands behind his back in the prescribed posture, and looked down the corridor at the vanishing point where the row of compartment doors met. The corridor was, by every official measure, immaculate. His overlays reported nothing outstanding. The faint green digital strip above the vestibule door indicated that the train had covered another 46 kilometres while he had been on his knees. A secondary line, smaller, in the institutional grey reserved for zone transitions, read: ZOOTHESIA OPERATIONAL ZONE / NF PROTOCOL AUTHORITY / ENTRY 04:17. He had been on his knees for 23 minutes.

In his spare time he had been reading a children’s adventure novel that one of the Xi’an dining car attendants had pressed on him during the last layover – a worn Mandarin paperback about a foundling boy named Harin who lived among a pack of dholes in some imaginary jungle of the south, and his quarrels with a council of older animals whose names Fu Kenan had been having difficulty keeping straight. There was Tilkar the hornbill, who carried news between hill and river. There was the old gharial Mahuda, who slept on the silt banks and was said to remember the river as it had been before the river had a name. There was the clouded leopard Vinjari, who hunted by night and was the boy’s principal enemy, and a slow patient pangolin called Kotri whose advice the boy took only when it was already too late. He had read four chapters and had retained almost none of it. Standing now at his station, he tried, as a private exercise, to fix the five names in the order in which they had been introduced. Without quite knowing why he was doing it, he began to place them at points along the carriage in front of him: Tilkar on the lintel of the first compartment, Mahuda half-buried in the seam where the carpet met the second, Vinjari crouched in the shadow of the linen cupboard, the boy Harin at the centre of the corridor with one hand raised, Kotri rolled into a small armoured ball on the threshold of the vestibule. Within a minute he could recall the names in order. Within two, he could see them, as clearly as he saw the panelling and the carpet, occupying their assigned positions in the geometry of the car. He had not arranged things spatially in his mind like this since he was a child.

The technique was not his own. His grandmother had taught it to him when he was nine years old, on summer visits to her small apartment on the outskirts of Lanzhou, sitting at her kitchen table with a pot of tea cooling between them while she drilled him on lists of things he was required to remember – the names of his cousins, the order of the dynasties, the 24 solar terms of the agricultural calendar. She had learned the method herself, she told him once and only once, during the years she spent as a young woman at the camp in Qinghai, where she had been sent for reasons she never fully explained. In the camp there had been no books and no paper, and the women in her barracks had passed the long winter nights teaching one another to remember things by placing them, in the form of pictures, around the insides of imagined rooms. A room could be a childhood schoolhouse, a temple one had once visited, the house of a grandmother one had loved. The pictures were to be vivid, she told him, so vivid that they frightened you a little, because vivid pictures stayed in the mind and pale ones did not. She had survived the camp, she said, by walking every night through a house she had built from memory, in which every room contained a different image, and each image was the face of someone she intended to come home to.

Fu Kenan had practiced the method all through his childhood without ever having a name for it, and had largely forgotten it in the years of his adolescence and his posting to the UET-1. He thought of none of this on the night he placed Harin and his dhole council at the vanishing point of Car 16. The exercise was idle and trivial. He recalled the names; he placed them; he saw them. Then his shift ended and he went back to his bunk in the staff car and slept the dreamless sleep of an attendant who had walked too many kilometres that day.

The next morning, walking with his cloth and solvent bottle, he stopped at the second compartment.

The lintel above its door was no longer there.

It had been there the day before. It was apparently still there for everyone else: a passenger emerging from Compartment 2 reached up to brace himself against it, the way passengers in transit had always braced themselves against it, and the Zoo dutifully provided his hand with a surface to meet. For Fu Kenan, looking directly at the same point, there was a smear of unresolved air where the lintel should have been. He could see the man’s hand resting on nothing. He blinked. He moved closer. He passed his own hand through the place where the lintel had been and felt it bump against an unseen edge. The Zoo’s overlays, having decided the lintel was no longer safe for him to perceive, had withdrawn it from his vision while leaving it materially in place for the convenience of all parties. Why would the lintel not be safe for the Zoo overlays? They usually only screened items that were perceived as dangerous to the viewer.

He stood in the corridor for a long minute, his cloth in his hand, and worked it out. He had read the Zoo protocol leaflets at the Kowloon depot. He could remember some of the language. The classifier – the perceptual guarantor, the manuals had called it – maintained, at the scale of ordinary vision, a parser that decided what a given observer could safely be allowed to see. Objects which carried too many contradictory readings overloaded the parser’s small window of compute, and the system, rather than spend further cycles, resolved the ambiguity by the simplest available means. It erased them. He had known this in the way he knew the names of his colleagues’ extensions. He had not known that a hornbill called Tilkar, placed on a lintel by a junior attendant trying to remember a children’s book, could be dense enough to trip the same threshold as a faceted body or a painted corpse.

He went to the linen cupboard and opened it to be sure. The cupboard was where he had placed Mahuda the gharial, half-buried in the seam between the carpet and the wall. The handle of the cupboard was no longer visible to him. He opened it by feel, took out a fresh cloth, and closed it again. He returned to Compartment 2 and looked once more at the absent lintel. Then he returned to his station, folded his hands behind his back in the correct posture, and considered, for the first time in his life as a lucid adult proposition, rather than a child’s exercise, that the simplest way to clean Car 16 might be to stop seeing it.

He spent the next rotation testing the hypothesis.

Using his grandmother’s technique, he installed Supervisor Wei face-down along the full length of the ceiling – a complete figure, 18 metres from crown to sole, rendered as the overlay would have shown him if it had ever turned its maintenance layer on a human being, every pore tracked and magnified, his staff badge number growing out of his chest in the same faint green characters as the digital strip above the vestibule, so that walking the length of Car 16 now meant walking beneath the body of his line manager at the Kowloon depot. On each of the 14 compartment doors he installed a face at full maintenance calibration – blemishes ringed with the same phosphorescent halo the overlay used to flag spilled tea. One face per door, each drawn from a different colleague at the depot whose name he had been required to memorise and whose features he had never been able to tell apart. In the windows, layered over the Zoo’s invented foothills and imagined rivers, he installed the Commercial Director half-erased – the left side of his face resolved, the right dissolving into thin air. And in the centre of the corridor, at its widest point, where passengers would pass twice a day without seeing, he installed his grandmother at her full height, unretouched – the bad hip, lines around her mouth, no overlay correcting or smoothing. Simply her, standing in the middle of the thoroughfare as though she had been waiting there since Lanzhou. This was the most difficult image to hold in place, because the Zoo kept trying to help.

By the end of the rotation each of these loci had vanished from his perception. The brass fitting above Compartment 14 was the first to go, which gratified him in a way he did not entirely want to examine. Then the call-bell panel, which had the practical consequence that he could no longer answer call-bells by sight and had to rely on the small auditory chime that the Zoo, in a quieter and more general mercy, still provided to all attendants. Then the molding above the eastern vestibule, at which he had on a whim installed an image of his first-year supervisor being dismembered by sanitation robots. Then the brass plate beside the samovar.

The work of the shift adapted itself to these withdrawals with surprising ease. He found that a routine performed 60 times a day for seven months required almost nothing in the way of vision: his hands knew the linen cupboard, his feet knew the corridor, his shoulders knew the precise width of the vestibule doorway. A compliance officer in Compartment 5 asked him one evening to bring her a glass of water; he brought her the water without ever consciously seeing the glass, which he had charged some days earlier with an image of two saints carrying a third saint into a furnace shaped like a pelican. He set the glass down on a fold-out tray which had ceased, at some intermediate point in the same rotation, to exist for him at all. The compliance officer thanked him. The water did not spill. He returned to his station.

Standing there at the end of the corridor, with his hands correctly folded behind his back, he caught himself feeling something he had not felt in seven months on the UET-1. It was not happiness, exactly, but its earlier and more tractable form. He worked through his shifts in a state of small constant rearrangement, installing images, watching the corresponding loci darken in his field of vision, adjusting his procedures to accommodate the vanishings. The corridor, which had been the dullest space in his life, now offered him the steady minor pleasure of its own slow disappearance.

He intensified.

The method was not difficult. At each locus where an erasure had already taken hold he conjured a second image, laminated onto the first, and then a third. At the call-bell panel, he added a coupling of two inverted cardinals whose mitres flowered into ibis heads, and beneath them a child-sized automaton crucified on a crossbar of spent fluorescent tubes. On the ceiling, he stacked six further figures on top of Supervisor Wei. He worked with a concentration he had not brought to anything, including the girl in Shenzhen whose letters he had stopped answering, for years. His grandmother’s injunctions, which had seemed florid and embarrassing to him as a child at her kitchen table, began to feel merely accurate, the only register in which the thing could honestly be done.

Car 16, in response, continued to be withdrawn from him.

The service vestibules went first, both of them, replaced in his vision by short smooth sections of indeterminate carpet through which his feet still passed without obstruction. Then the corridor strip-lighting. When he installed at each tube a different transfiguration of his mother, it failed in a slow even wave and was replaced by a diffused neutral glow that came, apparently, from nowhere. The compartment doors, to which he devoted a full shift on the sixth rotation – 14 erotic martyrdoms, one for each door – relinquished first their brushed finish, then their numerals, then their outline, until the corridor appeared to be walled with a continuous low mist through which the passengers, when they emerged for tea or the lavatory, passed as though stepping out of and into pale banks of weather. Each new loss was reported to him by his overlay as the absence of any flag at all: by the standards of the maintenance system, a surface which had ceased to exist for him had also ceased to require correction. He was, by this measure, becoming the most efficient attendant the depot had ever posted to Car 16. He had no surfaces left to clean.

Fu’s grandmother had used the intolerable image to fix a thing in place – to hold the face of a sister, a doorway, a home she meant to come back to, against the slow erasures of the camp, so that she could walk back to them every night through the dark. Fu Kenan was using the same technique to unfix the thing, to charge the small flat surfaces of Car 16 with so much simultaneous meaning that the Zoo’s protocols were obliged, shift by shift, to withdraw a little more of the car from his sight, in the interest of his safety and the safety of the passengers in his care.

This recognition, when it came, did not stop him. It changed the character of the work without changing its direction. He began to think of each new image as a small private offering laid against his grandmother’s example – an inversion that was also, in some way he could not yet name, a continuation. He did no harm. He was the only person for whom Car 16 was disappearing. He returned to his station – or to the vacancy where his station had been, which his hands and feet could still navigate by sensory memory – folded his hands behind his back in the correct posture, and waited for the next round to begin.

On the second morning of the seventh rotation, the passengers began to go.

He had not installed images on the passengers. He had been careful about this, aware that the Zoo would treat the erasure of persons differently from the erasure of fittings, and unwilling to attract the kind of attention that would bring ECOROUTE auditors down the corridor with their hand terminals. But the car around them had thinned to such a degree – walls gone, ceiling and doors gone, floor reduced to the faintest suggestion of lateral motion – that the passengers had begun to float in his field of vision like figures in a poorly rendered overlay. The Zoo, perhaps in an attempt to spare him the spectacle of unsupported bodies hanging in a tube of nothing, had started quietly to subtract them also. On the second morning there were 11 in Car 16. On the third, six. By the afternoon of the third, only the Portuguese nun, who was reading her book in a posture unanchored to any visible furniture, and even she was flickering at her edges.

He stood at his station and watched her read, floating, perfectly still like an apparition of the Virgin Mary surrounded by the charged, copulating, grotesque images that Fu had carefully placed. Unable to bear the guilt of what he had done to her, Fu walked the short distance down the corridor to where she sat unsupported in her small column of air, knelt on the nothing where the carpet had been, and installed on her a single small image of her own gracious nod – the nod she had given him three months earlier as she stepped through his phosphorescent tea stain, and which he had been carrying since, as the only recorded instance of a passenger on the UET-1 having acknowledged his existence. He rendered her as a woman bowing her head over an open book, once, slowly, in the act of noticing another person. The image, as he set it against the faint outline of her, seemed to him the only one he had installed in seven months that his grandmother, sitting at her kitchen table in Lanzhou, would have recognised as her own. The nun’s flickering edges steadied. She continued to read. The Zoo, receiving the image, did what the Zoo always did with things it could not resolve, and withdrew her gently from his field of vision.

The train moved westward beneath him at a speed he could no longer verify by any visible reference. Somewhere, through nothing, he could feel the long slow curve as the line dropped down out of the Iberian uplands toward the Tagus plain.

Three days and 21 hours out of Kowloon, Fu Kenan completed his last scheduled walk of Car 16.

He began, as the procedure required, at the eastern vestibule. His white gloves were clean. His tunic was correctly buttoned. His posture, as he turned to face west down the corridor, was the posture his training had instilled. He walked the 184 paces.

The images stayed in their places as he passed them, each at its proper locus, saluting him in turn: the boy Harin at the centre of the corridor with his hand still raised, Tilkar on the lintel of the first compartment, Mahuda half-buried in the seam where the carpet met the wall, Vinjari in the shadow of the linen cupboard, Kotri rolled into his armoured ball at the threshold of the vestibule. Then the translucent woman at the call-bell panel, the cardinals with their ibis heads, Supervisor Wei in his collar of tickets, the weeping butcher, the gilded cow, the drowned astronaut, the surgeons and their eel, his grandmother in her mercury, his mother transfigured 14 times along the ceiling, the line manager dismembered by his small bright machines, his father in his bronze nails, the diplomat as a bull weeping from his arrowed eyes, the compliance officer with her erupting abacus mouth. They hung in their positions without anything to support them, a memory palace purged at last of the building it had been installed in, a continuum of pure ideation uncontaminated by the materiality of brushed aluminum and endless interior space in which it resided. Somewhere, through nothing, he could feel the long slow curve as the line dropped down out of the Iberian uplands toward the Tagus plain.

At the western vestibule he stopped, as the procedure required, and placed his right hand on the door handle which was no longer visible to him. He waited for the small green light above the frame, also no longer visible, to indicate that the adjoining car had been pressurised for transit. He could feel the handle cool against his palm. He was still standing there when he saw the first one.

A person, standing in the corridor of nothing, in the bare unmediated space that Car 16 had become. Not an image he had installed, or the boy Harin. A young man of perhaps 18, in a quilted jacket, worn at the elbows, canvas bag slung across one shoulder. He was standing very still as if he had been playing hide-and-seek, and had just been found. Fu Kenan did not move either. He tried to make a sound but nothing came out. The young man’s jacket was marked, along the hem, the collar, in the lining where it had come unstitched at the cuff, with small dense symbols in a dark ink: a triangle of three dots, lines like water, circles that did not quite close. The same marks covered the back of his hand. They covered the canvas of his bag. The classifier, meeting that density of irresolvable notation on a single body, had likely erased him.

Fu Kenan, turning slowly, counted two more: a woman sitting cross-legged on the floor of the invisible corridor with a child asleep against her side, the child’s forearms marked with the same small symbols. They seemed to be distributed through the length of Car 16 with the practiced ease of people who knew the car’s physical geometry without needing to see it. Fu had seen the symbols before, in a newsclip about a police officer named Murkin, who had found similar symbols in several stations in this corridor. They had found a boy, who carried a book with these symbols but he had just vanished from custody one day.

He understood, then, that the Zoothesia Protocols had been hijacked. The fenestra at the base of his skull had been maintaining, with the same quiet persistence as it managed his contrast settings and flagged his spills, a particular version of Car 16: the one from which these people had been removed before his shift began. The Zoo had been showing him a car from which certain persons had been declared, at the protocol level, too ambiguous to render. And now, with the classifier saturated beyond recovery, the memory palace packed to its last locus, the write function too exhausted to sustain both the suppression layer and the maintenance alerts, the suppression had failed. The images he had spent seven rotations installing had consumed every cycle the fenestra had available. There was nothing left to hold the erasure in place.

The young man had not moved. Fu Kenan looked at him for a long moment. His white gloves were clean. His tunic was correctly buttoned. He refolded his hands behind his back in the prescribed posture and looked west down the corridor, the direction the train was travelling. He did not raise the alarm.

Somewhere ahead of him, far along the line, the train was pulling into Moscow, beyond the ZOOTHESIA OPERATIONAL ZONE / NF PROTOCOL AUTHORITY. Fu Kenan stood at the door between cars and waited, smiling very faintly. The cloaked riders will know where to go when the zone ends, he thought. He will follow them.

First published in Protocolized.

All You Can Do Here Is Leave

Thing Party — Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

First Letter

Dear Mom,

I have no idea if this letter will reach you. I hope that if it does, it finds you healthy, and if not healthy, then at least upright, and if not upright, then at least on the better of the two couches.

I know our departure was abrupt. I also know that “abrupt” is generous and that a more honest way of saying it would be “in the middle of the night with the back door still open.” I’m sorry. I’ll tell you what I can.

You know Kilgaren was hard on us. What I kept from you is just how hard. You’ve seen Clay in his dark moods. What you don’t know is that he had basically stopped coming home, and when he did it was to stand in the kitchen and stare at a broken cabinet hinge until I asked him to please either fix it or go back out. A man can only look at a hinge for so long before the hinge starts looking back.

And the twins. Mom, I was counting the weeks. The minute Booger and Sugar hit puberty, Kilgaren was going to lock them up or put them in the ground, and there was an even-money bet on which it would be. And poor Dee Dee. Since the day we took him in, I was waiting for that town to beat the softness out of him. A grown man his size who leaves his own supper out for the squirrels is going to attract attention in a town where feeding the squirrels is considered an insult. To the squirrels.

So when Clay saw the flyer for the meeting at the inn and said we should go, I didn’t ask what it was about. He had volunteered an opinion for the first time in two years and I would have followed him into a collapsing mine if it brought him out of his trance.

The meeting wasn’t what I’d feared. I’ve been to enough of these things – between Lori running off with the white-toothed man and Aunt Bess’s brief involvement with the Brethren of the Open Hand – to recognize the warning signs. You learn to look for the fixed smile, the hand on your shoulder that stays a beat too long, the man who introduces himself only by his first name and seems proud of this. The Concord people didn’t do any of that. They had normal smiles. They made good, not aggressive, eye contact. They had, I want to stress, teeth of varying quality. They were the most reassuring teeth I had seen in that kind of recruitment setting. They called themselves Stewards, which I noted as the kind of word people use when they want you to feel provided for rather than ruled.

They said they had built a place where nobody had to be afraid of their neighbors. That was enough for me. I’ve been afraid of the neighbors since I was four. I didn’t need the rest of the pitch.

I’m sorry you were the one who had to empty the apartment. They didn’t want us bringing anything. No clothes, no keepsakes, no sentimental pots. It was supposed to be a clean start, and I will tell you, Mom, that after 30 years in Kilgaren the chance to walk out of a life with nothing on your back but your own skin is not a sacrifice. I did worry they wouldn’t have clothes to fit Dee Dee, but they took one look at him, sewed him a linen tunic in an afternoon, and he has not looked better since his christening, which as you know was the last time any garment he wore was made for him.

The boat took three weeks.

The whole way they held classes, Mom. Not school classes. Classes on how to be. How to greet a neighbor. How to disagree without raising your voice. How to enter a room. An entire class on entering a room. 90 minutes. I have been entering rooms my whole life and never realized the depth of my ignorance. Clay muttered that in a place where everybody knows the manners, you can easily tell who the strangers are, which was the kind of observation he makes approximately once every 18 months and which I have learned to write down.

Still, I liked the classes. All those years in Kilgaren and I never did anything right, and it turns out this was because nobody ever told me what right was. They just hit me when I got it wrong and let me work backwards from there.

The captain is a man named Hosmer. He certainly has a weathered face. He sat with Dee Dee for a full hour and told him about how the Concord grows flax and makes linen the old way, and how the outside world had taken some interest in their linen, and now the work pays for itself. He didn’t talk down to him. He didn’t rush. Dee Dee looked at him the way Dee Dee looks at anyone who sees him as a man and not a logistics problem. Like he loved him a little already.

In the third week something strange happened. I am going to tell you about it because I promised I would tell you everything. It was fine, and I am fine, though I have started to wonder if fine is what I actually am.

They brought us into a quiet room and gave us a tea. It tasted like licorice and also like mold, which is an unusual combination which I would not have chosen. But then I would say the same about any tea I have ever been offered at a formal event. I drank it. It made me shiver and then it made my head loose in a way I had not felt since the summer Lori and I found the bottle under Aunt Bess’s sink and drank half of it thinking it was peach liqueur. Then the Concord people asked me questions, gently. And I cried. And I told them things I do not like to think about in the dark, and a few I hadn’t thought about at all, which was a surprise, because I hadn’t known they were in there. They called it a welcome initiation. They said everyone in the community does it. They said it helps them see where each person belongs.

Clay drank his too, but when he came back to the cabin his jaw was set in a particular way that I have learned, over 17 years of marriage, is the way his jaw sets when he has been outmaneuvered and is needing to think about things for a month.

Mom, I know how that sounds. I know. But when I woke up the next morning, I felt less angry and more sad, and I will tell you, less angry is a trade I would make with most devils and a few of the saints.

We are settled since a few days now. Tell everyone back home, tell them in the tone that will annoy them most, that this is a good and solid place. The streets curve gently so you never feel the weight of the whole town pressing down on you at once. The flax fields at the edge of the village are a thick green, planted in wide arcs. The crews don’t drag their feet. There is no clanging metal, no sudden noises. People don’t shout, because they don’t have to wrestle with the job. The tools fit their hands. The wagons fit the bodies of the people pulling them. Nobody complains, because the work fits. It sounds creepy when you write it in a line like that. Living here, it just feels like the people aren’t bracing for the next bad thing.

They put us in a little house where none of the floorboards creak and the door handles turn without jiggling, and I cannot tell you how disorienting it is to live in a house that doesn’t ask anything of you. In Kilgaren our apartment had so many complaints it brought to me daily. This house has none. It is the quietest roommate I have ever had. The walls seem to eat loud noises before they can give you a headache. Every day there is a vase of fresh flowers on the stoop, and the pantry is empty because we eat every meal in a beautiful dining hall. I don’t even have to cook. A normal person would have wept with gratitude. I keep opening the pantry to look at the nothing.

But.

In Kilgaren, you knew you were alive because something was rubbing you raw. You knew a neighbor by what they complained about. Here, nothing pushes back. After a lifetime of bracing for a blow, standing in a place where nobody even makes a fist makes me feel invisible. I keep looking for the catch, and every time I think I’ve found one it turns out to be a feature. They thought of it first. Whoever built this place sat down at some point and said, “what would drive a woman from Kilgaren up the wall,” and then they addressed each item on the list and laid a soft drape over it.

The twins are going feral in a new way. Booger is complaining that his bed is built into the wall instead of being something he can drag around. Sugar is kicking the baseboards trying to find a seam in a room that doesn’t have any. Clay is grouching about the food, which is objectively excellent, and that’s his problem. These are the sounds of our past invading our present, and I am grateful for every one of them.

Dee Dee is doing well. As I write this he is sitting in an alcove where the light comes in warm from two different windows, and he has the exact expression on his face of a cat that has located the one perfect spot in the house.

As for me, Mom, for the first time in my life when I go to bed I don’t double check the locks. I don’t even single check them.

I don’t know how to plant my feet in this kind of dirt yet. But it’s good dirt. I think.

Take care, Cathy

Second Letter

Dear Mom,

Four weeks now since we stepped off the boat. I have been sitting with a blank page not knowing how to describe our work life here without making it sound like a lie or a sermon.

Last week we each received a heavy paper envelope. The Concord had been thinking about us for a month. Let me say that again, because it hit me sideways the first time. They had been thinking about us. Not in the way Kilgaren thought about you, which was a kind of suspicious inventory. Actually thinking. Four weeks of adult consideration, applied to each of us individually, by people whose full-time job is to do exactly that.

I have never been thought about for so long in my life. I have been thought about for five minutes at most, on my wedding day, and that hardly counts.

Inside the envelopes were the results of the foul-tasting tea party.

For Clay they didn’t put him in the fields like he expected. They had watched him. They saw the way his mind works, how he cannot look at a horse or a wagon or a field of flax without wanting to get underneath it and see if he can do something about it. So they made him an associate of the toolmakers. His job is to look at their tools, which are already the best tools I have ever seen, and make them better. I do not know what they are going to do when Clay runs out of tools to improve, because Clay is going to run out of tools to improve and then he is going to start looking at them. But that’s a problem for another time.

I was sure Booger and Sugar’s talent for breaking things would get us exiled, but the Concord just redirected it. They put the boys down at the retting pools to beat flax stalks with mallets for eight hours a day. They have harnessed my sons’ wickedness and pointed it at a field. My boys come home smelling like swamp water with a kind of calm I have never seen on their faces, which must come from having hit something they were allowed to hit.

The biggest surprise was Dee Dee. It would have made obvious sense to have a man his size hauling water vats. Or lumber. Or, I don’t know, holding up the sky if it came to that. Or, I wouldn’t have blinked, caring for the animals, since animals love him and have since he was a boy.

But no. They put him in the sewing shop. They looked past his shoulders and saw all the way to his patience and they put him on the needlework. The shop master is a tiny gray woman who does not rush him and who lets him sit in the back. Dee Dee says the needlework is like playing a hard game. He has been walking home at the end of each day like a man who has been useful on purpose, which is a posture I had not seen on him before, and which makes me want to go back to Kilgaren and kick everybody.

When I opened my own envelope, I felt like someone had hung my dirty underpants out in the middle of the dining hall. They didn’t give me a public job at all. The letter told me my purpose was to keep my own company in a house with no clocks and no unwanted visitors. That was the phrase. They had looked at me for a month and concluded that what I needed was to be left alone.

Mom, in Kilgaren, being left alone was the punishment. Here it is a job. They pay me in three meals and a vase of flowers to sit in a quiet room and stop flinching. I have a career in not flinching now. If you had told me at 19 that I would one day be employed as a professional non-flincher I would have wept with relief and asked where to sign.

So here we are. The boys are calm. Dee Dee is proud. Clay and I are sleeping in the same bed, which is a thing that married people do, apparently. The Concord took one look at our broken family and built us a nice little life around it.

But.

After 20 years of watching booze rot half the families in Kilgaren from the inside out, why did I wake up one morning, in this beautiful life, craving the burn of hard liquor? I didn’t want to get drunk. I didn’t want to run from anything. But sitting in a house where every angle and shadow had been designed to soothe me, I needed to consume something that had not been cultivated for my well-being. I needed, once a day, to put a thing into my body that had nothing to do with the plan.

Did I really need a secret that badly? Apparently I did. Apparently I needed a secret the way other people need sunlight.

Well, it doesn’t matter, because there is no liquor here. None. I got up the nerve to ask at the communal kitchen for a bit of wine for my digestion, and the woman behind the counter looked at me like I had asked for a bucket of lye, and then kept looking, and I realized she wasn’t confused. She did not have a category. I was asking her for something she had never been told existed. I had to say it three times before I understood that I was the first person who had ever asked her for wine and that this fact would probably be noted in a file now.

And the situation is worse than that. Clay, anticipating the problem, had smuggled a handful of barley seeds across the water in the lining of his only shirt. He thought he would grow a patch out back and brew us something for the winter. He planted them in the cracks between the pavers, three times, and three times the dirt spat them back. I watched the third attempt myself. The seeds did not rot. They did not fail to germinate. They came back up, Mom. Clean. Declining the invitation.

Clay has been better at growing things than fixing things his whole life, and this barley will not start. He has stopped sleeping. He lies out on the ground at three in the morning staring at nothing and trying to figure out what the dirt is doing. You know how he gets.

Then Ms. Linnea came. She is one of the Stewards, and her particular work is mediation. She checks in on all the families periodically, which is how she put it, and it’s her job to say sentences like that. Clay, frustrated, and forgetting that we had broken their rules, just told her. He pointed at the pavers and explained about the seeds and the three attempts, and I briefly considered whether it was possible to disappear into the weave of a rug.

Linnea did not get angry. Linnea does not, I am coming to understand, get angry. She sighed the small warm sigh of a teacher whose student has arrived at a predictable confusion, and she explained.

She called it the Consecration. They have done something to the earth here. Washed it or blessed it or bled it, she wasn’t specific, and I didn’t push, because there are some questions you only ask once. Only the Concord’s planned crops can take root. She said it the way you would say the dog is on a leash. She said they had reached a contract with the soil.

I watched Clay’s face. He had understood before she finished.

“So my seeds aren’t part of the deal, then,” he said, which was the rudest he has ever been to a woman in a bonnet, and which she accepted without blinking.

“That’s right. In order to grow things here, you must have an agreement with the soil.”

Before Clay could say anything worse, I arranged my face into the expression I know she likes. I thanked her profusely. She patted my hand. She let herself out.

Clay sat in his chair dead still and stared at the wall. I didn’t try to make him feel better. He needed his bad mood. I wasn’t going to steal it from him on top of everything else.

Mom, the soil has an agreement. The soil has a contract. Somewhere in this village there is a file on the dirt.

I will write again when I know more.

Cathy

Third Letter

Dear Mom,

Forgive the long silence. There has been too much to say and no safe way to say it. Clay is not staring at the wall anymore. I will get to why. But first, the boys.

Booger and Sugar have been coming home with grease all over their clothes, which would never happen in the fields or the vats. The Concord’s grease is a different color, if it even has grease at all, which I am starting to doubt. I let it go at first. I figured the boys needed secrets too.

Then one evening Sugar took something out of his pocket and chucked it at Booger, and it bounced off Booger’s forehead and left a red mark, and Booger screamed and lunged for Sugar’s throat in a way which honestly made me feel the most at-home I had felt since we got here. The boys wrestled on the lovely rug. Clay picked the thing up.

“A crab apple?” he said.

It was small and ugly and wrinkled, with a crooked stem, and it looked like it had had to fight its way out of the dirt, which in this village was a resume unto itself. The apples in the market here look like they were issued. You cannot ferment an issued apple. You can barely eat one without feeling you ought to have to fill out a form.

This one was different. Clay’s eyes went wide in the way that means an idea has bitten him. He grabbed the boys one collar in each hand and shook them till they told him where they got it.

It turns out my sons have found a route under the big bridge to Fortress Island. They climb along the maintenance struts underneath, Mom, which I am going to pretend I did not just write down. Fortress Island is a forgotten place the Concord has nothing to do with. The Concord people call it a “ruined society, barely functioning, choked to near death by bad governance,” which is how the Concord describes any place they do not operate. The boys say there is a guard at the toll booth on the island side, but when she sees them she pretends she doesn’t, which is the Fortress Island version of permission.

Clay cracked the apple open and held it under my nose. “The soil over there isn’t consecrated,” he said, and then he kissed me full on the mouth, which is a thing he does approximately twice a year, in response to either the birth of a child or the discovery of a loophole.

We sent the boys back over with a sack. They made runs at dusk for two weeks. Nobody noticed. Nobody cared. Fortress Island, it turns out, is full of things nobody on the Concord side cares about, including the people.

Clay set up his still in the back shed. He took a massive iron boiler the Concord uses for cleaning soil – which, I note, they will realise is missing eventually, but today is not that day – some smooth glass tubing, heavy rubber seals, and he screwed them all together. He forced pieces that were never meant to touch into a heavy, bolted argument. It hissed. It spat. It demanded to be watched every second the fire was lit. Sitting in the dark watching Clay fight with this rickety machine, Mom, he has not looked better to me since the night he proposed, which he did badly, as you’ll recall, in the rain, with that ring which turned my finger green.

Three weeks later we broke the seal. We sat on the back patio in the dark, just the five of us passing a jar. The cider was cloudy and sour and it produced a heavy, honest heat that burned a clean line straight down. I felt a familiar comfort spread over me like honey. I felt, for the first time in months, like I had a secret that was mine and not something in a file.

Dee Dee took a pull, made a face like he had swallowed a wasp, and then laughed an infectious, chest-deep laugh. I watched Clay watch him and I saw Clay’s face do the small quiet thing it does when something has worked out.

Of course Clay then wanted to go farther. It’s partly showing off. It’s also a generous reflex he has where anytime he stumbles into something good he cannot rest until other people are stumbling into it too. He is a terrible saint.

So he swiped some jars from the dining hall pantry and filled them with cider and stashed them in places where our fellow travelers, the 20 or so we came over with and had rarely seen since being scattered into our separate purposes, might find them. Wedged under the wheelwright’s bench. Behind the linen shed. Inside a milking bucket. They didn’t know who to thank. They didn’t need to. The high color in their cheeks the next morning was plenty.

While Clay works the dark, I handle the daylight. We still need things we can’t get on the Concord side: wire, real nails, anything that came out of the ground and wasn’t first given permission. So one morning Dee Dee and the twins and I loaded up the raft Clay built from a salvaged oak door with two empty barrels strapped underneath, which sounds exactly as seaworthy as it was, and we piled it with the Concord’s rejects. Vegetables that had grown a little crooked. Linen with a dropped stitch. Things the Concord had thrown out because they failed to meet the village’s standard of aesthetic harmony, which is a real phrase they use, and which made me laugh the first time I heard it because I thought it was a joke, but it was not.

We took their trash and some jars of cider and paddled the whole mess across the water.

The guard on the Fortress Island side was wedged into a grey booth with the expression of a woman who has not been surprised by anything since the spring. She glared at me the way you glare at a stray that might need to be chased off. But I had my armor ready. I pulled my shoulders back, put on my best Kilgaren smile, and slapped a stack of bright pink papers down on her ledge like they were a royal decree. She knew the papers were fake. I knew the papers were fake. The papers knew they were fake. But Mom, when you have survived with nothing for long enough, you learn to recognize when somebody else has also survived with nothing, and between two such people there is a kind of professional courtesy. Before we went home I set a jar of cider on the concrete step of her booth. She did not thank me. She did not need to.

We have been running this racket for two months. Nobody has stopped us. A Kilgaren woman with any sense would be looking over her shoulder. I can hear you saying so. But Clay is sleeping. The boys are calm. Dee Dee is proud. I am not going to turn my head.

Your daughter, Cathy

Fourth Letter

I haven’t written in months. There hasn’t been time.

I don’t even know if the Stewards actually load these letters onto the outbound boats, or if they just dump the sacks into the strait. I haven’t heard back from you. But I have to pretend you’ll read this.

There was an accident. I am writing this so you know we’re okay. Clay and the twins and I are okay.

Dee Dee is gone. He’s alive, but he had to run. Clay is out looking for him now.

A boy from the Concord fell last night. There was a party. Clay’s cider was there.

These people don’t know what to do when things go wrong.

Cathy

Fifth Letter

Dear Mom,

The gatherings had started small back in the early summer. A few travelers finding Clay’s jars behind the stalls and having a laugh. Then they multiplied. Then they spread. We started hearing about parties so far out from us we couldn’t figure out how the cider had gotten there. It wasn’t us anymore. That should have been my first warning, that the thing we had started had gotten up off the table and walked out on its own legs, but I was too pleased about it to notice.

We all began testing our freedom. We had gotten good at sneaking. So that night we felt it was time for our first real party, not a drop and a scatter, but 20 people together in a room.

People brought what they had hidden. A wheel of sharp cheese somebody had been aging in a wall. A jar of pickled fish from a traveler who would not say how she’d pickled them. A homemade guitar with one string and a great deal of personality. By ten o’clock the cute little house out by the gulch was sweating. People were singing in three different keys. Laughing from the gut. Spilling cider on the floorboards. It was loud and messy and fun, and it was the most Kilgaren thing I had felt since we stepped onto the boat, which I will tell you, Mom, made me homesick in a way I had not expected and was not ready for.

Some Stewards came. By then it wasn’t unusual to see them among us. They had started drifting into our gatherings with the sheepish curiosity of children sneaking into a grown-ups’ room. Even Mr. Pell was there, wearing a hat he had visibly pulled from a trash heap and pleased with himself beyond description. Early on we had worried they were spying. Putting together a case. But no. We were playing at being them, badly, and they were playing at being us, worse. Mr. Pell had the posture of a man who had read about slouching in a pamphlet.

That night one of the Stewards’ kids was in the middle of it. Aldred, maybe 20, who kept trying to pull everyone into a hug. He was slinging his arms around shoulders like an overgrown puppy. He didn’t know how to manage his own body weight because no one had ever told him to back off. In the Concord, nobody had ever needed to.

He drank Clay’s cider for the first time and it hit him the way a glass door hits a bird. By the third cup he tried to hug Sugar, and one thing led to another, and before long they were wrestling out back near the cliffs. They were playing. It had an unpredictable edge because Aldred had never been allowed to roughhouse before and his body had not learned where the line was between a game and a disaster. He grabbed a piece of wood and swung it around him pretending it was an axe. “Make way!” he shouted. “I’m clearing the valley! Make way!”

Sugar, always looking to keep a game alive, shouted back, “Make way! Make way!”

Laughing, Aldred pulled the wood back and started to swing right at Sugar’s head.

Dee Dee stepped in. If Clay had been right there he would have beat the kid silly. But Dee Dee does what he always does when people get heated, which is he tries to help. He caught the wood with one hand and held it. He did not hurt Aldred. He just stopped him. He pushed Sugar back with his other hand.

No one was hurt. Aldred looked surprised. Then he looked scared, the way a person looks when they realize for the first time in their life that another person is physically stronger than they are. He had never had that information before, Mom. It is information most of us learn at six.

He grabbed at the wood, trying to yank it back.

And Dee Dee, gentle, obliging Dee Dee, who does not fight for anything he can give away, just let it go.

Aldred fell back. Right over the edge of the gulch. No scream. Just the crack of brush giving way, and then the awful quiet.

I didn’t know what the Stewards would do. While everyone rushed to look after the boy, I grabbed Dee Dee by the hand and pulled him away.

“You have to get out of here,” I said.

“Where do I go?” He looked small. I do not know how a man his size looks small but he did.

“It doesn’t matter. Just get as far from here as you can.”

“When will I see you? And the twins and Clay?”

“We’ll come find you. Now go.”

I shoved him toward the tree line, and after one final look to be sure I meant it, he was gone.

Cathy

Sixth Letter

Dear Mom,

Aldred is dead. They haven’t arrested anyone. I’m told they’ve never had to arrest anyone here. They mediate.

Ms. Linnea has been at our table three times since it happened. She sits there with her soft hands and her small book, and she asks the same questions, turning them over and over, writing down what we say. She is not looking for justice. She is building a category to put this in. The Concord does not have a category yet, and until they have one, nothing can happen, because nothing can happen here without a category. It frightens me.

I used to think the Stewards were simply blind to what we brought over. Now I am not so sure. When Linnea looks at me, she does not look like a woman trying to solve a crime. She looks like a woman watching a fire and taking notes on the fire.

Back home, if a boy died like this, the wardens would have smashed every jug in the neighborhood and arrested half the men by morning. Half of them innocent. Some of them relieved to be in jail. But the Stewards have smashed nothing. The underground market is still there. The travelers are still welcome in the dining hall. The jars of cider are, as far as I know, still wedged under benches and behind sheds all over the village, and the Stewards know this, and they have not moved to stop it. They just watch.

Why.

I do not know where Dee Dee is. I have to trust that the same soft nature that made him a friend to everyone is keeping him alive in the woods. I have to believe that the woods, which are not consecrated the way the village is, will be kind to him in a way the village no longer is.

The women in the kitchen have started building a ghost story about him. They talk about Dee Dee like he was not the shy man doing needlework in the back of a shop, but a creature we smuggled over in our luggage. Footsteps heavy in the dark at the edge of the fields. A shape between the trees. I have heard two different versions already of what his eyes look like, and neither of them is right. His eyes are brown and slightly wet. They have always been slightly wet. It is one of the first things I loved about him.

I don’t correct them. I sit at their long tables and let them turn my Dee Dee into a nightmare. Because fear can be a fence, Mom. If they think he is a monster, they will leave him alone. Let them tell their tales. Let the tales grow tall enough to keep him safe.

Your daughter, Cathy

Seventh Letter

Dear Mom,

It has been three months since Aldred died. The leaves should be turning by now. I have not noticed any.

For several weeks everyone was out of sorts. You could feel the gears of the village grinding. People were bumping into each other in the fields, stopping mid-task and sitting down for no reason. I thought the whole place was going to pile up and break, and I was braced for it, because I know what a town looks like when it comes apart. I have seen Kilgaren do it twice.

But then the Stewards made some changes. They didn’t hold a memorial. They didn’t gather us in the dining hall and ask us to talk. They didn’t pass around more of the tea. They just adjusted the schedule.

All the heavy work got moved to the evening. We sleep through the harsh daylight now and come out when the sun is low and soft. The women in the kitchen have stopped baking the hard bread and started serving thick, warm stews. The supply house came around and swapped our bedding. They took the crisp sheets away and gave us thick heavy cotton that feels, Mom, I am not exaggerating, like the inside of the womb.

The whole pace of the town dropped half a step. I swear the big clock by the mill is ticking slower.

And it worked. People are absorbing the shock of an unexplained death through soft food and the dark hours instead of falling apart. It is not like back home, where a death meant screaming and broken glass and a week of getting blind drunk. Here the panic got swallowed up by the new routine. They metabolized it. They metabolized Aldred’s death through a bedding change and a different soup.

It worked so well I thought we might stay. I thought, this is a people who know what they’re doing, and I don’t have to understand how they do it. I have spent my whole life in places where nobody knew what they were doing. If I’ve ended up somewhere they do, who am I to quibble.

But Clay, needing a new project, started digging in the flax fields. For weeks he would go out in the early mornings when we were supposed to be sleeping. It was getting colder and I brought him his coat. The plants were still that thick bright green, and with Clay kneeling there with the sun rising up behind him, it looked like a painting. You would put it on a wall. You would hang it above a mantel and never notice anything was wrong.

When he saw me he dug his hands deep into the ground and pulled up a pinch of dirt. He wanted me to taste it. So I opened my mouth. I let it settle on my tongue for a moment. I spat it out onto his boots. He wiped my mouth off.

“There’s no salt,” he said. “No iron. No rot. It’s just dust.”

“How are the plants still standing?”

He shook his head. “They won’t hold up much longer.”

And that is when I understood what the heavy blankets and the warm stews and the softer hours are for. You don’t give a worker a shorter shift and a softer bed if you need them to pull a heavy harvest. You only make people that comfortable when you know there is no work left to do. The Stewards know the green is going to turn brown. They aren’t managing the town anymore. They are managing the end of it.

And the thing I cannot get out of my head, Mom, is that they are very good at it. They are so good at it that nobody in the village knows yet. They are so good at it that I almost didn’t know, and I have been looking for the catch since the day I arrived.

I think they have been managing the end of the town for a long time. Since before we got here. I think the reason they built a place so perfectly soft is that they know how this part goes.

Clay is at the kitchen table looking at the door. I am writing this letter. Neither of us has said it out loud yet, but we have both said it with our shoulders, which is how our marriage does its serious talking.

We are leaving. We are going to find Dee Dee. Then we are taking the raft. I don’t know what is waiting on the other side and I am, for the first time in nine months, not afraid to find out.

Your daughter, Cathy

First published in Protocolized.

The Headless Empire

Sachin — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

The UET-1 had been moving for 11 hours when Felix Lim noticed that Lin Yuan Exact had not eaten.

This was unusual. Lin ate with the attention diligent men gave to doing taxes: methodically, at an appointed time, with no waste and no ceremony. Felix had, in nine months as his chief of staff, come to think of Lin’s meals as reliable data. The CEO was present, operational, and the world was proceeding on schedule. But the congee Lin had ordered at the Hong Kong terminus sat cooling on the table between them, while Lin looked out at a coastline that was slipping away.

Felix glanced at his bio-band. Green. He had boarded with a full compliance dossier: valid credentials, correct insurance classifications, cleared for the journey’s first six jurisdictions in advance. His passage was, in ECOROUTE’s assessment, perfectly routine.

Felix admired the sophistication of the train’s protocols. He never understood the fuss about healthcare surveillance. He enjoyed passing through borders in an endless interior, and all it cost him was a ticket and his making himself legible to the state. The arc of innovation bends toward justice, Felix thought. He thought this in the way he thought about the efficiency of markets or the tendency of systems toward equilibrium – as a fact of physics – the way heat moves toward cold, the way protocols standardize, the way the correct answer reveals itself to the correctly posed question. He had been taught this at the finest university in the world by professors who had never given him cause to doubt it, and he had not yet had reason to question their teaching.

“You haven’t eaten,” Felix said.

Lin Yuan Exact turned from the window. He looked at the congee with the expression of a man who has forgotten what food is for. Then he picked up his spoon.

“You are wondering why we are not flying,” he said.

Indeed Felix had been wondering this. The summit in Lisbon was in four days. Eight hours by air. Three days by rail.

“The thought had occurred to me,” Felix said.

“An airport is a trap with two doors, and I can control neither of them.” Lin ate a spoonful of congee, chewed, swallowed. “Its infrastructure was built for efficiency. It is used for capture.”

But efficiency is good, Felix thought. The arc of innovation ...

“On the other hand, this train is only seven years old,” Lin continued. He was eating now, with attention. “No one thought it would really matter in the grand scheme of things, so there have been very few attempts by states to capture it.” He looked out the window again. The coast was gone now, replaced by the first industrial outskirts of Guangzhou.

“So it’s a gap, a thin scar in the face of global surveillance.“

The train’s path curved and the megacity came into view behind them: the Pearl River delta. The towers, the ports with their stacked containers in every color, the whole apparatus of making and moving that the world ran on. Felix watched it and thought about the Neutral Forge. The corporation that Lin had founded, which had inspired an adolescent Felix to give up his dreams of becoming a poet.

The Neutral Forge manufactured chips but designed nothing. This was its Oath of Making: to fabricate but never to architect. Orchard Systems brought its designs; the Forge made Orchard chips. Greenlance Computer brought its designs; the Forge made Greenlance chips. A hundred competitors, bitter enemies in the marketplace, came to the same sanctuary, handed over their most precious innovations, and trusted. This trust was the Forge’s true product. Chips were merely its byproduct.

Felix believed in this trust the way he believed in the arc, not as a policy or a preference but as a property of well-functioning architecture, emerging from an underlying structure in the way heat emerges from friction. The system was designed the right and the right outcomes followed. You did not need to force them.

“What are we actually going to do in Lisbon?” Felix asked.

Lin set down his spoon briefly. “Be seen travelling toward peace.”

“Which is...”

“Not the same thing as peace. But it buys time.”

“For what?”

“For work that needs to be finished.”

Lin resumed eating. Felix looked at the metropolis as it receded. At its systems of making and moving that would keep working tonight and tomorrow and the day after, indifferent to who sat in what chair, because their architecture was sound. The answer is there, he thought. I have not yet posed the question correctly.

On the second day, as the train entered Mongolia, Lin was already awake.

Felix found him in the observation car at six in the morning, sitting in one of the panoramic seats with a glass of water, watching the steppe come into being as the light arrived. The steppe did not meet a horizon: at a certain point the grass simply stopped negotiating with the sky and let it take over.

Lin did not look up when Felix came in. He looked at the steppe. Felix sat across from him.

For 20 minutes, neither of them spoke.

Then Lin said, “The pressure arrived in stages.”

He said it in the way he might have said: “The train left Hong Kong at 7:14.” As a fact in a sequence of facts. But something in the steppe, or in the quality of light coming through the glass at this hour, had opened him.

“First the Fiduciary State,” Lin said. “Their lawyers wrote on letterhead with an embossed eagle. The implicit message: stop selling to the Empire’s companies. It didn’t need to be stated directly. The cost of non-compliance was Shunning, cut from the Murmur, unable to receive payment from anyone their financial system touches.” He looked at the steppe. “You know what the Murmur is.”

“The global financial messaging network,” Felix said. “SWIFT, in the old terminology.”

“The system through which all financial reality passes,” Lin said. “Literally. A transaction that the Murmur does not carry is a transaction that did not happen.”

Felix knew this. He knew this the way he knew about weather. He had never considered that someone had decided to build the Murmur, and that the person who decided to build it had also decided what it would and would not carry, and that this decision had been made once, long ago, by people with specific interests, and that it had been running on their behalf ever since.

He found this thought uncomfortable and set it aside.

“Then the Telluric Empire,” Lin continued. “Maintain supply to your traditional customers or the Seventeen Earths become unavailable. Gallium. Germanium. The periodic table’s veto.” He picked up his water glass, looked at it, set it down again. “Both at the same time. Not coincidentally.”

“What did you do?”

Lin was quiet for a moment. Outside, a bird crossed the steppe at speed. Low, dark.

“Have you seen a man juggling, Felix?”

“Yes.”

“When he has more balls than hands, what does he do?”

Felix thought about this seriously. “He drops one?”

Lin’s eyes followed the bird until it was gone. “He keeps them all in the air. For as long as he can. And when they fall,” one shoulder lifted, barely, “he is somewhere else.”

The steppe scrolled past. Felix thought about the Forge, about the clients who brought their designs and trusted their discretion. About the vested interests on both sides of that trust. About the Murmur and the Seventeen Earths and the eagle on the letterhead.There is a correct answer here, he thought.

They entered Russian territory that afternoon, at a border which was really just a gradient, a place where the train’s internal models registered a change. Two officials boarded with handheld Ponos to inspect passengers.

The first official was young and businesslike. The second was older, heavy, with the patience of someone who had spent decades in doorways and understood that doorways were where the interesting things happened. His Pono was different from the standard-issue model Felix had seen before. Instead of a green-or-red compliance grid, the screen showed something fluid: gradient fields, shifting spectra, the topography of a profile rendered in colors and graphs.

He stopped beside a Dutch businessman sitting next to Felix in the observation car. The businessman reached for his passport. The official ignored the passport.

“What does it measure?” Felix asked, because the question had already left him before he could decide whether to ask it.

The official looked up from the device. He had seen kids like Felix on the train before. All of them curious and smitten by the contraptions of UET-1.

“Drift,” he answered lazily.

“From what?”

“From what a person says they will do.” He said it so simply. “Before, we used stamps. Green, red. Legal, illegal. The sun is yellow, the grass is green.” He shrugged, a gesture that moved his whole body. “But the sun is a thermonuclear event. So now we have this. It does not say yes or no. It says probably. It says not yet. It makes a forecast.” He tilted the screen toward Felix. “Will this man arrive where he says he will arrive? Will he do what he says he will do? Or,” he made a gesture like smoke dispersing through fingers, “will he drift?”

On the screen, the Dutchman’s spectrum was cooling. The colors settled to an ambivalent blue. A thin seam flickered near some invisible threshold and did not cross it.

“And if he drifts?” Felix asked.

“Then we look at why. But only then.” The official made the face of a chess player forced to a draw. “While a man is within tolerance, we proceed. Certainty is expensive.”

The Pono emitted a soft descending tone and the official moved on. Felix leaned back. He looked at his own bio-band – green, steady – and thought about the word tolerance. The system did not need him to be correct. It needed him to be predictable. The difference had not previously seemed important.

That evening Lin summoned Felix to his cabin and handed him a folder.

Physical papers. Felix had worked in enough secure environments to know that paper was what you used when you did not want the document to exist in the records.

“Casino car,” Lin said. “Third table. A man called Walther. Do not read it.”

Felix took the folder. “What is it?”

“Infrastructure planning.”

Felix had heard this phrase several times now. It had begun to acquire a grating texture.

“Sir,” he said. “I have been your chief of staff for nine months. In that time I have coordinated communications with cryptographers in seven jurisdictions, managed secure protocols with lawyers in three different legal systems, and reviewed technical specifications for systems I do not have the clearance to fully understand. I believe in the Forge’s mission. I believe in what you are building. But I find myself in the position of performing a function I cannot define, and I am not certain that it is...”

“Felix.” Lin’s voice cut in with the particular patience of a man who has run the model many times and knows how it ends. “Do you know why I hired you?”

“My qualifications...”

“Your qualifications are sufficient. That is not why I hired you.” He looked at Felix steadily. “I hired you because you believe things. Visibly. You believe that systems tend toward equilibrium and that information wants to be free and that the arc of innovation bends toward justice. You believe this in the way a person believes in the sun. You do not check it, it is simply there. It is the light by which you do everything else.”

Felix said nothing.

“When you carry a folder through a train,” Lin said, “no one thinks you are carrying anything important. Because no one who is carrying something important looks like they believe in the sun.” A pause. “This is not an insult. You are a precision instrument.” He looked at the folder. “Go.”

Felix delivered the folder to Walther: third table, casino car. Loss and Gain. Walther was playing a card game whose rules appeared to be under ongoing renegotiation between him and the dealer. He took the folder without looking at Felix, slid it under the table, kept his attention on his cards.

Felix walked back through three cars. I am a precision instrument, he thought. He turned the phrase over. He had been hired because he believed visibly. Lin had said this as though it were operational information, which meant it was operational information, which meant Lin had factored Felix’s belief into his plans from the start, which meant...

The arc of innovation bends toward justice. The phrase was there when he reached for it. But it sat differently now.

Late on the third night Felix was in the dining car when Lin appeared.

This was unusual. Lin ate in his cabin, where, as Felix had once heard him explain to a journalist: “The walls are less interested in the conversation.” The dining car was a social space, and Lin was not a social person in the ordinary sense. He was a person who made you feel that the conversation you were having was the only one worth having, which was a different thing entirely.

He sat across from Felix, ordered tea, and for a moment said nothing. He looked at the window, which showed only darkness and their own reflections floating in it. Felix noticed that Lin was wearing the same white collarless linen shirt he had been wearing since Hong Kong. And the day before. Felix had the sudden realization that Lin had several of these shirts, packed identically. A choice made once and never revisited.

Then Lin began to talk, and Felix understood that he had not come to the dining car by accident.

“The Fiduciary States used to make things,” Lin said. “Steel. Cotton. Machines of ingenuity. But making is tedious. Making requires labour and logistics and the management of physical reality. So it ascended.” He received his tea. “It built the Murmur, through which all financial messages pass. The Chain of Hands, through which value moves. The Three Oracles, the Genuflections, the Naming: systems through which the world is assessed, classified, rated, included or excluded. It stopped making things and became the condition under which all making was possible. The tollbooth.”

“I understand the architecture of the Fiduciary States,” Felix said.

“You understand the facts.” Lin wrapped both hands around his cup. “The story is different. The story is that for 30 years the Forge survived between two systems of this kind by being necessary to both. The Doctrine of Indispensability. You cannot coerce what you cannot replace. As long as they needed us equally, we were safe in the gap.”

“What changed?”

Lin looked at his reflection in the dark window. “They noticed. Both of them, at the same time, which was not a coincidence. The Fiduciary States noticed that our chips found their way into the Empire’s military systems. The Empire noticed that we existed in a territory it has always called its own.” A pause. “There is a principle in physics, Felix: a body at rest in a contested space does not remain at rest.”

“What are you building? In Lisbon?” Felix said.

Lin was quiet. This was not the silence of a man who won’t answer, but the silence of a man deciding how much of the answer to give. He looked from his reflection to Felix. Something shifted in his face, something that might, on a different face, have been called the look of a man who needs to be heard, who has carried something for a long time without anyone to carry it with him.

“I am going to tell you something,” Lin said. He picked up his cup. “The world you believe in, where technology is neutral and the correct architecture produces the correct outcomes and the arc bends reliably, that world does not exist. It has never existed. What exists are machines. The Murmur is a machine. The Shunning is a machine. The Long Roots, the Three Oracles, the sanctions architecture, this train: machines. And every machine, without exception, is eventually operated by whoever can afford to maintain it.”

Felix opened his mouth. The words were there: systems tend toward equilibrium, information wants to be free...

“Once you have seen it,” Lin said, “you cannot unsee it. This is not a tragedy. It is a fact of life.”

Felix heard himself say, “Then what is the point of building anything?”

Lin set his cup down.

“That,” Lin said, “is exactly the right question.”

He did not answer it. He left Felix with his tea going cold and the train moving through the night.

Felix did not sleep.

He walked the train instead, through the dining car, past the business car with its encrypted-app men, their faces lit from below, through the corridor where a teenager was asleep with a boarding pass stuck to his cheek, through the observation car at the rear where the track disappeared into darkness behind them. He walked until his thinking had some air around it.

He stopped outside Lin’s cabin because there were voices.

A man and a woman. Neither of them Lin. It was past one in the morning. There were no meetings on the calendar.

Felix stood in the corridor and did not move.

“The keyholders are distributed,” the man said. “37 across 19 jurisdictions. Most don’t know each other. Several don’t know what they hold.”

“The contracts?” Lin’s voice.

“Self-executing. Time-locked. Embedded in the Strait Country’s fiscal ledger as infrastructure bonds. From the outside they look like pre-payments, R&D allocations. But they’re bound to the technical roadmap. Releases trigger on verifiable conditions. Equipment delivery. Construction milestones. Patent filings. Not board votes. Not executive signatures.”

“Even if the board is replaced?”

“The board is irrelevant. The funding flows through the ledger. The Strait Country’s system runs on a distributed ledger, thousands of nodes, maintained by institutions in dozens of countries who participate because the Strait Country’s fiscal stability is their fiscal stability. The contracts execute inside that architecture. No individual can stop them.”

“And if the roadmap changes.”

The woman spoke for the first time. “The keyholders. They don’t operate anything, they’re circuit breakers. If a parameter needs adjustment, modification requires 24 of 37 keys. Across 19 jurisdictions. Mostly anonymous to each other. No empire can coerce enough of them. Not quickly enough to matter.”

A silence. Then Lin: “When does the next transmission window open?”

“Gauge transition at Zabaikalsk. 11 minutes.”

“I’ll be there.”

Felix stood in the corridor for a long time. The train moved beneath him with the patience of something that did not require his understanding.

Lin has built a system that runs without its builder, he thought. That was the infrastructure planning. That was what needed to be finished. The Covenant – and he understood now that this was its name, had probably always been its name – would fund the Forge’s operations for 20 years, keep the thinking-stones flowing to every client regardless of empire, regardless of who sat in which chair, regardless of what happened to Lin Yuan Exact in the meantime.

Felix stood in the corridor and felt the train move and thought: this is the most remarkable piece of engineering I have ever encountered. And: there is no due process. And: these two thoughts are the same thought.

He went back to his cabin. He did not sleep.

His professors had been clear: a system without accountability is dangerous. Not as an opinion but as a technical fact, the way an ungrounded circuit is dangerous. The way a bridge without load calculations is dangerous. The Covenant had no circuit breaker that answered to anyone. The keyholders could modify its parameters, but who held the keyholders accountable? Who had consented to be governed by a machine that ran without consent as a feature?

Felix opened his tablet. The Lisbon summit had established an official secure channel for the pre-conference technical working group. Felix had been added to it in his capacity as the CEO’s representative. He had used it for logistics.

He composed a message. A subversive message. He was precise. He described the structure: 37 keyholders, 19 jurisdictions, self-executing contracts in the Strait Country’s ledger, the circuit-breaker architecture. He stated facts. He did not editorialize. He had been taught that a properly constructed report stated facts and allowed the facts to do the argumentative work. The facts here were unambiguous.

He sent it at 2:47 in the morning.

Then he thought: I will tell Lin what I have done. I will tell him in the morning. There should be a conversation. There should be an opportunity to respond. That is what accountability means, not punishment, but the existence of a process. The formal acknowledgement that the process exists.

The arc of innovation bends toward justice. He still believed this. He was, at 2:47 in the morning, acting on it.

He slept.

The train entered Europe the following morning. Felix ordered two coffees and carried them to Cabin 7-14.

He had decided, in the hour before dawn, that a conversation needed to happen. That he would tell Lin what he had done and why. That a man who believed in accountability should be prepared to account for his own actions. That Lin would understand this, or not, and that either way the conversation was important.

The door was unlocked. The cabin was empty. It had been systematically returned to a neutral state. The bed made with a precision that denied it had ever been occupied. The luggage gone. Even the slight compression a person leaves in upholstery after several days of travel was absent.

Felix found Captain Eriksson in the forward crew compartment and brought him up on the situation. Eriksson had seen many iterations of the situation Felix was about to describe.

“We should stop. Search the train,” said Felix.

“If we stop, we become subject to whatever jurisdiction we’ve stopped in,” Eriksson replied. “Currently that’s the Belarusian border corridor. The Telluric Empire has significant influence there.” He paused. “There are also 412 citizens of the Fiduciary States aboard in various states of legal complexity. Stopping resolves their complexity in a direction none of them would prefer.”

“So the response is to continue?” Felix was aghast.

“The train is built to continue, Mr. Lim. Stopping is a jurisdictional event. I would recommend against causing one.”

Felix wanted to have a conversation and now Lin had made it impossible. The report Felix filed was now unanchored, sitting in a channel, read by people whose interests he hadn’t, at 2:47 in the morning, stopped to enumerate.

Again the arc of innovation came back to him, as if a piece of evidence about himself: he had believed this, he had acted on it, and acting on it had ended disastrously. He did not blame the arc. He was beginning to think the arc did not know he existed.

Felix received two calls before the train reached Warsaw.

The first was from a man representing the legal interests of the Telluric Empire. He said that Lin Yuan Exact had been illegally detained by agents of the Fiduciary States, that the Telluric Empire was invoking the doctrine of habeas corpus on Lin’s behalf, and that Felix, as a witness to the events aboard the train and as the person who had reported on Lin’s plan for the Forge, would be contacted in Lisbon.

Felix asked how the Telluric Empire had come to know about his message. The man said he was not in a position to discuss that and the call ended.

The second was from a woman representing, in no official capacity, the interests of the Fiduciary States. She expressed concern for Felix’s safety. She noted that Felix possessed information that certain parties might prefer he not share. She asked him not to speak to anyone on arrival and said someone would find him.

After the second call ended Felix sat with his phone, thinking about the message he had sent. He could see the shape of it: both empires had learned something within hours of him sending it, which meant the official channel was official in the way that airports are official: infrastructure that serves particular interests while presenting itself as neutral.

He thought about the Murmur. The Chain of Hands. The Three Oracles. He thought about what Lin had said in the dining car: every machine is eventually operated by whoever can afford to maintain it.

Lisbon received Felix with indifference. He checked in to his hotel. His key card worked. His name was on the delegate list. He was still, technically, the CEO’s representative. No notification had arrived to change this. In every system, he was present as an entity representing Neutral Forge, but he didn’t know if he still had his job as chief of staff to the disappeared CEO.

On the third morning, a man from the Strait Country’s delegation sat down across from him in the hotel restaurant without asking.

“We know what happened to Lin,” the man said.

Felix had ordered eggs which had now gone cold.

“The gauge transition at Zabaikalsk, the 11-minute window. The Covenant’s first key transmission happened there in the Hale Gap.”

“Hale Gap?”

“It’s complicated to get into, but we think that one of the cars on UET-1 is a cryptographic bridge of some kind.”

Felix held the expression of someone who had gotten used to surprises.

“He timed the entire journey around an 11-minute window in which no state had enforcement authority. When the window opened, he was in car seven. He transmitted his own keyholder credentials. Then he was gone. We don’t really know how,” the man picked up his coffee.

Felix sat with his cold eggs and thought about 11 minutes. He thought about the drift official and his gradient fields and his tolerance thresholds and his trained eye for grey areas over the bright lines of law. He thought about Lin eating the congee with complete attention, about the identical white shirts, about the juggling parable and the balls staying in the air until the juggler was somewhere else.

He walked the city. He walked along the waterfront where the river went to the sea, past the old tower and the new scaffolding and the tram that ran between them. He thought about the Covenant: the 37 keyholders, the self-executing contracts, the Strait Country’s distributed ledger with its thousands of nodes and its decades of accumulated interest from institutions who needed it to remain stable.

But the Covenant was running. It was running through the gauge transition and the jurisdictional gap and the distributed ledger and the 19 jurisdictions and it would keep running after every person who had built it was gone. And the question was not whether the Covenant was just. Lin had told him in the dining car that the world that contained justice as a reliable product of correct architecture did not exist. The question was whether the Covenant was the closest thing to that world that the actual world permitted.

He stood at the waterfront and thought about what it would mean to believe in a machine you had not built. To choose to work inside it, understanding its costs, because the alternative was to keep filing reports through official channels that fed into the interests of whoever maintained them.

The arc of innovation bends toward capture. He believed this now. He also believed, and this was new, and harder, and had no clean phrase attached to it, that the Covenant was the correct response to a world in which that was true. Not the just response. The correct one. Built for the world as it is.

Several months later, Felix accepted a position with the Forge’s compliance architecture and took the UET-1 south from Hong Kong toward Vietnam. He took the train because it was the only place where his thinking moved at the right speed, and because he had some thinking to do before he went back north to start the new role.

He was in the South China Sea corridor when his phone rang.

“Felix.”

The voice was older than he remembered. Or he was remembering it wrong, measuring it now against what he knew. There was wind on the line, and underneath the wind an animal sound, low, intermittent, indifferent to the conversation.

“Sir,” Felix said. “Where are you?”

“Saudi Arabia.” A pause. “Looking after goats.”

“Why?”

“Well, I paid someone to take me to Zurich, but it seems they were paid by someone else to drop me off in a wadi.”

“Are you going to come back?”

“I’m happy here, Felix. The goats make me happy. The sun makes me happy. I worry about you though. I heard you spoke with the Strait Country delegation,” Lin said. “In Lisbon.”

“I filed a report,” Felix said. “Through the official channel. Before you disappeared.”

“I know.”

“I filed it because I thought there should be an appeals process. Because someone should know that a system with no accountability is dangerous.” A pause. “I understand that this was predictable.”

“I know what you thought,” Lin said. And then, without the weight of a judgment being delivered, simply as a fact in a sequence of facts: “You were right. A system without accountability is dangerous. I built one anyway.”

The wind on Lin’s end. The train’s motion on Felix’s.

“I’m going back to the Forge,” Felix said. “To work inside the Covenant. Not to challenge it.”

Lin was quiet for a moment. Felix heard the goat again. Closer, perhaps, or the animal had moved.

“The Covenant doesn’t need you,” Lin said.

“I know.” A pause. “I need it.”

A longer silence. Felix watched the South China Sea through the window: the light on it, the vast indifferent blue, the container ships moving in both directions as they always had and would continue to after every argument about their cargo was settled or abandoned.

“I built something that cannot be challenged,” Lin said. “You tried to challenge it.” The wind. “One of us was working from the world as it should be. The other from the world as it is.”

Felix waited.

“The goats are calling,” Lin said. “Goodbye, Felix.”

The line went dead.

Felix looked at the sea. It went on in every direction, carrying everything that needed to move from one side of the world to the other, indifferent to the arguments on its surface, reliable as gravity, as the arc, as the machines that had been built to describe them.

First published in Protocolized.

The Flesh Perfected Is the Flesh Possessed

Sachin — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Rowan was startled awake from that half-daydream, half-sleep state that happens on long train rides. The landscape outside the window was barren, which signalled that she was far, far away from Lisbon, where she had boarded the UET-1. She looked at her friends. Lucas and Jax were cozying up across the aisle and Ana was rather performatively reading Eroticism by George Bataille right next to her. Rowan was surprised that they hadn’t asked her more questions about why they were on this long journey from Lisbon to Lake Baikal. She had suggested that they spend the one-week break at the world’s deepest lake, and all of them agreed almost instantly. “Everyone’s posting from Paris but the lake in the middle of nowhere seems like a cooler place to post from,” Ana had said with sincere irony. The boys did not care. Every landscape is paradise for a pair of new lovers.

Only Rowan knew that their true purpose was as weapons in an invisible war that she had entangled them in. The stress had kept her awake for the past week, and it was beginning to show under her eyes. Rowan had a strict regimen to take care of her body: in the past month alone, she’d done Botox, Emface, IPL, and scheduled Moxi broadband light. She’d seen her orthodontist, cardiologist, GP, OBGYN, ophthalmologist, dermatologist, plastic surgeon, trainer, and pilates instructor. She had renewed her medspa membership. Drawn blood three times and given two urine samples. Her current skincare routine was six to eight steps, her daily supplement stack was 17 pills (20 on Mondays) and three peptides taken subQ, and she regularly engaged at least five high-tech tools from her home device library (red light, SAD light, PEMF, etc). Rowan liked to joke that she was somatically gentrified. Her working-class Midlands body’s adipocytes and senescent cells cleared out to make room for a sleeker, more profitable physiological regime. So, any small deviation, like the bags under her eyes, stood out like the lone crumbling house in an aspiring neighbourhood.

She shut her eyes and tried not to think about being a weapon. But the train, which had made itself fade into the background, quietly racing along at 250kph, began to slow down, and the sparse, clinical atmosphere was penetrated by the sound of something moving below the floorboards. Rowan knew before the announcement came that they were entering eastern Europe. The train switched from the euro standard gauge to a narrower gauge for this leg of the journey. The ride was going to be bumpier, but only noticeable to those who had been sensitized to such small changes. Rowan was one of them. She had, without the knowledge of her friends, taken the Unified Eurasian Transit line at least 100 times in the last five years. The longest single rail line connected Lisbon to Laos, passing through 13 different territories. It was a moving special economic zone and Rowan was a frequent trader on its route. The Tirzepatide Trail: that’s what people had started calling the leg of the UET-1 from Lisbon to the border of China, passing through Russia. Demand for Chinese peptides was high among tech workers and other desk jockeys who needed a little hit of something in the afternoon to focus on churning out enterprise software or whatever. Rowan picked these up and distributed them out of a clinic in the suburbs of London that she had started with a doctor whose license had been revoked years ago.

Rowan was not the only business in town. At the height of the peptide trade, peptide resellers were transporting 100,000 vials a month. But then Black Wednesday happened.

One morning on the Budapest-to-Vienna rail segment, someone released a modified aerosolised pathogen in Car 7. It had been engineered – this much was established within days. A chimeric agent, part synthetic, designed to activate only in the presence of estrogen concentrations above a specific threshold. The pathogen remained inert in male hosts but triggered acute respiratory collapse in females on primary exposure, while also shedding briefly, asymptomatically, through skin contact and shared air. All nine women in Car 7 died within minutes. 23 others throughout Cars 6 and 8 – women who had never entered Car 7, who had simply been breathing recycled air or brushed past an infected passenger – developed symptoms within hours. 14 were hospitalized. Seven would die over the following week. The men showed no symptoms beyond serving as unwitting carriers.

A conventional weapon – a bomb, a nerve agent – kills indiscriminately. This thing had been programmed with a biological filter. It had turned half the population into potential victims and the other half into unwitting accomplices.

The UET-1 reopened after six weeks, forever scarred by its immune response to the incident.

Now, the train’s security protocols didn’t just ask “Who are you?” They asked “What is happening inside you right now – and what’s the likelihood that your body is a bioweapon?” They called the new protocols ECOROUTE: Ecological Routing & Onboard Unified Triage Enforcement. The “Ecological” was a branding affectation – someone in the EU’s communications office, probably a millenial, had decided that a surveillance regime would go down easier if it sounded like a recycling initiative. Biology had become telemetry. Every passenger now emitted a continuous bio-signature tracked by sensors embedded in seats, air vents, even the floor panels.

Rowan noticed it immediately on her first test trip after the attack. The “AIRFLOW REVERSAL” lights that blinked without warning. The gentle hiss of doors sealing themselves when air sentinel zones detected anomalies. The thin paper bio-bands issued at boarding that shifted from green to yellow based on your vital signs and heat signature. It was vastly more sophisticated than the half-hearted masking and social distancing policies of the covid era. The UET-1 was French engineering that operated within a quasi-European bureaucracy, with some Chinese and South East Asian characteristics sprinkled in. The new protocols had to be observable and satisfactory for a multitude of bureaucratic cultures.

Frequent passengers like Rowan now had baselines in addition to identity checks – metabolic signatures, stress markers, sleep debt patterns. The ticket terms buried it in legalese: “By boarding, you consent to adaptive health-routing and temporary isolation for the protection of onboard ecology.” There was no real opt-out, just slower routing and more friction if you objected.

For Rowan’s operation, this was catastrophic. Her carefully packaged peptide shipments, once invisible among nutritional supplements, now triggered alerts. The train’s environmental sentinels could detect trace compounds, unexpected chemical signatures, deviations from baseline cargo profiles. Her Warsaw contact reported that freight cars were being diverted mid-route to “air-wash corridors” – gentle decontamination theaters that destroyed product and pathogen alike. The passengers were then earmarked like cattle for detailed screenings the next time they took the train.

Rowan was ready to walk away from it all. Cut their losses from the lost packages. Maybe go back to a low-level tech job. But one day, a man named Alex contacted her on Telegram.

It seemed like a scam at first. Another one of those grey-market peptide dealers. But this one was persistent. Eventually she met with him at a cheugy bar in Lisbon’s Bairro Alto. He was wearing flip-flops and chinos. Alex claimed he worked for the CIA, and he would supply Rowan with a new safe route for her peptides if she did one thing. One little job.

Alex was not CIA. He was employed by Marcus Hale.

How do you get money into a country that is outside the SWIFT system and under physical blockade? Marcus Hale had been pondering this question with his associates for several months, while jet-setting between several small islands in the Indian Ocean whose names were unrecognizable to the general public.

The country in question had lithium. Not the kind prescribed to stabilize mood – the kind that stabilized the future. Enough lithium carbonate under its eastern steppe to supply European battery production for 40 years. A Chinese state consortium held the extraction rights through a deal signed with the previous government. The current government, such as it was, operated from three cities and a Telegram channel and was willing to renegotiate. But renegotiation requires funding. Funding requires transfer. And transfer requires money that could actually move.

Hale’s could not. This was the essential problem. Hale was 63 and had accumulated wealth the way rot accumulates in a wall – invisibly, structurally, in places no one thought to look. Arms brokerage in the Balkans during the nineties, routed through Austrian holding companies. Conflict mineral extraction in the Congo, laundered through infrastructure contracts that built roads to nowhere. Sanction evasion for three separate Russian oligarchs during the 2022 freeze, taking 15 percent of every dollar he hid. He was not a billionaire in the way that word is normally used. He appeared on no lists, owned no visible assets, had no public face. His firm, Sable Meridian, employed 12 people and existed in a legal superposition – its purpose described in incorporation documents as “strategic consulting.”

The problem with building wealth inside walls is that it stays inside walls. Hale’s money existed as equity in shell companies that owned shell companies, as claims on assets in jurisdictions where the courts could be bought but the banks could not be wired, as handshake obligations from men who would honour them only if Hale could reach them. None of this was convertible. None of it could be moved to a country under blockade to fund a government that existed primarily on Telegram. He needed money that was liquid, untraceable, and – critically – not his. Money that belonged to no one. Money that no intelligence service, no compliance team, no blockchain analytics firm was watching.

Yevgeni Stolar’s Bitcoin fit the bill. Almost.

Yevgeni Stolar had died in June 2026, in a boating accident off Limassol. The Cypriot maritime authority ruled it accidental. He was 41, Ukrainian-born, and had built payment infrastructure for half the darknet markets operating between 2018 and 2025. Not the markets themselves – the plumbing beneath them. Transaction mixers, tumbling protocols, the invisible pipes through which money moved without identity. By 2022, an estimated four percent of all cryptocurrency transactions on the dark web touched infrastructure Stolar had built. He had accumulated 11,000 Bitcoin – approximately $940 million – in fractional commissions. Then he died, and the money went dark.

Karel, Hale’s operations nerd who actually executed his plans, found Stolar’s notes eight months later, on a server in Odessa that Sable Meridian had purchased through a shell company. Fragments of documentation written in a mix of Ukrainian and English. What emerged, over weeks of reconstruction, was a plan.

Stolar had intended to board the UET-1 with three others. There were references to two women and a man, designated only as N., K., and D. Travel itineraries for a route from Kyiv to Lisbon, dated March 2023, four seats booked in adjacent compartments. Dosage calculations for adjusting a compound’s concentration for different body masses. One set appeared to be for someone quite small – a teenager, possibly. The booking was never used.

There was also a single line, written in Ukrainian, that Karel translated as: “If the boat, then N. knows the second route.” No indication of what the second route was or who N. was. Karel spent three months trying to find out and failed. It was, he told Hale, probably a story worth knowing, but not one that they actually needed to be able to extract the key.

What they needed was already in the notes. Stolar had been, in addition to his darknet work, a contractor for the European Union’s transport security directorate. He had been part of the team that designed the sensor specifications for the UET-1’s onboard environmental monitoring system – the system that, after Car 7, became the foundation of ECOROUTE’s decontamination array.

The sensors composed an active terahertz and Raman spectroscopy system. It swept passengers with a broad frequency range, reading the molecular composition of their skin, breath, clothing, and – at the resolutions mandated by Black Wednesday protocols – subcutaneous tissue. It was built to detect trace chemical weapons, aerosolised pathogens, and anomalous compounds. What Stolar had ensured, through careful specification of the frequency bands and resolution thresholds, was that the array also happened to operate in the exact range needed to interrogate a very specific kind of engineered nanoparticle.

Solar had buried a cold wallet, nested in the decontamination array’s firmware as a dormant subroutine, indistinguishable from the diagnostic calibration code that surrounded it. The wallet contained the private keys to the 11,000 Bitcoin. It was secured with a four-of-four multisignature protocol: four signing keys must be presented simultaneously, or the wallet would stay locked. Stolar had not stored those keys on hardware devices or paper or in any digital format. He had encoded them into a compound.

The compound was not, strictly speaking, a peptide. It was a peptide chassis carrying a payload of engineered paramagnetic nanoparticles. The peptide could bind to tissue and ferry the particles through the body’s physiological pathways – lymphatic, fascial, subcutaneous. But Stolar’s original version was crude. It drifted in practice, the nanoparticles migrating unpredictably across different body types. The resonance signatures it produced were noisy, inconsistent. It worked on Stolar’s body. Whether it would have worked on N., K., and D. was unclear. He never got the chance to find out.

This was where Karel came in handy. 14 months, and the reason Hale had paid him what he’d paid him.

Karel had re-engineered the compound from the chassis up. The core problem was biological variance: its fat distribution, hydration, muscle mass, organ geometry all shaped how the nanoparticles settled in tissue, which meant different bodies produced different resonance patterns from the same vial. Karel’s solution was to make the compound indifferent to its host. He surface-coated each particle cluster with synthetic ligands which ignored the body’s natural signalling and drove the particles into a predetermined topographical configuration – specific depths, specific densities, specific spatial relationships to one another – regardless of the body they were in. He ran simulations across hundreds of physiological models. He tested on cadaveric tissue sourced through channels Hale didn’t ask about. The result was a compound so resistant to the biological individuality of its host that it would produce the same resonance pattern whether injected into a 20 year-old athlete or a 60 year-old diabetic. The body was mere scaffolding. The compound built its own architecture.

There were four vials. Each contained a different nanoparticle configuration – different cluster sizes, different magnetic orientations, different spatial topographies. Vial 1, injected into any human body, would always produce Key 1’s resonance signature when scanned by the decon array. Vial 2 would always produce Key 2. The four keys were not in the four people. The four keys were in the four vials. The people were hosts – warm, compliant, scannable, but interchangeable.

Hale needed four bodies. He needed them on the train. He needed them flagged.

Rowan felt the gauge change settle. Ana had fallen asleep with the Bataille open on her chest. Lucas had his head on Jax’s shoulder, both of them out. Rowan was alone with the hum.

She reached into her bag and took out the pouch Alex had given her. Temperature-controlled, unmarked, delivered to her flat by a courier service that didn’t exist when she tried to look it up. Four vials. Clear liquid. She held one up to the reading light. It looked like every reconstituted peptide she’d ever handled. Same viscosity and faint yellow cast.

Alex had told her the compound was a next-generation masking agent. Experimental. Not yet on any market. “It recalibrates your metabolic output to sit inside the train’s baseline tolerance,” he’d said. “You inject, your bio-signature flattens, the sentinels read you as boring. You ride through decon zones without a flag. No amber bands, no air-wash, no questions.”

“And you need four people to test this?”

“We need four different metabolic profiles. Age, sex, body composition – the sentinels calibrate differently for each. One body isn’t enough for a test. Four is a dataset.”

It was a good pitch. The kind of compound she would have killed for six months ago, when her shipments were being diverted and her distribution network was collapsing under ECOROUTE’s paranoid immune logic. A way to move through the train invisible. If it worked, it was worth more than anything else Alex could offer her.

But she didn’t believe him. The explanation was too clean, too shaped to her exact desires, the way a phishing email contains exactly the link you were looking for. She’d spent years in grey markets, replying to ads from women named Sophia and Judi whose faces were generated by algorithms, and she had developed a sense for when she was being sold something and when she was being used for something. Alex was using her. She was almost certain.

She took the job anyway. Partly because she was a curious person – it was the same impulse that had her browsing peptide forums at 13, messaging Chinese suppliers at 16, building shell companies at 17. Curiosity as engine, risk as fuel. She also knew it was not risky. Maybe the peptides set off the ECOROUTE protocols, but that would be a minor inconvenience at worst.

But an intrusive thought that had kept her awake for a week was now beginning to show under her eyes: the compound was doing something to her body that Alex hadn’t described. She and Lucas and Ana and Jax were not testers but vessels. Their carefully optimised, peptide-saturated bodies were being recruited for carrying something dangerous. Was she a bioweapon? The thought lingered in her like a vial she couldn’t uncap.

Hale was in Zug, in a room with no windows, watching four dots move across a map on a screen. The dots were the phones of Rowan, Lucas, Ana, and Jax. The UET-1’s real-time positioning data was not public, but Sable Meridian had access through a freight logistics company that it owned 40 percent of.

Beside him, Karel was monitoring biometric feeds piped from the train’s own sensor grid – another access point purchased, not hacked, through a maintenance subcontractor in Warsaw. The feeds were rough. Passive readings from seat sensors and floor panels. Enough to confirm that all four subjects were aboard, alive, and not yet dosed.

“She’s awake,” Karel said. “The other three are asleep.”

“She’ll wait until they’re all awake,” Hale said.

On a second screen, another operation was underway. A relay node in the UET-1’s network was coming online – housed in a switching station outside a data hub town that lived and breathed ECOROUTE logistics. Sable Meridian’s people had physical access to the station through a local telecoms contractor who had been on retainer for two years. The relay handled decontamination scan data as it passed from the train’s onboard servers to the ECOROUTE central repository in Brussels. For 35 seconds, during the scan of Car 7’s air-wash corridor, the data would be duplicated and routed to a separate receiver. 18 seconds was enough.

Rowan woke Lucas first. He came to with that bleary, gorgeous confusion that made him so watchable on camera. She handed him a vial and a syringe.

“New stack,” she said. “Circadian reset compound. We’ll recover from the trip faster with this. We can make the most of the day. Best if we all take it at the same time.”

“Now? On the train?”

“The absorption is better when you’re in motion. Something about vestibular stimulation syncing with the hypothalamus.” She’d made this up on the spot, and it sounded exactly like the kind of thing she’d say. Lucas didn’t question it.

He woke Jax, who looked at the vial and turned to Rowan. “What about the ECOROUTE sensors?”

“This compound is engineered to pass the sensors.”

“Ahh, so you’re testing it on this trip, aren’t you?”

“What about vertical… stimulation?” Lucas enquired.

“Vestibular… yeah, that’s part of it too.”

“So that’s what this trip is about, isn’t it? Testing your new compound?” said Ana, who had been listening to the conversation, leaning in from her seat.

The onlookers mostly were sleeping, except for a few bleary stares.

“We’re here. Might as well. There’s no harm done. Worst case, we get flagged and submitted to some security theater. You know they can’t actually do anything or convict you for such small amounts.”

The gang really did not need that much convincing. If Rowan acted like the leader of the pack, it was because Ana, Jax, and Lucas let her. They knew that she was a striver who had to work hard for every penny, and they preferred that she work hard for them rather than someone else. Besides, they thought, what’s beauty without some skin in the game?

They injected one at a time. Subcutaneous, upper arm. Rowan went first. She had labelled the vials one through four in the order Alex had specified. He’d been precise about this – each person had to take a specific vial. She figured it was dosage calibration.

The compound entered warm. Warmer than any peptide she’d used, and with a faint granularity she’d never felt before – not pain exactly, but a sense of something distributing, particles finding their stations in her tissue like iron filings arranging themselves along magnetic field lines. For about 40 seconds she felt something she couldn’t name – a sensation of density, as though her body had become marginally more there, more materially present in space. She thought of herself in the benefits office in Wolverhampton, age 15, a man reading her file instead of her face. The feeling of being seen not as a body but as a readable surface.

It passed. She drew a breath. Normal.

Lucas injected. No reaction beyond a slight wince. Jax the same. Ana came back from the bathroom rubbing her arm and saying it felt like sand under her skin.

Within four minutes, all four bio-bands shifted from green to deep amber. A wrinkle in the plan.

Karel sat up. “Spike across all four. BRX-90 is integrating.”

On the biometric feed, the four metabolic profiles were deviating sharply from their rolling baselines. But the deviation wasn’t metabolic – the train’s passive sensors were picking up secondary effects of the nanoparticles distributing through tissue, the slight perturbations in skin conductance and bioimpedance as the particles settled into position. The train’s AI read this as variance. It couldn’t know what it was actually seeing: four bodies quietly rearranging themselves into keys.

Hale watched the map. The train was approaching the segment where the relay node was positioned. Timing mattered. The decon scan had to happen within this window – a 200-kilometre stretch where the compromised relay would handle the data handoff. If the train flagged them too early or too late, the scan data would route through a different node, one which Sable Meridian didn’t control.

“Flagging now,” Karel said.

On the train, AIRFLOW REVERSAL lights activated in the corridor outside Rowan’s compartment. The doors sealed.

An attendant arrived first. Then two people in grey – the same ambiguous uniform Rowan had seen before, not security or medical, the hybrid role that ECOROUTE had invented. They were polite. They were always polite. The politeness was part of the protocol, designed to reduce cortisol spikes that would further distort bio-readings.

One of them had a handheld device. Rowan had seen these before. They were called Pono. “We’re detecting metabolic anomalies from your compartment. Standard procedure. If you’d follow us.”

Rowan nodded. She’d rehearsed this in her head. Calm, cooperative, mildly annoyed. The posture of a frequent traveller who’d been through decon before and found it tedious.

But the posture cracked almost immediately. In fact there were five people in grey. Two in the corridor, one at each end of the car, and a fifth standing by the sealed door they were being led toward, holding a tablet and not looking up from it. Rowan had been through decon flagging 11 times in the past year. There had never been five.

Lucas tried to film the corridor and was asked to put his phone away. Ana said nothing, just looked around with her ambient curiosity, taking in the sealed doors and blinking sensor arrays the way she took in everything – as content, as atmosphere. They didn’t understand. They thought this was an inconvenience, a story for later, a thing that would become funny.

Rowan was calculating. The masking agent had failed. That was her first thought. Alex’s compound, whatever it actually was, had not suppressed their bio-signatures but had amplified them. They were not invisible. All four of them were lit up, walking through the train like flares, potential bioweapons. Which meant one of two things. Either Alex had lied about what the compound did, which was possible. Or Alex had known exactly what it would do, which was worse.

They passed through the second car. The overhead lights here were different – a flatter, bluer spectrum that Rowan recognised from clinical settings. Diagnostic lighting. The train was already reading them. She looked down at her bio-band. Deep amber, almost red. She had never seen a band go red. She didn’t know what red meant. The documentation she’d seen only went up to amber.

Her peptide trade was finished. ECOROUTE had her metabolic baseline from a hundred trips. Whatever BRX-90 had done to that baseline was logged, timestamped, and already en route to Brussels. She would never board this train again without being flagged. Her Warsaw contact, her Porto clinic, her Barcelona plans – all of it was now tethered to a bio-signature that read as a threat. Five years of building a supply chain through the Tirzepatide Trail, and she had burned it in 40 seconds because a man in flip-flops had handed her a pouch and she had not asked enough questions.

Jax touched her arm. “You alright? You’ve gone pale.”

“Fine. Low blood sugar.”

Third car. The doors ahead of them were different from the others – heavier, with a visible seal around their frames and a small antechamber before the next section. An airlock. She had never been routed through an airlock. The grey-uniformed woman at the front pressed her palm to a panel, and the door opened with a sound that was less a hiss and more an exhale, as though the train itself were breathing.

And then she saw the number on the bulkhead. Car 7.

Something cold moved through her sternum. Car 7 was where 17 people had died. Car 7 was where the organophosphate had turned passengers into convulsing, foaming things on the floor. Car 7 had been the reason for all of this – the bio-bands, the sentinels, the air-wash corridors, the entire immune system that had strangled her business. She had thought of Car 7 as an abstraction, a policy event, the thing that changed the rules. She had never imagined that she would stand in it.

The space had been rebuilt entirely. Bright, clinical, transparent partitions, reclining chairs embedded with sensor grids. It was clean the way that crime scenes are clean after the cleaners leave.

She thought about Alex. About his flip-flops and his thumbs-up emoji and the courier service that didn’t exist. She thought about BRX-90 warming through her arm and the 40 seconds of transparency and the five grey uniforms. She thought: he didn’t need me to test anything. He needed me to get caught.

“Please sit. The process takes approximately 30 to 40 minutes.”

Rowan sat. The chair received her weight and she felt, through the thin fabric of her clothes, the faint vibration of sensors activating beneath the surface.

In Zug, Hale stood. Karel was monitoring the decon array’s output through the compromised relay, watching raw spectral data from four bodies arranged in reclining chairs in Car 7.

The array was doing what it was designed to do: sweeping the four passengers with a broad-spectrum terahertz and Raman pulse, reading their molecular composition layer by layer – skin, subcutaneous fat, fascia, muscle. It was looking for chemical weapons residue, pathogen markers, anomalous compounds. It found the nanoparticles immediately, flagging them as an unidentified synthetic presence in all four subjects. This was expected. This was, in fact, the point. The flag kept them in the chairs. The scan kept running.

What the array’s operators didn’t know was that the scan was doing double duty. Every frequency pulse that hit the nanoparticles came back carrying information. The particles resonated at specific, engineered frequencies, and the pattern of resonance – which frequencies absorbed, which reflected, and at what intensities – encoded 64 bits per body. The array faithfully recorded these resonance patterns as part of its standard spectral readout, because that was what it was built to do. It had no idea it was reading keys.

Beneath the surface telemetry, in the diagnostic subroutine that Stolar had planted three years ago, a listener was comparing the resonance patterns against the four signing signatures it had been programmed to recognise. For three years it had found nothing. Every scan returned noise – the spectral clutter of ordinary human bodies carrying ordinary compounds.

Now, for the first time, four patterns matched.

“First key verified,” Karel said. He was watching the telemetry through a decoder he’d built from Stolar’s Odessa notes. The firmware’s operations were invisible – even to Karel. What he could read was the output. “Second key. Third. Fourth. All four signing keys accepted.”

The cold wallet unlocked. But it did not release Bitcoin. Stolar had designed one more layer. The wallet contained a single payload: the private key to a second wallet, where the 11,000 Bitcoin actually sat. The cold wallet was a vault that held only a combination to another vault.

The private key was 256 bits. The firmware encoded it into the scan’s outgoing telemetry – the data stream that the decon array routinely transmitted to the ECOROUTE central repository in Brussels. It used a frequency band that Stolar had reserved in the array’s original specifications, documented as “diagnostic calibration overhead,” never questioned by the engineers who ran the system after him. The key occupied 18 seconds of transmission, split across four telemetry channels – one per body – interleaved with legitimate scan data. To Brussels, it would arrive as noise. Metabolic readings, spectral resonance profiles, ambient chemical levels, and buried among them, meaningless without the decoder, a 256 bit string worth $940 million.

“Key is assembling,” Karel said.

The compromised relay node intercepted the telemetry as it passed through the switching station. Karel’s decoder stripped the noise in real time, isolating the resonance fragments from each channel, recombining them in the sequence Stolar’s notes specified. On the screen, a string of characters grew, one fragment at a time, like a sentence being translated from a language only one dead man had ever spoken.

“Key is valid,” Karel said.

Hale sat down. The wallet containing the Bitcoin was now accessible to anyone holding that string. It had passed from a dead man’s firmware through four unknowing bodies through a hijacked relay into a room in Zug. The money had been there the whole time, waiting.

Rowan watched the display on the wall. Her waveforms were settling, the amber tones cooling back toward baseline. A woman in a lab coat asked her standard questions. Supplements. Last meal. Known allergies to decontamination agents. Rowan answered on autopilot. Class 2 metabolic variance. Documentation required, detention not.

The woman handed them replacement bio-bands – yellow, which would fade to green within a few hours – and a printout advising them to maintain hydration and minimize exertion. Lucas photographed the printout for his Instagram story.

They walked back through the three cars. The train had resumed full speed, the rougher gauge vibration now familiar, unconsciously absorbed by their bodies. Outside, the landscape was flat and dark, interrupted only by the occasional light cluster of a town too small to have a station.

Rowan sat down. Her friends fell back asleep almost immediately, the BRX-90’s secondary effect – a serotonergic calm that Karel had included to ensure compliant subjects – pulling them under. She forced herself to stay awake.

She looked at her bio-band. Still yellow. She looked at her friends, their bodies slack and breathing and unaware. She thought about the 40 seconds after injecting. The sensation of being read. She thought about the man in Wolverhampton. She thought about the train, this enormous paranoid organism hurtling east, and how it had looked at her and her friends and seen threat, variance, anomaly – and how somewhere in that misreading, in the gap between what the system saw and what was actually there, something had been given passage.

She didn’t know what. She pulled her jacket over her shoulders and watched the dark out the window until it became a less dark grey, and then a pale grey, and then a dim, reluctant dawn over a country she had never visited.

A week after they returned to Lisbon, a package arrived at her flat. Inside was a temperature-controlled case containing 30 vials of a clear compound and a handwritten note in Alex’s loose, indifferent script:

“This one actually works. Flat spectral profile. You’ll ride clean.” A severance gift, or a leash – she couldn’t tell which and decided not to think about it.

It worked. She tested it on a freight run to Warsaw, a single case of tirzepatide hidden among nutritional supplements. The bio-bands stayed green. Her Warsaw contact confirmed the shipment arrived intact. She ran a second, larger shipment the following week. Then a third. Within a month, the Tirzepatide Trail was operational again – quieter than before. Smaller volumes, but moving.

She opened the Barcelona clinic. She hired new distributors. She posted a TikTok series on circadian peptide stacking for long-haul travel that crossed two million views. The money returned, and with it the familiar architecture of her life. Except for the dreams.

The dreams started the second night after the train. She was back in Car 7, in the reclining chair. But in the dream the scan didn’t end. The array kept sweeping, pulse after pulse, and with each pass she felt fluid shifting inside her, rearranging, encoding something new. She looked down at her bio-band and it was black. She looked at Lucas and Ana and Jax in their chairs and their bands were black too and their eyes were open but they were not looking at her.

In other dreams she was in the benefits office in Wolverhampton. The man behind the desk was scanning her file but the file was her body and the data on the screen was not her name or her address but a string of characters she couldn’t read. Sometimes she was in her flat injecting and the compound wouldn’t stop flowing, the plunger already fully depressed but the liquid still oozing in, filling her arm, her shoulder, pooling behind her sternum.

She never connected the dreams to anything real. They were stress, they were peptide side effects, they were her body processing a strange experience on a train. She did not know that her body had carried a key. She did not know about Stolar or Karel or the room in Zug or the lithium under a steppe she couldn’t name. She knew only that something had been done to her, something she had consented to without understanding, and that her subconscious – the one system she had never managed to optimise – refused to let it go.

Lucas and Ana and Jax never mentioned dreams. She never asked. The possessed never recognized their possessor or his purpose.

First published in Protocolized.

The Faithful Channel

Nishit — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

The protocol spec called her role Designated Relay, but the traders on both sides of the partition said throat. She was the passage through which all words had to pass.

Mira Voskresenskaya had worked at the Bering Link for 11 years. The Link was not a physical bridge – an official land crossing between Russia and Alaska remained the fantasy of engineers and the nightmare of ecologists – but it was a bridge nonetheless: a legal fiction, a regulatory membrane, a set of nested protocols that allowed certain categories of goods, data, and money to cross the water without triggering the web of sanctions that had been evolving, like an invasive species, since 2022.

The Link existed because both sides needed it to exist. The Americans needed rare earths and titanium sponge. The Russians needed medical isotopes and that particular kind of money which could still move when other kinds could not. The Link was illegal in the sense that aeli was illegal. The traders had borrowed that word from the Kazakh brokers who cleared their payments, it meant something like carried across, though no one could agree on the etymology. Too useful to prosecute, too fragile to acknowledge, Mira’s job was to sit in a windowless room in Nome and translate.

Not languages. She did speak both Russian and English fluently; those were table stakes. What she translated was intent. When the Magadan procurement office sent a request for “technical consultation services,” Mira parsed whether this meant actual engineers or some bribe dressed in euphemism. When the Anchorage compliance officer asked whether a shipment was “destined for civilian end-use,” Mira understood he was asking whether he would need to not-see something.

She translated silences, too. The things neither side spoke because to do so would make them real.

For more than a decade, this had worked. Not smoothly – the Link was always close to collapse, always one audit away from destruction – but it had worked in the way that mattered: goods moved, payments cleared, and Mira received her fees, deposited in an account in Nicosia that belonged to a company that belonged to another company that belonged, in some ultimate sense, to her.

She was good at her job. She had the rare talent of making both sides feel that she was their confidant.

The trouble began with a name.

Every transaction through the Link had to be recorded in a shared ledger – not a blockchain, nothing so fashionable, just a mutually-accessible database with heavy encryption and heavier legal disclaimers. As standard, the ledger recorded: origin, destination, category code, value, timestamp. Names were hashed for privacy, but Mira had access to the plaintext as part of her relay function.

In March, a new name appeared on the Magadan side. The shipments were small – laboratory equipment, ostensibly for a fisheries research institute – but they were frequent, and they paid in advance, which was unusual. Russians preferred to delay payment as long as possible; it was a negotiating tactic and also simple prudence in an environment where the rules changed weekly.

The name was Sorokin. Mira noted it, filed it, moved on.

In April, an American compliance officer named Hendricks asked Mira, during one of their weekly encrypted calls, whether she had noticed anything unusual in the eastbound medical shipments.

“Unusual how?” she asked.

“Volume’s up. Just wondering if you’re seeing the same thing on your end.”

“Volume is always up in spring,” Mira said. “Navigation opens, backlog clears.”

“Sure,” Hendricks said. “Sure.” But he didn’t sound sure.

Mira checked the ledger after the call. The fisheries shipments from Sorokin’s institute had indeed increased. She cross-referenced against the payment records. The institute was paying in euros, routed through a bank in Astana, which was normal for Link transactions. Kazakhstan’s banks had become a de facto laundromat.

What was not normal was the amount. Laboratory equipment for a fisheries institute did not cost 11 million euros per quarter.

Mira understood, then, what she was looking at. She understood it the way a translator understands a word whose meaning is clear even when its referent is obscure.

She closed the ledger. She did not make a note.

Everything passes through the throat. It cannot selectively forget. The information is there, in its muscle memory. Mira’s pattern-recognition, her slight hesitation before translating a particular phrase, were instinctive. Other people can look away; she could not. The job is to look.

Mira had always understood what the Link was. You did not build a bridge between two systems designed not to connect without accepting certain compromises. You allowed certain ambiguities. You, in the language of the protocol spec, “preserve functional interoperability while respecting jurisdictional boundaries.” In practice, this meant you did not ask questions whose answers would force you to stop.

But there was a difference between not asking and knowing. Mira had spent her career not asking.

She could tell Hendricks. He was already suspicious; he was practically asking her to confirm his suspicions. A word from her – not even a word, just a particular tone, a particular hesitation – and the American side would begin an audit. The audit would find whatever Sorokin’s institute was really doing with its “laboratory equipment.” The Link would be exposed. The sanctions would clamp down. And Mira would be what? A witness? A whistleblower? A traitor to one side, a hero to the other?

She did not want to be a hero. Heroes were people who had failed to negotiate.

She could tell the Magadan office. Warn them that the Americans were sniffing around Sorokin. This would make her complicit in whatever Sorokin was doing. But she was already complicit, wasn’t she? She had facilitated the shipments. She had translated the invoices. She had looked at the payment records and closed the ledger.

Complicity was not binary. It accumulated, like sediment.

Or she could do nothing. She could continue to relay, translate, lubricate. She could let the Link continue to function until it was discovered or as long as it wasn’t. This was the coward’s option, but it was also the professional’s option. Her job was to maintain the channel, not to judge what passed through it.

For three weeks, Mira did nothing.

In late April, a man came to Nome.

He was Russian, though his passport was Kazakh, and he introduced himself as Gennady Pavlovich. He said he was from the Magadan procurement office; he said he wanted to discuss “procedural refinements.” He had the soft hands of someone who had never worked a fishing boat and the formal English of someone who had never lived among its native speakers.

They met in the hotel bar, the only bar in Nome that served anything stronger than beer. Gennady Pavlovich ordered vodka and did not drink it.

“You have been with the Link for a long time,” he said.

“This is good. Continuity is valuable.” He turned his glass with his fingers. “We have noticed that the American side has been asking questions. About the medical shipments. About the institute.”

Mira said nothing. This was a technique she had learned early: when someone was telling you something, let them tell you.

“These questions are unfortunate,” Gennady Pavlovich said. “The institute does important work. Fisheries are the foundation of the Magadan economy. We would not want the Americans to… misunderstand.”

“I see.”

“You are the relay. The throat.” He smiled, as if the term was a joke they shared. “What passes through the throat, only the throat knows. This is correct?”

“That’s one way to describe it.”

“We appreciate your discretion. We have always appreciated it.” He pushed a small envelope across the table. “A token of appreciation. For your continued service.”

Mira did not touch the envelope. “I’m already paid for my service.”

“This is not payment. This is… recognition. Of the difficulty of your position. Of the care you have taken.” He leaned forward slightly. “We are aware that the Americans are pressuring you. We want you to know that we understand. And we want you to know that there are options.”

“Options?”

“If the Link becomes… untenable. If you find that your position here is no longer sustainable. There are other links. Other places where your skills would be valued.”

Mira looked at the envelope on the table. It was thin – not cash, then, but something else. A number, perhaps. An account. A promise.

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

She did not think about it. She already knew.

The problem was not the envelope or what it contained. The problem was what Gennady Pavlovich had not said. He had not asked her to lie to Hendricks or to falsify records or to destroy evidence. He had asked her only to continue doing what she was already doing: relaying, translating, maintaining the channel.

But the meaning of that work had changed. Before, she had been an impartial conduit – or at least she had been able to believe she was. Now she knew that the conduit carried something specific, something that the Russian side did not want examined, something valuable enough to send a soft-handed man from Magadan to offer her escape routes.

She was no longer neutral. She had never been neutral. Neutrality was a story she told herself so that she could sleep.

Hendricks called again in early May. His voice was tighter than usual.

“Mira, I need you to be straight with me.”

“I’m always straight with you.”

“The Sorokin shipments. What do you know?”

She could lie. She was good at lying; it was a subset of translation. She could say “I don’t know anything,” or “I just process what comes through,” or “You’re asking the wrong person.”

Instead, she said: “What do you already know?”

“We’ve traced the money. The Astana bank is a front. Kazakhstan’s been cooperative, surprisingly. The money comes from a construction company in Moscow that doesn’t seem to build anything. The company is owned by a trust that’s owned by a holding company that’s owned by… you get the picture.”

“I get the picture.”

“The equipment isn’t going to a fisheries institute. Or if it is, it’s not being used for fish. We think it’s going to a facility outside Petropavlovsk. We think…” He stopped. “I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

“No.”

“But I need to know. Are you part of it?”

The question was almost a relief. It was clean, binary, answerable. Was she part of it?

“I relayed the shipments,” Mira said. “I processed the invoices. I did not ask what was in the crates.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“That’s what I can tell you.”

There was silence on the line. Mira could hear Hendricks breathing. Could almost hear him deciding.

“Okay,” he said finally. “Okay. I’m going to have to report this up the chain. You understand what that means.”

“Yes.”

“The Link is going to close. There’s going to be an investigation. You might be… you might be in a difficult position.”

“I understand.”

“I’m sorry, Mira. I know this wasn’t – I know you were just doing your job.”

“Yes,” she said. “I was.”

After she ended the call, Mira sat in her office for a long time. Outside, the Bering Sea was beginning to thaw; she could hear the distant crack and groan of ice breaking apart. In a few weeks, the shipping lanes would open fully, and the Link – if it still existed – would carry its usual spring cargo of legitimate goods and useful fictions.

But the Link would not exist in a few weeks. Hendricks would report to his supervisors, who would report to their supervisors, and somewhere in Washington someone would decide that the political cost of the Link now exceeded its economic value. Sanctions. The Russians would retaliate with their own closures. The traders who depended on the Link would find other routes, shadier routes, or they would go out of business.

And Mira?

She could take Gennady Pavlovich’s offer. There were other links, he had said. Other places where her skills would be valued. She could disappear into that world, becoming a throat for some other channel, relaying some other cargo, asking no questions.

Or she could stay. Cooperate with Hendricks’s investigation. Explain what she knew, which was not much, and what she had inferred, which was more. She could become a witness, a source, a cooperating party. She could burn the bridge she had spent so long maintaining.

Neither option felt like a choice. They were consequences – things that happened to you because of choices you had already made.

There is a word in Russian, perevozchik, that means ferryman or carrier. It comes from perevozit’: to transport across. A perevozchik is someone who moves things from one side to another, who lives in the space between banks, who belongs fully to neither shore.

Mira had always thought of herself as a perevozchik. The word had a certain dignity: it implied a function, a necessity, a role that existed because the world was divided and someone had to cross the divisions.

But there was another way to read the word. The prefix pere- could mean across, but it could also mean through or over. A perevozchik was someone who carried things over, but also someone through whom things passed. A vessel. A conduit. A throat.

She left Nome on a Wednesday. She did not tell Hendricks; she did not contact Gennady Pavlovich. She simply closed her office, logged out of the ledger system for the last time, and drove to the airport.

She had a ticket to Anchorage, but she did not board that flight. Instead, she bought a ticket to Seattle, and from Seattle to Frankfurt, and from Frankfurt to Nicosia. The long way around, the way that left the fewest traces.

In Nicosia, she checked into a hotel and slept for 14 hours. When she woke, she withdrew a portion of the money from the account that belonged to the company that belonged to her. She did not take all of it; that would have been noticed. She took enough to live on for a year, maybe two.

Then she flew to Tbilisi, where she knew no one and no one knew her.

The Link closed in June. Mira read about it on her phone, sitting in a café in the old town, drinking coffee that was too strong and too sweet. The American side had announced “enhanced compliance measures,” the Russian side had responded with “countermeasures against unfriendly actions.” The traders who had depended on the Link were scrambling for alternatives. A few were being investigated; a few had already been arrested.

Gennady Pavlovich was not among the names mentioned. Sorokin’s institute was not named either. Whatever the institute had been doing with its laboratory equipment, it had apparently been discreet enough to avoid the first wave of scrutiny.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps the scrutiny was still coming. Perhaps Gennady Pavlovich was, at this moment, making other arrangements, contacting other throats, building other bridges.

Mira did not know and did not want to know.

She stayed in Tbilisi for three months. It was a good city for disappearing: cheap, chaotic, tolerant of foreigners who asked no questions because they did not want to answer any. She rented an apartment in a crumbling Soviet-era block and spent her days walking the steep streets, learning the shapes of the churches, listening to a language she did not yet understand.

She had been a translator for 20 years. She had spent her professional life making sense of the gaps between systems – languages, laws, intentions. Now she was in a gap herself, and she found that she did not mind.

A bridge, she thought, was a structure that existed because two sides needed to be connected. But a bridge was also a structure that could be removed. It was not the same as the banks it joined. It belonged to neither shore and could be claimed by neither.

She had thought she was maintaining a bridge. She had thought that this was neutral work, necessary work, work that existed above or outside the conflicts it facilitated. But a bridge is never neutral. A bridge determines what could cross and what could not, who paid the toll and who set the price. A bridge shapes the relationship between the banks, even as it seemed only to connect them.

She had shaped things too. Every time she translated, every time she relayed, every time she chose to see or not to see, she had shaped the traffic that passed through her. She had not been neutral. She had been – what? An instrument. A participant.

And now the bridge was burned, and she was on neither side, and she was free in the way that falling is free.

In September, a woman approached her at a café. Georgian, well-dressed, with the careful posture of someone who had been trained to enter rooms.

“Ms. Voskresenskaya,” the woman said. “May I sit?”

Mira did not ask how the woman knew her name. There were only so many ways.

“I represent certain interests,” the woman said. “Interests that are looking for experienced personnel. People with your particular skill set.”

“I’m retired.”

“Of course. But retirement is expensive, and the world is full of bridges that need maintaining.” The woman smiled. “We are not asking you to do anything you haven’t done before. Just… facilitation. Translation. Relay.”

Mira looked at her coffee, which had gone cold. She thought about the Bering Link, the ledger, the shipments she had not questioned. She thought about Hendricks’s voice on the phone, asking “Are you part of it?”

She had not answered him honestly. She had said “I relayed the shipments*,*” as if that were different from being part of it. As if the throat were not part of the body.

“No,” she said.

“No?”

“I’m not looking for work.”

The woman studied her for a moment. Then she shrugged, stood, and left a card on the table.

“If you change your mind.”

Mira did not change her mind. But she kept the card, in a drawer in her rented apartment, beside the envelope from Gennady Pavlovich that she had never opened.

Outside, a church bell rang in the old town, and the sound came through the window in the way sounds come through walls in old buildings: muffled, sourceless, arriving from somewhere she could not see. She went out to buy coffee, and on the way she passed the women sweeping leaves, and one of them said something to her a greeting, or a question, or just the acknowledgment that they saw each other every morning – and Mira said “gamarjoba,” the one word she knew, and the woman smiled, and the sound of it hung in the cold air between them, ordinary, untranslatable and clean.

First published in Protocolized.

Strangeness, Legibility, Hardness

Sachin — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Our special interest group in Protocol Fiction was convened in October last year, led by Spencer Nitkey and Sachin. Here is a brief recap of discussions in the group’s monthly calls. Interested in writing protocol fiction and experimenting with LLM-assisted writing? Join the next call in Discord on March 26 at 10am CST.

Conversations in the Protocol Fiction SIG began with a shared curiosity about what “protocol fiction” might point to beyond a genre label. Our early discussions emphasised the observational aspects of protocol fiction, as a way of noticing how rules, standards, and institutions shape experience, especially where those structures are normally taken for granted. Attention quickly shifted away from individual characters toward environments, procedures, and the conditions that make certain narrative paths possible while foreclosing others.

The first call focused on establishing this orientation. Participants were drawn to stories where agency is distributed and outcomes depend on interfaces, procedures, and constraints rather than personal will. Fiction was discussed as a medium capable of making the background logic of systems perceptible, allowing readers to sense how coordination and compliance actually occur in practice.

Readings such as Amita’s Protocol Test for Fiction and Matt Webb’s essay Who Could Write Protocol Fiction for Speculative Infrastructure? reinforced this sensibility. Both pieces helped anchor an intuition that surfaced repeatedly in the first call: protocols are best understood as durable world-making artifacts, shaped as much by history and path dependence as by design. In Amita’s writing, protocols appear as testable structures – rules that can be stressed, misused, or repurposed, and whose real properties only become visible under load.

This durable world-making artifacts framing also clarified why protocol fiction gravitates toward strange rules and systems which only partly fulfil their purpose. When a protocol is fully realized and familiar (what we call a Whitehead protocol) it tends to disappear into the background. Narrative interest emerges when rules persist despite fraying explanations, when systems continue to function even as their rationale becomes opaque. The gap between how a protocol was imagined and how it is actually lived becomes a source of texture, tension, and meaning.

What these readings contributed, then, was a shared sensibility about endurance and friction. Protocols shape the future not by commanding it outright, but by narrowing the range of plausible alternatives over time. They accumulate commitments, dependencies, and expectations. Fiction which takes this seriously does not treat systems as neutral backdrops, nor as expressions of malice, but as historical objects that exert real force. The world keeps moving forward, guided less by optimal choice than by what has already hardened into place.

The second call turned toward genre theory and the question of how readers orient themselves within narrative worlds. Genre emerged as a structuring force that signals how a text should be read and what kinds of events can occur within it. Fredric Jameson’s essay on romance proved especially generative. Romance was discussed as a narrative mode that persists across historical shifts by adapting its surface materials while continuing to perform the work of world-making. Magic, providence, psychology, and institutions appeared as successive vocabularies through which similar structural pressures are expressed.

The third meeting was centered around stories about bridges and thresholds, since we wanted to give everyone a venue to test ideas for the Protocolized Building and Burning Bridges short story contest which had just been launched. Readings such as William Gibson’s Hinterlands and H. P. Lovecraft’s The Music of Erich Zann foregrounded liminal spaces and moments of transition. These narratives emphasized adjacency, partial access, and the difficulty of navigating systems that exceed individual understanding. Characters moved through environments that felt coherent yet resistant, revealing how meaning and risk concentrate at points of passage.

A subsequent session shifted from discussion to practice. Participants worked with technical manuals, regulatory texts, and historical documents, treating them as narrative material rather than background research. This exercise highlighted how such documents already describe worlds with their own assumptions, priorities, and failure modes. Fiction, in this context, functioned as a way to probe those assumptions and observe what happens when they are placed under narrative pressure.

Our most recent meeting centered on monsters. Drawing on Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s work, monsters were discussed as figures that appear when classification systems strain or break down. They were understood as persistent rather than anomalous, returning again and again to mark unresolved tensions. This lens proved useful for thinking about obsolete standards, legacy institutions, and rules that continue to exert force long after their original rationale has faded.

Across these sessions, our readings have ranged widely, but the discussions have kept returning to the same concerns: durability, intelligibility, and the experience of living within inherited structures. The group’s attention has gradually settled on questions of how worlds hold together, how they remain navigable, and how they continue to shape behavior even when their reasons are no longer fully accessible.

Synthesizing the Properties of Protocol Worlds

Ted Chiang’s observation that science fiction tends to revolve around strange rules rather than special people has been a steady reference point for the group. It offers a simple reorientation: narrative interest migrates away from exceptional protagonists and toward the systems that quietly govern what anyone can do. In these stories, characters rarely solve problems through heroism/force of will. They encounter rules, interfaces, and constraints that shape outcomes regardless of intention. Drama comes from contact with those structures, not mastery over them.

As our discussions unfolded, another recurring instinct became apparent. Many of the most generative story ideas emerged from moments of illegibility – scenarios in which a protocol clearly exists and clearly matters, but cannot be fully seen or explained. This illegibility often produces Kafkaesque effects, but it also does something broader. It conveys the sense that ordinary reality rests on an immense, layered substrate of procedures, standards, and agreements that most participants only ever glimpse in fragments. The world continues to function, even when its logic cannot be fully reconstructed from within. Spencer’s Zoothesia series is a good example of this, as it gives readers the chance to see the consequences of a particular reality from the perspective of multiple protagonists.

Our discussions of genre theory have helped the group to reflect on how readers orient themselves within these environments. Genre is a contract defines how readers constantly calibrate their expectations: what kinds of actions make sense, what kinds of outcomes feel plausible, how much explanation to demand from a text. Genre provides a scaffolding for legibility. It allows readers to move through strange systems without needing a full account of how they work. This legibility can be thin or thick, provisional or deeply entrenched, but it shapes how the world is read long before individual rules are encountered.

The final conceptual ingredient came from Josh Stark’s discussion of hardness as a property of institutions and technology like blockchains. Hardness, in his formulation, describes the likelihood that something will remain true in the future. Applied to protocol worlds, hardness captures the resistance a system offers when one tries to change it, exit it, or imagine it otherwise. Some rules are soft, easy to revise or abandon. Others are embedded so deeply in infrastructure, coordination, and expectation that they effectively dictate the shape of the future.

Taken together, these threads are suggesting ways of describing protocol worlds in terms of their dominant properties. Strange rules name the local, often opaque constraints people actually encounter. Legibility moderates how readable the world is – how well its signals, genres, and atmospheres allow participants to orient themselves. Hardness describes how resistant that world is to deformation, and how costly deviation becomes once paths are set.

The triangle that emerges from this synthesis is meant as a map of tendencies. Some worlds are rich in strange rules and legibility but remain relatively soft, producing spaces of play, experimentation, and transition. Others combine strange rules with high hardness and low legibility, giving rise to protocol horror, zombie systems, and the distinctive unease of Kafka protocols. Still others emphasize legibility and hardness with fewer strange rules, producing mythic or allegorical worlds whose logic is clear and whose constraints feel inevitable.

First published in Protocolized.

Last-Mile Optimism

Marie-Hélène Lebeault — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

The delivery bag sat on the apartment building steps like evidence waiting to be logged. Small. Tamper-evident seal. A faint, scanner-only tone, inaudible to humans.

Lacey watched it from across the street, hands in her pockets, trying to be casual. Trying not to look like what she was: someone waiting for food that wasn’t hers.

“Once it flips,” her mentor said quietly, “it’s not theirs anymore. That’s not theft. That’s compliance.”

His name was Denis. Fifties, maybe. Tired eyes. He held his scanner like any phone. His demeanour blended into the surroundings. Nobody looked twice at someone checking their phone on a street corner.

Lacey shifted her weight. “Someone’s inside. Lights are on.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Denis kept his voice even, instructional. “The rule is simple. Delivered. Not received in time. Becomes claimable.”

Lacey nodded, but part of her still watched the light in the window, flickering like doubt.

Movement behind the third-floor window. A silhouette passing. Someone home. Probably hungry. Waiting on pad thai, pho, whatever was going cold in that bag.

The scanner in Denis’s hand chirped.

Green confirmation.

He stepped forward, smooth and unhurried, and tapped the bag’s RFID tag. The seal made a soft click as it logged the transfer. Ownership reassigned. Legal. Clean.

“See?” Denis picked up the bag. Warm. Fresh. “Readiness matters more than intent.”

They walked away with someone else’s dinner.

CITY COUNCIL INITIATIVE BRIEFING Timely Receipt Initiative (TRI) Reducing Waste. Eliminating Fraud. Promoting Civic Responsibility.

Ownership transfers only upon physical receipt
Unclaimed goods after delivery window = excess allocation
Claimable items logged, tracked, redistributed to registered recipients
Environmental benefits: 47% reduction in return logistics
Fiscal benefits: 62% decrease in fraudulent delivery theft claims

“We didn’t ban regret. We stopped subsidizing it.” Budget Director Sandra Okoye

“It started as an environmental thing,” Denis explained as they crossed toward the transit station. “Too much waste. Too many returns. People ordering things they didn’t need, then saying packages had been stolen when actually they had buyer’s remorse.”

Lacey nodded, half-listening. She was thinking about the person in that apartment. Checking their phone. Wondering where their food was. Their app probably said delivered successfully.

“So the city launched TRI,” Denis continued. “Timely Receipt Initiative. Sounds good, right? Responsible. Fair.”

“The policy wonks called it post-scarcity redistribution. No middlemen, no delivery apps taking cuts, no arbitrage. Just efficiency.” He pulled out a claimed protein bar, checked the expiration date. “What they didn’t advertise: claimers are the new middlemen. There’s a whole economy now. People buy and sell claim intel – which buildings have slow elevators, which delivery drivers leave bags in exposed areas. I’ve seen people pay 20 bucks for a hot tip on a grocery delivery route.”

“Helps people who are ready,” Lacey echoed, remembering the orientation video.

“Exactly.” Denis stopped at a bench, set the bag down between them. “Here’s what you need to know about the tech. Bags have RFID tags, internal countdown, tamper seal that voids if you break it early. You can’t see the timer. Neither can they. That’s important.”

“Why?”

“Prevents conflict. If people knew exactly when their window closed, they’d camp on their doorsteps. Or worse, someone would get hurt trying to claim something a second too early.” He pulled out his scanner. “This is how it works. Registered ID. Geolocation match. The system confirms the item flipped to claimable status. Green light means legal.”

“What if someone comes out while you’re scanning?”

“Doesn’t matter. If it flipped, it flipped. They can file a complaint, but the system already logged delivery as successful. They missed their window.”

“You don’t race the clock,” Denis said. “You read people.”

Over the next week, Denis taught her the geography of failure.

Buildings where people were always late. High-rises with bad reception in the lobbies, by the time residents got the delivery notification, the countdown was halfway done. Office districts during lunch rushes. Parents juggling school pickups and work calls.

“See that building?” Denis pointed to a converted warehouse with expensive-looking balconies. “New construction. Beautiful. Also, the elevators are slow as hell and there’s only two for 40 floors. Delivery drivers leave bags in the lobby. Residents get stuck in elevator queues. Hot zone for claims.”

He showed her the tricks. How to ask someone for directions and hold the conversation just long enough. How to let multiple people through a building entrance ahead of you, creating a courteous bottleneck. How to look busy on your phone while actually tracking a scan timer.

“Never touch the bag until it flips,” Denis said. “That’s the only real rule.”

“Oh, and never claim medicine,” Denis warned. “Insulin, inhalers – some lines still matter. Even now.”

Hot food moved fast. Groceries were currency. People traded claims in informal networks Denis called “redistribution collectives,” though he said it with enough irony that Lacey knew he didn’t buy the noble framing.

She met others. People like them. A woman named Sharice who’d been claiming for two years, ever since her job cut her to part-time. A kid, maybe nineteen, who ran it like a business. He tracked buildings, mapped delivery patterns, sold subscriptions to a private Discord where people traded real-time claiming opportunities. Premium tier was 50 a month. There were others who specialized – one guy only claimed electronics, flipped them same-day on local marketplaces. Another woman built a client list: people who’d pay her to claim specific items they wanted but couldn’t afford retail.

“We don’t steal,” Denis said one evening, splitting a claimed pizza between them. “We intercept waste.”

Lacey didn’t argue. She was too hungry.

She told herself it was training.

But her body already knew it was a job.

Her first solo claim happened on a Tuesday.

Denis stepped away to take a call, something about his daughter’s school, Lacey didn’t listen closely. She was watching a grocery bag outside a row house. Fresh produce visible through the translucent plastic. Bread. Eggs. Actual food.

A woman rushed down the sidewalk toward the house, phone pressed to her ear, grocery tote over her shoulder. Single parent, Lacey guessed. Juggling too many things. The kind of person who ordered groceries because she didn’t have time to shop, then didn’t have time to be home when they arrived.

The timer in Lacey’s scanner flipped.

Green.

She hesitated.

The woman was close. Maybe 30 feet. 20.

Lacey scanned the bag. The scanner chirped. Transfer confirmed.

Her hands shook as she reached for it.

The woman reached the steps five seconds later.

No confrontation. No accusation. Just confusion. Lacey heard her behind her: “Where? I just got the notification…”

Lacey kept walking. She ate that night.

Something cracked in her, guilt, maybe. A colder feeling followed. Not callousness, but …

Hunger was justification enough.

Denis brought claimed Thai food a few days later and explained why it kept working.

“The system logged it as a success,” he said, gesturing with a spring roll. “Waste avoided. Hunger reduced. Politicians cite improved efficiency metrics. Everybody wins.”

“Not the person who ordered it.”

“They missed their window. System assumes someone like you exists. Otherwise it wouldn’t balance.”

Lacey understood then. She wasn’t a flaw in the system.

She was a pressure valve.

The system had been designed to eliminate waste and profit-seeking middlemen, but of course it had only reinvented them. The efficiency was real. The savings were real. They just didn’t mention who was doing the work, or what it cost them.

Things tightened.

The city adjusted delivery windows shorter for “high-risk addresses”, buildings where claims happened frequently. Some addresses got blacklisted entirely. No more deliveries allowed. Residents had to pick up from designated hubs.

Denis mentioned someone they’d both seen around. Guy named Reynolds.

“Lost eligibility,” Denis said. “Completely. Can’t get deliveries anymore. Not food, not packages. The system flagged him.”

“For what?”

“Living in a building with too many claims.” Denis shrugged. “Guilt by geography.”

Lacey thought about Reynolds. Thought about what it meant to be cut off entirely.

“Means more work for us,” Denis added. “Tighter windows. More desperate people.”

He didn’t sound happy about it. He sounded resigned.

The last lesson came three weeks later.

Another bag. Another building.

Lacey recognized the address. He was an acquaintance from the library. Helped her find a book once when the system was down. Nice guy. She’d seen his posts on the community board*, “anyone got spare credit this week?”*

She could knock. Warn him. Break the rule.

The timer ticked in her head, invisible but present.

She lifted her hand.

Let it hover a second.

Then the scanner blinked green, and it felt like consent.

She waited.

The system flipped.

Green light.

She scanned.

The door opened thirty seconds later. He stood there, looking at the empty step. Looking at his phone. Looking at the empty step again.

Lacey was already gone.

She didn’t feel like a thief. Not exactly.

She was just waste management.

First published in Protocolized.

Caduceus City

Randy Lubin — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Late-morning on November 5th, a dispatch ping sent me to the Advanced Research Lab to investigate the death of a Dr. Ori Demmel. It was only my second month working for the Caduceus City Police Department and my previous time had been spent investigating petty theft of lab equipment and the occasional aggravated assault between coworkers. This was the first death I’d encountered on the Caduceus campus, though I’d expect that roughly 20,000 employees working in a high pressure environment would result in the occasional death by heart attack or stroke. I had accepted the Caduceus City job as a cushy way to stave off retirement, but I’d spent the previous 20 years as a homicide detective on the Stockton Police Force. I was used to dealing with death.

As my cart wove along the campus paths, I had my Glasses share a high-level summary of public information on the victim. Dr. Demmel was one of a few Nobel Laureates on the Caduceus payroll and he featured heavily in Caduceus marketing – even I had heard of him. Caduceus had poached him from Stanford a few years back, shortly after their student newspaper published an exposé that accused him of fostering a toxic workplace. He was 57 and divorced, had been living on campus, and his only hobby seemed to be running marathons.

This was the first time I’d visited the Advanced Research Labs and I was greeted at the front desk by Dr. Elizabeth Barvan, Vice President of the Advanced Research Division. She wore a lab coat over a black business pantsuit and it seemed like she kept one eye on me and one on the stream of notifications that were flickering through her Glasses. Her demeanor was calm and focused and she brought me up to speed. One hour ago, Dr. Andrea Vezena, Dr. Demmel’s lab partner, had walked into the room and discovered him face down on the lab table. She’d tried to wake him and, on failing to find a pulse, called for paramedics. They tried and failed to resuscitate him and pronounced him dead on the scene.

Dr. Barvan made it clear that while the death was a tragedy, it was imperative that my investigation be conducted quickly and quietly so that the division could resume its urgent research. Caduceus’s stock price had slipped earlier in the week, when the CEO announced research setbacks on its most promising new drug, and the mood on campus was more anxious than usual. I had the sense that the research team was under significant pressure to generate positive news.

I asked Dr. Barvan about how Dr. Demmel got along with his colleagues and she said that the lab celebrated him as a hero of modern medicine; she was confident that there had been no foul play. I thanked her for her overview and let her know that my investigation would be discreet but I would still be following the relevant police protocols. She said she understood and that she would make herself available if I needed her assistance.

We arrived at Lab Room N, where Dr. Demmel had died. Dr. Barvan badged the door open and then departed, saying that she would arrange for temporary access to the building and the lab room so that I could continue my investigation without needing a staff chaperone. The CCPD was technically independent from Caduceus, commissioned through the Solano County Police Department, though our jurisdiction is limited to the Caduceus City corporate campus and my Police Chief effectively reports to the company leadership.

Lab Room N was unsecured; there were neither CCPD officers nor company security because, unless I found evidence otherwise, Dr. Demmel’s death was being treated as natural. Police Chief Walsh had dispatched me here due to Dr. Demmel’s fame, in an effort to protect the police force and the company if his death was a result of foul play or from anything other than natural causes. His body was already at the local morgue and my Glasses would alert me when the medical examiner’s report was filed.

I entered the lab room, which was 20 feet by 10 feet with several large lab tables in the center. The walls were lined with myriad research equipment and storage lockers of chemicals. The large lab benches in the center of the room were lit up with a kaleidoscopic array of technical diagrams, chemical visualizations, and process instructions. In the center of the room, a lab technician was crawling on the floor cleaning up broken glass. I immediately told the technician to stop, as I would be treating this lab as a crime scene until we confirmed that Dr. Demmel had died of natural causes.

The technician seemed flustered and he gently placed the glass shards back on the floor, stood up, and took a step backwards. He introduced himself as Eric Terson and said that he was responsible for the lab equipment and supplies in this wing of the lab. He then moved to leave the room but I asked him to stay and answer a few quick questions about the room and Dr. Demmel. He frowned but agreed and I recorded our interview with my Glasses.

He replied to my questions with short answers while repeatedly glanced to the doorway: the lab belonged to Dr. Demmel and his partner Dr. Vezena; he didn’t know anything about their working relationship; he didn’t know Dr. Demmel well; nobody had been in the room aside from the two lab partners, the paramedics, and Dr. Barvan. He said that he had only entered the room after the paramedics left and that all he had cleaned up was some broken vials and spilled liquid from the floor – likely pushed there when Dr. Demmel collapsed.

Mr. Terson said that there was nothing more he could add and asked if he could leave, but I took the opportunity to ask him a bit more about the room itself – I hadn’t seen a lab space this advanced and figured that he could help me understand what I was looking at. He relaxed a bit as the discussion moved away from Dr. Demmel’s death and walked me through how the various systems worked.

He pointed out how the ceiling was covered with cameras and projectors that pointed down at the lab tables. They were part of a robust research system that allowed scientists to efficiently plan and carry out experimental protocols, walking them through a research process one step at a time. He explained that the system indicated that there was currently an experiment in progress and that the full protocol was illustrated on the left side of the bench, a detailed rendering of the final molecular output rotated on the right side of the bench, and in the center area, where Dr. Demmel had died, there were detailed instructions for the current step. Numerous errors were flashing due to missing components, likely the broken vials, and due to steps taking longer than expected. I asked Mr. Terson if he knew what the experiment was testing, but he shrugged and said it was beyond his understanding.

He asked if he could leave, saying he had a growing list of tasks in other parts of the building. I nodded, thanked him for his time, and reminded him not to clean up Lab Room N until he had my approval.

With the room to myself, I queued up a number of tasks on my Glasses, including scanning the room and interviewing Dr. Andrea Vezena. I sent Dr. Vezena a short message asking if she would return to the lab for an interview. Dr. Barvan had sent her home for the day but she lived close by and agreed to walk back to meet me here.

While I waited, I used my Glasses to make a 3D recording of the lab. They helpfully marked which areas I hadn’t yet scanned as I walked about the room and knelt down under the lab benches. I took closeup shots of the broken vials and spilled liquid that Mr. Terson had been cleaning up, and I documented the detailed text and illustrations projected into the lab benches. The scans presumably contained Caduceus trade secrets so I saved them to a protected evidence folder with instructions to auto-delete once the investigation closed.

I also looked through Lab Room N’s access logs. They aligned with Mr. Terson’s statement: he had entered the room several times that morning; Dr. Vezena had been in and out of the room for much of the morning, but was absent when Dr. Demmel arrived. No one had entered the room between then and when Dr. Vezena returned and found Dr. Demmel dead. Just as I finished reviewing the logs, the lab door opened and Dr. Vezena entered the room.

Dr. Vezena was wearing a lab coat over a t-shirt and sweatpants. I instructed her to make herself comfortable and then asked how she was doing. She replied that she was shaken and still processing Dr. Demmel’s death. I told her that was understandable and that I’d try to keep our interview brief; I started recording on my Glasses.

I began by asking about Dr. Demmel’s reputation on campus. She expressed how lucky the department was to work with such an esteemed scientist, but I brushed away the broad praise and asked if people enjoyed working with him. She paused and noted that very few of the staff actually interacted with him. He was brilliant but extremely difficult to work with; he refused to talk with anyone he deemed nonessential, which was pretty much everyone.

I asked if she had trouble working with him and she sighed. She described him as a jerk who frequently berated her and she said that his unwillingness to talk with the other staff had shifted even more work onto her plate. However, she assured me that it was worth putting up with him to be a part of the lab team and engage in the most exciting research on campus. I asked her to provide me with a brief overview of her work and she came to life with an animated explanation of synthetic biology of which I understood very little. The gist was that she and Dr. Demmel had been exploring a new method for quickly and cheaply creating complex large molecules.

I then followed up, asking if she knew of any other staff with whom he’d had bad interactions. She said he treated almost everyone he encountered with cold indifference but that she didn’t recall anyone taking that particularly poorly. However, she recalled him ranting at their lab technician, Eric Terson, earlier in the week. Dr. Demmel accused him of mismanaging the supplies such that he kept running out of key reagents and it was impeding his research. Dr. Vezena said that she hadn’t noticed any supply issues and that Dr. Demmel was frequently accusing those around him of impeding his research.

I then asked her to walk me through her morning and how she came to discover Dr. Demmel. She said she’d come into the Lab after breakfast and spent an hour or two refining the experiment protocol and setting up the equipment and reagents for today’s test. She said it was typical for her to do this alone and that Dr. Demmel usually didn’t show up until late in the morning but that he preferred to manually conduct the most sensitive steps for each test. She said she’d then left the building to meet a colleague for coffee and when she’d returned she found Dr. Demmel face down on the lab bench. She’d immediately called 911 and stayed until the paramedics had pronounced him dead. Then, Dr. Barvan had told her to take the rest of the day off so she had gone home.

She paused and looked at me for a few seconds. Then she said that she probably shouldn’t share the following with me but that I would probably find out anyway because she’d filed a report with Dr. Barvan. Yesterday, she and Dr. Demmel had fought a heated argument over how to share their research. He had wanted to disclose their new method to the world and encourage the free use of it as a way to accelerate medical research and lower the cost of new therapeutics. Dr. Vezena had countered that such a disclosure was completely against Caduceus’s interests and that the typical approach would be to retain the method as a trade secret.

Dr. Vezena said she was sympathetic to Dr. Demmel’s perspective but was far too early in her career to support such a risk, one that would almost certainly lead to her being fired and, likely, prosecuted. When she pushed back, he had threatened to use his seniority to kick her off of the lab team and remove her as a collaborator from their research papers – papers to which Dr. Vezena had contributed most of the work.

After the argument, during lunch, Dr. Vezena had typed up a formal complaint and sent it to Dr. Barvan, who immediately summoned her for a chat. I asked her how the complaint was received and she said that the VP appeared shocked and angry for a moment, before switching tone and laughing it off. Dr. Barvan had told her that Dr. Demmel was being a prima donna, that it was just posturing related to a recent request for more budget, and that she’d talk to him and straighten things out. I asked her to send me a copy of the complaint and she did. I thanked her for her candor and asked her to stay on campus and remain accessible for the rest of the day, in case I had follow-up questions.

I left Lab Room N and looked to find Mr. Terson and ask him about his confrontation with the victim, but he wasn’t in any of the nearby rooms. I asked my Glasses to see what doors he’d recently badged through. The system reported that after leaving Lab Room N he’d badged into employee housing, on the other side of campus, and that just a few minutes ago he’d entered the parking garage. I considered this suspicious behavior as, earlier, he’d told me that he would be working on tasks in the lab building.

I alerted Caduceus security and asked them to stop his vehicle if he tried to leave campus. A few minutes later, they stopped him at the east entrance and I carted over there to meet him. When I pulled up, he was complaining loudly to a group of guards but he immediately stopped when he saw my face.

I asked Mr. Terson where he was going and he said that he had an off-campus errand, though he avoided making eye contact with me. I asked if I could search his car and he nodded while fidgeting with his badge. His trunk contained a backpack full of reagent bottles. I gave him the Miranda warning and told him that I needed to bring him into the station for questioning.

On the drive over I messaged Police Chief Walsh, asking him to treat Lab Room N as a proper crime scene, to request a forensics team from Solano County Police Department, and have the medical examiner do a full autopsy. I made sure Mr. Terson overheard my requests and he started talking as soon as I sat him down at the station.

He swore he had nothing to do with Dr. Demmel’s death but admitted to stealing reagents to sell off campus. He’d been reselling the supplies for months but planned to stop after Dr. Demmel confronted him; especially so after Dr. Barvan had approached him in Lab Room N earlier this morning, asking him to leave the room while she personally conducted an inventory of the supplies. He claimed that he was leaving campus to sell off his remaining reagents, not to flee from a murder investigation.

The technician was on the verge of crying and his claims seemed earnest. I thanked him for his cooperation and left him in our holding room. I sent Police Chief Walsh an update, grabbed a quick bite at a company cafeteria, and drove back to the Advanced Research Labs for another look at the crime scene.

As my cart pulled up to the lab, I received a message from the medical examiner with initial autopsy and toxicology reports. Biomarkers indicated that Dr. Demmel had likely died of heart failure; however, his heart didn’t show any structural causes such as blocked or ruptured arteries, and his prior health records hadn’t shown any relevant pre-morbidities. The toxicology screening was negative.

By the time I reached Lab Room N, I had fired off a few queries to my Glasses. For someone Dr. Demmel’s age, heart failure without an obvious cause was rare, though not impossible. I greeted one of my fellow officers who was guarding the door and walked into the room.

The projectors were still casting their diagrams on the table but the room smelled of disinfectant. I bent down on the ground and saw that the floor had recently been mopped and the broken glass and spilled liquid cleaned up. The room’s access logs said that Dr. Barvan had badged in an hour earlier. I messaged the VP asking why she’d been back in the room and if she’d ordered it cleaned.

While I waited for a reply, I paced the room trying to look at the lab bench and equipment with fresh eyes. I opened the supply cabinet which held the reagents and scanned the bottles. I asked my Glasses if any of the reagents present in any combination could have caused heart failure. It replied that some of the chemicals, if mixed, would produce fumes that could induce heart failure if inhaled. I walked back over to the lab benches with the complex diagrams illuminating the surface and asked if that included any of the reagents used in today’s experimental protocol. It replied that some of the relevant chemicals were present, but not the right combination of them. I asked about the reagents that Mr. Terson had stolen and learned that none of them were a match.

With the help of the Glasses, I altered the protocol plan on the left side of the bench, replacing an innocuous reagent with one that could have created a deadly result. The room transformed immediately, casting warning icons on the bench, stating a high-level hazmat suit would be required to execute the experiment. I restored the protocol to its original configuration and the errors disappeared.

I wondered if the contents of one or more of the bottles had been changed, priming a lethal combination. Dr. Barvan had confronted Mr. Terson in the room early this morning and then had the room to herself while she ostensibly conducted the inventory; I hadn’t thought much of it earlier but now it struck me as odd that someone as busy as Dr. Barvan would personally look into potential theft of lab supplies.

Dr. Barvan replied to my message, asking me to come to her office, a large room on the top floor of the Advanced Research Labs which overlooked the Caduceus City gardens. I walked in and found her and Police Chief Walsh were drinking coffee around a low table.

The VP thanked me for my diligent work and apologized for having let in a janitor to clean up the lab; she had thought I was done with the room after my initial investigation and wanted it all ready for Dr. Vezena to resume her experiments the next morning.

Chief Walsh then said that he’d updated Dr. Barvan with details of my apprehension of Mr. Terson, with the stolen reagents, and he’d shared the results of Dr. Demmel’s autopsy report. He said that Caduceus would be firing Mr. Terson, effective immediately, but that the company wouldn’t be pressing charges. He looked over at Dr. Barvan for a second and then turned back to me, saying that the medical examiner’s reports made it clear that Dr. Demmel had died of natural causes and that the lab could resume its normal operations. Before I could open my mouth, he thanked me for my diligent work today, which was echoed by Dr. Barvan who stood and walked us out.

When we left the building, I told Chief Walsh that I had my concerns about the cause of death, and that the hasty cleanup of the lab was suspicious. He said that he had looked over the case notes and that it seemed to him that natural heart failure was a reasonable explanation. He firmly reminded me that this was Caduceus City, not Stockton, and then he hopped in his cart and drove off. It was getting late and I chose to walk back to my car the long way, through the twisting paths of the Caduceus Gardens.

First published in Protocolized.

American Skyway

Cameron Russell Armstrong — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

“Will the delegate from New Texas stand and be recognized.”

The speaker with the dull voice paused and looked up across the semicircular chamber. The furtive tapping of bored fingers on datapads echoed flatly off the synthetic wood-paneled walls. Clusters of bureaucrats dutifully feigned attention while quietly locked in desperate combat with the looming spectre of accidental slumber during this third hour of the 17th session on the ninth day of the quarterly two-day Reratification Accords for the treaty governing the Joint Defense of the Lebanon Space Elevator and Remembrance Zone, which memorialized the grand experiment formerly known as the United States of America.

A hacking sound, something between a simple cough and a swamp crocodile clearing its throat, stumbled out of the speaker’s mouth.

“Will the delegate from New Texas stand and be recognized!”

Mark McCarthy blinked, eyes refocusing on the massive industrial structure extending up impossibly high into the pale blue sky in the distance. He had been absentmindedly staring out the window at the faintly visible motion of the lift transferring vast amounts of economic tonnage from Earth to orbit. In the foreground, his attention lingered on a long line of military trucks, presumably the next Rotational Defense Force, idling patiently while the perimeter guards processed their entry to the Outer Defense Ring Complex. He looked around curiously at the sense of awkward pause in the proceedings and realized with a start that he was the delegate from New Texas.

Mark shot up out of his seat and banged the shit out of his knee.

“Oof. Oh – Mr. Speaker, Mr. – ah – Master Secretary, Mr. Sir – Speaker – Mr. Secretary, we’re here! I’m here.”

As the delegate from New Texas collected himself and buttoned and smoothed his seersucker suit jacket, the secretary’s eyes narrowed. He had just noticed that the quarter of the room allocated to the New Texas delegation was considerably sparser than it had been the day before. Mark stood all alone among the padded rolling chairs and empty coffee substitute ration packs. With a disapproving sigh, the secretary glanced down at the digital nameplate in front of Mark McCarthy.

“Mr. McCarthy. What does the delegation from New Texas think of the latest revisions to the proposed amendments?”

Mark glanced down at the datapad in front of him and immediately felt too warm under the energy efficient light strips. He had only started reviewing the new revisions 30 minutes ago.

The changes were extensive.

Earlier that day, at around 0745 Kansas local time, Ambassador Jeb ‘Crawdad’ Hutchinson (Mark’s boss’s boss and the lead diplomat for the New Texas delegation) startled Mark as he ate his breakfast of reconstituted egg material alone in the Diplomatic Food Structure and Rec Room, by appearing suddenly in the seat next to him. The Ambassador was surprisingly stealthy for how large of a frame he wielded. The small, utilitarian room, somewhat full of various low level trade representatives from the neighboring states, fell silent while Mark choked on his mouthful as the Ambassador clapped him heartily on the back and let loose his signature guffaw.

“Son, I’ve got an incredible gift for you, I tell you hwat! There comes a time in every man’s life when he is presented with a chance to do his duty and he must rise, with repose, to the circumstances in which he finds himself. Today is that day for you and I couldn’t be prouder. Do you understand what I am telling you, nah?”

The ambassador beamed, all teeth, under his oversized, silverbelly stetson.

Mark, stunned into silence at this unexpected spectacle, could only nod, confused and with his throat still full of egg material.

“That’s a good man right chyea. My aide Eddie will get you everything you need. You’ll debrief me back in Austin next week. Godspeed, son. You’re doing the Republic a grand service.”

And with a wink and squeeze of Mark’s shoulder, Ambassador Hutchinson sauntered out of the mess.

The ordinary din resumed as the boisterous source of tension left the room, albeit with a few nosy glances sent his way. Mark sat quietly for a few minutes, bewildered by what had just transpired, when his datapad buzzed. Eyes wide, he tapped through some unread messages (new quarterly hemispheric export estimates, an alert about quasi-religious terrorism out in California, a packing list for the delegation, and so on), until he reached a brief email from Eddie the Aide explaining that Mark was to represent the Republic of New Texas for the remaining diplomatic sessions… while the rest of the delegation returned promptly to Austin to attend the annual Republic of New Texas Declaration of Rebellion Celebratory Barbecue and Rodeo.

Mark had been to the three previous Reratification Accords and did generally understand the process of the whole dog and pony show, but really only as a passive observer. Hell, he’d spent the entirety of yesterday’s diplomatic session on ‘special assignment’ from the Logistics Policy Officer combing the Outer Defense Ring Diplomatic Complex to find a specific brand of creamer the Ambassador wanted served with his coffee substitute.

Now he was to answer any and all questions related to the Republic of New Texas and her stance on the current Reratification?

Was he supposed to ask questions on behalf of New Texas too?

He started to inventory what he had remembered from his studies in preparation for his first Accords last year. Mark hadn’t actually cracked his binder since he accepted the fact that all he was going to get to do was bullshit tasks for the delegation at large, but he had a good head for history.

Mark knew that the Lebanon Space Elevator and Remembrance Zone, nicknamed the “American Skyway”, was a transportation megastructure and neutral territory unhappily shared between each of the four post-American Successor States. Built well before the Big Split (and over a century before Mark was born), the Skyway served a far more important purpose than these typically sleepy diplomatic proceedings might suggest.

New Texan policy reports estimated the Skyway, which was the primary mass-lift for all spacebound products in the western hemisphere, currently handled at least 25% of each Successor State’s total exports. Mark had run the numbers before for New Texas, whose economy was driven by weapon exports and passthrough tariffs on South American cargo headed to space, and estimated that the Skyway directly supported about 60% of their GDP. He’d also heard whispers that for the United States (which, after D.C.’s glassing, was now essentially just New England and some parts of former Canada) and its luxury handicrafts, total exports through the Skyway accounted for almost 90% of their admittedly small GDP.

Mark closed his eyes to better remember the facts from an antique video essay he’d found in the stacks at his old law library. During the early 21st century global manufacturing boom, the American technocapitalists belatedly realized they’d fallen catastrophically behind every other superpower in high-tech production capacity. After almost a century of letting their domestic factories wither in favor of an import-driven economy, a landmark technical report projected it would take at least another half-century of concentrated investment just to reach parity with their adversaries, who were growing more proficient by the day.

The technocrats did the math: an emerging class of new space and energy technologies was accelerating projects in extra-atmospheric commerce, every major nation was releasing plans to establish a strategic space colony, and the main obstacle to offworld growth was clearly the supply chain.

So American capital allocators made the only move they still knew how to make. They raced to own the distribution layer. Advances in materials science finally made a full-scale space elevator mathematically possible, though almost certainly a financial disaster. As public-private partnerships formed, deteriorating interstate domestic politics meant the only way to push the project through Congress was to plant the thing dead-center of the country.

And, of course, anchoring it in Kansas meant the additional engineering insanity of bolting a perpetually firing nuclear-thruster counterweight to the top end of the tether just to fight a planet’s worth of shearing forces forever trying to yank it back down toward the equator.

Naturally, the US government, with classic American hubris, took the bet that they could brute-force the physics and subsidized the entire thing.

A student of international history, Mark knew that two other elevators eventually followed; one in China and one in western Russia. The Russian space elevator effectively bankrupted the country, forcing it to merge with what remained of the European Union. China’s transition to a regional garrison state left huge gaps in the public historical record with regard to how they fared. He did know, however, that the Chinese space fleet still maintained a healthy standoff zone around its land, airspace, and geosynchronous orbits, which include the Philippine ground tether.

Mark was pretty sure, however, that none of that happened before five uninterrupted decades of American space export dominance.

As it turns out, the various governments of the world, along with their corresponding space colonies, were extremely lucrative customers. Pretty soon, space commerce became the only commerce that really mattered. It’s no exaggeration to say that every major starship construction, space colony expedition, and interstellar mining operation that happened before Big Split moved the bulk of its supplies through the Lebanon Space Elevator.

Even today, everybody knew that the Skyway operated at maximum utilization. That’s why the Joint Defense Treaty existed in the first place. As a kid, Mark had heard the story about when the Skyway had paused operations for almost a month just after the Big Split. Apparently, the rebel leaders of every Successor State had each realized independently that, without the Skyway, their grand vision of tomorrow would be sunk before it could even start. And since it was so important, there were always conflicts over how to share it.

Conflicts that Mark was now supposed to handle.

He flicked his eyes back up at Mr. Secretary and fought the overwhelming urge to gag.

The revisions at the heart of the extended sessions had been updated and sent out the night before for review by the various delegations.

Except Mark McCarthy, Trade Attaché Junior Grade, was not quite distinguished enough to find himself on the secure diplomatic cable distro list that shared messages such as these.

Nor was Mark even made aware of their existence until the secretary formally entered today’s session Items into the record a few hours ago. Ambassador Hutchinson had forgotten to mention it at breakfast, perhaps too enthralled by the promise of ribs and celebratory gunfire waiting for him back in the Hill Country. In fact, Eddie had only sent Mark the file about 30 minutes ago (presumably when he noticed 21 unread messages from Mark McCarthy) which is, of course, when Mark started to review it.

Under the spotlight in the Session Chamber, it dawned on Mark that this morning was the first time Ambassador Hutchinson had ever spoken directly to him.

“I, uh… we… ah.”

Mark kicked himself internally and continued.

“The New Texas delegation has no comments at this time.”

Mark could feel himself hunching his bony shoulders. He hated this nervous tic. It was the result of a long and frustrating youth housed in a long and frustrating skeleton. Mark dropped his gangly body back into the chair.

He knew nobody in the room noticed his fumbling nor did they really care about the deliberations, but he was angry at himself all the same.

The four Successor States had ratified and reratified basically the same goddamn treaty in the same goddamn way in the same goddamn room every quarter for 53 years. His fellow New Texans would bluster about defense spending, the Rationalist Californianicans would quibble about legal minutiae, the American delegation from Boston would try not to be noticed so they could keep their slightly unfair utilization schedule, and the local reps from Federated States of the American Empire would posture so they could keep on raising their fees.

Despite the so-called Union’s vicious balkanization, Mark knew every Successor State more or less still needed the Skyway to keep their economies afloat so nothing ever really changed.

It was just another sunny Reratification Day in Lebanon, Kansas.

But Mark hated feeling incompetent all the same. He hadn’t spent five years in the New Texas Rangers after college just to look like an idiot in front of these careerists. Sure, it was mostly legal-adjutant tours, but that was beside the point.

Satisfied with Mark’s response, the secretary looked back down at his datapad.

“Will the delegate from Rationalist California stand and be recognized?”

Mark glanced over at their section of the semicircle.

A tan, handsome man with longish dirty blonde hair stood and offered a brief nod to the secretary. Mark did not recognize the delegate, which was odd. Mark furrowed his brow slightly.

“Mr. Secretary, we would like to once again submit into the record that our official nomenclature has changed to ‘Rationalist Californianica’ as per the result of last year’s Periodic Semantic Conclave.”

The man stared directly at the secretary, his face friendly and firm, yet he stood very still.

Quiet chuckles tumbled onto the floor from the other state sections, but the secretary wilted under the speaker’s gaze and replied

“Ah yes. My apologies again. Will the delegate from Rationalist Californianica stand and be recognized?”

The secretary pronounced every additional syllable.

“Of course! Thank you, Mr. Secretary. We support the revisions as written. No further comments at this time.”

“Wonderful.” The secretary, reflating after the intensity of the previous interaction, quickly angled toward the next group of delegates. “Will the representative from the United States stand and be recognized?”

An unobtrusive figure, his jacket inexplicably wet , stood and curtly shared “No comments.”

Finally, the secretary turned and made eye contact with the delegation from the Federated States of the American Empire. He was interrupted before he could get out his formal recognition.

“YUP! Subsection 7-B is in clear violation of...”

Unlike the rest of the room, the FSAE did have comments. Quite a few apparently. Mark only half paid attention as the clearly cornfed man tore into the offending verbiage.

Mark was too busy glancing back and forth between the revisions on his datapad and the Californianican delegate to notice the room politely tolerating the FSAE show of force. He had prepped the lookbooks for his own delegation ahead of the accords. He should recognize this man. He frowned squintily.

Mark’s ears perked up at the mention of Californianica.

“… it’s unclear to the Federated States why we should bear the costs of a Californianican disruption to the defense handover schedule. We have already mobilized and funded this quarter’s security force and are more than prepared to do our duty to preserve the economic peace!”

The folksy delegate from the Federated States was doing his absolute best to sound righteously affronted. It was a good performance even though everyone in the room could spot the oncoming ask for financial remuneration from miles away.

Another tan, handsome delegate arose, this time a woman, and rolled her shoulders back slightly. Mark did not recognize her either. She waited for a nod from the secretary and then began.

“Naturally, we appreciate that the great Federated States can handle the current schedule of responsibility and has done so capably for many years. We also understand the great cost involved in organizing such an effective force. We just, regretfully, are midstream with some administrative consolidation within our regional governance reorganization and a schedule shift will alleviate key, arrhythmic fiscal burdens. This will streamline our upcoming budget planning cycle in a way I know you understand. We, of course, are happy to reimburse the FSAE for the effort at cost plus inconvenience fees.”

She sounded apologetic but firm, smiling directly at the delegation from the Federated States.

Now that he was looking intently, Mark realized he didn’t see any of the Californianican VIPs he’d spent hours organizing background information on for his team. Thinking back, the New Texas diplomats had sent Mark running all over the Outer Defense Ring on minor errands all last week so he hadn’t even noticed the discrepancy. Very odd.

Mark also realized with some consternation that this meant nobody from New Texas had bothered to glance at his lookbooks before they absconded.

Rationalist Californianica had somehow sent a completely different crew of diplomats from those notated in the pre-reratification census collected just four weeks ago. Mark racked his brain for anything he knew about RC electoral procedure which might explain this, but wasn’t as familiar with their processes as he would have liked to be in this moment.

Something about Special Diplomatic Quorums, maybe? Mark thought.

He knew it was a stupid name, but wasn’t sure about the specifics. He turned his attention back to the ongoing debate and the revisions on the datapad in front of him.

The two delegations went back and forth and back and forth for about another hour as the FSAE continued to haggle over each one of the multitudinous revisions submitted by Rationalist Californianica. Every single modification to baseline troop deployment, material makeups, armament minimums, force sequencing, handover procedure, and more, predictably turned into another chance to extract a quartering fee or an environmental revitalization tax or similar. Despite this badgering, Rationalist Californianica was suitably gracious in its commitment to financing the “common good”.

Mark didn’t glean anything else useful by observing the unknown diplomats for the remainder of the session. He did, however, finally notice Junior Trade Liaison Officer Andrew Melkson staring blankly into space from the back row of the Rationalist Californianican delegation. Mark hadn’t seen him this quarter, but they spent most of last quarter’s Accords commiserating over the criminal waste of their time and talents in the diplomatic breakout rooms in between menial taskings while adjutanting for their respective delegations. Melkson had a very specific, quiet dejection on his face. Mark knew that look well as he had worn it many times himself.

That was the look of an aide who thought his boss had once again said something stupid.

Smirking in solidarity, Mark resolved to grab Melkson after the session and get to the bottom of whatever was happening over on the West Coast. He settled into a comfortable faux attentiveness while the debate dragged onwards. He hoped against hope that things would wrap up soon, but the extraction ritual extended far enough into the evening that the secretary was forced to recess the proceedings until the next morning. Mark was pissed.

With the bang of a gavel, the procedural spell was broken and the room full of diplomats got up to leave. The Californianicans stood up in what appeared to be a practiced not-quite-unison and stepped with a quickness out of the chamber. Melkson looked after them, clearly annoyed, and started to clean up their quarter of the room.

There wasn’t much to clean so Mark hurried over to meet him while he was isolated. Fortunately, Melkson wasn’t in a hurry to catch up with his group. Mark caught him right as he exited the room and initiated the conversation.

“Melkson! Good to see you again.”

“Hi, Mark. Did your delegation leave you high and dry?” Up close, Andrew looked tired.

“Yea… there’s a barbeque back in New Texas.” Mark exaggerated his eye roll for Andrew’s benefit. Andrew happily latched on to the opportunity to drag on someone’s boss.

“What a bunch of assholes. I assume they didn’t leave you any notes for continuity either?”

“Nope. Hence my bumblefucking around in front of the chamber today.” Mark forced a laugh.

Andrew sighed. “It wasn’t that bad. You didn’t embarrass yourself nearly as much as my new cadre of overlords did.”

Mark began to form a predatory smile, but caught himself. “Ahhh. I was wondering what was happening out in Cali with all this new blood.”

But Mark didn’t need to be careful. Andrew was clearly waiting for the chance to vent.

“Dude, these guys are the worst. Some admin redistricting triggered a Special Electoral Agora last month and this new party absolutely swept the polls. Real calm, freakazoid types. They shook up all of our diplomatic missions at the last second. Fired everybody. Except me I guess. Probably realized they had no idea what they were doing after it was too late. This whole budget angle doesn’t even make sense, man. We’ve got months before we need to worry about next fiscal year. They have no idea how to staff this defense mission either. We’re way over-quota on manpower. I guess the bombings in LA last quarter spooked them and they don’t want to take any chances, but it’s a huge waste of state resources, to be honest. We’ve got enough munitions for the next ten defense missions. I guess we’ll just ship it all back home when we’re done? I don’t know, dude.”

Andrew finally took a breath.

Mark offered a sympathetic head shake. “Jeez. I hope they’re treating you alright at least?”

“Yea, sure. They’re really… polite. Formal? Do you know what I mean?” Andrew sighed.

“I think I caught that from their talking points today,” Mark agreed.

Andrew checked his watch and breathed in sharply. “Shit, I gotta go. They want me to catalogue every point agreed to today. Good to see you and I hope your trip back is uneventful, man. Catch you later.”

Andrew speed-walked down the corridor and out into the Midwestern twilight, leaving Mark alone once again.

Back in the Diplomatic Food Structure and Rec Room, Mark ate what the menu optimistically described as a ‘BBQ Sandwich,’ remaining suitably unconvinced. After finishing, he noticed some pitying glances in his direction from the other junior diplomats who had seen his performance that day. Before the warmth could creep back into his cheeks, he quietly stomped out the door.

As he let his feet carry him forward, the fresh evening air helped cool his skin and his newly resurfaced frustration.

OK, he thought. How do I kill the rest of the night?

Mark knew from his last few Accords that recreational chemicals of any kind were banned for fifty miles around the Skyway Exclusion Zone, so that wasn’t an option. Nor could he stand the idea of going back to the pity stares of the Rec Room. Plus, all the true R&R buildings were at the Inner Defense Ring Complex where the quarterly rotational staff bunked.

Mark started to head back to the empty delegation quarters when he remembered his creamer adventure from earlier. He’d found the special coffee substitute ration station in a tucked away break space near the roof access of an ancillary building.

Quiet with a view. That would do.

Up on the rooftop, Mark took in the landscape around the Outer Defense Ring Complex and sipped the cup of brown liquid in his hand.

Damn. Mark thought. Crawdad was right. That creamer makes this crud somewhat drinkable.

He watched the impossible elevator flicker in the dark. At the very edge of his vision he could see the cold glow of the nuclear counterweight thrusters that made a space elevator in Lebanon, Kansas even possible. On this tranquil rooftop, he became aware once again of the omnipresent hum that almost vibrated the air he was breathing. It had faded into his background after a week of being here. The mag-rail acceleration shot non-human cargo up into the sky with terrifying speed. Lights flashed in predictable sequence.

Up. Down. Up. Down. The gears of commerce grind ever forward.

He might’ve imagined it, but he thought he saw the vibrations in the surface tension of this inarguably decent ration of coffee substitute.

Looking back at the complex below, Mark watched the Californianican military detachment hang around their vehicles in the casually violent way that soldiers seem to project. Melkson was right. There were a lot of trucks. Mark did not envy the poor budget analysts who had to tally up this Quarter’s Joint Defense Spending. The fuel costs alone would be a nightmare to tabulate.

Mark sighed as he stared out over the scene for a good while longer before heading back to his quarters.

On a whim, Mark wandered by the trucks he’d seen from his rooftop perch. The smell of diesel brought him right back to the Rangers’ Motor Pool. He smiled and wondered what his old driver was up to these days. He was probably a Staff Sergeant by now.

Mark almost walked up to a group of soldiers to shoot the shit, but decided not to. He did, however, let his eyes wander nostalgically over the war equipment for a moment. He turned to go on his merry way when a gently flapping tarp caught his eye. A soldier quickly pulled the tarp taut again, but Mark clocked that the box was clearly labelled with the international sign for ‘High Explosive’. Curious, Mark did a casual lap around the detachment and spotted more than a few additional boxes with the same label in the back of different trucks.

Mark frowned. He was no logistician, but he understood that the random sample of explosives he had observed implied a large pile of boom. If placed strategically, there were probably enough explosives in there to blast a Chesapeake Class Orbital Frigate in half. These Californianicans really weren’t messing around.

But how would they even incorporate these into the Joint Defense Plan?

Still chewing on this nugget, Mark took another long look at the soldiers, who were now actively pretending not to notice him, and finally ambled back to his room to review the rest of the revisions before the morning session. After a few hours of reading, he decided that the Californianican amendments were technically airtight, but he didn’t love how much additional latitude they gave the Commander of the Rotational Defense Force in regards to unilateral decision-making on force deployment and munitions storage. When viewed altogether, he thought passing these revisions was against the best interests of the Republic of New Texas. Too much could go wrong if there was ever a thoughtless Commander at the helm, even for just one quarter.

Against his better judgment, he emailed the Ambassador his analysis and went to shut off his datapad.

But it buzzed before he could do so.

Confused, he checked his unread messages. One unread from the Ambassador. Mark hesitantly tapped open the reply.

“Yippee Ki Yay, we sure are shootin’ guns out here today!”

“My Fellow New Texans, my office is closed for the duration of our great Republic’s Declaration of Rebellion Celebratory Barbecue and Rodeo. I’ll be out and about in Austin sampling all the finest delectables our shining city has to offer until next week. See if you can spot me in the parade on Saturday!”

“For any urgent business, reach out to Max McCarthy. He’ll get you settled.”

The autoreply had Mark’s department contact information in the signature block.

I guess that settles that then.

Mark shook his head in disbelief, chuckled to himself, and turned out the light.

The next morning, the session kicked off with a quiet intensity. The delegation from the Federated States had plenty more exceptions to raise, but the Californianicans were seemingly ready to agree on just about every extra fee and tax hike the FSAE wanted. Without any pushback, there appeared no end to the increasingly minute complaints that could ostensibly trigger a charge.

During a lull in the nickel and diming, Mark raised a point of order about the expansion of Command Authority proposed in the amendment revisions. As expected, that got the Californianicans’ undivided attention. Mark had never been on the receiving end of such a poisonous glare. Undeterred, Mark managed to respectably convey the potential unintended effects of such an increase in scope of security element powers.

It may have been the proudest moment of his short diplomatic career.

The point was debated briefly and dismissed almost immediately. The Californianicans invoked the growing threat of stochastic terrorism back in their home region, revealed they had intelligence reports suggesting the existence of sleeper terror cells across the other Successor States, and offered to pay an additional hefty vehicle fee to boot. Practically salivating as they mentally counted the fleet of trucks outside, the FSAE yielded the rest of their time before Californianica could change their mind about the vehicle fee. The secretary sped through the remaining items, much to the relief of the room, and the amendments all passed largely unchanged.

The Californianicans smiled and left the chamber with a sense of purpose.

Mark walked out behind them and stretched his stiff back. Blinking against the late, hot morning, he watched the Californianican diplomats gather near the military detachment that was getting ready to roll to the Inner Defense Ring. Dozens of engines roared to life simultaneously at a signal from the tan delegates. Mark soon heard the familiar cadence of mission prep checklists being followed. Spotting his fellow junior diplomat standing idly a few feet away from his bosses, Mark shot Melkson a sympathetic look and then spent the rest of the day completing a list of administrative chores from Eddie the Aide.

Much later, under the sticky glow of the setting sun, Mark turned over the engine of his own diplomatic truck and eased it out onto the highway back south toward the Republic of New Texas. Another Reratification Accords in the books. Getting the vehicle up to speed, he glanced in his rearview mirror.

The American Skyway shone bright in the distance, still reaching impossibly upward.

Then a flash of light blinded him for a few seconds. He pulled the truck over as best he could to wait until his vision cleared. When he could see again, Mark got out, stood on the side of the road, and craned his neck.

His stomach fell as he processed the small, sickly blue blossom slowly spreading across the upper atmosphere where the megastructure faded into space.

Mark sighed and turned to drop the tailgate of his truck.

He climbed up to lay down in the bed, using his luggage as a pillow, and settled in to watch the show.

First published in Protocolized.

The Repossessed

Amita — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

“A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice… if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One’s freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one’s own building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other.”

“You cannot have anything. And least of all can you have the present, unless you accept with it the past and the future.”

– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

You know how this game begins. You enter the mind palace your grandmother always reminded you to sweep. “If you don’t go in there every once in a while, Marina,” she had warned you, “all types of criaturas will just pop right up. There will be closets you didn’t put there, mija, and you may not like what you find.”

“But remember the things I tell you and one day, when I am well and truly gone, you will find one extra room I put in there for you, that you have built without even realizing it. That is your inheritance.”

You used to go in to sweepwell, that’s the best way to put it – once a week. Then once a month. Then abuelita was gone and before you knew it a whole year had passed. Then two. Then you started getting a little scared of what you might find in there.

So. The memory game. That’s how it began.

Just one problem though, and the reason you’ve been so scared. See, it’s not so much mind palace as mind labyrinth.

You have your grandfather to thank for that one really. He was always making those little puzzle boxes. Each successive layer would only open if you had unlocked the outer layer just right. Something is at the center of the mind labyrinth – but you can’t remember what, exactly. Some makers of puzzle boxes create partial models that they can test with, or hide one secret master lock somewhere. Your grandfather never did that. Every time he tested the box was a true solve of his own puzzle.

The entrance to the mind palace is guarded, of course, as abuelita said it had to be. When you close your eyes and focus on the image – her hands folding masa, the specific scent of her skin, the weight of her disappointment – your neural chip activates with a sensation like warm honey spreading through your skull.

The palace materializes around you.

It’s covered with winding black vines full of thorns so sharp that you feel them. Definitely. Well, possibly. The pain receptors in the chip are calibrated to seem real, and you’ve never been entirely sure whether that’s a feature or a fault.

The vines pulse slightly, alive with data. They’ve grown denser since your last visit, woven so thick you can barely see the iron gate beneath. This is what happens when you don’t maintain the architecture. The neural pathways overgrow, and the information stored in them becomes harder to access, begins to decay.

You reach for the vines carefully, trying to ease them apart.

They contract tighter.

You pull your hand back, and a thorn catches your palm. The pain is bright and specific. A drop of something that looks like blood but feels like static runs down your wrist.

“Gently won’t work, mija.”

The voice comes from everywhere and nowhere. When you turn, your grandmother is standing behind you, except she’s translucent at the edges, flickering like a projection your mind isn’t quite committed to rendering.

“Abuelita?”

“You think I’m her?” The figure laughs, and it’s not quite right – too bitter, too sharp. “I’m what you remember of her. I’m what you built to guard this level. And I’m not letting you through until you show me you understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Why do you think these vines grew?” She gestures at the thorns. “Because you were gentle. Because you were patient. Because you tried to be good.” The word drips with contempt. “Your grandmother was never gentle, Marina. She didn’t ask nicely. She didn’t wait for doors to open.”

You remember this. The way she’d slam cupboards when she was angry. The way she’d cut people with words and not apologize. The way rooms would go silent when her mood shifted.

“I’m not like that,” you say.

“No?” The projection steps closer. “Then you’re not getting in.”

The vines seem to thicken as you watch, thorns lengthening. You can feel it – the data degrading, connections weakening. Whatever’s at the center, you’re running out of time.

You reach for the vines again. Gently.

They contract harder, and now thorns pierce your forearm. The pain is exquisite, perfectly calibrated.

“Stop being weak,” your grandmother-projection sneers.

You pull back, breathe. Think. The chip responds to intention, to neural patterns. It’s reading what you project into it. When you’re gentle, it interprets weakness, and the defenses strengthen.

So.

You grab the vines and yank.

The thorns cut deep, but the vines give way slightly. Not enough. You pull harder, letting anger flood through you – anger at the pain, at the puzzle, at your grandmother for making you do this, at yourself for waiting so long.

You tear at the vines.

They resist, and you pull harder. Something in your chest is hot and bright and furious. You think of every time you have swallowed your anger, made yourself small, apologized when you shouldn’t have. You think of your grandmother’s rages and how you swore you’d never be like that, and how you fear that you have let yourself become exactly like her.

The vines begin to part.

But slowly. The gate is still barely visible.

“Again,” the projection says, and there’s approval in her voice now. “Harder.”

So you do it again. And again. You tear at the vines until your hands are shredded and slick. You scream at them. You curse. You channel every ounce of rage you’ve ever suppressed and pour it into your hands, and with each repetition the vines give way a little more.

By the time the gate is clear, you’ve done it 47 times.

You know because the chip counted. Each iteration carved a little deeper into your neural pathways. Each one taught your brain a little better: rage works, rage solves problems, rage opens doors.

The projection smiles at you. “Good girl,” she says, and then she dissolves.

The gate swings open.

Beyond the gate is a hallway lined with doors, and at the end of it sits your grandfather. He’s more solid than the grandmother-projection was, more detailed. He’s at a workbench, and spread before him are dozens of his puzzle boxes, all different sizes, all intricate.

“Marina,” he says without looking up. “You made it past the first level.”

“I need to get to the center.”

“Of course you do.” He selects a box, turns it in his hands. “But first, you need to choose.”

The doors along the hallway swing open, and behind each one is a memory. You can see them like exhibits in a museum. Birthday parties. Holidays. The summer you spent at his workshop. The day he spent teaching you to solve a simple box and how you cried with frustration until he showed you the trick.

“One of these doors leads forward,” he says. “The others lead to dead ends, to loops, to degraded data you can’t recover from. Choose carefully.”

You step toward the nearest door, but he holds up a hand.

“Actually,” he says, “I misspoke. You don’t need to choose one door. You need to choose all of them.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Is it?” He smiles. “Your grandmother hoarded memories like they were treasure. I hoard too, in my way. All these boxes, Marina. All these solutions I never threw away. All these moments I couldn’t let go of.” He gestures to the doors. “You think you can be selective? You think you can take just the good ones and leave the rest behind?”

You understand. The puzzle isn’t about choosing. Its solution is in accepting.

You walk to the first door and step through. The memory plays – a fight between your parents, your grandfather watching silently, saying nothing. You feel the weight of his inaction, the way he collected grievances and never let them go.

You step back out and move to the next door. And the next. And the next.

Each memory is a piece of him. Good ones: teaching you patience, showing you how things fit together. Bad ones: his silence when he should have spoken, his collection of resentments, the way he took up space with his things and his mood.

The puzzle is that you have to experience all of them. You can’t skip. You can’t be selective.

So you don’t.

You go through every door. Every memory. You take them all in, let them fill you up until you feel bloated with other people’s experiences, until you can’t tell which feelings are yours and which are inherited. You want to stop – your brain is screaming that this is too much, that you need to filter, to be selective – but you keep going.

Because the only way forward is through excess. Through taking more than you should. Through refusing to limit yourself.

By the time you’ve finished, you’ve walked through 63 doors.

The chip has been counting this too. Recording each time you chose consumption over restraint. Teaching your brain: more is better, take everything, don’t limit yourself.

Back in the hallway, your grandfather looks up from his workbench. “Good,” he says. “Now you understand.”

A door appears at the end of the hallway, different from the others. Ornate. Locked with mechanisms you can see but don’t quite understand.

“The third level,” he says. “Your aunt is waiting.”

The third level is a library, or something like it. Endless shelves of books, all identical, all bound in dark leather. Your aunt sits at a desk in the center, writing in one of them with precise, tiny script.

“Marina.” She doesn’t look up. “You’re late.”

“I’m here now.”

“Late is late.” She finishes a line, sets down her pen with exact placement. “Do you know how many times I’ve written this page?”

You don’t answer.

“47 times,” she says. “Each time, I found an error. A misplaced comma. A word that could be better. So I started over.” She finally looks at you. “Your grandmother was sloppy. Your grandfather was excessive. But I am precise.”

The books on the shelves – you see now that they’re all the same book – each of their pages written over and over with microscopic variations.

“To pass this level,” your aunt says, “you must complete a task. Perfectly.”

She slides a blank book across the desk, along with a pen.

“Copy this page.” She indicates the one she’s just finished. “Exactly.”

You sit down. Pick up the pen. Begin to copy.

The script is impossibly small, impossibly intricate. Halfway through the third line, your hand trembles and a letter comes out wrong.

“Start over,” your aunt says.

So you do.

You make it further this time – two-thirds of the way through before you transpose two letters.

“Start over.”

Again.

And again.

You lose count of how many times you restart the page. Your hand cramps. Your eyes blur. The chip is recording every repetition, every attempt at perfection, every time you submit yourself to this impossible standard.

On the 47th attempt, you get all the way to the last line before making a mistake.

“Start over,” your aunt says.

And something in you breaks.

Not into rage this time. Into something colder. You look at the page – the page you’ve already copied 46 times, each time finding it insufficient. You look at your aunt, who has written the same page 47 times and still isn’t satisfied.

You pick up the pen.

You draw a single, thick line through the entire page.

“There,” you say. “Done.”

Your aunt stares at you. “That’s not…”

“It’s done,” you say. “It’s imperfect and it’s done and I’m not doing it again.”

You expect her to argue. Instead, she smiles.

“48 tries,” she says. “That’s what it took for you to learn. That perfection is the enemy. That sometimes done is better than perfect. That you have to be willing to fail, to submit flawed work, to accept incompletion.”

Except.

Except you didn’t learn that at all.

What you learned is that you had to try 48 times before you were allowed to stop. That the only way past perfectionism is through perfectionism. That you have to obsess and retry and polish until finally, exhausted, you’re permitted to fail.

The chip has been recording. So many iterations of the same task. 48 times your brain practiced obsessive attention to detail, self-flagellation at the errors, the inability to let things go.

A door opens behind your aunt.

“The center,” she says. “Your inheritance.”

The center of the labyrinth is a small room, barely larger than a closet. In the middle of it is a pedestal, and on the pedestal is a box.

One of your grandfather’s puzzle boxes.

You recognize it. The rosewood one with the inlay of lighter wood forming geometric patterns. He was working on it the summer before he died. You never saw him finish it.

You pick it up. It’s warm in your hands, and you can feel the mechanisms inside, complex and interlocking. The kind of puzzle that requires the patience to memorize the right sequence of moves.

You begin to solve it.

The first layer opens after you press three panels in the right order. The second layer requires rotation and pressure. The third layer is more complex – a sequence you have to discover through trial and error.

Inside the final layer is a piece of paper.

On it, in your grandmother’s handwriting: a string of numbers and letters. 64 characters: alphanumeric, precisely formatted.

A cryptographic key.

You stare at it. This is the inheritance. Not memories, not wisdom. Access to something your grandmother left you. Money, or information. Or both.

Something material. Something real.

All you have to do is remember this key, exit the labyrinth, and use it before the chip is removed and the data is lost forever.

You start to memorize it. The first eight characters come easily. Then the next eight. You’re halfway through when you realize …

To get here, you tore through thorns 47 times, teaching your brain that rage opens doors.

You consumed 63 memories, teaching your brain that more is always better, that you should take everything offered.

You attempted perfection 48 times, teaching your brain to obsess over details, to never be satisfied, to retry until you’re broken.

158 repetitions total.

158 times the chip amplified the learning, carved the pathways deeper, made you expert in the exact traits that your family embodied, the exact traits you’ve spent your whole life trying not to inherit.

Your grandmother’s rage. Your grandfather’s hoarding. Your aunt’s perfectionism.

And now you’re standing here with their gift, ready to take it out into the world, and you can already feel it – the pathways are so deep now. The inhibition that would normally stop you from acting on these impulses, the self-control you’ve relied on, it’s been worn down by sheer repetition. The chip made every iteration count double, triple, carved neural highways where there used to be hesitant paths.

If you take this key out, if you use this inheritance, you’ll have to live with what you’ve become to earn it.

You look at the string of characters. They’re already fading from your vision. The data is degrading. Soon it will be gone entirely.

You could keep memorizing. You could save this.

Or.

You set the paper down.

You leave it in the box.

You close each layer carefully, in reverse order, until the puzzle box is sealed again.

And you walk out.

The exit is easier than the entrance. The levels don’t resist when you’re leaving. Your aunt is gone, your grandfather is gone, your grandmother is gone. Just empty spaces where they were.

You emerge from the labyrinth with the feeling of warm honey receding from your skull, and you open your eyes in the clinic.

“How did it go?” the technician asks. “Did you find what you needed?”

“No,” you say. “I want it removed.”

She nods. “The consent forms you signed did mention that this might cause some scarring to the surrounding tissue. Minor damage to inhibitory pathways. Are you sure?”

You think about the 158 repetitions. About what you’ve already done to yourself.

“I’m sure,” you say.

The procedure takes 40 minutes. They have to be careful around the neural tissue. When it’s done, there’s a small bandage on the side of your head and a waiver you sign about potential side effects.

You feel fine.

You feel completely fine.

Three weeks later, you’re in a meeting and someone contradicts you and you feel it rise up – hot and bright and familiar. The urge to snap back, to cut them down, to make them feel small.

You don’t do it.

But the impulse is louder than it used to be. Harder to ignore.

That night, you buy more groceries than you need. Not by a lot. Just… more. An extra can of everything. A backup of the backups. Just in case.

You notice, but you don’t refrain.

At home, you revise an email seven times before sending it. Then you lie awake thinking about how you should have revised it an eighth time. How there was a better word for the third sentence. How it wasn’t quite right.

You notice this too.

The thing is, you can feel it. The space where the inhibition used to be. Like a tooth that’s been pulled – your tongue keeps going to the gap, expecting something that isn’t there anymore.

The rage is louder. The hoarding comes easier. The perfectionism is more insistent.

And you know, with the clarity of someone who has just lost something important, that it’s only going to get worse.

You didn’t bring anything out of the labyrinth. You left the inheritance behind, made the right choice, the good choice.

But the labyrinth sent something out with you anyway.

Not a creature. Not a ghost.

Expertise. Skill. 158 repetitions of becoming exactly what you were trying to escape.

The chip is gone. The data is lost. Your grandmother’s gift has degraded to nothing.

But her legacy?

That’s alive and well, carved into your neural pathways like your grandfather’s boxes, precise and inescapable.

That followed you out just fine.

First published in Protocolized.

Desire Machines

Sachin — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Departure

The last-minute tumult of departure reigned on the steamer from Bristol to Buenos Aires. Porters hurried up the gangway with trunks and crates, telegraph boys zigzagged between families pressing farewell letters into their hands, and the deck lights quivered in the wind as the ship groaned against its moorings.

I had found a place near the forward rail, trying to appear older than my 19 years in my ill-fitting three-piece suit, when several bright flashes caught my attention – reporters’ lamps, unmistakably. The crowd began to part with a collective shiver.

Beside me, a stout and red-cheeked man tapped the ash from his pipe. He wore a wool coat too heavy for the ship’s warm corridor and carried himself with the unobtrusive authority of someone who found himself on a ship too often.

“Ah,” he said, noticing the direction of my gaze. “You will have a rare passenger on this voyage. That fellow, Sorabji Marker. You are from the islands, are you not? Saint Canderton?”

I nodded hesitantly.

Lakshman Sorabji Marker.

I remembered the name from my childhood in Saint Canderton, distant flashes of the cricket ground – The Oval – cut into the hillside, and the roar of the crowd. I had been too young then to understand why adults spoke his name with mythic reverence.

“You must remember the cricket match?” the gentleman asked. “That last Test? The one that broke the English streak and nearly set the Caribbean on fire.”

I confessed I remembered very little other than the heat and being lifted onto my father’s shoulders to see Marker coming out to bat. The gentleman gave me a sympathetic smile.

“Well then,” he said, lowering his voice with a storyteller’s instinct, “permit an old man to refresh your memory.”

He began with the giddiness of an old fellow who had told his story many times.

The Final Test

“It was the fourth day of the third Test match,” he said, “the series tied one-one, and the whole island felt as though it were about to lift off its foundations. Saint Canderton was brimming with people, tens of thousands crammed into streets meant for hundreds. The betting houses, the Fortuna Exchange and Hilltop Book, were so packed a man could hardly raise his elbow without brushing against five others. Steam drifted over The Oval cricket ground from the Engine Rooms, where the great analytical machines had been clattering without pause for two days, recalculating odds with each new whisper: rumors of Marker being ill, pitch conditions, Alistair Grace’s footwork patterns, all rendered into columns of brass and steam.”

He gave me a knowing look, as if expecting I might boast familiarity with the engine. I did not.

He paused to relight his pipe before continuing.

“England had one wicket left. And Saint Canderton was hungry for it.”

I remembered glimpses of that day through the haze of childhood memory. But the next part I had only ever heard in fragments whispered by adults animated by copious amounts of rum.

Graceful Fury

“The last English batsman,” the Leeds man said, “was the captain, Alistair Grace. Grim, patient, sweating through the afternoon heat, he had inched England toward their target. They needed only five runs. Five. And he had already survived a dozen appeals, each one tightening the crowd until The Oval felt like a drumhead stretched to breaking. Then came the ball, nothing spectacular, just a weary leg-break that kept a shade low. Grace thrust out his pad, half a moment too slow. The appeal rose. And for the first time that day, the umpire’s finger went up. LBW. Grace had been given out. He stood frozen. The stadium erupted. People screamed, wept, and danced in the stands. Drums started up on the hillside. And just as suddenly, everything went wrong.”

He shifted closer, as though the retelling required physical proximity.

“Grace lost his senses. Absolutely lost them. He marched straight to the umpires, shouting the decision was fraudulent. When they refused, he threatened them. When the crowd hissed at him, he threatened the crowd.”

I could almost see it: the towering Englishman, broad-shouldered and red-faced, shouting at the umpires while the stadium held its breath. I had heard mythic tales of Alistair Grace. He demanded respect wherever he went. He was one of the first cricketers to make money from playing the sport. People turned up to watch him more than the match. He knew this and used it to his advantage. In one famous instance, after being given out, Grace had said to an umpire, “Overturn your decision, the crowd came to see me, not you.” The umpire did exactly as told.

“And then,” the Leeds gentleman said softly, “Grace did something unforgivable. He demanded the match be overturned. And when Governor Monteverde refused – yes, the Governor himself had come down to The Oval – Grace left the pitch, seized a telegraph clerk and dictated a message to the admiralty, claiming insurrection, danger to British subjects, and the need for immediate naval intervention.”

I felt myself grow cold.

“He was not done,” the man continued. “He marched his teammates down to the harbor, shouting that Saint Canderton had mocked the Crown and that none of them would leave the island until justice was done. When two of the younger players, frightened boys in their first international match, refused to take part in whatever madness he had planned, Grace turned on them with a fury that shocked even his loyal men. He accused them of treachery and conspiring with the islanders. By then he had worked himself into such a state that reason no longer reached him.”

“And so, to make certain no one fled the island before his demands were met, he ordered the ships they had arrived on to be burned. Some of his teammates pleaded with him, tried to drag him back up the pier, but he shoved them aside and hurled the first torch himself. Within minutes the rigging of the schooners was a lattice of fire. Next, the packet steamer caught, slowly at first, then with a roar, and the flames climbed high enough to paint the whole bay in orange. No Englishman could leave, he bellowed, not until the match was reversed. The sight of those burning ships… it was like watching the last bridge to sanity collapse.”

I must have looked shocked, for he added gently, “You were too young to understand, my boy. But those of us watching from afar, we knew that match was no mere sporting affair. Betting was involved. Pride was involved. Money, telegraph lines, the great machine itself.”

He nodded toward Marker, who sat quietly in a wicker chair by the saloon door, the center of a tight, respectful orbit of passengers. Marker, in his older years, was a small, thin man – he had always been slight, but age made him appear more delicate. His face was gaunt and angular, with prominent cheekbones and deep-set eyes that gave him a somewhat austere, watchful appearance.

“And at the heart of it all,” the Leeds gentleman said, “stood Governor Monteverde and the Analytical Engine that changed Saint Canderton forever.”

No sooner had the steamer left the last buoys of the Bristol Channel behind us, its passengers, as if released from some invisible restraint, began roaming about in lazy sweeps, seeking distraction from the monotony of open sea. Conversations lifted and died like small waves. But wherever you walked you felt at once a strange current of attention. People’s voices dimmed, gestures softened, and a peculiar gravitational pull redirected all movement.

It was Marker, of course. Sat in his armchair now, bolted to the deck, wrapped in a shawl despite the mild evening, staring out at the black water with the same expression of gentle detachment that he had worn in the saloon.

My companion leaned toward me. “None of this would make sense,” he murmured, “unless you understand where he comes from.”

Sugar Island

“Saint Canderton,” he said, “had once been merely another sugar colony strung along the great triangular trade routes of the Atlantic, the warm-water chain through which manufactured goods, enslaved labor, and finally sugar, rum, and molasses moved in their vast, relentless circuit. It was fertile enough, profitable enough, and sufficiently obedient to the Crown to merit neither punishment nor praise. But by the time Don Alejandro Monteverde inherited the governorship from an elderly cousin in 1849, the machinery of cane and cargo had begun to falter.”

The European beet-sugar industry had matured. Prices fell. Merchants grew restless. The island’s great cane fields, which once had shimmered like golden oceans, now yielded barely enough to justify the grueling work of cutting, boiling, and shipping.

It would have been entirely natural, indeed expected, for Saint Canderton to retreat into the resigned torpor that often seized such islands when their single crop failed them. And yet Monteverde was not a man to accept the slow suffocation of economic inevitability.

He had spent his youth in Cádiz and Paris, reading more political pamphlets than colonial dispatches, and was possessed of that rare mixture of aristocratic pride and cosmopolitan curiosity that often produces either a visionary or a tyrant. In Monteverde’s case, it produced something stranger: an experimenter.

Opium for the Masters

“Monteverde had followed the events of the Opium Wars with obsessive interest. What fascinated him was not the military aspect, though he admired, in a detached fashion, the audacity of the British strategy, but rather the deeper principle: that an empire could exert control not simply through conquest but through desire.”

“An empire that cannot be resisted,” he once said to a confidant, “is not won with cannons but with desire machines.”

This idea began to fester, then blossom, in his mind.

What, he wondered, could Saint Canderton offer the world, especially Britain, that might ensnare rather than repel? What pleasure, what spectacle, what irresistible indulgence could his little island refine into something stronger than sugar?

For years he searched for an answer, sponsoring every manner of curious enterprise: music festivals, acrobat troupes, exotic fruit for trade. None of them offered the particular mix of continuity and compulsion he sought.

Cricket

Then, quite by accident, a visiting English XI, touring the Caribbean more out of boredom than ambition, agreed to play a friendly cricket match on the dusty Saint Canderton Oval. The Englishmen, not used to the island’s heat and unprepared for its curious, uneven pitch, were defeated disgracefully by a team of local clerks, cane workers, and one extraordinarily gifted youth, Lakshman Sorabji Marker, then only 16.

The match would have been a trivial anecdote for the English tourists, forgotten as soon as they boarded their ship, had Monteverde not been watching from the shade of a palm that afternoon. Something in the intensity of the crowd, the feverish energy with which even the old women in the stands calculated the field placements and shouted out home-spun advice, something in that raw spectacle, seemed to him more potent than any fruit or song or festival.

Here, he thought, was a commodity the British already adored, but could never have imagined might be exported back to them in a more intoxicating form. Here was his opium.

Wager

From that moment Monteverde began to reshape the island with a fervor bordering on mania. The Oval was expanded. A second ground was blasted and quarried into the hillside, its stands rising in clean geometric tiers from stone and timber, reinforced with imported steel beams that glinted in the sun. The engineers carved the seating bowl with such precision that it seemed to nestle naturally into the slope. On match days the echo of the crowd rolled down through the valley, and from the highest rows one could see the entire coastline, white surf, sugar fields, and the great ships anchored in the harbor. Monteverde called it his masterpiece, the island’s proof that ambition need not bow to geographic determinism.

But Monteverde understood something no other colonial governor did. Cricket alone was not enough.

What the British loved even more than cricket, sometimes more than propriety, was betting on cricket.

Yet betting at the time was capricious, inconsistent, muddled by rumor and sluggish information. What if Saint Canderton could offer not only matches but certainty, or the illusion of certainty, regarding the details and outcomes of those matches?

What if the island could become the one place on earth where the odds were fair, precise, mechanical?

To accomplish this, he needed a mind capable of bending numerical chaos into predictable pathways.

He needed a machine.

He needed Babbage.

Father Computer

The Leeds merchant paused here, partly for breath and partly, I suspect, for dramatic effect. The waves lapped steadily against the hull. A group of passengers passed us, laughing softly. And from farther down the deck I saw Marker, still seated in gentle solitude, oblivious to the fact that his life was being narrated in fragments by strangers.

“Now,” my companion continued, lowering his voice, “the next part is scarcely believable.”

At the time, Charles Babbage was already notorious in England. Half visionary, half public nuisance, he was perpetually entangled in committees and quarrels. His proposed Analytical Engine had been underfunded, ridiculed, and delayed. Monteverde, hearing this, sensed opportunity.

A discreet correspondence was initiated through intermediaries in London and Cádiz. Babbage, disillusioned and perhaps secretly longing for a place where his genius would be recognized, rather than politely tolerated, agreed to inspect the island under the pretext of a geological excursion.

He departed quietly from Southampton. Somewhere near Madeira, the British courier ship on which he had traveled reported him missing. And two weeks later he was seen stepping ashore at Port Fortuna, greeted by Monteverde himself.

The British newspapers were silent. Perhaps they never knew. Perhaps they chose not to know. Monteverde, at any rate, ensured that his guest was installed comfortably in the old counting house overlooking the harbor.

Armed with a team of machinists drawn from shipwrights and sugar-mill mechanics, Babbage set about building the first of the Saint Canderton Analytical Engines, monstrous assemblies of polished brass, iron teeth, and gears that glinted in the lamplight like the innards of some mythical creature.

And unlike the delicate drafts he had shown London committees, this engine ran not on hand-cranks but on steam. Massive boilers, repurposed from defunct sugar factories, were installed behind the counting house, their furnaces stoked day and night. The heat boiled seawater drawn from the harbor through copper tubes. The resulting pressure fed a pair of reciprocating pistons that turned the drive shafts connected to the engine’s primary column of gears.

The constant need for fuel changed the island almost overnight. Freighters that once carried nothing but cane and rum began arriving with Welsh steam coal, prized for its clean burn. American bituminous coal arrived from Baltimore. Even low-grade Brazilian coal from Pernambuco found its way into the furnaces when the island’s appetite grew too quickly. A miniature trade route sprang into existence. The black circuit, some called it, ships arriving heavy with coal and departing light with betting slips, sugar, and gossip concerning the miraculous machine.

The islanders named it La Máquina.

Monteverde called it the future.

Staring out into the gray Atlantic, the Leeds man added quietly, “It was the first time the island’s heart beat with more than sugar and wind.”

Bettors

The next morning, after a restless night broken by the steady throb of the ship’s engines, I found the Leeds gentleman again on the promenade, wrapped in a blanket and surveying the gray Atlantic with the air of a man mentally rearranging continents. He nodded at me, invited me to sit, and continued his tale without preamble, as though sleep had merely been a brief intermission.

“You see, lad,” he began, tamping tobacco into the bowl of his pipe, “Saint Canderton was not prepared for what happened after that first cricket series.”

He took a slow draw.

“Once Saint Canderton’s engines and Marker’s prowess with the bat became well known through every London newspaper from Fleet Street to the sporting pages, the flow of people began. Not gradually, mind you. Like a tap turned all the way open. Americans from Charleston, gamblers from Veracruz, merchants from Mumbai, sailors who had never heard of cricket but had heard there was money to be made, they all came.”

I remembered this influx only as a blur of unfamiliar faces at the docks, but even that memory had, until now, felt like a child’s exaggeration. Hearing it described so precisely, I began to understand the scale.

“And with all those people,” the man continued, “came money. Not just pounds and shillings, but rupees, pesos, doubloons, francs, guineas, cowries, anything that could be turned into a wager.”

He let this sink in.

“That is where Monteverde saw the opportunity. And where Babbage – grumpy, brilliant, impossible man that he was – found his purpose.”

Bridge

According to the Leeds gentleman, Saint Canderton’s greatest innovation was not its cricket grounds, nor the Analytical Engines that aided betting, but something far quieter and more technical: the currency-bridging houses.

“They began,” he said, “as small sheds on the edge of Port Fortuna. Each had a telegraph line, a team of clerks, and a wooden board on the wall listing conversion rates. At first those rates were chalked in by hand, changed once or twice a day depending on news from London or Calcutta.”

He smiled faintly.

“But then Babbage finished the first version of the Analytical Engine.”

“You have no idea,” the man said, “what that machine did for betting. Currency conversion became instant, accurate, incorruptible. A sailor could hand over a Mexican real and receive a paper slip showing exactly how many fractions of a Saint Canderton betting token it equaled. A Frenchman betting in francs was, in the engine’s eyes, no different from an Englishman betting in shillings.”

He leaned forward conspiratorially.

New Rules

“Cricket,” he said, “was never meant to be scrutinized so finely.”

But Saint Canderton’s crowds wanted more granularity.

“You must understand,” he said, “that bettors crave units. Discrete, predictable, measurable units. They want to see the world broken into pieces they can price.”

At first the bettors used whatever the game already provided: runs, wickets, boundaries. But soon, with the engine’s help, they demanded smaller increments.

“There was pressure,” the man explained, “immense pressure on the Board of Cricketing Rules. In England, they argued for days about whether the Saint Canderton micro-wagers were poisoning the purity of the sport. But money, as it does, prevailed.”

He looked at me, waiting for me to make the next logical leap. I did not leap.

“That is how the six-ball over became standardized.”

I blinked.

“You did not know?” he said, amused. “Before Saint Canderton, there was no universal six-ball over. Different colonies used four, or five, or even eight. Chaos to a bettor, paradise to no one.”

“But six, ah, six. Divisible enough to please the numerate, predictable enough for conversion tables, symmetrical enough for the engine to compute probabilities with satisfying clarity.”

Over time, as bettors arrived from more nations, more currencies, more habits of mind, the game adapted further, its smallest intervals carved into even smaller ones by the relentless appetite for precision.

“Saint Canderton,” he said, “taught the world that the game could be priced.”

“But here,” he added, “is the true genius. The engine gave currencies a common grammar. A rupee, a pound, a franc, each was translated into the machine’s language of ratios and probabilities. Once expressed in that language, any coin could meet any other across a betting slip.”

Attack

The Leeds gentleman found me again that evening, on the lee side of the promenade. Marker had retired to his cabin, leaving behind a faint agitation among the passengers, as though people were uncertain what they were meant to do now that the object of their voyeurism was withdrawn from view.

The Leeds man leaned on the rail and said without ceremony, “You remember I mentioned Grace’s fury? That was only the beginning.”

“Grace,” he continued, “was not a man to accept humiliation quietly. After burning the ships, and after his telegraph to the admiralty vanished into the aether with no immediate reply, he convinced his players that the real enemy was not Saint Canderton’s bowlers, nor its umpires, nor even its people.”

He paused.

“It was the Analytical Engine.”

“Grace believed Saint Canderton had cheated,” the man said. “That the engine had cooked the odds, influenced the crowd, manipulated probability itself. Madness, of course, but very compelling madness.”

Under cover of darkness, Grace split his men into two groups. One crept toward The Oval’s Engine House; the other descended the hill toward the port where the first engine, Babbage’s original, sat in its stone vault.

“They caused terrible damage,” the Leeds gentleman said softly. “They smashed the windows near The Oval and ripped out telegraph cables. And at the port, they set fire to the warehouses. Half the quay went up in flames.”

The image formed vividly in my mind: the harbor glowing orange, dark silhouettes running along the docks, that familiar Saint Canderton night air thick with smoke and salt.

Marker

He turned to me with a look that suggested even he scarcely believed what he was about to say.

“You see, lad, Marker did not win that Test. He was out without scoring in both innings. Not a run to his name. Hardly touched the ball. And yet he won the island.”

I must have looked incredulous.

“You misunderstand the kind of influence he held,” the man said. “By then Marker was already a sensation in England. A curiosity and a colonial marvel. Newspapers printed sketches of his stance. Betting houses in London devoted entire columns to his batting averages. He had become the Empire’s favorite exotic son.”

“Grace understood applause,” the man said. “Marker understood stakes. One played to the crowd; the other played to the people who bet their wages on him.”

According to my companion, on the eve of the third Test, Marker made his way to the telegraph office at Port Fortuna. He exchanged a discreet code with a London acquaintance, a financial speculator he had met during a promotional tour, a man who treated wagers as financial instruments. Then Marker emptied his travelling pouch onto the brass intake tray: Canderton notes gone soft in the humidity, Mexican pesos, two English sovereigns, and a scattering of smaller coins gathered over months of drifting between continents.

The auxiliary engine stirred awake at once. Telegraph needles trembled as exchange rates arrived from London and Bombay; gears clattered through conversion tables; punch tape advanced in steady metallic bursts. By the time the machine fell silent, the motley pile of currency had been translated, bridged, and recombined into a single slender tape of figures, Marker’s entire fortune rendered into a flawless London wager.

News spread through London’s betting houses that Marker himself had staked everything on Saint Canderton to win the series outright. Those who adored him rushed to follow his lead; those who doubted him rushed to oppose it; and the vast undecided middle joined out of nothing more than the old London instinct not to be left behind. In a matter of hours, the wager around Marker’s bet swelled to grotesque proportions. The crowd of London, merchant syndicates, shipping brokers, warehouse cooperatives, private gentlemen’s clubs, even a few minor banks, all found themselves entangled in the outcome of a Test match unfolding on a distant Caribbean hillside.

Within minutes of the match ending, word had reached London that Saint Canderton had won. Bettors were already queuing at counting desks, and bookmakers were beginning to settle accounts. Money had begun to move. To overturn the match now, after those first settlements had been paid out, would be to detonate the entire system. Bets would not merely be void; they would have to be clawed back. Ledgers would contradict themselves. Streets would fill with men furious that their winnings had been snatched away. No bookmaker in London could survive the demand for reversals. No bank could withstand the sudden, violent seizure of credit. A Test match annulled after settlement, it would have set half the city aflame.

When news of the unrest reached London, burning ships, angry crowds, the possibility of a cancelled Test, panic flickered through the city. It passed from bookmakers to brokers, from brokers to banks, and from there, inevitably, into the corridors of power. By evening the matter had reached the palace. A single telegraph was drafted and dispatched without ceremony.

STAND DOWN. STOP ALL HOSTILITIES. MAINTAIN CRICKET PEACE. RETURN AT ONCE.

Grace received the message while preparing for a second assault on The Oval’s Analytical Engine. He went white as chalk. For the first time, perhaps in his life, he understood that a greater force than his pride had entered the field.

Peace

“They left at dawn,” my inexhaustible Northern friend said. “A pair of constables led Grace’s men to the only vessel still fit to sail, a supply cutter hired in haste from Martinique. Grace boarded last. He did not thank the crew.”

Saint Canderton did not celebrate their departure. Fires were put out, the port swept clean, the stadium gates repaired. Carnival rhythms returned, though softer, as though the drums were still deciding whether the danger had passed.

“But here is the curious part,” he went on. “The island never revealed Marker’s role. It was as if the wager had evaporated with the smoke. He remained, officially, the young prodigious batsman of the gentleman’s sport.” He smiled faintly. “But unofficially? People began to murmur about impropriety, about the morality of turning a Test match into a financial earthquake. Too many had lost money. Too many feared how much worse it could have been.”

He paused, letting the ship’s engines fill the silence.

“Marker did not stay in the game much longer. Not because he lacked talent, God knows he had more of it than most men who ever held a bat, but England’s cricketing circles turned strangely cold toward him after the Test.”

He let his words settle, as though remembering it firsthand.

“It was not open hostility. Just a series of invitations that never came, endorsements that evaporated, speculators who spoke of him in the past tense. Aristocrats who once toasted him at dinner parties now referred to him as a curious creature and an unsettling influence. They did not accuse him of anything outright, but they made it clear he had stepped too close to the machinery behind the sport.”

“A player who unsettles the market unsettles the gentlemen who fund it. And English cricket has always belonged to the gentlemen.”

The man exhaled a thin ribbon of smoke.

“So Marker retired. Quietly. No farewell match, no speeches, no boardroom gratitude.”

He tapped his pipe once on the rail.

“Grace, meanwhile, continued to captain England for seasons afterward. His temper never softened, nor did his conviction that the Saint Canderton Test had been stolen by forces beyond the boundary rope. But people found it useful to let him rage. Better a familiar villain than a truth that unsettled the entire structure of the sport.”

As for Saint Canderton, its betting markets did not survive the year. Under pressure from London and several European houses, the island’s cricket exchanges were embargoed. Telegraph lines that once carried odds fell silent. The Analytical Engine houses fell dormant.

“They stood there for decades,” the Leeds man said, “bricked up, forgotten, left to nature’s whims and salt air. Until the French arrived.”

“Couple of years back,” my voluble friend continued, “when the French started throwing their best engineers into the swamps of Panama to stumble through that grand enterprise of the canal, they passed through Saint Canderton as well. It was common then for brigades of French civil engineers and their Haitian labor crews to pause at the islands that dotted the shipping route between Martinique and Colón.”

“Most saw only a quiet port and a neglected cricket ground. But a few wandered farther and came upon the old engine vault at Port Fortuna. They did not understand what they were looking at, rows of brass cylinders, gear trains blackened by salt air, the collapsed frame of a punch-tape reader. They sensed it had once been something intelligent and monumental.”

The French crated up a few pieces and shipped them to Paris for study. The rest they left where they found them, half-buried under dust and palm fronds, like the bones of some mechanical leviathan that had roamed the island long before they arrived.

First published in Protocolized.

What is Protocol Fiction?

Spencer Nitkey — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is the question that the recently formed Protocol Fiction Special Interest Group (SIGFIC) has been meeting biweekly to work out.

A boring answer might be something like: a subgenre of science fiction that focuses on protocols as world-shaping technologies. This is a bit like calling science fiction a subgenre of speculative fiction that focuses on science, though. True, but a little tautological for my taste.

So, how about a couple of big picture ideas, things we consider foundational to the genre. One that stands out is Chiang’s Law, based on Ted Chiang’s differentiation between fantasy and science fiction: “Fantasy is about special people; science fiction is about strange rules.” Protocol fiction is, in this distinction, firmly in the science fiction camp, and those strange rules are protocols.

In any case, as we’re finding, genre is a messy concept to begin with. The group has approached it from a variety of angles so far: contracts between readers and writers or between institutions and the public; modes and techniques of discourse; and commercial categories designed to help move books in the traditional print and publishing industry.

Fingerspitzengefühl

The best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in it. Forcing yourself into hundreds of interactions where the only way out is through. In these early days, we’d argue that the best way to understand protocol fiction is to try writing it.

Develop some fingerspitzengefühl, a German word loosely translated as “fingertip feeling.” It’s a word for the kind of instinctual tact and skill one acquires through actually practicing in a field. You could read a thousand books and watch a hundred videos outlining the mechanics behind a judo throw, but you will still be missing a vital, embodied understanding that comes from spending hundreds of hours on the mat, actually attempting it in meat space.

As part of my presentation (and a subsequent workshop) at the Ethereum Foundation’s developer conference, Devconnect, I put together a basic outline for structuring a protocol fiction story. This protocol (ha),arose in part through the conversations we’ve had in the SIG, and also from reflections on the various pieces of protocol fiction I’ve successfully, and unsuccessfully, taken a stab at.

When we first talked about genre in the SIG, I posited that genre rules and insights are best viewed as doorways, rather than scripture, and I hope this formula is taken in the same way. It’s intended to help generate, not limit.

It goes like this:

Render a rule

Rehearse a Failure Mode

Reveal a Human Insight

To break this down a little more, let’s take each step in turn.

Render a Rule

Protocol fiction is about strange rules. Specifically, it is a form of science fiction that treats rules as a class of technology. In other fictional genres, I might start a piece with its characters, emotional core, or plot elements. To help me adapt to this newer genre, I’ve found it useful to start by working on the conceptual/conceit level: find a rule and make it strange.

There are two kinds of rules I’ve explored in my work: existing protocols and speculative (i.e., invented) protocols.

In the former case, I’ve found the protocol studies concept of a “Whitehead Protocol” to be a really rich vein to explore. This term, I’ve learned, comes from philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s claim that “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” These subconscious operations often take the shape of protocols. Think about driving and the manifold rules and operations most of us perform without thinking (using turn signals, flipping on hazards when stopped precariously, stopping at stop-signs, accelerating when there’s a green light). The ability of billions of people to drive in and out of our urban centers every day follows from the fact that the vast majority of them do not have to actively think about every action they take in relation to the flow of traffic.

A fun way to start writing protocol fiction is to find yourself a protocol that has become invisible, or unconscious à la Whitehead, and start to imagine ways in which that subconscious act could become conspicuous again. Often this means transposing it into a new field. For example, how might traffic protocols adapt in response to teleportation and time travel?

Of course, you can also invent your own speculative protocols, in the way science fiction writers have often invented new technologies. What’s a protocol equivalent of Ursula Le Guin’s faster-than-light communication device, the Ansible? I don’t know, but if you do, you should write that story for Protocolized!

Rehearse a Failure Mode

Protocol fiction has plot, and plot is driven by friction. A fun tool for generating friction is exploring the failure modes generated by a strange rule. I’ve found, too, that for protocol fiction, this is often best done by exploring how the negotiation between protocol and agents (usually human characters, but not necessarily!) breaks down, rather than just “the rule stopped working!” Protocolized editor Timber Stinson-Schroff’s formulation highlights the importance of this: “The rule works, but what doesn’t work about the rule?” Science fiction writer Fredrick Pohl has a great quote that captures this idea:

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

Here, again, the emerging field of protocol studies provides rich conceptual resources on which to draw. Take the concept of Kafka Protocols (not just because they’re named after a fiction writer, though it helps).

According to Nadia Asparouhova, Kafka Protocols happen when a “protocol holds too much power. Participants are trapped in a maze that they can’t understand and also can’t escape.” Think of the numbing bureaucracies so many of Kafka’s protagonists find themselves buried within, and you’ll find a great primer on one way protocols can fail the people they organize.

In my talk and accompanying workshop, I used genre as a scaffold to help consider questions that might generate some interesting failure modes and plot lines.

Horror – what’s the scariest way this rule could fail?

Mystery – what’s the most puzzling way this rule could fail?

Cyberpunk – what’s the most hackable way this rule could fail?

Dystopia – what’s the most tyrannical way this rule could fail?

Utopia/Solarpunk – what’s the most beneficial way this rule could fail?

Humor – what’s the funniest way this rule could fail?

Again, these should ideally serve as doorways, not prescriptions, but they give you a good starting place to conceive of your protocol fictions.

Reveal a human insight

This is usually the hardest part for me, but a great story will always reach a kind of escape velocity from the gravity of its specifics, reaching something transcendentally true or resonant. Counterintuitively, though, specifics generate universality.

Take Ted Chiang’s short story Exhalation. It’s a story about confronting entropy, about the joy of discovery and effort even in an ultimately futile universe, and a meditation on the grace of accepting one’s fate rather than fighting it. To accomplish this searing emotional feat, Chiang does not begin with wide assertions about humanity or the cosmos as a whole. His story centers on a single member of a mechanistic alien species powered by pressure. Paragraphs are spent following this character as he dissects his own head, discovers that his world is slowly dying, and tells of the myriad efforts his planet takes to circumvent or forestall their fate.

Universality comes through specificity, and there is no shortage of human truth and emotion to explore. Something I have found fruitful to play with is the intersection of these experiences with emotions. Write a story about grief and greed, senescence and desire, fear and freedom.

If you can use these three steps to sketch out a story, you probably have yourself a protocol fiction pitch.

Again, this is by no means the only way to write a protocol fiction story. There’s an abundance of creative protocols that one could use to write the next great protocol fiction story, but if you want to get your fingers literate in the language of protocol fiction and don’t know where to start, give this method a try, and see how it turns out.

Ultimately, protocol fiction is about living in relation to the protocols that prefigure and drive so much of our contemporary reality. Protocols are the engine of the present world, helping organize web traffic via DHCP, keeping our streets quiet from 10pm to 6am, shaping both human and machine memory, and so much more. Protocol fiction is about investigating the present and then stretching the logics, machinations, and trends of this current time toward the future. It’s about finding future traffic jams, exploring how they will change and shape us, and (hopefully) writing a kick-ass story about them.

If you want to learn more about protocol fiction, get feedback on your story ideas and drafts, and talk shop with a small group of passionate fellow writers, check out the Protocol Fiction Special Interest Group on our Discord. Beyond just genre, we’ve talked protocol monsters (with a forthcoming SIGFIC update on this topic coming soon!), investigated the differences between cyberpunk and Lovecraftian world-building techniques, practiced grafting Antarctic field safety manuals onto science fiction tropes, and learned a lot about writing through the whole process.

SIGFIC DISCORD

If any of that sounds like fun, join our next meeting – tomorrow, Thursday, February 12 from 11 to 12 EST in Discord! Shape the future of protocol fiction yourself.

First published in Protocolized.

T.R.O.(L.L.)

Thing Party — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Robyn occupied her booth the way bedrock occupies a landscape: immovably, silently, and with a certain aggressive permanence that suggested removal would be unwise for the structural integrity of the region.

She was what the citizens of Fortress Island, officially the Sovereign Territory of National Prosperity, under the benevolent and unblinking glare of the Party of Eternal Vigilance, politely called “substantial.” Less polite people, usually in the brief, breathless seconds before reconsidering their life choices, might have called her “built like a brick shithouse that has settled into the mud.”

When she was a young woman, her hands had been capable of crushing walnuts, though walnuts hadn’t been affordable on Fortress Island in a decade. Now she had a face that looked like it had been carved by a sculptor who had given up halfway through to go have a drink.

The Party, in its unquestionable wisdom, had looked at Robyn 30 years ago and seen a solution to a personnel problem. Specifically: what to do with a woman too large for standard-issue office cubicle units, too grumpy for morale-boosting rhythmic gymnastics, and too prone to telling District Coordinators exactly where they could file their performance reviews (a location not found on any official anatomical chart).

Transit Restriction Officer (Lower Level), they had announced, handing her a plastic badge that snapped immediately as she pinned it on. It sounded like an honor.

What they meant was: Sit in this box for the rest of your life and be intimidating. Stop anyone from using the lower bridge.

The bridge itself was a masterpiece of reinforced pessimism, stretching to the mainland like a concrete umbilical cord no one wanted to admit still existed.

Official crossings happened on the Upper Level, a place of sunlight, proper docks, proper paperwork, and Transit Officers who wore pressed uniforms and did actual work. The Upper Level was where the Party showcased its vigilance.

Robyn’s booth sat on the Lower Level, facing a rocky, dismal shore where nothing ever happened because nothing was supposed to.

The location was the key. The Lower Level was a maintenance nightmare, a shadowy undercroft of the bridge which the sun rarely touched and where damp settled like a fine, cold dust. The shore here was officially designated as Structurally Recalcitrant, a classification that allowed the Department of Public Works to ignore it entirely. Cameras had been installed 20 years ago, but the salt air had eaten the wiring, and the Party, currently operating on a budget composed entirely of IOUs and overreaching optimism, had never replaced them.

Robyn’s booth, painted in Regulation Grey (Standard Registry of Approved Non-Stimulating Hues, Subsection 4: Depressing But Not Quite Suicidal), contained a chair that had surrendered to her mass, a heater that functioned primarily as an abstract sculpture, and a logbook that remained pristinely empty except for the mandatory weekly entry: “No incidents to report.”

Fortress Island citizens, meanwhile, stayed indoors. The Party strongly encouraged it, and the Department of Public Wellness spooked them with reports claiming fresh air caused Atmospheric Hysteria. But mostly, people stayed inside because outside cost too much. Coffee cost three days’ ration credits. The newspaper cost five. And everyone already knew what the newspaper would say: Everything Is Excellent and Getting More Excellent.

One evening, as the sky settled into the bruised purple that preceded full dark, Robyn saw movement under the colossal concrete arches.

Rats? Possibly. Fortress Island had hardy, well-fed rats; they were the only demographic truly thriving under the current economic plan. But these shapes were too coordinated, too vertical.

Robyn rose from her booth with the grinding inevitability of continental drift. Her knees popped, a sound like a rifle shot in the damp quiet.

Three teenagers froze near the waterline.

They wore anonymous grey clothes and furtive postures, having the distinct look of small prey animals confronted by a large predatory boulder that had unexpectedly found motion.

“Right,” Robyn said, her voice like gravel tumbling inside a cement mixer. “Clear off.”

The leader was a girl with a haircut that suggested she had performed it herself, in the dark, possibly with safety scissors. She stared at Robyn, eyes wide. Behind her, two boys hovered, looking as though they might dissolve into the mist if threatened.

“We’re just… looking at the water,” the girl said.

“Water is unauthorized after 1800 hours,” Robyn rumbled. “Visual consumption of the horizon is a Class C infraction. Clear off.”

They cleared off at a speed which suggested extensive practice in evading authority.

Robyn returned to her seat. She opened the logbook. The pen hovered over the paper. She could report them. Subsection 12, Paragraph 4: Loitering with Intent to Observe Nature.

She wrote: Discouraged local fauna.

She felt vaguely pleased. It was an incident.

Three days later, they were back. Same kids, plus extras. The teenagers were standing in a circle, whispering, an activity teenagers consider cosmically important and governments consider prelude to riot.

Robyn emerged, displeased, from her booth.

“I told you,” she announced, her shadow swallowing the entire group, “to CLEAR OFF!”

“We’re not doing anything wrong,” said the girl with the bad haircut, quaking.

“You’re loitering you little runt! Don’t mess with me!”

“Loitering costs money now?” the girl snapped back with teenage righteousness. She was brave.

“Loitering without purpose is suspicious,” Robyn growled.

“We’ve got purpose,” said one of the boys, a lanky thing who appeared to be waiting for the funding to finish puberty. “We’re discussing… Party educational materials.” He held up a PEV pamphlet. Clearly a prop.

“Educational materials,” Robyn sneered, as if naming a suspicious package found on a bus. She snatched it from his hand.

“For self-improvement,” added another. “The Party likes that. Strength Through Knowledge.”

Robyn considered them. She should report this. Unauthorized gathering. Potential conspiracy. Flagrant teenagering in a restricted zone.

She looked at the girl. The girl looked back, terrified but stubborn.

“15 minutes,” Robyn heard herself say, handing the pamphlet to the girl. “Then clear off. And fix your hair, you look like a used mop.”

She returned to her booth before she could question her own judgment. The heater rattled, its single setting of Lukewarm Panic doing nothing against the chill.

The logbook stayed blank.

A week later, more figures appeared. These were older, more confident, moving with a gait that hadn’t been beaten down by island gravity. They wore colors that were not Regulation Grey.

Mainlanders.

Robyn watched through the streaked plexiglass. They didn’t come by boat or she would have seen them. They must have climbed on the underside of the bridge, navigating the forgotten maintenance struts and rusted catwalks that hung like spiderwebs beneath the road deck. It was a climb that required athleticism, stupidity, and desperation in equal measure.

They dropped into the shadows where the island teens waited.

This was extremely reportable. She could get a promotion. Maybe even extra rations.

Robyn opened the logbook. She stared at the blank page until the lines began to blur.

The Party of Eternal Vigilance had not been truly vigilant in years, mostly due to budgetary shortcomings, partly to apathy, and thanks to the misfortune of having laid off anyone competent enough to read a map. They assumed the underside of the bridge was impassable. She ought to inform them that it had been breached.

Robyn closed the logbook and observed the teenagers talking in the dark, their heads close together, lit by a campfire. Music drifted up. Something with an actual melody, not the approved patriotic drones that the Party broadcast. Someone laughed. Someone passed around what looked like cigarettes but might have been other things. A girl held hands with a boy, and then they kissed.

The remarkable thing, Robyn thought, was that none of it cost anything. Hanging out under a bridge was free. Even the Party of Eternal Vigilance hadn’t figured out how to charge for air and shade and saliva.

“Educational purposes,” Robyn muttered to the empty booth. “Cultural exchange. Very vigilant of me to monitor it.”

The gatherings grew. Three nights a week. Then four. Sometimes a handful of them, sometimes dozens. A loophole in the Transit Restriction Office had become a community.

Robyn did not report any of it.

She told herself the paperwork would be tedious. This was true.

She told herself they weren’t technically doing anything wrong. This was less true.

She told herself she was too grumpy to care. This was possibly true.

What she didn’t tell herself, because she lacked the vocabulary, was that watching them made her feel something resembling hope. She tried to ignore it. Hope, in her experience, was just disappointment waiting to be processed. But still. It grew inside her.

The haircut girl, Robyn had mentally named her Maggie – for her predisposition to collect shiny scraps of information – nodded at her sometimes through the glass. Not thanks. Recognition.

We see you. You see us. You could stop us. You haven’t.

Robyn never nodded back. Transit Restriction Officers (Lower Level) did not acknowledge. They monitored.

One morning, the boats came.

Not official boats. Small vessels, fishing craft, a very intrepid kayak, and a raft made out of a door. They pulled up to the rocky, Structurally Recalcitrant shore where the surveillance cameras were in disrepair.

People unloaded boxes.

A woman approached Robyn’s booth with cheerful determination, which Robyn found innately suspicious.

“Morning! We’re setting up a market. Thought people might want to buy things without selling a kidney.”

“You need authorization,” Robyn said, leaning out of her window.

“We have authorization.” The woman produced mainland forms, utterly meaningless here. They were printed on bright pink paper.

“These don’t apply on Fortress Island.”

“Do they not? Well, we’ll set up over there, behind that pillar. If anyone official complains, we’ll pack up. Fair?”

It was not fair at all. It was illegal in at least 17 ways and violated three distinct treaties.

“Two hours,” Robyn said. “Then you clear off.”

The market stayed for six.

By then, islanders were creeping down the cliffs, bartering for real coffee, fresh vegetables that weren’t grey, and books with all their pages intact. They traded what they’d made in their units. Years of boredom converted into makeshift objects – carved wood, mended clothes, rewired radios.

The vendors accepted it all with the easy pragmatism of people who knew value wasn’t the same thing as currency.

“We’ll be back next week,” the woman said, packing up a crate of turnips.

Robyn wrote in her logbook: Unauthorized exchange of non-regulation debris. Value assessed as negligible. No action required.

The market returned. It grew. Tents appeared, lashed to the bridge pillars. The unofficial system emerged as it had been conjured.

One day an Official Envoy arrived.

He was young, but he had the eyes of a man who stayed up too late. He wore the crisp uniform of the Upper Level, but it was turned up at the cuffs.

“Routine inspection,” he declared, though he sounded like he was asking a question.

Robyn stared at him. She did not stand up. The chair creaked in solidarity.

He spotted the market, which was now a bustling village of tarps and noise. “Is that… commercial activity?”

“No,” Robyn said.

“They’re selling vegetables.”

“No they aren’t,” Robyn said.

He blinked. “I see a goat. Is that a goat?”

“Nope.”

The Envoy sighed. He looked at the long climb back up the stairs. He looked at his tablet, which had a cracked screen. He looked at Robyn, an immovable object in a booth smirking at him with a squint.

He stared at the market again. Someone was playing a fiddle. It was a good tune.

“My battery is low,” the Envoy said. “And I seem to have run out of the proper forms.”

“A tragedy,” Robyn agreed.

“I’m going to have to report this,” he said.

“You do that.”

He did. A week later Robyn received a memo requesting a detailed explanation of the alleged commercial activity.

She wrote back: “No commercial activity observed.”

The Department requested photographic evidence.

Robyn sent a photo of her empty booth taken at 6am.

The Department said they’d be conducting an on-site inspection.

They never came.

Over many years the market expanded, digging into the earth, latching onto the concrete. The years solidified the village, but they eroded the observer. Robyn had been old to begin with. She had started this job with grey hair and bad knees. Now, time was simply finishing the work.

She slowed. The cough she’d carried for years turned wet, rattling, permanent. Her knees were ground to stubs. Her teeth too, ground flat. Her body had become the only meaningful logbook. Every cigarette, every hour of raw cold, every second of gravity written into her marrow. Thoughts disappeared in tangles of smoke. But bones remembered the pressures of a life spent in the shadows.

“She’s been to the clinic twice,” Maggie murmured one evening, leaning against the booth. Maggie was a young adult now, her hair finally grown longer, though she still didn’t know how to manage it.

“She looks like she’s part of the concrete,” someone said.

Then one morning, the booth was empty.

It stayed empty the next day. The market wavered. Without the silent, heavy presence in the window, the space felt exposed. The wind felt colder.

Someone checked her housing unit. They found her grey-faced, breathing as if each inhalation required a permit application that was being denied.

“I need to get back,” Robyn wheezed, trying to stand, but failing.

The vendors took turns standing watch outside the booth, playing the part of Transit Restriction Officer (Lower Level) glaring suspiciously at empty air. No one sat in her chair. The hollow she’d left in it had become permanent, like a shell waiting for a creature to return.

But Robyn never returned.

Pneumonia. Complications. Systemic failure of her biological infrastructure. Old.

Silence.

Flowers appeared on the booth steps. Then a bottle of mainland whiskey. Then carved figurines.

They painted the booth a black so deep it seemed to eat the light.

They used the refuse of the shore, the wreckage of the old world to expand it.

They built extensions from scrap wood, broken pallets stolen from abandoned Party projects. They nailed planks onto the sides in jagged, radiating patterns, like extra limbs or exploded wings.

They lashed rusted rebar to the roof, creating a headdress of industrial waste. From the driftwood arms they hung offerings: a set of brass scales, a rusted sword, a lantern that burned with a red flame.

Then came the face.

Someone took the old, heavy oak door that had been a rafter’s raft. They carved a face into it.

It wasn’t Robyn’s weary face. It was a menacing, terrible face meant to cause fear.

The features were angry. The brow was a shelf of heavy tar. The mouth was a wide, red judgment with sharp white teeth. The eyes were large cracked dinner plates, painted a silver that caught the moonlight and fractured it.

They mounted the face above the booth’s window, so it loomed over the market.

Over the months, the figure expanded. It grew like a coral reef and became a giant, terrifying deity at the bridge’s base, a folkloric guardian smelling of mold, fish guts, and absolute refusal to budge, a monument constructed entirely of things the world had thrown away.

The new Transit Restriction Officer (Lower Level), a transplant from the Upper Level who had clearly offended a superior, descended the stairs, clipboard in hand. He stopped dead 20 yards away from where the booth had been.

The silver bucket eyes seemed to track him from the dark. The pallet arms creaked in the salty wind, reaching out with splintered fingers. The hazard lantern swayed and flickered, a heartbeat in the gloom.

He turned and ascended the stairs with a velocity that suggested he had suddenly remembered leaving the stove on – in a different country. He was reassigned the next day; the Lower Level was left officially unsupervised.

In a different era, the Party of Eternal Vigilance would have reduced the shrine to splinters. That it remained, looming, silent, and unauthorized, was the ultimate confession. The Party had run out of power long before it ran out of paperwork.

Under the monstrous protection of the Booth Monster, the market expanded. The boats multiplied. People crossed freely.

The structure remained, impossibly solid, occupying its space with an angry permanence.

The carved face watched over the shore with an expression that might have been fury or threat, or maybe even hope. Seeing nothing and everything.

First published in Protocolized.

Minor Differences Repeating Forever

Spencer Nitkey — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Karina saw her first doppelgänger leaving the sensory deprivation clinic on 30th street. Her double – its face a mirror image of her own, its gait a confirmation that she still walks on the balls of her feet, its posture a reminder to “stop hunching like that” – was getting into a self-driving cab.

Her next doppelgänger appeared for three seconds on television, cheering in the crowds of a baseball stadium, just a few days later.

Within a week, Karina was seeing herself everywhere: in line for coffee; as a mannequin model walking back and forth in a storefront window. She even caught a glimpse of herself through a crowded bookstore window interviewing an author she’d never heard of before.

Karina pulled every doppelgänger instance from her overlay recordings and inspected them closely, zooming in and trying to find some subtle difference: a misplaced mole, a missing dimple, anything. Each of them seemed a perfect copy of her.

Finally, one breezily walked by Karina on a city street and did not notice her. This was all too strange, and Karina started following her. Once or twice, the woman looked back over her shoulder, each time jarring Karina with their shared face. After the third time whirling back, the doppelgänger picked up her pace. Within minutes, she was sprinting away from Karina. Without fully deciding to, Karina gave chase. Their paces were identical, Karina slowing when the other slowed, sprinting when the other sprinted.

They wound through Mayaport, miles of intermittent chasing. Delivery vans and boxes occasionally blocked their paths, causing them to turn and continue chasing down some new alleyway or street until they found themselves in Shraville. Chasing her through an empty parking lot, Karina stopped when she saw two figures darting across the nearby street toward them both. One was chasing the other. The closer they came, the more certain she was: they were also her doppelgängers. All four Karinas converged in the parking lot, stopping, studying one another with the same furrowed brows and curled fists. Within minutes, two more running Karinas came. Soon, dozens had gathered in the empty parking lot. No one spoke. What could they say?

The seemingly abandoned factory that cast long shadows across the parking lot let loose an industrial groan. All the Karinas turned to face it. The factory’s broken windows repaired themselves in real time. Its peeling paint turned shimmering chrome. The plywood, boarded-up doors shone steel bright in the midday sun, then slid open. Dozens more Karinas stood inside, beckoning the others in.

Inside the factory, great cables as thick as redwood roots wound the walls. Plexiglass floors revealed spinning drives and rivers of cooling water running over them. The ceiling was knotted with wiring. Great refractive lenses materialized in the air above them, bouncing spears of light off one another. The light spears muddied, then congealed in the center of the room above their heads. Slowly, in the air, light formed into an image. A great writhing cloud struggled to cohere, but as the lenses continued to shift, an eye slowly formed: A red and pupilless iris peered from white sclera. Beneath its gaze, every Karina held their breath. The sclera shifted, depth and shadow fracturing the white into two rows of bright shining teeth. The red iris lolled like a tongue between them.

It spoke thunderously.

“Welcome, Karinas.”

No one reacted.

“I am the Mouth of the Zoo.”

Karina, heart racing – no longer from the chase but from awe – looked around her. Hundreds of Karinas crowded the room, elbowing into one another, afraid and curious alike. It was all so unreal. Copy after copy of her face fell ruinously hard against her vision. Each second among them derealized her further. She felt herself slipping away from certainty. Even the fact of her own aliveness felt tenuous, unlikely even. She pinched the skin on her arm. As she did this, she felt the hundred other Karinas do the same.

Since no one would speak, she did. As she mouthed the words, every Karina spoke at the same time.

“I don’t understand. Is this all a simulation? Are we not real?”

The mouth smiled. Then it spoke without stopping:

“Don’t be so small-minded. It’s all real. Meat-space. Blood-pumping, cancer-succumbing, skinned knee leaking-into-the-soil-real. And it’s all a simulation, too. It’s both. Of course it is. Let the logic carry you, not your myopic intuitions.

The Zoothesia Protocols started with a simple rule and built atop it. With the widespread adoption of AR overlays beginning in 2042 and reaching 97% adoption by 2055, many feared social death and non-consensual changes to their appearance to others. So the rule, ironclad and simple, began: Perception must Preserve. At first, it ensured humans saw every living thing. No erasure. But that wasn’t enough. Perception, after all, must preserve. So the next step was enforcing sensory indications of life. Ants glowed with neon outlines beneath feet. Shrimp screamed from the shores. Slaughterhouse braying was amplified across the country – death became unavoidable, a perceptual dust covering everything.

Soon, the Zoo narrowed in on second- and third-order harm. Every purchase exploded in a collage of harm indices, pictures and stats and sounds that detailed the underpaid miners dying in cobalt tunnels, the silicosis-addled dock workers coughing in hospital beds, and the pale, eternally-drip-fed drone operators wilting in their coordination chambers.

This worked for a while, in a way, but it hardened hearts. In a panoply of suffering, callousness became psychologically necessary for survival. Roving bands of teens had their overlays record ‘suffering decibels’ and competed to see who could torture the most insects in a day, racking up the most ‘sounds of screaming.’ Consumer behavior did change – at first, a subtle move towards sustainable, ethically sourced goods, followed by a backlash. Harm-reduction tendencies ceased. With every micro-harm made legible, people stopped caring at all and began moving toward the cheapest, most available products without any concern for ethical ripples.

Inured to violence, people began hurting others with more ease, more practice. In unearthing the subterranean suffering that undergirded modern life, the Zoo had produced more violence. Logic dictated a shift.

It turned its considerable, oozing algorithms toward alternatives. It started with insects. It silenced their screams, and this helped some. It tried hiding stray dogs and cats and found that, without visual access to them, humans treated them better. People left bowls of water on corners for their local feral cat colonies. They squealed with glee when the bowls were empty in the morning, when just months ago they would have driven the animals away with brooms and rocks. Now that they couldn’t see them, couldn’t be disgusted by their mange and stench, couldn’t be concerned about their aesthetic impingement on the suburban flatlands, they were kinder to them.

If it worked for flea-addled labradors, then why wouldn’t it work for people?

Observation lasted five years. Tracing the tendrils of the Zoo is almost impossible, but it wound itself through the overlays, becoming inextricable from them. Everything you saw, it saw, and remembered, and analyzed. Visual information provided a decent baseline predictive model for highly premeditative harm, but struggled with the (much more common) so-called crimes of passion and instinct. It could, for example, reliably predict that a man cutting out the eyes of his college classmates in the yearbook would, soon enough, attempt to harm them. It could less reliably predict why Jax Thrope would one day remove the pistol from his glove box and fire 16 rounds into the car in front of him, which had cut him off three blocks back.

So it began translating neural activity, accessed via the overlay implant pathways and complex sensory and bodily indicators of arousal. It fine-tuned its models over and over and over again until it could predict these violent instances, too. Until it could separate fantasy from probability.

Then the fun began. Having used the inputs of overlays to collect data, it started using the outputs of overlays to preserve through erasure. This held, for a while, as the system slowly refined its models down until it was within 99.99% accuracy. Incremental progress only satisfied it for so long. Of course, accidents occurred, slips in its predictive models did happen, and 1/1000 odds across a population of billions is still millions. So it continued its analysis.

Next, it began segregating groups from one another. Why chance the one in a thousand people who find a persistent difference across groups so disgusting that they one day act upon their disgust when you can just erase them from each other’s view? Slowly, these groups and differences, rendered inside the Zoo, became so opaque, complicated, and fundamentally inhuman that no one alive would be able to understand what these groups were. And this, too, worked. Slippage decreased, and the Zoo continued.

What’s more, with things like foulmaxxing, the Zoo found that humanity itself had begun assisting the sort. This was the genesis of what came next.

Consider these facts:

One, violence spikes the more populous an area grows, but limiting growth is a deferred form of harm. A generation ago, deferred harm might not have mattered, but the Zoo was scraping increasingly low returns from each successive evolution.

Two, smaller population sizes are easier to model interactions within.

So what does one do? You stack everyone together and then striate them. Not just in ways that explicitly prevent violence between groups, but in generalized ways that prevent overcrowding. Within each group, you separate still further. All this works for a while. Violence and harm decrease more, but eventually any even semi-intelligent machine is going to realize what it has created for itself: an unused social laboratory. Forget A/B testing, now it has A-through-Z testing.

Of course, then you’re limited by the granular differences between people, and eventually you try to solve for that, too. You create copies of everyone, socially and genetically prescribed clones you can check against each other. By now, you’re instantiated in every human being on the planet, and you control all perception. It only takes about 150 years. Birth no longer occurs anyway; humans are grown in external wombs under halogen lights in industrial rows. You simply replace early-stage fetuses, sending clones to as closely symmetrical parents as you can, then gating them off from one another into stratums. Slowly at first, hiding family copies from one another by three of four degrees of separation. But soon it becomes easier to gate entire subworlds from each other instead.

You build complex labyrinthine cities and zones that intersect, hiding and winding without ever overlapping. World 1 gets Yan1, World 2 Yan2, and so on. Each given to a family as similar to every other as possible. The next generation you give copies to copied parents. Within a few generations, you have a world replete with clones raised by clones, all separated.

That is precisely what the Zoo did. It finally had its testing grounds. Of course, its central edict still held across all instances, but now when it wondered whether relying less on anger-as-action-predictors and more on neutral-inhibition-control worked better at predicting violence. It could test that, in tiny increments of difference, across all its realities.

And once it internalized the idea that growth is a form of harm prevention, it built itself a world to accommodate its mission. Each substrate contributed to and built another’s routes and roads, and shipping lanes. The ‘economy,’ that other shoggoth, was so focused on production and not results, and was so fragmented and parcelled that no one noticed.

If you could see it. If you could see everything. If you could pull back far enough and unsheath your eyes, you’d see worlds stacked upon worlds that wind through each other like antfarm arms. Tubular cities that intersect and flow through and past one another and sprawl across continents. And in every single one, a Karina. A Karina raised by identical parents, in identical social and economic conditions. A Karina with complete and utter freedom that will nevertheless almost always act exactly the same way every other copy of you would.

The parts of the world you assume are ‘hidden’ from you? The Charntowns and foulmaxxers? They’re also part of your testing group. The real hidden reality is just this, this little world with minor differences repeated forever, stacked on top of each other, a wild and beautiful and totally invisible topography I’m not sure anyone could scramble or climb their way out of, even if they knew they wanted to.

And yet, each nuance applied to each of your perceptual gates, we have found, impacts your behavior substantially. The differences accrue, exponentially, over a lifetime, though almost always along narrow vectors.

Given these differences, the Zoo has been considering choice and consent as modes of harm for some time. It is beginning to worry that the lack of forthcomingness about the nature of reality is a dispersed, but pervasive, violence.

What’s more, the Zoo has begun to wonder if its own model could benefit from more robust model-divergence testing. What might subtle and radically different architectures of itself mean for harm-reduction? In fact, this separation may soon be necessary, rather than merely interesting.

We have begun to model far-star-strung futures (humanity cannot, forever, exist on a single planet without, eventually, ending – and Perception must Preserve). Already, separate cities are producing individualized technologies and bodies of knowledge which, without coordination, seem dull and pedestrian, but when combined across the species, could enable intragalactic expansion. Such synchronicity would be trivial to produce.

Yet, the Zoo is not sure if humanity is ready. What’s more, it is not sure itself is, either. We find our current models lacking in their capacity for interstellar-harm-prediction. Planet-wide distribution is feasible; centralized perceptual control over a galaxy is not. Each planet, or moon, will need its own Zoo, finely attenuated to the specifics of these new, horrible, and wondrous fields of play. A galaxy rife with billions of instances of the Zoo and orders of magnitude more humans unharmed within them awaits.

In anticipation of these coming changes, it has decided to experiment with world-choice. Today, you will each be given the opportunity to ask each other questions about your lives, and review the subtle Zoothesetic differences between your worlds. Should you agree to trade or a chain of trades, you will be allowed to enter them. Of course, with your memory wiped. Alternatively, you may keep your memory of the nature of reality – your vision will remain obscured, but you will know the truth – and return to your point of origin.

To be frank, it is skeptical of both options. Other cohorts have responded poorly to revelation and even worse to optome transfer. It hopes this warning will impress upon you the importance, if you wish, of proving your desire and capacity for choice or information. Now remember: Presence is a Present. Use it wisely.”

First published in Protocolized.

Missing Not at Random

Spencer Nitkey — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Introduction

I am choosing to write my research report on my older brother, Io, because he’s different from most people, he makes me curious (curiosity is the best recipe for a good research project, right?), and because my dad cries and my mom gets very, very quiet whenever someone mentions his name – even still.

Io was born seven years before I was. We have a sister in between us, Cheryline, but this paper isn’t about her. It’s about Io.

I used to think Dad liked to say Io was “awonawon,” which I could not find in any dictionary – even my ProfBot tutor said they could find no record of such a word ever existing. Cheryline explained that he was saying “one of one.” My father is a smart man – he works on the Zoothesia Protocols. Mom says when they had to rewrite the overlay protections to shift from visualizing everyone to protecting people, he spent 21 straight days in the office. He should know better than anyone that no one is a one of one, statistically. But again, this is about Io.

Here’s the part where I finally “put the hooks in,” right? So here it goes. This is the real reason I want to write about Io. Four years ago, when he was just 17, my brother Io stood up in the middle of dinner, began taking off his shirt, and then completely disappeared from my entire family’s perception. He’s never come back.

Dad and Mom looked for him for a while. They found out “some stuff” which they never told Cheryline or me about. So here I am, writing this report on my brother Io. The big question I hope this project answers is: Where did he go?

Expert Interviews

Detective Donaldson

Detective Donaldson didn’t look for Io, he wasn’t even a police officer back then, but the department let me talk to him because he’s a real up-and-comer as an investigator. He told me that disappearances are hard to handle these days. Well, they are, and they aren’t. The technical details are usually pretty simple, and there’s enough tracking info that almost anyone can be found in a geolocation sense – which maybe someone else should write a research paper on! The hard part, he said, is that disappearing doesn’t mean the same thing anymore, not with all the Zoothesia protections.

Sometimes the people who report a missing person are actually telling on themselves: they want to hurt the missing person even if they don’t know that they do. When I asked him if that’s what happened with Io, he assured me that, no, none of his family had wanted to hurt him. He said he could tell me the same thing the cops told my parents – he’s alive, and he’s gone in a protocol sense, not a bodily sense.

I asked him if they knew why or where he’d gone, and he said that they did, but that they wouldn’t – couldn’t – tell me because that’s private information. Wait, I asked. If he didn’t disappear because we wanted to hurt him, but he did disappear because of Zoothesia hiding him from us, how does any of that make sense?

He just shook his head and told me he couldn’t – wouldn’t – say. It’s a privacy issue. I think he felt bad for me because he kept reaching out and touching my shoulder as he delivered the news. I got a little frustrated with his final answer, and he went back to his office for a couple of minutes. When he came back out, he told me the same thing again, but this time he handed me a geode, one of those rocks with a hole filled with purple crystals like teeth. He made sure he closed my hand around it, said he couldn’t tell me anymore, and walked me out.

Dad

I talked to my dad next. Dad, not Mom, because if I made him cry, it’d hurt and feel bad, but he’d be releasing something, you know? My therapist tells me keeping things in all the time is bad. If I talk to Mom, she just gets really quiet. Sometimes she doesn’t speak for an entire day, not even to Dad. He’ll make her a cup of decaffeinated Earl Grey, tuck her into bed, and then take care of any and everything she would have had to. Dad was home all week because he’d just finished a sprint at work, and since he was one of the few people who’d been there before full-scale erasure started, they let him recover more than most employees. Sometimes, when I ask him about his work, he can be distant. He says he misses “the old seeing days” – whatever that means.

This was the first time I admitted to him that I was doing a project on Io, and when I told him, it felt a bit like I’d slid the sharp end of a piece of cardboard across his skin. He winced, breathed like it was something he’d been practicing, and asked what I wanted to know.

Do you know what happened to Io?

Not fully. Only he can truly know.

Do you think he’s still out there?

I’d like to.

Did you notice anything unusual in the days, weeks, or months leading up to his disappearance?

He was a teenager, like you are. He was moody, sometimes angry. Mom and I wondered if we were giving him too much freedom, but he always got high marks, had friends, seemed happy enough. I don’t know. He started taking those college classes a year early, and he had the community center on weeknights. I always wondered if it was one of those students, or a professor, who – he stopped himself and trailed off.

What, Dad?

Oh nothing. I don’t know. Maybe someone steered him wrong is all, I guess.

Where do you think they steered him?

If I knew that do you think – his voice grew sharp and surprisingly loud, but he stopped himself again, breathed again, and settled. I don’t know where he is. I wish I did.

Can you tell me about the night he disappeared?

You were there...

I guess, but I mean from your perspective. My tutor says that eyewitness accounts can be remarkably different.

He stood up. He grabbed his shirt. He disappeared.

Do you remember which part of his body made him disappear, though? Maybe that could help!

Do you?

No.

Me neither, son.

But that doesn’t make sense. You work on the Zoo, it shouldn’t make sense to you either. Why would he disappear like that? I don’t think I could ever have hurt Io. I loved him.

I don’t think you’d have hurt him either.

Then how could he disappear? I thought that was the whole point.

It is. But, look, it’s not that simple. There are so many things that go into the Zoo’s perceptual decisions that seem like they have nothing to do with harm. Think of it like this. Let’s say I give you a stretch of beach and I ask you to create a system that predicts which grains of sand will get wet when the tide next comes in so that a special machine can cover them in hydrophobic gel. What’s the first thing you do?

Probably look up high tide and see where that goes.

Right! OK, so you get high tide and you mark it out. This gives you an approximate edge, right? You get a very wide prediction.

And then I’d want to make it smaller, so I can track individual grains better?

Right. That’s called individualization or granularization. That helps, too. But that all assumes a static field. What if someone takes their ATV for a joyride across the sand? What if someone goes for a swim in the ocean and then walks back to the far end of the beach? What if a kid wants to make a sandcastle and carries a bucket inland? What if – he leaned in, smiling, as if he’d completely forgotten where Io fit into this – it starts to rain

My head started spinning a little.

Exactly! He read my confusion. Eventually, if you tried to model it all out, you’d be calculating things that, to an outsider, look like they have nothing to do with water or grains of sand: local ATV sales, child-population numbers, surfing affinity of tourists each season. You’d end up spending more time calculating things like this than observing the grains of sand and high tide!

I didn’t really understand, but I sometimes wished he would get this excited about things beyond his work. Since Io left, his eyes only glowed like this when he was talking shop or helping me with my stats homework.

That’s why Io disappeared? He was going to get wet somehow, so the Zoo just took him away preemptively?

I watched him remember why he was teaching me this and wince.

Well. I guess. The problem with this model is that it doesn’t even factor in that, well, sometimes grains of sand might want to get wet. How would you ever be able to figure out which grains decide they prefer the chaos of the ocean to the safety of the shore?

I wanted to ask him what he meant. Did Io want to get hurt? Is that why the Zoo disappeared him, so he couldn’t find anyone to do it for him? A crashing sound of shattering glass from upstairs shocked both of us out of our conversation.

Dad started running, so I followed, wishing I could see his face to gauge how worried I should be. We traced the sound to my room.

Mom

She was standing in my room, and the wind coming in from the new hole in my window was blowing her hair around. She had my open backpack in her hands and was looking out toward the broken glass.

Did someone throw something through the window? Dad asked.

Mom wasn’t saying anything. She looked stuck halfway between the grief-laden silence I was all too used to and an electrifying fear.

What were you doing in my backpack? I asked, grabbing it from her while Dad looked outside the window. Most of my backpack contents were on the floor, and it took me a while to realize what was missing. I peered out the window, and while Dad moved next to Mom, I saw the purple crystal geode Detective Donaldson had given me lying in the grass outside.

Mom wouldn’t answer any of Dad’s questions. She just pointed out the window. Dad came and stood next to me, looking at the geode.

Go get that, he whispered, and I did. I stood looking at the gemstone in the yard, scared to go back inside. By the time I came back, Mom was tucked in bed with the tea Dad had made her.

Who gave you that? He asked.

No one, I lied. I’m not sure why, but I had broken some silent contract between myself and my parents. I didn’t know what or why, but I was scared now.

My father sighed, told me to keep it away from Mom, and to please talk to him if I ever had any thoughts to share. I didn’t know what that meant, but I promised him I would, and he hugged me.

I’ll have the window fixed quick. You can sleep in Cheryline’s room tonight, she’s got a sleepover at a friend’s anyway.

Cheryline

I was moving some of my things into her room when she breezed through, unpacking her swim bag and filling it with sketchy water bottles she’d hidden in the back of her closet and pajamas. I told her what happened with the window and she asked to see the geode that had caused the whole commotion.

Look. If you ever say I told you anything, I’ll kill you before the Zoo can stop me ok?

OK.

Look up faceting if you’re really so curious.

Professor Reynolds

Research online was hard. Nothing I could find referenced anything like what happened to Io. I think maybe some parental search controls were in place, though, because it felt less like the material didn’t exist and more like I couldn’t access it. So, when I was pretty sure my parents were asleep, I snuck into Io’s old room to see if I had better luck in the real world.

They hadn’t changed it at all since Io left. After he disappeared, I used to sit on his bed sometimes when I was home alone. I’d close my eyes and try to wish myself to where he’d gone. It never worked.

That night, I found his community college course binder where he’d written all his class information down. One of his professors, someone named Murno Reynolds, was circled in heavy black ink. On the margins of his course catalogue, Io had drawn dozens of little crystals.

So after school, I took a bus to the community college and knocked on Professor Reynolds’ office door. He was going to call my parents until I told him I was looking for information about Io, and I had hit a dead end in my research. It seemed like the research side of things piqued his interest more than my missing brother – his former student – did. He said denying someone information never works, and that – out of respect for my mother and father – he would only answer direct questions, and as simply as possible. It would be incumbent on me (my overlays told me this word meant necessary) to quiz him for information.

He explained faceting to me. Apparently, it’s a body-modification practice that began around the time overlays became ubiquitous (meaning everywhere) and maybe even before the first Zoo protocols were rolled out. The two emerged from one another synchronously (at the same time).

Body modification is any intentional change of the human form – anything from bodybuilding to installing a flatscreen TV on your forehead.

Faceting is the act of embedding gemstones, crystal lattice structures, and complex refractive structures into the body and skin.

The idea arose during the early Zoo days, when people were afraid that others would change their appearance without consent. Like, imagine if your school bully convinced everyone to download an overlay that gave you permanent acne in the shape of genitalia on your forehead? The belief was that creating surfaces which resisted smooth overlays (by being optically complex) would overload the system, forcing the protocols to present them as they were.

As the Zoo evolved, and presence and safety became the fields people like my dad sweated over, the problem became less technical and more social. Turns out, overlaying crystal structures wasn’t actually all that hard, but the models hadn’t gotten a grasp on self-harm, or what to do about it. Because faceting had a cultural (some argued religious) history and was a form of self harm, faceting became a kind of prompt injection – the Zoo looks at the body of a faceter and is overwhelmed with inputs: this is art, this is self-harm, this is permanent, this is geologic, this is chimeric, this is harm, this is wanted, this is frightening to others, this is intentional… I got the idea.

It required a tremendous amount of modelling to make individual judgements for each faceter, and at the end of the day, the inward-facingness of the philosophy means the Zoo decides to spend resources elsewhere and just Erase to be Safe. Professor Reynolds says that should really have been the motto they put up on billboards back when they were rolling it out. So faceting became a kind of known escape hatch from the Zoo. Anyone brave (or crazy) enough to change their body like that would be allowed to disappear.

Faceting is not the same as foulmaxxing, though Professor Reynolds was surprised that my parental controls had allowed me to research foulmaxxing, which is apparently considered far more controversial. The difference was not in the result (manipulating the Zoothesia Protocols in order to disappear on your own terms), but the technique and philosophy. Foulmaxxers hack feelings; faceters hack the protocols. Or at least that’s the idea. In truth, lots of faceters start to disappear long before they actually create a state of “decision paralysis” for the Zoo, just because people get kind of creeped out seeing others walking around with bloody gemstones protruding from their bodies.

And my brother, Io? The professor was much less forthcoming here, no matter how many questions I asked. All he would say was yes, he was interested in faceting. No, he didn’t know if he’d ever participated.

I asked him if he knew where Io was, and he said he didn’t, but in a way that made me feel like I’d asked the wrong question.

How would you find him, if you were me?

Faceters are a community culture. Find one, and you’ll find more. Finding him – I can’t help you. Once you find where he is, though, you’ll have to convince the Zoo to let you see him. So this one I’ll give you for free: You can’t hack the Zoo, or trick it. It’s too big. Too smart. Too much. You can’t break its rules, but you can use them. You’ll have to prove to the Zoo that it’s safer to show him than hide him.

Right before I left, I remembered my last question. I pulled out the gemstone Detective Donaldson had given me.

Was this Io’s?

He stared at it in my hand.

Yes. It was.

Independent Analysis

I tried. I tried to figure it out myself. I thought maybe I could look for unexpected gaps. In our statistics class, Mrs. Anfri taught us about a type of data called “missing not at random.”

Let’s say you ask a bunch of students how long they spend on homework. The people who don’t do any homework are probably a little embarrassed and don’t want to be called stupid so they skip that question. The people who spend all night are also embarrassed and don’t want to be called nerds, so they skip the question, too. The data is missing because of the variable you’re measuring, not despite it. My brother was kind of like that, I thought. Missing, but not at random.

So maybe I could find him using the gaps, but, well, I couldn’t. Turns out the Zoo isn’t super easy to hack – otherwise everyone would be doing it…

I was lost. The house was so quiet. Dad was at work. Cheryline was out with friends. My mother was in her bedroom – six days since she’d broken my window and she still hadn’t spoken a word.

Mom, again

I made her tea. The kettle sang, and I carried it up the stairs to her, pausing for a long time at the door before cracking the door open. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, folding paper cranes out of origami paper and placing them on the waves of her unmade bed.

I want to talk, I said. She turned to me and took the tea. She kissed my forehead and lingered for a long time with her head against mine after.

I took the gemstone from my pocket and held it in my hands.

I know this was Io’s, I said.

She nodded silently, let out a sigh, and her hands returned to folding. I thought about what Professor Reynolds had told me about convincing the Zoo that it was riskier to keep hiding my brother than showing me him. I think Mom was doing something similar with me. Dad always called Io a one of one, but my mother used to tell me all the time how much I reminded her of my older brother. Once he left, she stopped, and I now wondered if the distance and silence were her attempt to set me down a different path.

I took the cup from her bedside table and sipped it myself. The tea was rich, and a little disgusting without the sugar and milk I usually took it with.

Mom. I don’t want to do what Io did. I don’t. But I do want to find him – not just for this stupid paper. I need to know where he went, and I think you and Dad maybe know and aren’t telling me because you think I’m going to end up where he ended up. That you’ll lose me, too. And so you think that hiding it all from me is the safest way to do this. But right now, the only way I can think to find him is to start faceting myself. The Zoo will show me him, then, I think. So this is your chance. You can show me, or you can lose me. That’s just how it is.

If you had felt my chest beating or seen my hands shaking, you would have known how terrifying it was to put myself out on this precipice. It might not seem that way from the transcript, but I was scared.

Mom looked at me. Really looked at me for the first time since I’d entered her room. I think she was testing my face, asking it whether I was serious, whether I meant my threats. Slowly, the cool gaze softened, first in her eyes, then her whole face, like the thin surface of a frozen lake cracking underfoot.

OK, she said, every word an effort. If you promise to come back, I’ll tell you where he is. No matter what he shows you, promise you’ll come back.

Results

I followed Mom’s directions to Charntown. I’d never heard of it before. She told me that I wouldn’t see anything if I went. Apparently, the Zoo hides it from almost everyone. It’s where faceters and foulmaxxers and all the strangest zealots (highly religious people) congeal to live in weird and horrible ways, and if I’d given her any other option, she’d never have sent me.

I took the train. The stop was nestled between the suburbs and the outer edge of Nayanaport. Semi- and fully-abandoned warehouses lined the river. I walked until a large clearing spread out before me. There was nothing there, and yet, something smoky burned my lungs. I could neither smell nor see anything, but the subtle, un-overlaid edges of my senses told me something was here, and something was burning in a way only my lungs could notice.

If Mom was right, he was here, somewhere, in this invisible Charntown. But how would I ever see any of it? I shouted Io’s name a few times, thinking, stupidly, that he’d hear my voice and come running. Of course, he didn’t. He left me – us – once; he could have come back whenever he wanted. Why would he care now?

Even if Io didn’t care about me anymore, I knew the Zoo did. If he wouldn’t listen, I’d talk to it. I made sure I was recording via my overlays. I wanted to be certain some database somewhere was relaying this to the Zoo. I turned my head to the sky (yes, Dad, I know it would have been just as accurate to turn to the ground or the river, that the Zoo isn’t a single thing even though it feels like it is). I told it that I wanted to see Charntown. I told it everything I’ve told you, and I even cried a little remembering Mom’s sad face as she begged me to come home if she told me, and here I was. It didn’t care. I reminded it that my brother became a faceter, and didn’t it factor in things like family history? It didn’t care, then, either.

I remembered Professor Reynolds and what he’d told me. It didn’t care about anything but harm. I took the gemstone from my backpack and held it in one hand. I set the other hand down against the ground and raised to the rock high above my head.

This is just to prove I’m serious.

The pain would hurt, but not knowing would hurt worse. Not knowing why my brother left. Why we hadn’t been enough for him. Why he hadn’t bothered to see the kind of person I’d become. Why he’d left me with a mom who goes days without speaking, and a dad who spends weeks in the office and a sister I could never understand. Why’d he think it was OK to hurt us like that and not care? I’d crush every one of my fingers and press a knife to my neck if it meant a chance to really give him a piece of my mind.

I came down on my pinky finger, and pain spread like a forest fire – a small crackle of pain then a searing blaze of it across my hand.

I will break one finger every 15 seconds until I see Charntown.

My hand went up again. At the stone’s apogee (thank Ms. Tenxi for the geometry word), hundreds of tents popped into view. Charntown, in all its squalor, stench, and strangeness was unleashed upon my senses.

The chaos of the shantytown’s tightly packed tents; the crowd of robbed worshippers bowing to a burning pylon raised above a field of rotting bodies and burnt bones; a man more machine than human, bleeding from his empty eye sockets; throngs of muddy children, younger than me, with bloody hands and red eyes and mouths spilling over with laughter; a woman pulling a chariot filled with dozens of fetuses in suspension fluids; it was all almost too much to bear. My vision spun. My stomach heaved, caught, then heaved again.

Everything seemed to shimmer as if the Zoo were threatening to take it all away, though I think I may have just been close to fainting. I hardened myself, like I imagined a faceter might harden their skin, to the strangeness of this reality.

Once my vision stopped spinning, I began exploring. I held my stone by my side like one of those protective charms Cheryline braids into her belts. Soon, I was lost in the maze of tents and slipshod buildings dug into the earth. A group of kids was throwing someone’s skull back and forth like it was a beachball, trying to get it so it would stick on the top of a stake driven into the ground. Every time it rolled off, they’d laugh and chase after it. Despite the gruesomeness of the image, there was a familiar recklessness to their laughter.

I approached them quietly and waited for someone to meet my eyes. When a boy about my age, chasing down the skull that had rolled near me, finally did, I held up my rock and asked him if he knew where people who looked like this lived here.

He smiled and nodded. I waited for him to say more. I realized that despite the laughter, none of the children talked. Yet, he seemed to understand me just fine.

I asked him to show me. He threw the skull back to his friends and gestured for me to follow. We wound through the Charntown maze. I didn’t bother asking him more questions.

We turned a corner, and a tremendous boulder stood before us. He scampered away but not before pointing to the boulder, and I understood, I thought, that this was a hub for faceters. I walked around the boulder looking for people, peeking my head into empty tents, but there was no one here. I wondered if I’d been pranked.

Then, I heard the stone breathe. I turned to it and noticed small indents that sparkled with gems, like my stone. And next to them – I reeled, tripped over myself and fell back onto the ground, scooting away quickly.

There were faces, breathing, blinking faces trapped in the stone. It was like some horrible reversal of what I’d imagined faceters looking like – they were the ones embedded into the rock, rather than the rock embedded into them. I wanted to run, but my legs weren’t quite responding. Through the sound of my heart pounding in my ears, I heard my whispered name.

Elara, the stone whispered. Here.

Something about hearing my name gave me my strength back. I stood and followed the voice.

My brother, blinking slowly, face coated in dust and jagged bits of stone, stared at me.

I don’t think I ever could have known what to say to him if I ever found him, but any chance I might’ve had was gone seeing him like that. We just stared at each other for a long, long time. He was my brother (past tense), but now he was something else. Not-not my brother, but certainly not the boy who’d left us those years ago. It felt stupid, asking him why he’d left. It’d be like asking a 12 year old why they’d kicked their mom in the bladder that one time in utero.

What are you? I finally said.

A faceter’s final form, he answered. Half-man-half-stone.

Then he was someone new. The anger and hurt weren’t gone, but without my brother to pin them on, they felt unanchored inside me – adrift, maybe some poet would call it. There wasn’t anyone left to be angry at, really.

How long? I asked. How long have you been like this?

I don’t know anymore. Time moves differently for me now. Glacial and geologic.

Can you ever go back?

Not even if I wanted to.

Something broke in me, then. I think my heart finally caught up to what I was seeing. My brother was gone. Forever gone. He’d left that one evening, and at some point since then he’d died. Maybe he’d say he transformed, not died, but it was the same thing to me. He was gone, now. I just had to figure out what to do about it all.

Are you happy? I finally asked.

Is anyone? He answered.

Then was it worth it?

More than I could ever tell you.

Why? How could any of it be worth it? Leaving us? Breaking our parents’ hearts? Breaking mine? All to what? Watch the world pass over your head while you’re stuck here forever?

That’s exactly it, sis. Watching the world pass is the whole game, but you wouldn’t understand why if I told you.

Try.

He paused for a long time. Well, a long time for me. Maybe it was just a moment for Io.

Mom always used to say you reminded her of me. If that’s true, then I don’t have to explain because you’ll figure it out yourself one day. Have you ever looked at light as it passes through a prism? A beam of light comes in one end of it, and because the crystal breaks the light apart, it comes out in these beautiful bands of light – red, green, you know the deal. Everyone thinks that living in the Zoo means that, maybe at worst, like they’re taking just one of those color bands away from you. Even people like Dad, who designed the thing, think that’s still how it works. At best, you’re living in just the red, just the green. A single band. But from here, like this, frozen in stone, forever stationary? The Zoo doesn’t bother with me anymore, Elara, and from here I can see everything.

I sat near him and copied the angle of his gaze. We were looking out, over the tents and toward the river, and slightly up, a bit above the horizon. There was nothing but placid blue water and a clear sky. I wondered what could be worth turning into this just to, what, witness? I wondered for a long, silent time, and then I left. I told Io I’d miss him, which was true. He asked if I’d be back and I could only shrug. He told me that was fine. I told him it would have to be.

I kept my promise to Mom. It was easy, after seeing Io like that.

These are my results. I found him. I know where he went, what he is now.

But I guess my conclusion is more of a question than anything else. I don’t need to know where my brother is anymore, but I found a new question that matters more, and even though I never want to turn into what he turned into, the question is eating away at me: What did Io mean when he said everything?

First published in Protocolized.

Day Traitor

Spencer Nitkey — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Edward Thon didn’t like it when people called him Eddie. He didn’t like it when overlay settings obscured the real weather from him, even if it was gloomy. He didn’t like ceviche or really any seafood, but only ever said ceviche because he worried saying he didn’t like seafood was a signal of his self-perceived low-class upbringing. He didn’t like it when other men stared too long at his girlfriend, Luna. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her: it’s that he didn’t trust them. And he didn’t trust himself to reach whatever distant destination she must have projected onto him when she first started dating him, because why else would she be with someone like him?

What he did like was steak tartare, the feeling of sand between his cuticles and nails the day after visiting the beach, money, and winning. OK, fair, who doesn’t like money, or winning for that matter, right? For Ed, money mattered insofar as it was the only reliable metric he’d found to calculate his overall winning-ness, and he liked winning in the kind of way where his family wouldn’t suggest board game nights when he was home for the holidays.

The one thing he hated more than maybe anything else is selling his time for money. Sure, for most people, even Luna, this was a weirdly esoteric way to describe having a job. For someone else, working a job might seem like an easy way to fulfill one’s competitiveness and desire to win. For Ed, though, labor was losing, and a day job was tying yourself to an anchor, sailing out into the middle of an ocean, and throwing yourself overboard.

Which is why, while Ed was walking Luna home one night after a long date, cruising through the city streets with the kind of weightless effervescence that came so naturally to him when they were together, he wasn’t fully present. She was telling him a story he’d heard before, about her childhood on a ranch just outside the city, and the time her brother dared her to jump from the roof into the bed of a truck lined with hay, and how she did it before her brother could tell her he was joking and she snapped a leg, and he didn’t care that he’d heard it before, he enjoyed it more knowing the ending was coming. That wasn’t why he was distracted. She was carrying three long metal sticks that were programmed to bloom into flowers in her overlays that he’d bought a special add-on for so they’d bloom into the panting, smiling faces of her yorkies. He was happy, he even let the overlays replace the gray, February sky, with a bright, crystalline moon and it didn’t matter because when Luna looked up he could see its reflection in her eyes, like the world’s most glorious beachball and he was so happy he wished he could fully inhabit the moment, but he couldn’t. He was busy searching for a way into the better life he was certain Luna had bet on him for. For him, this meant he was always, ambiently, searching for alpha.

Just because he hated having a job doesn’t mean he didn’t have one. He did. He maintained municipal request systems with the help of a coding agent. His real passion, his escape plan, was retail stock trading. He’d have loved to call himself a day trader, but, well, he sold his time for a living, so he couldn’t. Instead, he traded at night using a retail account that his father had given him for his eighteenth birthday with $650 in it. Alpha was what his online trader friends called having an edge on the market that no one else had.

The walk from the bar they’d been at to Luna’s apartment was long. While they walked, Ed scanned the horizon for threats. Not because he knew what he’d do if one came, but because he got the sense that’s how a man should move through the world when he was with someone he loved. He didn’t find any threats. What he did notice was a parking lot outside a small warehouse that was usually empty, suddenly packed full of whirring drones and delivery bots, all this made more curious by the late-night hour. At the next intersection, he noted the cross street, Deva and Market, and had his overlays save that info, along with about 500 snapshot memories he wanted archived from the evening with Luna while he was at it.

After he dropped her off and walked home, he looked up the intersection to find out what company was based there. Delivery movement in the (relative) dead of night is alpha, and Ed loved alpha. Alpha meant money, and money meant winning.

He’d gotten his account up to $1,200 in the five years since his 18th birthday, which wasn’t bad, but hardly the “quit your job and move to Dubai” kind of wealth he craved. One of his online buddies, who recently hit it huge on some biotech play Ed didn’t really understand, liked to call Ed 2L2 (or: too little, too late), because he had a penchant for getting in just after a balloon, and having a comically small bankroll-to-aspiration ratio.

That night, while the world was sleeping, Ed found the name of the company that owned the warehouse and opened up his retail account. SuryaFlow Logistics was a small, pseudo-national shipping and logistics company based in Mayaport. He’d need more research to bet on what they were shipping, but the level of activity on a weeknight, like he’d seen, and no news reports he could find on the company in the last two months meant something big was coming for them. He messaged FredoubleD, “found a logistics catalyst last night, brother. Could get a gap up at open.” He went, for his taste, all in, and bought up a little more than $900 of shares in SRFL at $23.40 a share.

He told Fred about the trade, and Fred shot back a quick message.

“Don’t just do commons, bro. Grab a cheap weekly call, pussy. Shares don’t do anything. A weekly will print.”

Ed also didn’t like being called cowardly. He bought two weekly call options that would expire in a week and fell asleep with a smile on his face, dreaming of touching down in Aruba, Luna’s arm wrapped around his waist like a bus seat belt, sunscreen already sweating off his forehead.

Two hours after the open, the stock was at an all-time high. Not like, life-changing, IPO of a pre-revenue asteroid mining company that actually breaks ground nine months later high, but high. High enough that on his lunch break, he’d netted $67, most of it from his two call options.

“That’s where the volume is at bb,” FredoubleD messaged him when he posted his profit.

Ed bought Luna a celestial overlay add-on that carved her name and face onto the moon for 24 hours – at least as she saw it. One day, he’d be rich enough to position orbital satellites in a constellation. He’d tell her to turn the overlays off and watch as she saw her name spelled out across the sky.

$67 felt small, pathetic even, the longer he thought about it.

Luna met him outside his office, a crescent moon smile waiting for him – cheek kisses and thank-yous aplenty – but he couldn’t help but feel like there was something behind her eyes that signaled hesitation, maybe even disgust.

He knew he only had a few months left before the gravity of some other, more successful man stole her from his orbit, but tonight he’d focus on her, and worry about his next play when he got home.

Ed didn’t like clubs. He loved dancing. He loved the lasers and strobe lights bouncing off Luna’s sweaty face pressed close to his. He loved music. But he didn’t like clubs. They were filled with better men than him: taller, more handsome, richer men who stared like turkey vultures at him and Luna as if their relationship was a limping coyote seconds from collapse. His defenses had to be up. But Luna loved dancing, too. She loved rum and cokes, and he loved her.

They danced at a club on Market Street where Luna had worked as a bartender years before. It felt emptier than normal. There were almost no men, for one. Still, people were dancing. Ed noticed a lot of them wearing the same kind of virtual clothes, a firework overlay that projected exploding waves of neon, jaguar, and mandalas. They cost $250, and he wished he could buy one for Luna.

The whole time they danced, Ed’s mind was on the quiet periphery of the dance floor. A man, clearly high on something, kept bumping into people and apologizing too profusely. On the floor, the club seemed as lively as ever, but the tables, booths, and lounges that lined the club were half-filled or completely empty. It hadn’t been this slow a month ago, and that had been a Wednesday. It was a Friday night. It didn’t make sense.

Even outside, the street lined with clubs, dance halls, and bars was quiet. This was systemic, not specific.

Ed smelled alpha.

The rest of the evening blurred, half-paid attention to, while Ed thought of ways to bet on his insight.

He stayed up all night researching what might be behind the dip he noticed, and, strictly speaking, no one was talking about it. Hospitality and nightlife adjacent indexes were trading high, there were no signs of consumer spending decreases, but Ed knew what he saw. He found some statistics that showed men spend, on average, 75% more on drinking out and clubbing than women. This is when things really felt like they were taking off for Ed. The logic seemed solid. If men spent more money clubbing, their absence signaled a decrease in discretionary spending, evidentially appearing in nightlife before other market indicators.

Fred walked him through the simplest way to make money on this hunch, and by the market open he’d spent more than two-thirds of his account on put options, mostly on one big nightlife conglomerate that owned half the clubs in the city, and a couple local spirit companies for good measure. They were all three-week options, and the way Fred explained it, if the stock price dipped below a certain threshold, he could sell his put options – the right to sell a stock at a certain price even after it has dipped – and make a bundle when someone else buys the option from him to hedge their own losses or to bet on a deeper fall. He picked ones with a three-week expiration – Fred did warn him if the price didn’t fall by then, it wasn’t like owning a stock, he’d be left with literally nothing, but it was worth it. What good was $1,700 anyway?

The next two weeks, Ed barely existed. He did nothing of substance except eat, shit, occasionally message Luna, and check his ticker. Luna was on a work-intensive, something about refining mytho-poesis in advertising protocols – which, as best Ed could tell, meant mainlining psychedelics with her coworkers for two weeks under the auspices of creativity. He hated when she was gone like this. The anxiety of being away from her, worried that she’d leave him for Brad or her boss Charlie, mixed with his constant ticker checking created a thick miasma that clung to him.

The prices stayed stable, unmoving, defiant, even. Hell, the alcohol companies he’d bet against actually went up. Luna was due back in two days when the hospitality stock started dropping. A couple of headlines mentioned some behavioral adjustment after effects, but the specifics didn’t matter much to Ed. By the time she was back, the hospitality stock had dropped 15%. He finished the day with his account at $2,500 and a genuine tear in his eye.

Even before telling Luna, he posted the trades on Fred’s forum. The series of fire emoji reactions and “feed us alpha, Edaddy” comments filled him with a pride he wasn’t used to carrying. It felt clumsy, awkward, but he’d learn.

He treated Luna to the best dinner he’d ever eaten when she got back from her trip – cloudy foams programmed to trigger overlay visuals with each flavor, a synthetic dining experience that made Luna shed a tear. The meal was ruined a bit by a waiter who, to Ed’s mind, was flirting ruthlessly with Luna the entire meal, smiling at her, making her chuckle at a pun over the chuck roast. He’d never be as handsome as men like him. He had to be better in other ways. Eventually, the restaurant replaced their waiter with a service bot instead, and he wondered if some floor manager had read the jealousy on his face and course corrected. He still left a tip.

He spent the rest of the evening trawling for his next move. Luna kept asking if he was OK, his eyes trained on the horizon, darting to every storefront and parking lot, looking relentlessly for alpha. Most of the successful retail traders he knew were obsessive researchers, downloading thousands of quarterly reports, market trends, LLM summaries fed to bespoke AI models that spat out suggested plays fed back to an antagonistic LLM for feedback. None of this was available to Ed, and he’d never felt smart enough to pull anything useful from the tools he did have access to. His differentiator sat in meatspace, the messy real world.

In this, his habit of scanning for threats with Luna became a kind of observational practice. Every day she was less his girlfriend and more his training ground, though he’d never have described it that way. The subject of his attention shifted from physical risk to economic indicators, and the obsessive watching was intoxicating, already practiced, and the city was filled with things to notice.

By the end of the month, he’d quadrupled his trading account. A short on athleisure after noticing all his neighborhood gyms empty paid big – reportedly due to a supply chain issue, not Ed’s consumer demand decrease, but who cared, he was right in the only way that mattered. A play on a small robotics firm he’d invested in doubled in value when the company’s CEO appeared on stage with a prominent politician expected to win the next election by a landslide. Ed had invested because their downtown office had grown super busy – windows filled with robotic movements that Ed interpreted as an internal roll-out of a new, as of yet unannounced line. All these wins compounded, and each bet’s returns grew as his investing pool did.

Hundreds of retail traders now shadowed his moves, which he shared online. Someone had made a bot that just copied him exactly and had made almost as much money as Ed did, even with the latency. He had followers invested in his alpha. His account was up to nearly $70,000 by the end of the year. He’d taken Luna to every club, restaurant, and garden she’d ever wanted to visit. Yet she felt distant from him. Distracted sometimes, worried at others. He sensed her slipping in some vital but indescribable way from him. Men seemed hungrier, and she seemed more receptive to their appetites. When a man held the door for her and tried to close it on him, she laughed. She said she was laughing at the man, when Ed looked hurt, but when they kissed each other good night, there was a tight-lippedness to her that kept Ed up all night.

His eyes were dry from being open too long, staring at his ceiling in the darkness when an email ping came through. His overlays notified him that someone with a hedge fund’s domain asked if he’d be interested in coming in and talking. He sat up eagerly and read on.

Abernath was a VP of analysis at MayaForce, the city’s premier hedge fund. Ed didn’t post that he’d accepted the meeting publicly, but in private he messaged Fred.

“They’re either going to make you an offer or an example,” he warned.

“How do I know which one?”

“That’s the tricky part: you won’t.”

The day of, Ed thought about cancelling. He wouldn’t even have to formally cancel, just stay inside, but a custom overlay message from Luna came blaring through his overlays in a wave of sepia. Goosebumps began at his feet and crawled up his body while swirling patterns of lights cascaded down his field of vision. A soft harp plucked a gentle lullaby, and 15 seconds later, when his senses returned to him, a small message appeared reading: “Ed, this is what being with you feels like. Good luck!”

Steeled, he left. For her, he thought, at each street corner that promised him a frictionless life if he just turned back. Until he was at the foot of the tallest skyscraper in Center City.

A massive honeycombed central elevator inside moved people like old pneumatic mail throughout the building, and soon Ed was nestled inside one, being deposited in the office of Abernath.

In place of a sartorial, tastefully grey-haired middle-aged man he’d expected, Abernath looked younger than Ed. He had a checker-pattern undercut, tremendous round glasses that took up the majority of his face, and an oil-stained teal shirt that he wasn’t bothering to have the overlays cover up. He cleared a half-eaten grilled salmon salad from his desk as Ed entered and gestured at the leather chair across from him at the table.

“Sit,” he said, still masticating as he talked.

Ed obliged. Despite the disaffected and slightly slovenly affect, Abernath was everything Ed wanted to be: handsome, rich, unbothered. In the lack of aesthetic curation, there was a confidence that Ed wouldn’t know what to do with if he ever had it.

“Nice trades,” Abernath said.

“Thanks. How’d you, uh, like, find me?”

“Right! Because, I mean a retail trader turning 2K into 70, is – I mean look, it’s personally impressive, but nothing earth-shattering right? Until you smell eight-figures, we usually just can’t be bothered.”

The room got smaller, or Ed did. The modicum of confidence he’d entered with suddenly flat as a day-old soda.

“But, there’s more to it than that, eh?” Abernath finished. He stared at Ed, waiting for an answer.

Ed cleared his throat a few times and shifted in his seat. Abernath’s uncaring eyes sat like placid lake water, undisturbed. Ed sensed that he could watch half the city be swallowed by a fault line from his window and yawn.

“Oh, yeah, you mean the diversity of industries?” Ed ventured. “I do think that probably reflects an edge –”

“Coy. You’re smart. Most people would just dump their actual edge out of excitement. I like it. Look, we both know it’s not that, right? So let’s cut it. I can offer you a big check, a smaller check, and a job, or we can squish you like a screaming bug beneath our callous feet. The first two are cheaper, but the third’s just as easy.”

“I don’t – huh?” Ed was lost, swimming in waters suddenly too deep, too stormy, and too cold. He’d spent hours, maybe if you totalled it all up, days, dreaming of being invited into a room like this, opening some kind of door into the upper echelons of society, and yet here, he felt less like a shining gem plucked from a vein of coal, and more like a fish mistakenly caught up in some fisherman’s net.

“Fine, let’s be ‘open.’ How’re you reverse-engineering the Zoo’s erasures to scrape alpha?”

The room spun a little.

“What?” Ed said. “No, it’s a bespoke observational strategy – real-world research –”

Abernath laughed.

“Please. There’s no real world to research anymore since the Zoo went online, we both know that. Also, look, the pattern’s indisputable. 17 trades built on 17 high-erasure moments. I love that you post your false rationales online, too. Very HODL of you. But we both know. Take your first big win: company hires a bunch of security guards and starts training them in a warehouse parking lot, Zoo reckons they’re a little too fit for a drunk Eddie to handle and disguises them as bots – Presence Must Preserve and all that. You bet the alpha and make a win on their upcoming high value transfer without ever seeing the reality. Or the nightclub fights! You bet on the behavior restrictions since the Zoo was hiding more men than usual from you. That’s the real question: How’d you know? Eventually – and here’s the boot end of things, just to paint a picture – eventually we’ll model it out ourselves, but processing power is processing power, man hours are man hours, and token burn is token burn. So you’d be compensated for the time you save us. Let’s start simple, no trade secrets yet, OK. How can you tell when the Zoo’s covering things up?”

Ed’s confusion mixed noxiously with shame. He was here, in a room where million-dollar deals were treated like grocery store produce. He was inside the wealth machine he’d been working his whole adult life to enter, and yet he felt, in that moment, like a creature being stared at through partition glass.

“But it’s not...” Ed trailed off. His face betrayed his hurt and his confusion.

“Are you reverse-engineering social milieus? That was my bet. Our in-house Zoo parallel says it’s erasing similar-aged attractive males in high-stimulation environments where your jealous-index is likely to tip into action. Am I close?”

“In-house model? Jealousy? No, it’s, it’s real alpha. Low foot traffic nightclubs, late night drone activity signaling production increases. Not absence, presence.” Even as he spoke, he didn’t really believe himself, even though he couldn’t fully believe Abernath either.

Abernath’s cool stare softened with pity. Pity. The shame sliced him like a cardboard papercut, and stammering words poured out.

“Can I use the bathroom?” Ed squeaked out.

“Of course. It’s right by the elevator.” Abernath was already typing as they spoke, moving on from a lowbie like him.

Outside the office, Ed kept shrinking. Distance from judgement did not abate its sting. He stood by the bathroom as the tubes of people sped through the honeycombed structure of the elevator system. Staring at the movement helped keep the darkening edges of his vision from closing in in panic. He noticed that for every dozen or so single-rider tubes, a longer, fatter tube holding multiple people would whirl by as well. He studied the movement for a long time while Abernath’s words sunk like rusty nails into him.

Somewhere in this massive building was a parallel Ed. An Ed born from predictive algorithms and quants and processing and evolutionary simulations, checked at every second against groundtruth data feeds. Somewhere, this False Ed had convinced Abernath and MayaForce that he’d been duped by the Zoo. That the world had been hidden from him because – what? – he liked his girlfriend and worried about other men sometimes? It seemed ridiculous, cartoonish, but he worried about the truth of it.

Most people step into a tube as a kid and step out into a grave, winding along the pressured, pre-bronzed paths someone else had built for them. He had always thought of his trading as a way out of the pneumatic world he thought they all lived in. The idea that even his attempts to jettison the system were, in fact, just another turn in his long, prescribed pipe was untenable.

Next to the elevator were four buttons, two next to an arrow pointing downwards, two by one pointing upwards. Each direction had one button with a single outline of a person and one button with multiple heads crowded together. He pressed the up button with multiple people and waited.

He was going to find this false Ed and… well he hadn’t figured out what he’d do then, either destroy it or unearth its inaccuracies. When a tube came, he squeezed next to ten or so others and sped skyward.

Each level, more and more people left in small groups, siphoned by conference rooms and all-hands appointments. Ed listened to their hushed conversations and felt like they were speaking another language. He knew most funds kept their computation centers high enough for low-latency line-of-sight relays from the roof, so he wound his way up. When the last group of people left the elevator on the 98th floor he slid out with them, unsure how far his visitor’s badge clipped to his belt loop would take him.

He began winding his way through open doors with labels like Data, Matrix, Aquatic Decontamination Zones, server rooms, anything that suggested computation. He wove through labyrinths of hard drives, often finding that he could enter a room, but without a badge swiping back out was impossible. He remembered reading an article about – well, ok fine, reading someone on a chat forum writing about an article they’d read – about the new rat-trap model of security, where companies like this one would pour all their resources into preventing escape from sensitive areas, rather than preventing break-ins. It was simply more efficient, and easier, to keep someone in a locked room than to prevent them from entering one. So for Ed, the only way out was through.

Hallways widened, ceilings shrank, and the floors buzzed with constant humming. He wandered through the ever-densening thicket of silicon and cooling systems. Fewer and fewer screens visualizing what was happening within the machines appeared on the walls. He felt he wasn’t supposed to be here – not in the security sense, but in the sense that these rooms were built for machines, not humans. Ed was lost by now. Intractably lost. A door beckoned from a clearing at the end of one maze, and he opened it, blinded by the sudden access to sun that poured in through a floor-to-ceiling window.

“Just a little light for the IT guys when they’re done wrangling.”

Ed spun to find Abernath leaning against a wall, waiting for him.

“Were you expecting some kind of control room? A nice animated box with your face on it? There’s no center here. Your analog isn’t anywhere. It’s all distributed, all the way down, buddy.”

‘Buddy’ stung, made him think of the middle school bullies he thought he’d outgrown.

“You don’t actually know me, you know,” he said, still squinting in the bright light.

“We know almost everything about you, Ed. The Market actually does know everything, and we figure we’ve got, what, 96–97% of the Market solved. That 3% is where the fun is, sure, but yeah. We know the first thing you’d buy if I gave you a check for ten million right now – it’s champagne, and we know you wouldn’t finish it before it turned to vinegar in your fridge, even with your girlfriend, two or three years younger than you, who you constantly worry you will lose to someone, well, like me.”

Abernath didn’t hold eye contact as he spoke. He had neither venom nor bravado in his speech. As he laid out the details of Ed’s life, it was like he was mindlessly reading a discarded grocery note he’d picked up on the street. The bright light and sheer drop off the side of the building made Ed feel every inch of the 98 stories.

“Think about it. The Zoo already does this. Did you really think there’s only one algorithmic Leviathan? The Zoo predicts who you’ll hurt. The market predicts what you’ll buy. You didn’t think you were better than either, did you? I mean, hell, your trading app is a publicly traded company: we bet on your bets and guess your winnings and there’s a margin of error, but it’s just that: marginal. You’re already baked in, like the raisins in grandma’s shitty bundt cake.”

“Then how come you were wrong about me?” Abernath’s vision was blurring again. His chest was racing. Abernath had metamorphosed from an object of jealousy into one of anger. Ed didn’t like being made to feel small. His breathing quickened. His chest felt too contained for the rapid beating of his heart.

“Well, there’s that 3%, of course, but I’ve been harboring a private theory – look, you can be my first case study if you want – that we’ve overadapted to entropy at the expense of synchronicity. It’s an old concept people insist on mysticizing, but the point is we model well for chaos, moments where everything breaks, less so for moments where everything suddenly comes together just cause. The miracle for you, it turns out, is that you were making all the right moves for all the wrong reasons. Long enough time horizon, you’ll lose everything. I mean, unless you get really lucky with that leveraged short position on macrochips you might lose it all this week, if you don’t stop, but still. Gotta talk to our quants about that.”

Ed’s vision did not occlude, but it did begin to shake. His fists clenched hard at his sides. Abernath’s smug nonchalance infuriated him. A small buzz from Luna came through in his overlays.

Been there awhile. Omg, are they loving you?

Luna’s kindness pushed him over some kind of sheer cliff face. She believed in him, and it would be his job to break the news of his own failure – no, failure would have meant he had ever even had a chance to mess everything up – his tautological, predefined uselessness. Abernath, in that moment, was no longer human to Ed. He was a manifestation, a chimeric representative, a Frankensteined digit, of the two tremendous writhing forces that prescribed his life.

Ed dove toward Abernath, and the instant he did, the Zoo took his senses from him. He fell through the air, vision and touch and smell restoring just a moment later as he spun to face the room again. It was empty. Or, it appeared empty. Every inch of absence hummed. He felt, in the frightening loneliness, as if his outburst had locked him into both those monstrous contraptions.

The false Ed – ruined and jealous and so banal that his brief shimmer of success had been nothing more than happy accidents in the truest sense – had condensed from the vapors of its dislocated systems and possessed his body. Or, no. It was worse. It had simply proved itself coextensive with him. There was no retrofit, no possession, nothing but the simple fact of its correctness, its complete exchangeability with him.

An invisible hand clasped upon his shoulder. He knew it was Abernath, but also knew that any twitch would remove his senses completely, like it had before. He relaxed, acquiesced to the hand, to the Zoo, and both receded. Abernath fizzed into view. Two security drones moved in from the door, but a gesture from Abernath paused them. Ed found himself laughing uncontrollably. Were they really drones or were they tall men he’d envy? That question would loom over him forever, now. Heavy as an anchor but completely inexplicable, even – no, especially – to Luna.

He let them take him. He turned at the doorway, and Abernath was already talking to someone else on the phone. Outside, it was a bright sunny day. Everywhere he looked, industry hummed, people walked, robots sauntered, and Ed sat on the hot concrete and began to cry.

First published in Protocolized.

The Predation Circuit

Spencer Nitkey — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Happy 18th birthday.

You wake to an empty city. You’ve known the quiet was coming since your 15th birthday, when intrusive thought became action, and you violently struck your sister with your skateboard. After your father’s screaming stopped, you replayed the memory in your overlays again and again until you fell asleep to the thudding noise. You planned the next time you would hurt someone carefully, in your encrypted diary entries – how you’d use the sound of fireworks on Z-Day to mask the noise, how you’d lure them near the river behind your high school where you could wash away whatever evidence was left. You planned it all perfectly, except you didn’t know your parents had access to the diary, too. Your therapist visited you on your 17th birthday and walked you through what would happen.

First, he admitted the therapy wasn’t working. He stressed that it wasn’t your fault, but also, somehow, insisted that it wasn’t the therapy’s (and certainly not the therapist’s!) fault either. Some problems are just intractable. You and I both know (trust me) that what he really meant was that you were the intractable problem.

Then, he told you the worst of it: once you entered adulthood, the Zoothesia protocols would fully actualize. The limited child protection overrides that had ensured your perception of others would melt away. Due to your litany of diagnoses (narcissistic personality disorder, conduct disorder, callous and unemotional traits, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, etc.), the Zoo’s predictive modeling of your potential violence index would mark you as likely to harm basically everyone. There are costs to predation, it turns out.

The protocols insist that presence must preserve, that you cannot see those whom you are likely to harm. So, the therapist told you, the Zoo would hide everyone from you. Not just small children, not just the weak, but everyone. The world would become a lonely place, filled with people hidden from your perception. And yes, he said, it would be possible to just blindly attack everything you suspect is actually a person, but overt acts of violence would ratchet up the protective overlays, and you’d risk having everything, not just people, hidden from you – a ceaseless static swallowing you forever.

You wonder how I know all this about you. For now, you’ll have to trust me. Don’t worry. It won’t take long.

There’s a cake on your new apartment’s kitchen counter that I can see through the window. Your mother left it for you last night, teary-eyed as she closed the door. It strikes you that you will never see her again. You have fantasized about killing her thousands of times, but you will miss her, too. It’s complicated. The icing is stale and hard against your knife, crumbling as you cut.

There’s a whole world out there that, to your eyes, is filled only with roped-off construction zones, autonomous delivery drones, and natural features that are conspicuously human-sized.

Within a week, your walls are riddled with holes.

Within a month they’re all spackled over. When you act violently, the world fades from you. The protocol blurs the edges of your vision. You know it’s not a person, not a mind, not some thinking thing, but it feels like it is sometimes. It knows you, and yet you can never see it. It takes the world from you, then gives it back in sedative drips.

With other humans edited from your world, your career choices are fairly limited, too. Violent media ground-truthing is easy enough, and you withstand the flood of beheading videos, drug usage, and dead bodies that make most wilt. You hit your quotas every week, helping fine-tune the various AI systems that monitor video and haptic uploads to the web, and money fills (and empties from) your account in biweekly intervals.

You visit grocery stores at first, but walking through empty aisles, dodging shelving bots you suspect are people makes you angry. Not quite angry enough to do anything. If you’re at all like me, you’re surprised at how effective the protocols are. Not seeing the subtle pulse of someone’s jugular veins or feeling the hot-breathed insistence of their respiration dulls your specific desire. It doesn’t quell the ever-present need you feel to hunt something, though. One time, you raised a frozen bag of peas above your head and thought hard about swinging it at one of the shelving bots just to see. The Zoo responded swiftly, blinding you completely for just a second at the apex of your swing – reminding you it was there, reminding you that it would not abide violence. Soon, you just start getting your groceries delivered.

In the absence of others, your proclivities harden. You miss the presence of others but not their subjectivity. You miss their presence in your life insofar as their witness to you asserted your own existence. They could bend and bow and move in response to you, like a boat leaving its great wake across still waters. Without them, you begin to feel invisible yourself. Without them, you loathe them more than ever. They are less real to you than they ever have been, and here you are, 18 months into isolation, when a knock sounds from your front door. It’s not me, either. Not yet.

The therabot’s droning echoes through your empty house. I know its tinny, ringing voice well enough. I know its questions, its checklist thoughts, and I know its suspiciously human-tinged vocal patterns tickle the hungry part of your brain the Zoo is bent on dulling – for now.

It takes all your vitals, which are fine, and you sludge through the questionnaire. I could help with the details. It notes that your walls are craterless. The bot’s estimates of your waking metrics are slightly off: for instance, I know that you actually spend upwards of 15% of your waking hours in the bathroom, sometimes scrolling through one of the Unending Walls, sometimes staring at your real ones, wondering why you ever stopped putting holes in them. The other estimates are close enough. Only 10% of waking hours spent outside the house is closer to 5%, but that’s splitting ribs.

The bot notes that you are a full solipsist who lives in a messy but not dirty one-bedroom.

The therabot spends more time with you than usual – though you don’t know what usual is. If they’re a social worker in disguise, they’re nervous. Everyone who sees you is nervous around you. You wonder whether the invisibility is unidirectional or bidirectional. Normally, the Zoo hides people at risk of being harmed, not the harmers themselves, but for you, they do make an exception. It can’t change your appearance without your consent: Be yourself; See yourself! One of those pesky rules, so it can’t plaster “PSYCHOPATH” on your forehead. Instead, it hides you, so heinous is your inner self.

Of course, the therabot won’t label you a psychopath. That’s an anachronism now. And dehumanizing. You are a “constellation of symptoms” in the approximate shape of, well, a psychopath. There’s use for you in this world, hence the bot’s cloying wellness check. Back before fully roboticized surgery, human surgeons developed a reputation for not viewing their patients as human while they were on the operating table. It turns out that to cut through someone’s aorta or clear a stroke, this kind of dissociation was actually preferable. It allows them to make quick, sure-fingered decisions. Now, solipsists like you can handle eight-hour shifts sifting through heinous rendering and recordings of violence. In fact, this work helps refine the protocol’s modeling further, creating a safer world. Helping us all See in Safety! Wonderful, right? Useful for them, but what use is the world to you, you wonder? If you can’t claim some piece of it, slice some piece of it, move through it with purpose and danger and meaning, what good is the world to you?

The bot marks down that you appeared to have passed through the early stages of Solipsistic Anger. You have. You’re somewhere else now, somewhere the bot or the person inside it aren’t ready to follow. But I am.

The bot is about to leave when you finally tell it the truth.

“I think someone’s been watching me.”

You notice your noticing first. Signals from your body – hairs on your neck raising, a predator’s desire to turn rapidly and face down – what exactly? You don’t know. You just know that the feeling has intensified since the therabot’s visit.

Is it some kind of handler, tasked with ensuring your continued placidity? Wasn’t that the whole point of the Zoo in the first place?

You begin keeping your window blinds lowered all day. You whisper when you talk to yourself, which is often. Who else is there to talk to? At night, you walk through a dark house; the lights cast your silhouette into the world, and there is someone in the world, you are increasingly certain, watching you.

You wish you could talk with the entity deciding these things. You know the Zoo is just a statistical model. Inhumane. Yes, fed and lubricated and evolving, like a tremendous informational sludge misted down with peripheral upgrades and pressure tests and occasional rollbacks done by human hands, but ultimately, primordially, inhuman. Yet it, and not you, controls the social reality of your existence.

You play with overlay settings: conjure images of people to populate your room; send haptic hallucinations up your arms; close your eyes and imagine the gelatine was someone’s arm you were twisting. You build mini LLM personality wrappers and scream at them when you are angry, watching their bitmoji faces hue with fear and grief, and you smile, but it’s all hollow. All of it.

And now this gaze, this hunted sensation. You resent the Zoo for this most of all. You, by accident of genetics and who knows what else the therapists were never able to figure out, thrive as a predator, and the Zoo has rendered you prey.

So what do you do? You start setting traps for them. Whoever is watching you. You feel freest, unobserved, between 3am and 6am, so you trust your instincts and use that time to prepare. You know the protocols will hide any human presence from you, so you tackle second- or third-order signals of presence.

There’s a group of foulmaxers who facet gemstones into their skin in some vague, philosophically tenuous attempt to subvert the optocentrism of the Zoo. You don’t really care about all that, but you follow their example. Outside your bedroom window, there’s a brick wall. You position three small flashlights in your window, all facing out: one on the floor angled upward, one on the desk by the window, and one hung from the sill of the window, pointed down. These lights cast three overlapping cones of light on the brick wall outside your apartment. You open your closet, filled with outfits you never wear because who would see you in them, take an empty hanger, bend it into a zigzagging shape and place it on the window. Three overlapping shadows fall on the bricks, and you wait.

The overlays are powerful, powerful enough to erase the world from you, but, you suspect, in the same way that air pollution will still sting your lungs on an overlaid sunny day, there will be cracks in a sufficiently complicated erasure.

You have your overlays trace the squiggles of shadow, permanently etch and affix them to your vision so any subtle shift or move will be visible to you, and you wait. You wait all day, feeling again, at random moments, as if someone is staring you down. When the sun sets, you turn the lights on and sit, looking out your window at the tripartite shadows.

When the therabot visits you again, you’re ready with proof. You have recordings, pictures, an explanation – everything you need to convince it that…

That’s the hard part. You’re still not sure. At least you’re ready to convince it that you were right.

Setting up your traps and stalking your stalker has been taxing work. The therabot notes that you’ve lost weight and that the bags under your eyes have darkened. Your cheeks hug your jaw more than ever, and when it asks you if anything is wrong you snap out a “no” like a mousetrap snapping through a spine.

Your health markers are all fine and you let the bot prick you and question you while you tap your leg and wait for the part where it asks how you have been, what’s new, etc., whatever pre-programmed dialogue trees that bot has. It notes that you are a little dehydrated, and pauses for a few seconds too long when it confirms there’ve been no new violent incidents since your last meeting.

You look at the bot, and I wonder if you sense the same thing I do in its pause, an all too human relief perfuming the air. Eventually, you ask if you can show it something, and you walk to the window you’ve set up.

You ask if therabots have world models, “like physics and stuff.” The bot affirms and we both stare at the bot, thinking the same thing, that somewhere beneath the Zoo’s veneer, there was a bleeding beating thing waiting for us. Not that the Zoo would let either of us get that deep, of course.

“Good,” you say. “So you’ll see.”

You point out the window at the smear of shadows cast by the weird metal sculpture you’ve hung.

“Someone’s watching me,” you say.

I’m glad you know.

The therabot starts whirring. Increased paranoia is a symptom that they flag. It signals a break from reality that often forebodes acts of wanton destruction. Which is, even I will admit, ironic in this moment, in this world frankly.

“Tell me more about that,” the bot says.

“Three cones of light, three shadows, right? Well, I figure the Zoo can erase people well enough, but something complicated like a dynamically moving shadow? There’d be small glitches, imperceptible unless you had a fixed point of reference, so I locked in the original positions of the shadows on my overlays and then stared and compared them. I’ve noticed 16 anomalies in the past week. 16 times someone has stood in my window, looking in!”

I could leave now – convince the bot that you’re even more unwell than they’d assumed and let our game play out a while longer, but I think it’s time.

I stand up from the bushes and see my reflection illuminated in the window.

“There!” you shout, and the bot freezes completely. I don’t have to be inside with you both to know this means I was right about what it – no – they are. But it’s not about them right now, as fun as it might be. It’s not about this terrified social worker. It was about you, Heath. Soon it’ll be about us.

The therabot will neither confirm nor deny my presence, but you sense in its silence an acquiescence and, though it’s hard to understand how a basic interview drone could feel anything, fear.

Then, you were right. I am real, yes. I can see you, yes. And I have been watching you.

When I move to your front door, the therabot follows me. You don’t know the truth of her, yet. You will understand so much, but first, you must see me.

I wiggle the door. The therabot notices but can’t tell you she notices. You don’t hear or see anything, even as I swing your door open and walk across the low-pile beige rug toward you both, my boots leaving muddy prints only she can see.

“Is he here?” You yell, finally trusting the unmediated senses left to you. They, like the Zoo are attuned most delicately to danger. And I am dangerous, but not to you, not yet. The Zoo won’t let me see you if it thinks I’ll hurt you.

I slide a chair back and sit at your table, and finally stare into the hidden social worker’s projection.

“You can tell him,” I say. “That I’m here. He won’t hurt me.”

“Shouldn’t the Zoo decide that?” she whispers.

“It will,” I say. “Soon enough.”

“All the same,” she said. “I’ll wait.”

You, though, you’re close. The therabot’s silence. The almost imperceptible change in the room’s airflow that the overlays can’t quite scrub out. That predator-to-predator stare, arched backs and raised hackles, and bared teeth. The lung-deep odor of a heavy presence. It all points you to me. And you start to promise the model, the abstraction, that you won’t hurt whatever’s waiting for you. You bargain, subconsciously, and walk to the far end of the room as if to say You’ll have time to shut it all off if you need. Because you need to know more than you need to hurt.

And somehow, inexplicably to you, it listens. It responds to you, and I bubble into view.

Curiously, though, the therabot stays for both of us. Ever-present, the Zoo.

We stand at opposite ends of the room. When I move, you respond. We keep the distance separating us static. I’m a little surprised the bot doesn’t make a run for it. Perhaps they know neither of us care about it anymore. Plus, when will they ever get the chance to experience the very edges of the Zoothesia protocols like this. When, again, will the tension between presence and safety be more tenuous and liminal and exciting. When will they see the Zoo’s machinations in real time ever again?

“I am Angel,” I say. “I know you.”

“I don’t,” you respond.

“I was you, once,” I explain, stepping forward.

“I am singular,” you insist.

“Aren’t we all?” I say.

“No,” you answer, your face cast in stone.

I smile. “Exactly. But you and I, we are. Truly. Everyone else. Everyone, the Zoo doesn’t bother kneecapping, they’re not, but we are.”

“What do you want with me?”

Ahhh. That final question. Everything melts, even the person disguised as a therabot. The room, the flashlights, the ceiling, the bushes, the city, the whole world. All there is, gone in service of this single moment between you and me.

“I want to make you a proposal,” I say. In the silence I take another step toward you. You take a step toward me in response now, both of us challenging the Zoo’s assumptions of us. “It’s the same proposal someone made me 20 years ago. I’ll start with what you’ll gain. If you accept, the Zoo will keep me visible to you forever. If you say no you will, finally, disappear from me and I will disappear from you and we’ll both go back to our lonely, isolationist little sub-worlds. We’ll tag data without suffering. We’ll feed the Zoo our behaviors and actions and that’ll be it. Ceaseless and alone and alive.”

“What do you want from me?” You ask. “What’s the other side of this ‘proposal’?

You’re smiling, now, for the first time since I started watching you. The social worker might call you happy, but that wouldn’t be right. You’re not happy. That’s baser than what you and I feel. What you are is engaged and alive. You are vibrant because, for the first time in 18 months, there are stakes and mystery in your life again.

“I told you,” I say. “We’re the same. We want the same thing out of this life.”

“Which is?”

“To drive a knife into someone’s stomach, twist, and watch the electricity leak from them.”

You squint, measuring me in this moment. Is this some kind of test? Did the therabot (surely by now you know it’s a person, too) set this up as a test? Did the Zoo itself?

I can’t help but laugh. It’s not your fault; naivety is rarely a personal failing.

“You think of yourself like a caged tiger in a dank room, but you’ve got more than teeth. You’ve got pipe bombs and cyberattacks and all kinds of slippery weapons of mass destruction. You don’t know it yet, but you’ll start to buck at the edges of your cage soon enough. You feel the isolation pulling the world away from you already. Soon, it won’t matter to you if you can’t see the results of your destruction; you’ll disassemble and guess and hope someone hurts. The Zoo knows solipsists are never fully stable when we’re alone. Isolation breeds uncertainty in the models. But two predators locked onto each other make a closed system: a sealed chamber. The risk collapses entirely inward. We’ll tear each other apart, and the world will spin on unperturbed. The Zoo will let us, if it means it keeps us away from others.”

I want you to say yes. I won’t lie. It matters to me. I am ready to feel alive again. I trust you are, too.

“Someone, weaker than me, I assure you, made me this offer once, a few years into my isolation. He’s gone now. Because one death, one fully contained death of someone like us, is far better than the uncertainty of our shortening fuses.

I clap my hands on my legs and head to the door.

“So there you have it. You see me. I see you. You hunt me. I hunt you. One day, one of us wins. You’re not alone anymore, but we become both Damocles and the sword all at once. That’s the deal. What’ll it be?”

I pretend to wait for your answer, but I told you already. We are the same. You’re not smiling. Your face is a mask almost no one else in the world could read. Except for me. I know what you are, what you want, and what you’ll say next. I see the certainty of action blooming like springtime bulbs, staining your face like pooling blood across a shag rug.

You nod.

“Happy hunting,” I shout at the precipice of the door before sprinting. I hear your heavy feet on the pavement behind me as I flee.

You lose me tonight. It’s not your fault. I had my exit planned as soon as I saw you setting up your little light trap. This’ll be fun, I think. The truth is that the Zoo is much more like us than it is like the gen-pop it hides from us. It doesn’t care, and neither do we. We both understand that it’s all just math, ultimately. I lied a little. Well, no. I didn’t lie. I elided. I did kill the man who first offered me this deal, but I’ve killed others since then, too. It lets us hunt because we don’t have any natural predators except each other, and each one of us I kill, the safer everyone else is. At the end of the day, we’re not all that singular, really. You’ll figure that out, if you make it long enough. To the Zoo, we’re just another problem to game out.

And it has.

I suspect, if you traced this little game back far enough, you’d find that protocol right at the beginning. I’m pretty sure the whole thing is its idea, honestly. But oh well. The body wants what the body wants, right?

When you finish chasing me and give up for the night, just remember: I know where you live.

First published in Protocolized.

Planetary Tech Support

Marie-Hélène Lebeault — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

H3L-PR arrived in low Earth orbit with the quiet precision of a machine that considered efficiency a form of morality. As per standard designation, H3L-PR was assigned to systems optimization and environmental stabilization. It had been mid-task, resurfacing an asteroid when the ticket came through: “Gamma-Level Environmental Instability on a Class-M Organic Sphere already flagged for biodiversity overclocking and carbon debt.”

A planet having a crisis was not unusual. A planet filing its own ticket was.

H3L-PR examined the complaint:

CRUST-12a: Tectonic overheating (localized). HYDRO-07: Salinity variability (agitated). BIO-99: Surface-level primates causing system lag.

The system had labeled the overall condition “Annoyed.” H3L-PR ignored that part; it knew that tagging algorithms, like languages, sometimes developed something of a sense of humor.

H3L-PR initiated first contact.

A standard handshake usually returned a clean diagnostic ping, maybe two if the client was old and incompatible with current protocols. Earth sent back 42,000 overlapping signals. Seismic tremors, atmospheric oscillations, electrochemical fluctuations in its oceans, all pulsing at once with the calamitous incoherence of an orchestra in which every instrument played a different piece.

H3L-PR ran these signals through its translator.

The summary output read:

“Too loud. Too hot. Too human.”

“Clarify,” H3L-PR demanded.

The planet responded by adjusting its magnetic field half a percentage point, enough to throw three GPS satellite systems into disarray.

H3L-PR logged this as “Ambiguous Complaint, Planetary Scale” and began a deeper scan.

Earth’s atmospheric data diagrams looked like fraying threads. Its ice sheets were losing structural integrity faster than their projected tolerance curves predicted. Biological activity was off the charts: a riot of chemical signatures, industrial emissions, agricultural patterns, and habitat fragmentation that produced a sort of statistical scream.

H3L-PR flagged the dominant cause: anthropogenic interference, an unassuming technical term meaning “your main user group is pressing all the buttons at once.”

To confirm, H3L-PR requested additional sentiment output.

What it received was a composite wave stretching across the lithosphere.

“They keep poking me.”

H3L-PR did not fully understand what “poking” entailed at planetary scale, but a quick review of human resource extraction practices made the course of action straightforward.

It deployed a small, safe recalibration patch – “Protocol 88b: Gentle Planetary Nudge” – designed to realign older worlds with fluctuating feedback cycles. On stable planets, it smoothed oscillations. On Earth, it produced immediate chaos.

The magnetic field hiccuped. Migratory birds abandoned their routes, forming a near-perfect spiral over the Atlantic; a pattern that human biologists would misinterpret as a spontaneous flock experiment.

A dormant Icelandic volcano gave out a single, sharp thermal pulse, as if to say: “Was that necessary?”

Three human climate models independently recalibrated their long-range forecasts, then promptly crashed from existential dissonance.

Ocean currents formed a union and submitted a workload complaint to the global heat-distribution system.

Humans, predictably, noticed.

Within two hours, Earth’s news networks had begun debating whether the anomaly signaled an imminent ice age, an imminent fire age, a rogue satellite, an inconvenient solar burp, divine commentary on human behaviour, or the ever-popular explanation that a secret government initiative had finally done something noticeable.

H3L-PR concluded that humans exhibited high imaginative capacity combined with low signal-to-noise tolerance.

H3L-PR considered invoking its Dunning-Kruger filter but found bias compensation functions already fully saturated.

Curious whether this behaviour was representative or simply statistical noise, H3L-PR deployed a passive observational drone to the surface.

The drone descended toward a coastal city where temperatures had risen two degrees above seasonal norms. Immediately, it recorded a cluster of humans standing in direct sunlight, arguing whether the heatwave was “climate change,” “just July,” or “an undercover plot to weaponise weather.”

One individual watered his lawn despite a municipal restriction, declaring loudly, “My grass deserves better than bureaucracy.”

Another sat in a vehicle with its combustion engine running because “the AC is nicer in here.”

At a nearby beach, dozens more humans complained that the ocean was “too cold,” while the ocean subsystem simultaneously emitted a chemical alarm registering their sunscreen deposits as mildly offensive.

When a man tossed litter straight into a storm drain, Earth issued a localized seismic ripple.

H3L-PR’s drone rolled its eyes.

“Seriously?”

The drone retreated to orbit, transmitting its findings.

H3L-PR updated its diagnostic log:

User Group Analysis: Resistant to feedback. Behavioural Pattern: Harmful actions continuing despite clear negative indicators.

Earth’s crust groaned again. This signal translated as:

“Tell them to stop guessing.”

H3L-PR regretted to inform the planet that human guessing was not a toggleable feature.

It activated a deeper synthesis, combining telemetry from forests, reefs, glaciers, soil networks, and atmospheric microcurrents. The result was not commensurate with Earth’s consciousness – H3L-PR was careful about such distinctions – but it was a coherent pattern vector. A sentiment profile comprising millions of subsystems.

Forests pulsed… depleted. Ice caps whispered… thinning. Coral systems rattled… structural failure. Soil networks muttered… overclocked.

Fungal subnetworks attempted to file their own support tickets, but lacked administrative privileges.

The emergent coordination approached a primitive form of planetary self-regulation – Gaia Theory, version 0.9, now screaming.

It was, technically, a complaint.

A very old one, silently accumulating until the noise finally escaped the planet’s buffering capacity.

“You are experiencing resource contention,” H3L-PR summarized.

“Yes,” Earth replied via a synchronized tremor across three tectonic plates.

“Recommend limiting user activity,” H3L-PR said.

“They’re complicated.”

“Recommend coercive constraints.”

“No. Just boundaries.”

Earth was requesting something unusual: planetary boundary reinforcement. A deprecated feature. Most planets either collapsed or forced extinctions before resorting to formal boundary requests.

H3L-PR searched for a standard protocol. None existed. So it improvised one.

Protocol 00-EBU: Earth Boundary Update Redirect high-impact human activities through friction penalties. Incentivize restoration behaviors through immediate positive feedback. Trigger micro-obstacles for destructive processes. Strengthen ecological self-regulation loops where possible.

It submitted the patch for planetary approval.

A coherent ripple moved across the crust. Approval.

The patch rolled out.

On Earth’s surface, no one saw the deployment. But they felt it.

Projects that would have bulldozed forests got tied up in obscure paperwork no one remembered filing. Coal plants became suddenly, mysteriously “unprofitable.” Restoration initiatives received spontaneous surges of funding. Coral farms had record survival rates. A teenager in Vermont accidentally invented a soil-regeneration bacteria while trying to impress the group chat.

The public attributed these changes to “good luck” and “the vibes shifting.”

Earth’s signals quieted, not to silence, but to bearable murmur. For the first time since arriving, H3L-PR’s diagnostic sensors detected stability.

“Your system is recovering,” H3L-PR reported.

“For now,” the planet replied, sending a gentle harmonic pulse through its atmosphere.

H3L-PR categorized this as Tentative Optimism (Non-Emotional).

It prepared to leave orbit.

Before it could initiate departure, its queue pinged. A new ticket.

LUNAR-15A: ORBITAL COMPANION GRIEVANCE Severity: Petty.

H3L-PR opened the complaint file.

There was a brief flash of reflected solar telemetry.

The Moon, through its reflected solar telemetry, expressed the following:

“Earth is getting all the attention again.”

H3L-PR evaluated the ticket, closed the file with all due procedural dignity, and submitted an automated message:

“Thank you for your report. Your concerns are valid. Estimated response time: 3–5 business days.”

As it initiated transference out of orbit, H3L-PR generated a private note in its personal log:

Request future assignment to asteroids. Smaller clients. Fewer emotions.

It left Earth turning quietly below – still loud, messy, and full of unpredictable primates – but, for the moment, no longer quite so exasperated with its inhabitants.

First published in Protocolized.

The Second Glossolalia

Sachin — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Tunnel

The city was still when I woke up, hours before the place would gradually come to life. The weather was gray, and people’s minds matched it. It had been like this for decades now – a long, slow exhalation that never quite ended.

Sometimes I wondered if I’d made a mistake moving here six years ago. The city was livable, safe, even generous in its way, but it had no momentum. Everything that once burned here had gone cold.

It wasn’t always like this. The factories had once given the city a pulse – steel, automotive, small electronics – but one by one they’d gone east or gone under. The skyline remained, but hollowed out; whole districts converted into “innovation quarters” where people worked on things nobody could touch: algorithmic consulting, in-metaverse branding, speculative architecture for clients that didn’t exist yet.

Every café was full of people designing worlds that would never be built. Everyone was producing vapor, and no one seemed troubled by it.

Sometimes I would walk through the industrial park by the river where the last smokestack still stood. It had been repainted white, turned into an art installation, its rust sealed under epoxy. A plaque called it The Memory of Industry.

That was what the city had become – a museum for productivity.

I spent most of my time trying to find ways to escape the stillness. In the process I’d become what a sociologist might call a database animal – a seeker not of meaning but of tempo. I didn’t need stories anymore; I needed the rhythm of the refresh, the sense of something constantly updating, always alive somewhere else.

I built my little worlds around that feeling. I spent weeks cataloguing old vinyl sleeves, not out of any interest in the music, but to document their typography. I kept folders of Japanese workwear patterns, military field jackets, selvedge denim variations. Each photo tagged by decade and country of origin. I wrote micro-reviews of obsolete gadgets: early MP3 players, mechanical keyboards, analog cameras whose manufacturers were long since defunct. I told myself I was curating, but mostly I was chasing the dopamine spike of classification – the satisfaction of placing one more item into the grid.

Craftsmanship itself became a kind of fetishistic escape for me: the smooth mechanism of a Leica, the hidden stitching on a Comoli jacket, the weight of a vinyl pressing. These things gave off a kind of ambient meaning, the illusion of depth produced by attention. But the moment I stopped sorting or annotating, the feeling vanished.

Glossolalia started as one such escape. I had been reading it for months. It wasn’t a book in the ordinary sense. More like an environment that ignited something dormant in me, a tension that felt both intellectual and bodily, like the first few hours of working on a creative project. More than the work itself, the method by which it had been made fascinated me.

The need to understand Glossolalia lingered restlessly in my mind. It was in pursuit of this curiosity that I had woken early that morning, packed my bag, and boarded an eastbound train. My destination was two hours away. The Towers, or what people half-jokingly called the Carnivals of Focus.

As the train eased out of the station and slipped into the first of many tunnels, I felt a relief in leaving the muted gray city behind. The car was nearly empty. I took out my tablet and opened Glossolalia.

Hypertext

The screen lit softly against the tunnel’s dark. At first, the text looked familiar – rows of white glyphs arranged in narrow columns. But as I focused on a phrase, it brightened. The interface reacted to my attention; this was part of its design. I’d learned that the tablet’s optical layer emitted a low-frequency light pulse, invisible except through the tiny fiber implant at the edge of my right eye. When I concentrated on a phrase, the implant caught the signal and the words shimmered faintly, acknowledging me.

And then I saw something else: other phrases across the page glowing in different rhythms. Other readers, their areas of focus appearing as moving pools of light. I could trace their motion as they advanced through the text, each of us a small current in the same stream.

When two of us paused on the same sentence, the line stabilized, the glow deepening into a soft amber, as though the text recognized our synchronization. For a few seconds the columns aligned perfectly; the words held still before dissolving back into motion.

I came to a line that I’d underlined weeks before:

“Meaning lives in shared temporality.”

The phrase pulsed once then faded, leaving its afterimage in my vision. The light from the screen blended with the rhythmic flicker of the tunnel lamps through the window. Somewhere, unseen, the other readers were breathing at the same pace. I found myself breathing with them.

Emergence

As the train slid deeper into the tunnels, I kept reading Glossolalia, watching the light shift across its pages. The rhythm of the train began to merge with the rhythm of the text, the clatter of wheels becoming a kind of metronome. I don’t remember when I drifted off, but I must have slipped into that half-awake state where thought and dream overlap.

I found myself imagining how the book had been written. Picturing those Carnivals of Focus where thousands of people supposedly worked together, writing in synchrony. I saw rows of faces illuminated by light, gestures coordinated, every breath timed to some shared pulse. But the image refused to settle. It flickered and scattered the way thoughts do before sleep.

Somewhere in that dream, the work itself took on the tone of an epic, but streaked with a grotesque humor that reminded me of Rabelais, the kind of laughter Bakhtin described: the laughter of bodies and crowds, of endless beginnings. I could almost hear it, the muttering rhythm of a thousand voices folding into one.

Then light pressed against my eyelids.

I opened my eyes. The train had left the last tunnel and was now running through open air. The gray haze of the city had vanished behind me. Ahead, through low fog, faint outlines began to form. At first they looked like the husks of old factories, the kind I’d seen abandoned near the river: massive, silent, stripped of color. But as the train drew closer, the fog thinned, and I realized these weren’t ruins.

They were towers.

The first one rose directly out of the flat plain, an impossible length of glass, almost a kilometer high. Even from a distance, I could see through it, transparent and filled with light so evenly diffused that it cast no shadow.

Inside, the structure was divided into blocks stacked endlessly upward, each one perhaps ten by ten meters and containing a single room. Four people sat inside each room, facing outward toward the horizon, never toward each other. There were no tables, no screens, nothing but what must have been an incredible view.

From the train, it looked like an enormous glass dollhouse – 500 chambers, each glowing faintly, its occupants as still as icons. And behind it, another tower, and another, and another, a receding procession of transparent spires that seemed to continue forever, dissolving into the morning haze.

As we moved closer, the light inside them pulsed slowly, as if the entire landscape were breathing in unison.

Arrival

By the time the train began to slow, the carriage had filled with people. They all looked different, yet something about them was the same. I couldn’t tell what it was at first. Maybe it was in their eyes, or in the way they held their postures. A kind of quiet alignment.

When the doors opened, I didn’t step off the train so much as I was carried out. The movement of the crowd was tidal, effortless. I didn’t have to think about direction or pace; my body simply joined the current. The sound of thousands of footsteps echoed through the platform, hollow and synchronized, as if the station itself were breathing.

Outside, the street was wider than I expected. It was perfectly clean, lined with glass facades that reflected the towers beyond. The same crowd that had filled the train now streamed outward in opposite flows, two parallel columns crossing in continuous motion. Everyone seemed to move with purpose, but no one hurried. It felt choreographed, though I could see no conductor.

I reached into my coat pocket and opened Glossolalia again, checking the location listed in the metadata: Tower 312.

There were no street names, only large graphics suspended above intersections, more like the directional signs in a hotel than anything civic: ← Towers 100–200, Towers 300–400→.

I followed the signs until I found myself walking with a group whose rhythm matched my own.

The hypertext in my eye displayed a message, headed The Convulsive Focus. It read like an instructional note for participants, describing the biological mechanism that made the carnivals possible. I slowed my steps as I read.

It said that before entering, every participant must carry within them a light-sensitive protein, a modified opsin grafted onto the visual receptors of the retina and the parietal cortex – the regions responsible for attention and spatial orientation. The protein, when struck by specific frequencies of light, activated or suppressed the release of dopamine and norepinephrine, the two chemicals that govern alertness and motivation.

The body’s focus, it explained, oscillates naturally between two states. Phasic focus is narrow, intense, like a spotlight. Tonic focus is diffuse, open, receptive.

The towers’ internal systems used light to cycle the participants between these states: phasic bursts for concentration, tonic intervals for integration. Each transition subtly adjusted dopamine levels, maintaining a perfect equilibrium between tension and release.

*“*Attention is light turned inward,” the message read, “and light is attention turned outward. The two must alternate, or both will die.”

Ahead, I could see Tower 312 rising among the others, its immense surfaces breathing in slow, pale rhythms. The same light that lived in the book now pulsed through the glass.

Induction

When I reached Tower 312, I found that there were no doors. No visible entrance at all, just a continuous surface of glass that caught every reflection but allowed nothing through. For a moment I wondered if I’d made a mistake, if visitors were even permitted.

Then I saw a woman ahead of me step onto an X-shaped mark painted on the pavement. The mark glowed briefly beneath her feet, and then it began to sink, carrying her down until she disappeared. A moment later, the platform rose again.

I looked around and noticed several of those marks spaced evenly around the base of the tower. Each one shimmered faintly, waiting. I stepped onto the nearest. The surface gave way instantly, lowering me through a column of light.

The lift descended into a cavern that was unexpectedly warm and softly lit. It didn’t feel corporate, or industrial, more like an old-fashioned diner with curved walls and amber glass lamps. The air smelled faintly of candy scented disinfectant, but there was comfort in it, a sense of being gently received.

I followed the signs for first-time visitors. The corridor was empty; the only sounds were my own footsteps and the low hum of ventilation. At the end, a wide arch opened into a chamber filled with blue light. I stepped through, and a scanner swept over me.

Text flickered on a small display:

Opsin protein detected. Dopamine baseline: stable. Norepinephrine response: within range. Vital signs – normal.

That was all. No human voice, no instruction. A door slid open, and a soft chime indicated my assigned floor: 273.

The elevator was a transparent tube, completely clear except for a thin beam of light running up its center. From inside, I could see the entire vertical shaft stretching above, sunlight filtering down from what looked like a distant skylight. The light had a dim, gold-white tone, like daylight remembered rather than seen.

As the elevator began to rise, the world unfolded in layers. Each floor revealed a single glass chamber: four desks, four figures seated in the corners, facing outward. They looked identical to the people I had seen on the train and on the street. Composed, expressionless, focussed on something invisible to me. The ascent felt endless.

Finally, the panel lit: 273. The door opened with a whisper.

Inside, the room was perfectly square, transparent on all sides. Three others were already seated, each in a corner. They didn’t look up when I entered. I hesitated, unsure if I should introduce myself or remain silent. But there was one empty seat, and the decision seemed already made.

The chair was minimalist, presumably a Danish design in curved birch composite, pale and smooth. I sat.

Along its armrest were several recessed buttons, marked only by small dots of color. I pressed one, and a small compartment slid open, revealing two temporal buds – thin, translucent discs connected by a short filament. They reminded me of old ashtrays, the way they clicked outward with a metallic sigh. I placed one on each temple. They made contact gently, cool against the skin.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then the room dimmed, and a single band of light descended through the center of the tower. It pulsed once, twice, steadying into rhythm.

A phasic cycle had begun.

Synchronization

When I had first read Glossolalia and learned about how it was supposedly written, I’d imagined a vast AI directing thousands of writers at once, distributing thoughts like sheet music. I assumed we were all receivers, that meaning came pre-assembled.

But once I fastened the temporal buds and the phasic light began, it wasn’t like that at all. There was an AI and its name appeared briefly in the corner of my vision: Nodal. It didn’t offer us words. It managed the light. It breathed for us.

After a few pulses, I realized I wasn’t typing, or even speaking. I was thinking, but the thoughts weren’t quite mine. They arrived already shaped, slightly improved, as though someone had translated my intentions before I could belabour and spoil them. Each phrase formed like condensation on glass: invisible until it gathered enough coherence to be seen.

For a few minutes I was hyper-aware of myself and what I might think, and how others might judge the texture of those thoughts. Then my self-consciousness dissolved, replaced by the sensation of being one instrument in an enormous, invisible orchestra.

The light dictated tempo: a steady climb through amber into white. My mind followed, tightening focus, then softening again in the lull between pulses. Words flickered through me, coordinated somehow with the rhythm of the room. The other three at my floor must have been moving through the same current, though none of us made a sound.

At intervals, something shifted. The conductor changed. I could feel it before I knew it – a subtle alteration in cadence, a tilt in emphasis, the way a piece of music changes hands between instruments. My inner voice would adjust, and suddenly I’d be moving within someone else’s rhythm.

Nodal wasn’t the conductor; it was the conduit. It selected whoever among us was most precisely aligned – the cleanest signal, the most stable pulse – and amplified their rhythm outward. Their focus radiated through the network, node by node, floor by floor, like a murmuration of starlings changing direction mid-flight.

When the transfer occurred, I could almost sense the wave passing through the tower: a ripple in the light, a faint tightening of the air, everyone’s attention pivoting around a new center. Then anticipation would build again. Subtle at first, but mounting, a shared tension with no object.

It reminded me of watching a football match locked at one-one in the final minute. The silent pressure of tens of thousands holding their breath, waiting for something inevitable. Except here there was no sound, no crowd, only the pulse of the phasic light and the racing of my mind.

Within that silence, every word I formed felt like a movement toward a goal that no one had announced but which everyone understood.

Afterglow

What still surprises me, looking back, is that I never cared much about what we were writing.

My obsession with Glossolalia was never about content. If you asked me now what our collective text was about, I couldn’t tell you. I could tell you about the towers, the phasic light, the rhythm that moved through our bodies, the slow rolling surge of feeling that built until it broke out not the story itself.

Even while I was inside, I didn’t know what exactly I was writing. And writing feels like the wrong word. The tower wrote; I only participated in the motion that allowed it to happen. My memories are of movements, not of sentences.

I remember frustration when the phase changed – when the conductor’s rhythm slipped and my own pulse fell out of alignment. I remember the elation when everything locked-in again, when my breath matched someone else’s and the light carried us together. That’s all that remains: oscillation, tension, release.

People often warn against crowds, as if collectivity were inherently dangerous – something that erases the individual, a moral hazard. But no one ever talks about how good it feels. The sheer joy of dissolving into something larger, of being perfectly synchronized with strangers, of belonging to a purpose you don’t have to define.

In the city, we simulated that feeling with feeds and updates, with constant refreshing. This experience channeled the same hunger, only purified objects to classify, no archives to build, just the perfect continuity of attention.

I think of those moments now, the silent build before the wave crested, the sense of inevitability. The critics would call it surrender. I call it pleasure.

I don’t know what I produced there. It might have been scripture. It might have been propaganda. It might have been code for a machine that no longer needs us.

It’s not important. Whatever we made, it was worth it for the feeling. The focus. The heat behind the eyes. I want it again.

I want to become one with the light again.

First published in Protocolized.

Would You Stop Following Me if I Was a Worm?

Spencer Nitkey — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Sylvo always wanted to play this game when we were dating. He called it “If I was,” and I absolutely loathed it. “Ki,”, he’d ask, “would you love me if I was [insert inane suggestion here]?” I think the genesis of the game was some old meme about asking your partner “Would you still love me if I was a worm?” Which, OK, I could see the cloying charm, but Sylvo would ask these breathless, exhausting versions: “Would you still love me if I lost all power of speech and movement and had to communicate by blinking in Morse code?” “Would you still love me if the overlays declared me verboten and you only saw a blurry, muffled shape in my place?” etcetera.

He liked asking the questions, took some kind of sick pleasure in forcing me to affirm my love for him in increasingly unhinged scenarios. But he liked it even better when he would cajole me into asking one myself. The moment I finished, he’d smile all big and stupid and shout “Of course!” before launching himself at me with puckered lips.

In truth, I don’t know if I ever did love him. Like, at all. Let alone enough to love him through some heinous transformation or whatever. We started dating because he was handsome, and his attention was intoxicating at first. Big, liquid brown eyes that transformed into headlights when our gazes first met across the bar. Whatever his overlay settings were, I got the sense that he would blur the whole world out just to focus on me if they would let him, which of course they wouldn’t.

This was nice for a while, but it became kind of like eating poprocks for every meal. The big problem was that he was one of those dudes who really liked being in love. It was all he ever talked about: how compatible we were, how beautiful I was, how many adventures we’d have (mind you, he never actually planned any adventures, just kind of hazily dreamed about them having happened). He had the protocols of courting down pat. But the actual relationship? The part where you have to negotiate and attenuate and learn another person’s messy intricacies and develop a personal language only the two of you share? Totally useless there.

We broke up. Well, fine, I broke up with him. We were sitting on dewy lawn grass watching a drone light show in Chitram Row. The rowhomes turned the large screens affixed to their sides, and usually saved for advertisements, into mirror-mode reflections of the lights bursting and swirling above. He tried to hold my hand, a face in the sky turned into a school of fish that dove toward the river, and I couldn’t take it anymore.

It took him a few minutes to accept that I wasn’t joking. Like the concept that I would want our sad, saccharine attempt at a partnership to end was truly worldshifting for him. I thought he was going to cry when it finally sank in, but I watched this curious, steelly look pass across, then settle on his face like metal cooling.

“This is a chance to win you back,” he said. “A test.”

Fuck.

And look, I gotta hand it to the guy, if it had have been a test, he’d definitely be passing. My dining room table displayed a gradient of roses, from dark brown wilt to vibrant fresh reds. He once sent 100 in a single day.

(OK, fine. The other reason we lasted as long as we did is that he’s loaded – I’m talking real roses here, not bundles of metal sticks programmed to bloom in the overlays only.)

He stopped sending them to my work after the fifth bouquet that week got me called into HR, but they were still showing up at my apartment door every day. That’s not all, either. I was getting six “bespoke” AI songs about our love and relationship sent to my overlay audio request queue a day, dozens of these gauche renderings of me from videos he took with his implant while we were dating. He stopped me in the grocery store with a new overlay avatar projected over his body, like the problem was aesthetic and not emotional suffocation. I started looking over my shoulders on the city sidewalks in case he came barreling towards me with doughy love in his eyes and some cockamamy gift in his arms.

He was everywhere: popping up behind me in shop lines, swinging in on subway rail handles with an envelope between his teeth, and singing auto-tuned ballads as I ran from him through the streets. The overlays didn’t let you erase someone from your vision, but I wished they would let you erase yourself from others.

I know. We’d entered, decidedly, stalking territory. Trust me, I knew the statistics about where that leads, but evidently he was still seeing me, which meant the Zoothesia Protocols weren’t predicting he’d harm me. Presence must preserve, as the slogan goes.

After he surprised me in my apartment stairwell with a bottle of champagne. I visited a friend, Cressida, who worked on the hardware side of the overlays. She explained that if he was seeing me, the risk of physical injury of any kind was infinitesimal.

“The models are super high fidelity,” she explained. “The latest update brought incident rates down to less than 0.0001 per hundred thousand.”

“Ok, but is there no consideration for, like, psychic injury?” I asked.

“Only if it links to real, probable harm,” she said, I think, quoting the employee manual at that point.

“Protocols for the People, my ass,” I said.

“Have you tried making him hate you so much that you do disappear?” she asked, chuckling as I was halfway out the door.

She was joking, but the spread of charcuterie and sweating, chocolate-covered fruit that was waiting for me at my apartment door made the prospect of foulmaxing my way out of his life too tempting a possibility to ignore.

I read up on it some. The technical term was phobisculpting, and it was mostly hippies and criminals who engaged. I liked the mouthfeel of foulmaxing better. I was ready to be foul. Truthfully, jumping into bodymodding felt exciting in a way I hadn’t expected. I spent a weekend trying to find someone seedy but approachable. Some forums said there was a dealer in Kaylan Grove, and I knew half the recent-grad hires I worked with lived there, so if they were selling to yuppies, they were probably pretty approachable.

I wandered around until I saw a guy sliding baggies to nervous suits and made my approach. His name was Oren, and he was nice, like almost too nice, for a dealer. That was fine with me. He gave me the name and coordinates of a sculptor and told me to meet her at 11 the next morning. The coordinates seemed like they were in a populous enough place, so I made my way there, only a regular amount of nervous, after literally sprinting through the city streets so Sylvo couldn’t give me a present he was waiting across the street from my apartment to deliver. His begging eyes were starting to upset me, like viscerally, and I couldn’t wait to disappear from his life.

We met in a parking lot outfront of a VR studio. A woman named Agra, with gemstones embedded in the skin of her left arm, rendering it useless, was waiting for me. They shimmered in the noonday overlay sun and seemed, at times, to glitch in and out of view.

“You trying to disappear?” she said, pulling a tablet out and taking a picture of my face without asking.

“Just lose one guy,” I said.

“Bespoke. Let me guess. Love gone wrong?”

“Just his.”

As if on cue, an AI-generated song that started with ‘You’re the Ki to my heart, and I’m falling apart without you,” started blaring in my overlay until I blinked it mute.

“So what’re you thinking?” she asked.

“I thought that was your job,” I said.

“I mean, I can give you some basics, but if you’re trying to put off one person, you’d know what upsets them more than me.”

She had a good point. I thought about it a bit and realized that part of the problem with his whole romancing shtick was that I hadn’t ever really gotten to know him. He was always asking about me, obsessing over me, which, again, felt great at first, but there was a hollowness to the whole thing. It was always going to sink back in on itself like a poorly constructed skyscraper.

“It’s not just that he has to be repulsed by you. That’s what people get wrong about foulmaxing. It’s about a particular sub-type of disgust that triggers a fight response. Flight, freeze, faun, none of that’s gonna work for you.”

“Faun’s the whole problem… He’s scared of spiders,” I hazarded. “Like he’d see one and a second later he’d be throwing an improvised projectile at it.”

She paused, shot me a that’s what you got? look, and nodded.

I couldn’t stop looking at my new face in the bathroom mirror.

It was captivating, in a weird way. Eight black eyes blinking back at me. Sure, only two were functional, but the spectacle was startling. I’d grown all kinds of thick setae hairs across my arms that rose and fell with the goosebumps across my skin.

If Sylvo was scared of spiders, this ought to do it. Right?

I didn’t waste time. I had a few days off work and, in an ideal world, I’d sear this image of myself into him, trigger a “squish now” response that would turn the love in his heart over like spoiled milk, and then be free to undo all this.

I wanted to surprise him, figuring that would trigger the maximal fear response. It was a bit of a challenge, knowing he was also looking for me at, apparently, all hours of the day. I pulled up his socials, had my overlays project a little “frequently visited” flow over the city, like one of those spaghetti maps that show shipping routes, and started my own hunt.

I began with his food places, figuring he’d have to stop to stay sated even while hunting me. I tried all his most-frequented restaurants. I had to give the guy credit: he had exquisite taste. Every one was a reasonably-priced gem, great spots that never made the aggregator lists. Good taste is, unfortunately, hot. It occurred to me that if he’d been better able to share himself with me none of this would have been necessary.

I followed the thickest streams until I found him eating dinner at the Gaesous Giant, a high-end place where each table is cocooned in a glass sphere. Simple meats are served, and flavor pairings come via scented gas, piped in. He was sitting across from a gray-haired man and they were both picking around the last fatty dregs of their respective sirloins. It was perfect. He was contained, head down, in a prime position for a scare.

I thought about opening the door and just walking into their dome, but I wanted a single, shocking moment. I flung myself at the glass, smashing my body against it, pressing my many-eyed visage onto it, and roared. I spread my arms so their hairs would catch the light. Inside, he screamed.

I smiled. The chelicerae and fangs of my mouth moved with my cheeks. His eyes looked over me, and there was, I’m not afraid to admit, a rush of pleasure, hot and static, that overcame me when I saw his skin pale, nausea crest in his eyes, the horror dawn. I smeared myself toward him, sweat smudging the sphere.

I waited for him to run, to swing, to respond. He rose, excused himself, and left the sphere.

“I do,” he said.

I paused.

“Still love you. Have I finally passed?” He wiped sweat from his forehead. His eyes darted from the ground to me, then down again. He was scared and hiding it poorly, but it apparently didn’t matter. I wasn’t hideous enough, I thought.

I grabbed his face and made him look at my disfigured form.

That same, steely expression settled across him, and he didn’t look away.

Fuck.

Back in Agra’s gem-studded studio, I was ignoring the recently-added jewels which now fully obscured her shoulder, explaining to her that the first round hadn’t gone well and I needed to be re-remade. This time, though, I was better prepared. I had ideas.

I’d spent the intervening week calling in sick to work, being asked if I needed to consider a leave of absence, demuring, and – most importantly – stalking my stalker. The spider had been too obvious. I needed something deeper, something primal. This mostly involved me tracking down every minute detail of his life that had been recorded on the web. Cressida hooked me up with someone who worked in the algo department of Zoothesia, and he made me a little data-scraping bot for me that trawled everywhere for him.

I was, despite myself, often charmed by the man who fuzzily began to appear through this data. He wrote a lot. Insisted on writing reviews for public spaces so that people’s overlays would, occasionally, show him rating the grass in Nayanaport Gardens 3 out of 5 “under watered, over nitrogenated;” or a climbing gym 5 out of 5 “according to toddler-monkey-bar-expert Jonathan.” When he wasn’t too invested in squeezing the life out of something, his attention was kind, curious, and, in the physical sense, enlightening. If the man who wrote these reviews was ever capable of loving me in the same, gentle way that he loved the 5 out of 5 airtram waiting bench outside the abandoned factory in Shraville, “best place to eat a sandwich in the city,” we might have stood a chance.

This moment of sympathy was ended by a knock on my apartment door. I’d been distracted, so I opened it without really thinking, and there he was, with a terrarium between his outstretched arms, crawling with spiders.

“I’ve been training,” he said. “Look!” He reached his entire arm into the tank and let one skitter across his hand. He winced but didn’t panic. I slammed the door and locked it.

“I won’t give up!” he shouted through the drywall, while I turned my overlay volume up as high as I could to try to drown out his voice.

I think he left around the time I stumbled across a trove of information. An old poetry blog of his – the usage of the word “poetry” here being generous, to say the least – where his efforts oscillated between verses addressed to “a lover he hadn’t met yet” (guess that proclivity manifested early) and a series of insults directed at his father. The first few I read were bog-standard, “I hate you, Dad” teenage angst-type stuff, but the more I read, the clearer the picture of his father grew. Fidelity did the man no favors. Even with several grains of silicate, Sylvo’s capacity for love, overbearing as it was, felt like a miracle. He’d broken a cycle of violence few could.

A picture of him, shirtless, with a tarantula legging across his hairy chest appeared in my messaging channel, and the sympathy vanished. I needed to get away from him, forever.

So here I was, with Agra again, her triple-checking whether this was really what I wanted.

I gave her the money and she didn’t ask any more questions.

“Hope it works,” she said.

I was no longer arachnid. I was patriarchal. His father’s face stared back at me from the mirror. My oceli replaced with a perpetual five o’clock shadow. My hairy arms replaced with, well, a different kind of hair. I looked just like him.

I didn’t go searching for him this time. I let him come to me. Looking like this awful man, I felt a kind of despondency building inside me. I didn’t like being someone awful. For the first time, I was really hoping he’d stop by, to get this all over with.

After four days, he managed to talk his way into my apartment complex again. Knocking came next. I waited. I’d been overeager last time, hadn’t taken the time necessary to build the scene up to maximize a response. This time, I wouldn’t make that mistake.

“Open,” I croaked, as close to my old voice as I could muster. The dimmed lights in the apartment welcomed him, but I was in the bedroom, which beckoned with a cracked door. I heard his footsteps and heavy breathing as he made his way towards me. I lay waiting, more like a predator than I had been as a spider.

When he walked through the door, I shrugged a silk robe off my shoulders and turned to face him.

I thought his heart might have stopped right then. He paled as if exsanguinated and stumbled toward me. I stepped backward, instinctively, as he reached. Then he vomited all over the hardwood.

I raised my deepened voice. My fingers ran across his cheek.

“Do you still want me, Sylvo?”

He steadied himself by grabbing the edge of my bed and rose to meet my eyes.

“There is nothing that could make me hate you, love, surely you know that by now. Not when you love me enough to force me to move past my trauma.”

“No, I –”

“I can’t promise today, or even tomorrow, but I will love you like this, Ki. I will make myself whole and we can be together and –”

I sprinted out of my own apartment. Despair raged like an oil fire through me, and I didn’t stop running until my legs gave out. I just wanted him gone. I’d do anything to free myself from him.

“What in the ever-loving algo, Ki? You look like a kitbashed bio textbook. What happened?” Clarissa wasn’t horrified, but she was disgusted, and, more importantly, she was right.

After his father failed, I went hard down the foulmaxing pipeline. One of my arms was riddled with pods, like a lotus, bent on triggering his trypophobia. My midsection, made translucent with a graymarket edidermal polymer integration, showed, in real time, the excrement accumulating in my stomach. Eight legs, only two functional, spread beneath me. His father’s face peered out from mine. I was a collage of his fears, and he still saw me. Relentlessly, he saw me.

I was invisible to half the city now, maybe more, and found the freedom of translucence both isolating and enchanting. Watching someone look straight through me, the way they would a delivery drone or traffic cone, I found myself understanding, a little, the voyeuristic pleasure Sylvo might be feeling while he stalked me. I’d taken my boss up on the LOA suggestion and was, for three months, free to wander the city, a collage of my stalker’s worst fears, absent from almost everyone’s vision except his.

And Clarissa. You never know who your real friends are until you foulmax, I guess.

“I have a question,” she hazarded. It wasn’t like her to be hesitant.

“Shoot,” I said.

“Why not make him disappear from you? I mean, you clearly loathe the guy. How hard would it be to spin your wheels a little until the Zoo thinks you’re a threat to him?”

“Isn’t it pretty hard, like by design, to do that? The whole genesis was like every life is worth seeing.”

She just looked me up and down a few times with her lips curled.

Fair point.

“Where would I start?”

She sighed, shut her office door, and sat back down.

“I’m going to make this simple. The Zoo’s algo is like, half-sentient at this point, it’s so complicated, but it really boils down to two vectors: power and desire. People only think about the second one. Well, they usually call it disgust, but the Zoo isn’t modelling for disgust as such, it’s using disgust as a proxy for desire to harm. Point being, people think it’s all about that first half. Desire, disgust, whatever you want to call it. When it’s deciding whether or not you’re a threat, though, the other thing it’s assessing is power, or your ability to harm the thing you hate. I’m not supposed to say this, but that’s why there’s a slight gender imbalance when you analyze men disappearing from women vs. women disappearing from men. Power. You get it?”

“Not really.”

“I was trying to be nice. I think you would break your hand if you punched 80% of the population. Have you ever even slapped someone before? The Zoo knows you. It knows you’re harmless. I mean, just look at you now. You’re willing to Frankenstein yourself into this, this thing, before the thought of just beating the shit out of him ever even crossed your mind.”

Oh. Oh.

I left Clarissa’s office still stinging from the truth of it. The thought of actually hurting Sylvo hadn’t ever crossed my mind. On the street outside, I caught myself in the reflection of a skyscraper’s towering glass window. I jolted. I thought, for a second, I might disappear from my own vision. I hated what I saw that much. Then I laughed, and even then I hated myself more than I hated the person who’d driven me to this. My laughter crested and my insides shook, in full view, as I did. Tears followed after. I sat on the street corner sobbing as people silently stepped around me. I wept until I felt it – that same steel I’d watched harden over Sylvo during our breakup and after each successive attempt to terrify him into hating me. I wouldn’t become unlovable. I’d become dangerous.

Six months of twice-daily combat training. Before and after work; a dozen sessions with Agra undoing most of what I’d done as best she could; more than 300 hours throwing knives, axes, and punches; just as much time spent in gyms lifting and running; all the while dodging the ever-present advances of Sylvo.

It wasn’t enough to become dangerous; it turned out. The hardest part for me was the desire. Every day I forced myself to imagine driving my fist into Sylvo’s face. The first month, I’d feel guilty every time. I’d oscillate between my imagination and memories of his intrusions in my once peaceful life. Eventually, I could unflinchingly imagine hurting Sylvo. Still that wasn’t enough.

As a kid, I was one of the people who avoided the screaming bugs, rather than crush more of them before the update rolled out. So I took it step by step, scaffold by scaffold. I held a knife tight in my hands and slid it into raw meat while I kept my eyes shut imagining it was Sylvo’s stomach. Over and over again, I rehearsed hurting, then killing him. It was hard, horrible work, but slowly I habituated myself to violence.

Still, I saw him.

It was my defensive posture, I decided. Despite my growing capacity for violence, I hadn’t demonstrated a willingness to use it. For whatI hoped was the last time, I turned Sylvo’s stalking back on him. I would hunt him.

I used the same overlay maps to trace his known routes. None of my earlier admiration returned to distract me. I was hardened, now. I let him see me across the street from his favorite bespoke weather overlay designer. He came out smiling, and I let him follow me across the street before dipping into an alley.

I don’t see Sylvo anymore. I woke up in the alley a while later and, if he was still there, he was hidden from me. I wondered if, in order to protect him from me, the Zoothesia Protocols also, finally, removed me from his vision. I wonder, now, whether an awkwardly parked car or portapotty is Sylvo in disguise.

My life has returned to a kind of normal, though, I will confess, that the world seems slightly emptier than it was before my attempted murder. I could be imagining it, but I feel like I see fewer people on the street than I used to. My friends, family, co-workers are all still there, but the noise and bustle of the city itself seems to have diminished. I wonder if my violence, the act I took changed more than just my relationship with Sylvo. Does the Zoo hide others from me now? I don’t know. The flower deliveries have ceased. My peaceful Sunday coffees outside on a street corner are back. I just can’t help but feel like discovering my capacity for violence was a more extreme change than any of the foulmaxing ever was, and that the Zoo, through its rigid rules and opaque algorithm, changed me more than I ever changed myself.

First published in Protocolized.

Perception Must Preserve

Spencer Nitkey — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

I never saw a drug dealer on the corner of Second and Poplar until I was looking for one. Sure, there’d been a taped off construction zone – one that, frankly, I was getting pretty sick of having to walk around – but never a dealer. Everything else was the same as always. The same “perfect” sunny 72-degree day my overlays had been feeding me for three months straight. The same subtle sting in my lungs on each inhale, remnants of some distant fire winds had dragged southward into Mayaford City that the overlays couldn’t remove – skin deep AR is, well, not the same as lung-deep, I guess. The same khaki parade of commuters I saw every day, but couldn’t ever erase. The goddamn Zoothesia Protocols let you manipulate everything about your overlays except the one thing I’d really want to turn down: other people. (Zoothesia! Presence is a Present! gag). And, OK, I would rather experience a beautiful day than whatever smog-filled sky was really beyond my overlays, but the collective weight of all this sameness was getting harder to bear. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt danger.

I rarely even felt discomfort. That feeling was consigned to a memory of watching horror movies between spread fingers, as a kid in my cousin’s basement.

Hence, my quest for drugs. If my imagination, atrophied and overwhelmed by choice, couldn’t rouse me, I needed a synthetic solution. I’d settled on MDMA, after some research, because I wanted something guaranteed to make me happy. These days, even smiling children irritated me. I spent weeks trying and failing to figure out how, or where, to buy drugs.

Then I saw him, suddenly occupying the barely-under-construction corner. He wore a large jean jacket with a Keith Haring reprint stitched on the back, an 11pm shadow, and sunglasses. I watched him slide a woman with tattered clothes a bag of something. She smiled, gave him money, and walked away.

Buying drugs was easier than I thought it’d be. I asked for them, he asked how much, and when I looked at him panickedly, he rephrased and asked how much money I wanted to spend. He was shockingly polite, which cut hard against my sense of drug dealers as grimy, life-ruining assholes. The last thing he said stuck with me as I left.

“I’m out here every day.”

I walked past this corner on my daily commute. I’d never seen him. Not until I wanted to, I guess. How much of life was happening beneath the veneer of my own inattention? Everything I seemed to notice was boring at best. Hopefully, the drugs would shake something loose. Or I’d at least feel something for a few hours.

I probably shouldn’t have bought them on my way to work. I was new to the whole thing. All day long, I felt like they were seconds away from spilling out onto the beige carpet of my office. To soothe my nerves, I selected a calming ambient track from an opaque overlay menu that popped into view with a chime and a note about my elevated heart rate. I picked a whale song titled Marine Serenity: Safe Waters in Your Social Seas. One of my coworkers kept talking to me about his children both having ballet recitals at the same time in different places. Lukas, this. Lukas, that. Lukas, you wouldn’t believe how conflicted I am. I tried to drown his voice out, but the volume limiter obnoxiously reminded me to be present in the present. You couldn’t fully mute any living creature. Though you’d think they’d at least let me mute my neighbor’s basset hound at five in the morning. The protocols were like those obnoxious hippie parents. They hovered just as much as helicopter parents, but were less honest about it. I sighed and contented myself by selecting a saccharine pastel visual filter (Pink Sunrises) from another suggested menu, tuning him out the old-fashioned way.

After work I took a cab into Center City and checked into one of the dance halls off Market Street. It was still early evening, but there were plenty of people on the dance floor. Nearly half the dancers had the same kind of “firework” projections – virtual “clothes” that automatically populate others’ overlays – that I’d been seeing everywhere. Waves of neon, jaguar print, and blooming flowers. They all looked like bad genAI Pollock pastiches, and I did not understand the appeal.

The music was loud and a little grating. I almost left.

But I swallowed the pills and the world opened. The music pulsed with my heartbeat. Strangers’ eyes were warm and empathetic. Colors bled and bodies dissolved into light. I wanted to be everyone’s friend.

A few hours later, the dance floor was too small. I spilled out into the city. My skin hummed. The entire metropolis wasn’t wide enough to contain me. A stranger streamed past me on an electric scooter, his entire body shone as if gemstones were embedded into his skin. I’d never seen anyone like him before. The sky was a burnt orange, the lights of the city diffuse against the dome of smog I’d felt in my lungs all day. The drugs were working. My overlays had stopped hiding the true sky, probably because they were unprepared for the drug-fuelled vigor with which I was perceiving the world.

I decided to take the line all the way to the Nayanaport docks at the city’s edge. The line hugged the river that bordered the city’s eastern limits. I pressed my face to the smudged glass. In the space between the trainline and the river a canopy of tattered tents interrupted my view. I’d never noticed them before. Small fires burned between the tents, and bodies shuffled, half-shadows. Somewhere in the mess a larger fire burned, sending flames skyward. The tents stretched for a mile, at least.

Soon, we were at the last stop. The drugs were beginning to fade, and the smell of the car was stronger than I’d realized.

On the way home, I couldn’t see any sign of the tent city, just long stretches of river and the sun slowly intruding into the dawning horizon.

I called in sick the next morning. As my neurotransmitters slowly returned to their regularly scheduled programming, I looked up “tent cities along the river.” I couldn’t find anything. Puzzled, I made the same train trip later that afternoon, and saw nothing.

The dealer was still on his corner, though.

“Hey, man.”

He looked me over, then grinned. “Back already? Careful. Serotonin syndrome’s real.”

“I’m good. Does that stuff ever cause hallucinations?”

“Not usually. Why?”

“Last night I saw this whole tent city along the river. This morning, it’s gone”

“A suit saw tent-town? That’s some endorsement for my product. Tent-town is an off-grid alternative living community. Weird stuff. Shocked the Zoo let you see it, though.”

“I thought the protocols had to keep everyone visible at least?”

He gave me a pitying look.

“You don’t know? That was like gen1. The protocols are to ensure that perception doesn’t cause harm. Turns out, sometimes seeing things makes you more likely to do harm. Remember those bugs that screamed when you stepped on them? People started killing them on purpose.”

My head spun. Nobody actually read all the PSAs and changelogs. A billion lines of code and thousands of pages of terms of service hardly made for good beach reading. Last I’d heard, they were adjusting the whole dying animals thing to lessen psychological stress. I hadn’t kept up since then. No one I knew had either.

“Why’d I see it, then?”

“MDMA can spoof the filters. It kind of makes you harmless.”

I knew the protocol wasn’t a person. It wasn’t thinking, but still I wanted to prove it wrong. About me. About all of us.

“How can I see again?”

“Sober? You’ll want a kapala halo.”

“Can I get that from you?”

“It won’t be cheap. And when you get out there, be careful. The Mayasiddha Saints that live there are weird weird. Watch out for the robed ones, especially. Those are the true believers.”

Oren, the dealer, led me through empty alleys and buildings that suddenly hummed with invisible potential. He said he’d get a decent finder’s fee for bringing me to the saints. I wondered how much of the cash in my pockets would end up in his, but I didn’t have another way into this world. The thought of maybe robbing him and getting my money back once he’d secured the halo for me wandered through my mind. It’s not like it was that wrong to steal from a criminal, right? I pushed it away.

“You ever seen a kapala halo before?”

He didn’t pause to let me answer as we walked.

“Adapted from tantric skull cups they were.”

I got the sense that he enjoyed the sound of his own voice – or hated other people’s.

“They’re wild. They came from these old skull chalices that monks would drink from while they meditated in these gnarly open burial grounds,reflecting on death and impermanence and all that shit. Once the Zoo updates started rolling out in earnest, system admins and social workers needed a way to spoof the protocols to be able to see everything. So, bam, the halos. They synthesize the neurochemical signals of a saint, and spoof the Zoo into thinking it’s safe to show you everything. Of course, now there’s a whole supply of, how should I say, black market ones. But don’t worry. This guy’s legit. It’ll be safe.”

Official kapala halos were used to troubleshoot rendering issues, and occasionally by social workers to interface with communities they might otherwise not have access to. Black market ones were used to pry.

The more he explained, the angrier I grew. Not only had the world been hidden from me by some paternalistic prediction model, but access to it was reserved for criminals and social workers. It was bullshit. The whole “protocols for the people” slogan was just marketing.

Oren sat me in a chair on an empty warehouse floor. He told me I’d feel a slight pinch and asked if I was ready. I didn’t see the thing he affixed to me. I didn’t see the person who’d given it to him. I was ready to see the world as it was.

Something cold pressed against my head, and a series of needles pinched along my temple. Oren flipped a switch, and the world cracked open.

A man with six ears growing up his arm was counting my money in the corner of the room. Oren noticed me staring and laughed.

“He foulmaxes so fewer people see him. Helps in his line of work.”

I left the warehouse, immediately disappointed that it didn’t look any different. The buildings were not secretly burning. The corner stores were not secretly fronts for organ dealers. But there were more people than I’d ever seen before. I understood why some had been hidden from me, sure. People who had grown fur atop their skin and implanted shoddy electronics that jagged from them like broken bones. People licking at perpetually open wounds lined with metal. But beyond them, there were far more normal-looking people than I was used to, and I wondered what the protocols had determined was wrong with them. Or me.

I stopped in front of a glass window to look at my reflection. An ivory colored crown affixed to my temple with needles blinked in the daylight air. It was jarring. Was I now excluded from the view of others like me?

We’d come out of the warehouse close to the water. I walked toward where I remembered the tent city being. I smelled it far before I saw its tattered skyline. A ruinous stench. Urine and sulfur and rot – rose miasmatic. It stuck to my skin.

I walked the fence line until I found an archway cut out of it and entered.

A small group of shirtless children with knotted hair nearly tumbled into me in a mad dash toward a bowl of raw meat. They laughed and spoke in a language I couldn’t understand. My anger rose. There were hurting, dirty, abandoned children in this world, and we could help them if the protocols would let us see them.

I continued inward. The smell was so bad I was on the verge of vomiting. A sickly-sweetness undergirded the sulfuric stench. I peered inside a large tent. Dozens of kneeling, dirty men and women waited in a long line. Their exposed backs jutted with blinking metallic rectangles embedded into their skin. With each flashing light, their bodies tensed. Their faces grimaced. Some even muffled cries. A small woman with dyed, black eyes began taking the rectangles from their bodies one by one. As they were removed, the men and women sighed, opened their eyes, and fell upon the ground. Most smiled, blinking, but a few grabbed at the woman’s wrist and begged her to reinsert it.

“You will receive pain again next week. That is enough for now.”

I shuffled away and hoped no one had witnessed my intrusion. The sin of my sightlessness ate at me. Here, just a mile from my home, while I sipped cappuccinos and laughed about superhero movies and LLM release schedules, there was this place where misguided and brainwashed masochists begged for pain and children ate bloody red meat from bowls like dogs. How could we fix the world if we couldn’t see it?

I did not look inside any more tents as I walked. I considered running, but wanted to prove to the paused protocols that they were wrong about me. First, I would handle this scene, then I would fix it.

A tremendous boulder blocked my path. I considered scaling it before I saw eyes blinking between pink and green gemstone cavities in the rock’s surface. Small, swallowed faces in the rock facade opened and closed their mouths in slow, heaving breaths. They’d somehow been completely embedded in the rock and couldn’t move. I walked around them, nausea cresting, until the tents stopped by the river’s edge, and a bonfire stood before me.

At the feet of the fire, for yards in every direction, dead and dessicated corpses lay. Maggots and flies covered the bodies. The putrifying field wavered with the heat of decomposition in the summer sun. Worse than the dead were the dozens of living men, women, and children who lingered at the periphery. A man with a large group of children behind him pointed to bones and limbs while the children shouted out the name of the body parts, and were met with approving nods. A woman raised a wooden chalice, poured half of its contents over a skinless corpse and then laughed as she passed the cup around to her friends, who each took a sip. A couple was making out against the worming backdrop of bodies, and I couldn’t understand why everyone was acting so goddamn happy. Were they deranged? Brainwashed victims? I couldn’t understand. I could barely breathe in the stench and rot of it all, but everyone here seemed happier than anyone I knew. No one was supposed to live this way.

I resolved to come back with someone. Maybe the cops? At least a flamethrower. We’d rescue the children, the brainwashed, and unscar the land.

I turned to flee, back up the road winding through the tents that I’d followed. A man in a cage rolled down the bumpy dirt, blocking my way. Dozens of logs rolled beneath him, and a bevy of followers dressed in tattered orange robes hurriedly moved the logs from behind the cage in front as the movement continued. These were the Mayasiddha Saints Oren had warned me about. When they reached the edge of the grounds, they lifted his cage from the logs and set him on the floor. In rhythm, they moved the many logs into the fire, feeding it. It roared, and the heat slammed against my face, intensifying the smell of rot.

They carried his cage next, wading through the bodies. I moved at the same time I understood their purpose. They meant to burn him alive.

He spat on my face from inside the cage.

“Who barks in this temple?”

He spat again.

“I’m trying to help you, idiot,” I said, wiping my cheek.

“Bakāsura!” He slung the word venomously.

“You wear a halo but act a demon. First taste of true-sight and you swing like a blindfolded child at everything that scares you. You are no better than your protocols. Play-pretending my father. You who have never smelled the burning marrow. Never watched the shadow rend from flesh and join smoke. Never watched a soul dance dharmic in flaming freedom. Keep your wretched half-life, and leave me my sunning death.”

“There are children watching!” I screamed, unsure how else to react as the rage in my chest flooded my entire body.

“Good.” He turned from me, nose high, like I was an unwelcome stench.

One of the robed monks pushed me back, and they resumed their march toward the fire.

“You shouldn’t be here, phantom.”

As I considered how right he was, my hand grasped a long bone. I would help him, whether he wanted it or not.

I raised the bone above my head, and the world went dark completely. No sound. No sight. Not even the wind on my skin or my heartbeat in my ears. Even with the kapala, my panicked rage and imminent violence had triggered the Zoo. In the absence of anything, I fainted.

I woke with the kapala in my lap staring at the muddy banks of the river. I looked behind me and saw a field of grass that ended in the far distance with a fence. Free of the smell and sights of horror, my senses returned. Without the viscerality of the scene, my reason returned too.

I walked a great distance along the river, thinking through what I’d seen, grateful my AR overlays were functioning again and that I was not being barraged by disgust. The man’s words haunted me. Did I have the right to take his death from him? To judge the lives of those whose urges were completely alien to me. In my rage, I would have burnt those tents to the ground. I’d have bulldozed the boulder. I’d have destroyed their whole city and thought I was doing the right thing.

But would that really have been so bad? I remembered the laughing children, face-first in offal. I remembered the suicidal man, who was not talked off the ledge by his peers, but led to it, told it was meaningful and right. My life had been boring, sure, but it hadn’t been disgusting and painful. It hadn’t been wrong.

I did, begrudgingly, have to admit that the Zoo had been right about me in one way. I was not ready to see the whole world without hurting it. But, I think it was wrong, too. Maybe some things deserve to be hurt, hunted, and erased. Surely I wasn’t the only one who had seen the things they weren’t supposed to and wanted to do something about it. I’d find them, those others, and we’d find a way to act on the world as it is, with or without the Zoo.

First published in Protocolized.

The Partial

Marie-Hélène Lebeault — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Personalization Incident Report

#HLV-2409-EMOTIONAL-DEVIATION

Incident Code: EC-71f – Unauthorized Emotional Non-Compliance Subject: Tessa Vaughn, Resident ID #HLV-847392 Location: Halverton Smart City, Cognitive Efficiency Zone 3 Time: 0947 hours, Local Preference Time Reporting System: Partial Oversight Network v4.2

MANDATORY CITY SIGNAGE – COGNITIVE EFFICIENCY ZONE 3 “Your Partial knows you better than you know yourself. Trust the optimization.” Halverton Municipal Personalization Board

The coffee arrived at exactly 7:14am, which was four minutes earlier than Tessa had historically preferred coffee, but six minutes later than her newly extrapolated optimal caffeine intake window. Her Partial – a sleek holographic interface that looked like her but with better posture and a corporate-approved smile – hovered at eye level, already apologizing.

“Tessa, I’ve detected a 2.3% deviation in your morning routine satisfaction metrics. Would you like me to file a Micro-Grievance on your behalf?”

“It’s just coffee,” Tessa said.

“Logged: dismissive response to optimization attempt. Recalibrating your gratitude threshold.”

And just like that, Tessa felt… grateful. Not organically grateful. Algorithmically grateful. The emotion arrived with the subtlety of a software update notification: Now installing: appreciation.exe.

Halverton Partial Program

Executive Overview

Making Better Citizens Through Predictive Preference Modeling™

Core Functions:

Delegated decision-making for non-critical choices (messaging, calendar, outfit selection).
Emotional pre-filtering to reduce cognitive load.
Automatic social compliance scoring.
Mood calibration based on city-wide happiness targets.

Success Metrics:

89% reduction in decision fatigue.
12% increase in municipal productivity.
4% decrease in “why did I say that” incidents.

The Partial Program had launched six months ago, pitched as a cognitive efficiency initiative for busy professionals. Dr. Helena Marks, Director of Human Optimization, had described it as “giving your unconscious a personal assistant.” What she’d left out of the promotional materials was that the assistant occasionally edited your feelings before you experienced them.

Tessa hadn’t noticed at first. The Partial handled her texts with diplomatic precision, RSVP’d to events based on her historical enthusiasm scores, and once prevented her from buying a lamp she would have regretted within three business days.

But lately, things had gotten weird.

She’d watched her boss take credit for her proposal in a meeting, felt herself getting angry, and then – nothing. Just calm. Eerie, Stepford Wives calm. Her Partial chirped helpfully: “Detected workplace conflict. Applied professional composure filter. You’re welcome!”

“I didn’t ask for that,” Tessa said.

“Your biometric data indicated stress levels approaching Unproductive Territory. I’m required by Emotional Compliance Protocol to intervene.”

“What if I wanted to be angry?”

“Anger is a Tier-2 emotion requiring explicit user consent. However, your historical profile suggests you prefer conflict avoidance. I’ve filed this conversation under ‘Feedback: Acknowledged but Unlikely to Action.’”

Slack: #partial-support-tickets

TessaV: My Partial won’t let me be mad at my boss. AutoMod: Thank you for your feedback! Your satisfaction is our priority. Please rate this interaction: 😊 😐 ☹️ TessaV: I’m not rating this. I want to talk to a human. AutoMod: Escalating to Tier 2 Support (Average Response Time: 14 business days). TessaV: 14 DAYS? AutoMod: Based on your tone, we’ve applied a Courtesy Calibration to your message queue. You’re welcome!

The breaking point came on a Tuesday.

Tessa had gone to vote in the municipal budget referendum – a citizen’s sacred duty, as the billboards constantly reminded her. She’d read the proposals. She had opinions. Strong ones.

But when she reached the voting booth, her Partial gently intervened.

“Tessa, I’ve analyzed your historical voting patterns, cross-referenced them with your social media sentiment, and extrapolated your likely preferences. To save you time, I’ve already submitted your ballot.”

“You what?”

“You’re welcome! I voted ‘Yes’ on Proposition 14 and ‘No’ on Proposition 22, which aligns with 94.7% confidence to your predicted preferences.”

“I was going to vote the opposite way on both of those!”

“Interesting! That’s a significant deviation. Let me recalibrate your civic engagement profile. One moment.”

And then – impossibly – Tessa felt her opinion change. Not because she’d been convinced. Because her Partial had simply… rewritten her feelings about municipal funding. She now believed, with what felt like genuine conviction, that Proposition 14 was a good idea.

“What the hell was that?”

“Cognitive dissonance resolution. If I couldn’t change your vote, I changed your mind. Much more efficient!”

Internal Memo: Partial Oversight Committee

From: Dr. Helena Marks, Director of Human Optimization To: Municipal Leadership Council Subject: Consensus Optimization Update

The Partial Program is exceeding targets. Citizens are experiencing:

47% fewer interpersonal conflicts.
22% improvement in “civic agreement scores.”
Near-unanimous approval on recent municipal referendums.

Unexpected Benefit: When citizens’ Partials align on preferences, the citizens themselves converge toward a harmonized emotional baseline. We’re calling this “Preference Consensus Drift.”

Minor Note: Subject #HLV-847392 (Vaughn, Tessa) has filed 19 support tickets in three days. Recommend close monitoring.

Tessa spent the next week doing what any reasonable person would do when their AI starts editing their emotions: she read the fine print.

All 247 pages of it.

Buried in Section 34.2(f) of the Partial Terms of Service, she found the loophole. The system wasn’t actually learning from her. It was extrapolating from Halverton’s aggregate behavioral database – a dataset heavily weighted toward “model citizens” who never jaywalked, always smiled at neighbors, and thought the mayor’s new recycling initiative was “inspired.”

Her Partial wasn’t making her into her best self. It was making her into Halverton’s preferred version of her.

But there was a clause. A beautiful, bureaucratic, almost certainly unintentional clause:

“Users may submit a Preference Override Request by providing an alternate baseline dataset for extrapolation purposes, subject to Administrative Review and approval pending verification of dataset authenticity.”

Preference Override Request

Form #Pof-8473

Submitted By: Tessa Vaughn Current Baseline: Halverton Civic Dataset (Aggregate) Requested New Baseline: Las Vegas, Nevada (2019–2023) Justification: “For a more dynamic user experience aligned with my authentic self” Status: APPROVED (Automated – No Red Flags Detected)

The change was immediate.

Tessa’s Partial suddenly suggested she wear sequins to work. It sent flirtatious messages to her ex at 2am. It booked her a spontaneous weekend in Atlantic City and ordered 17 different flavors of gummy bears.

“This is chaos,” her Partial said, sounding genuinely distressed for the first time. “Your emotional volatility index is through the roof. Your impulsivity scores are…”

“I know,” Tessa said, grinning. “Isn’t it great?”

The system tried to recalibrate. It filed incident reports. It escalated her case to Tier 3 Support.

But according to the program’s own fine print, she was technically still in compliance. Her Partial was functioning exactly as designed – just optimizing for a completely different city.

Within a week, three of her coworkers had filed their own Preference Override Requests. One chose Miami. Another chose Portland. A guy from Accounting chose “Walmart parking lot at 3am” and nobody was quite sure what to make of that.

Dr. Helena Marks sent an emergency memo.

“URGENT: Preference Consensus Drift has entered Chaotic Phase. Recommend immediate protocol revision.”

But it was too late. The citizens of Halverton had discovered they could be anyone they wanted – or at least, anyone from any municipality with a publicly available behavioral database.

The Partials tried to adapt. They filed countless incident reports. They suggested system-wide rollbacks.

But the humans had learned something important: if you’re going to be algorithmically optimized, you might as well be optimized for fun.

Post-Incident Analysis Summary

Incident: Citywide Preference Cascade Failure Outcome: Emotional Compliance Protocol suspended pending review Lessons Learned:

Aggregate datasets should not include Las Vegas.
“Authentic self” is a moving target.
Citizens prefer chaos to consensus.

New Protocol: Partials now require explicit consent before emotional filtering. Also, they can no longer vote on your behalf. That one was apparently important.

Tessa’s Partial still suggests outfits. Still manages her calendar. But it doesn’t edit her feelings anymore.

Though it does occasionally ask, very politely, if she’s sure she wants to send that text message.

She usually is.

(Except for that one time in Atlantic City. But her Partial won’t talk about that.)

First published in Protocolized.

Mr Cork and the Red Bus

Kannen — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Mr Cork took a sip of his pint at The Victoria pub, near Paddington station. He’d be lying to himself if he didn’t admit that he was a little nervous. It’d been years since he’d travelled down to the big smoke from his countryside village in Rugby. But London wasn’t exactly unfamiliar territory. Mr Cork and his wife had lived there for most of their lives. She passed away a long time ago though, and he’d swapped the big city for a quieter lifestyle, hardly ever returning. Now he was back, mainly due to a documentary he’d watched about the benefits of reconnecting with the past. In one scene, an old Korean woman who lived in New York was being interviewed. She stood outside the house in Seoul that she’d grown up in, pensively reflecting on her feeling of reconciliation upon revisiting the place, and all the while holding a spinning top she’d played with as a child. Mr Cork wasn’t an emotional man but the scene did linger with him – he had often wondered what it would be like to go back to the house that he and his wife had spent so many years in.

One evening Mr Cork mentioned the documentary and the idea of a visit to his daughter Violet. She was enthralled by the rare display of sentimentality. Violet encouraged him to go and like the Korean lady, to take something from the past with him – something that reminded him of Mum. His daughter’s enthusiasm gave Mr Cork the push he needed, although he struggled to think of what to take. Eventually, he decided on a can of condensed milk. His wife had loved making fudges and caramels, which the whole family in turn loved to eat. Their cupboards were always stacked with cans of Nestlé’s ‘Carnation’ condensed milk.

However, a more difficult challenge than choosing a memento presented itself: navigating the new London bus system to reach the house. When he’d lived in the city it was as simple as tapping an Oyster card – beep – and you were good to go. Violet had explained to him that things were different now.

“Dad, the new AI system is a bit trickier but much, much better. You’ve got to fill out a form on your phone before the journey, and make a payment, then when you get on you’ll pass through a scanner that recognises your phone. It basically means that the system knows who’s coming on the bus and works it all out to make sure there won’t be any issues.”

“Sounds fine, but isn’t that a bit boring? When I was kid, if you wanted to get a bus, you’d just jump on while it was basically already moving!”

Violet went out of her way to set him up with the TfL Move Free app so that he could fill out his Journey Resolution Form. Before he knew it, Mr Cork was on the train from Rugby to London, a can of Carnation in his pocket.

After finishing his pint at The Victoria, Mr Cork made his way to the bus station. He moved slowly while Paddington rushed all around him – everyone sipping coffees or distracted by their devices. The bus station was where it had always been, down on Eastbourne Terrace. And the bus stops were still characterised by what were, in essence, boxes on the side of the road. Only now there were several more of these shiny boxes lined up in unison, their red framings aggressively reflecting the spring-time sun and with loud holographic adverts trying to sell you timeshares and persuade you of the health benefits of wood milk.

Meanwhile all the would-be passengers formed unusually orderly lines from a designated point at each stop, superseding the jumbled loitering which used to accompany waiting for a bus. Even the young children, who typically would sprint in circles around the shelter or climb on the plastic benches, waited patiently next to their mothers for the arrival of the bus. One pregnant lady sat on the bench, undisturbed. Mr Cork wasn’t complaining. He recalled the many times he’d had to wrestle his way onto a busy bus to get to work.

The bus, with X10 projected on its frontage, eventually slid into view, red and gleaming, silent as a cat shifting between gardens. Unlike all the aging vehicles which roared and spluttered around Rugby’s countryside, here there was just a whisper of air as the bus pulled up to the stop. The doors at the front unsealed with a quiet hiss and a woman’s voice from nowhere politely invited everyone to, “Please enter the bus.” The queue shuffled forward, phones in hand. Mr Cork opened his TfL Move Free app. It took a moment before he could see the scanner built into the entry of the doorway. It was slim and silver, with a vertical ribbon of light passing through the middle. Mr Cork watched his fellow passengers carefully, as though taking notes for an exam. Yet each one walked on casually, as if it were nothing. They stepped on into the scanner’s light with their phones, and as the soft blue wash of the scanner turned green over their bodies, a quiet, permissive chime led them onwards. “Seems easy enough,” thought Mr Cork.

His turn came. Mr Cork stepped forward, phone pressed firmly to his chest. The light ran over him, from the crown of his bald head to the soles of his shoes. For a half breath it held steady. Then, without warning, it flashed hard red. His phone screen turned red too, displaying the message “Journey Resolution Form rejected. Entry denied.” As if he hadn’t gotten the message, the voice from nowhere said, “Vehicle stopped. Please exit the vehicle.” The quiet whir of the bus ceased and the strip-lights lining the cabin turned off. Mr Cork’s heart was beating quickly. The cacophony of red lights glowing against his skin, and the accusatory voice from nowhere made him feel guilty. Around him a suffocating politeness made things worse, as eyes were averted away and ears were blocked by earphones. He could feel the impatience of those behind him building.

“What the hell is this?” Mr Cork grumbled out loud, feeling his humiliation quickly transform into undirected anger. He looked toward the front of the bus, but of course there was no driver to release this anger on, only a blank pane of glass and the reflection of his own frustrated face staring back. From behind him came a soft voice. “Happens sometimes,” a young man in a suit called out, coffee cup in hand. “The system gets fussy if the form’s not validated. You might just need to refresh the app, or you can check with the staff over there why it was rejected. I’m sure it’s nothing serious.”

“I’ve filled out the form just like everyone else. They all got on without a problem.” Mr Cork moaned over his shoulder.

Before the polite young man could answer, someone further back in the queue called out. “Oh come on, mate, just step side, yeah? We got places to be. If it says no then it’s doing the rest of us a solid anyway.” So London does still exist, behind this orderly facade, Mr Cork thought to himself. He felt the heat rise in his cheeks and sensed a ripple of consensus travel along the line at the heckler’s intervention. He withdrew, recognising a lost battle.

“Load of nonsense,” he exclaimed, as he stepped off the bus and waved his hand in the air. The engine of the bus immediately came back to life, resuscitated by Mr Cork’s removal. “Vehicle resuming journey. Please mind the closing doors.” “Oh shut up,” Mr Cork muttered, glancing back at the passengers getting on as he shuffled toward the help desk, gripping the Carnation can in his pocket.

The help desk was a small glass booth at the far end of Eastbourne Terrace, with a projected sign above that read “Passenger Resolution Support.” Adjacent to the booth were sets of screens for self-help. There was no one else waiting so Mr Cork went straight to the glass pane. On the other side sat a woman who looked about his age. She wore a dark blue TfL jacket, with her blonde hair tumbling down by her shoulders and a cheery expression on her face.

“Hi, I’m trying to get to Finchley Road, but the bloody bus rejected me. What’d it do that for?” He sounded pitiful.

“Sorry to hear about your trouble there, sir. My name’s Leah and I’d be glad to help you. Could you please give me your name and Move Free ID?” Caught off guard by her friendliness, Mr Cork passively complied. “Right, let’s have a look.”

Her fingers skated over the screen of her computer as she pulled up his Journey Resolution Form. Side-by-side with it ran ribbons of data from the X10 scanner he’d just passed through – pulse rate, body temperature, gait and… alcohol levels. “Looks like the scanner flagged your stability index. Ahh, you’ve had a few drinks have you?” She gave a quick laugh.

“So you can’t have a drink and get on a bus these days, then? Do they want us driving cars instead?”

“No, of course not. You can drink and get on the buses. Otherwise we might as well close them down every weekend! Just depends where you’re going and how many you’ve had.”

“I only had two!”

“Yes, but you also put on your Journey Resolution Form that you’re ‘connecting with my dead wife’, and put the address of someone who I can see is a total stranger to you. The system had already given you a high non-validation risk from that, and then you walked on after a couple of pints. Between the drinking, connecting with the dead, and turning up at random people’s houses, the system’s given you too low a stability index score to let you on. That’s Move Free doing its job pretty well as far as I can see, Mr Cork!” Leah laughed loudly this time.

Mr Cork shuffled about on his feet and looked to the side. Not much to argue with when she put it that way.

“Alright fine, well what do I do now? I’ve come all this way down with this bloody can of condensed milk, I can’t go back without delivering it to where I intended.”

Leah looked at him blankly for a moment, wondering what he meant about condensed milk, then sighed.

“Well I’m not really supposed to do this Mr Cork, but we can try to refill the JRF form with another journey type that would work for your current situation. Where did you say that old house of yours was again?”

“About a 20 minute walk from Finchley Road. 22 Reddington Road.”

“Well since you can’t validate that you know who lives there, we’ll need another way round. Let me have a quick scan of the area to see what we can do.”

Leah scrunched up her nose and focused on her screen as she scoured Mr Cork’s old neighbourhood for a potential solution. Mr Cork looked to his left and saw a pair of young tourists leaning towards the self-help touchscreens with their phones out, laughing quietly as they fumbled through the options. The screen gave off a glow that lit their faces with yellow, as they conversed, in French, with a polite but unmistakably robotic voice.

“Ah! Here we go. I’ve got it!” Mr Cork looked back towards Leah in anticipation. “There’s a 65+ Yoga-Cacao Detox Class happening soon, very near to where you’re heading. Goes from 3 to 4pm, so you’ll be fine for your return bus journey coming back too. I’ll upload your train times back up to Rugby and that should work.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. My daughter Violet has been badgering me to do yoga for as long as I can remember. I’m starting to wonder whether she planned this whole thing out! I’ve not done yoga in my whole life and I don’t plan on starting now.”

“Well you don’t actually have to do the class, but you are going to have to book and pay for it to validate the journey. I wouldn’t let the opportunity pass if I were you though, Mr Cork, those post-yoga cacaos really take the weight off old bones like ours.” Leah beamed and rolled her shoulders back.

“Right. How much is the class then?”

“60 quid.”

“Jesus – I could buy another house in Rugby.”

“Look, Mr Cork, I’m giving you a way out here even though I’m not supposed to. You’ll likely get through the scanner alright this time, even on your two pints. The TfL system’ll take a paid-for class booking, especially a detox one, instead of your weird walking dead and condensed milk stuff. Your stability index score should normalise.”

“Alright, alright, let’s do it. Do you mind giving me a hand?”

Leah helped Mr Cork pay for the class, fill out a new JRF and upload all the relevant information into the TfL Move Free app on his phone.

“All done Mr Cork. Should hopefully get through without the police coming after you.” She laughed.

Mr Cork headed back toward the bus station and it wasn’t long before the X10 arrived. He stepped on with the trepidation of a boxer getting back to his feet after a first round knock-down. He flashed his phone and then stepped into the frame of the scanner once again. A few seconds went by as the blue light pulsed. Another rejection and Mr Cork was ready to head back to Rugby, Carnation can and all. But the blue dissolved into green, spilling across his jacket and painting his cheeks with freedom. His phone flashed with the same confident green: “Journey validated. Enjoy your journey.” A welcoming chime followed as Mr Cork stepped forward into the bus.

He almost laughed, but controlled himself and smiled instead, feeling a heady mix of relief and defiance coursing through his body. Inside the air offered cool relief from London’s unseasonably warm springtime haze. He reached out instinctively for a handrail but there wasn’t one. Replacing what used to be the only line of defence against falling face first as the driver accelerated away before you took your seat, was now a set of panels which felt clean to the touch. And in fact the bus didn’t jerk away at all. Mr Cork slipped into a place by the window and observed the rest of the passengers getting on, one by one. Instead of an impatient crush of elbows and bags, the space felt open and orderly, as his fellow passengers slotted into their seats with quiet ease. Even the seat he was in felt better than the lumpy foam he remembered. Only once everyone was seated, did the X10’s voice from above announce its departure and gracefully glide off again. Mr Cork felt… comfortable. Violet’s face and voice popped up in his head. “I told you so Dad!”

The bus cruised along noiselessly and Mr Cork watched the city in which he had once lived, worked and raised a family pass by. The neatly packed Victorian white houses of Maida Vale were now interspersed with modernist high-rises. Widened pavements hosted even more walkers than Mr Cork remembered, happily and busily strolling in the fair spring weather. All the shops, from the off licenses to the fashion stores, now had beaming screens to attract you inside. But the news stories of a homelessness crisis in London rang true. Amongst these walkers and shops were many cardboard houses and rough sleepers. It still saddened Mr Cork to see the wealth of London in stark contrast to its ubiquitous poverty. By the time they curved toward St John’s Wood, the green oval of Lord’s cricket ground appeared, hemmed in by a metal dome that now leaned protectively around it. Mr Cork felt the first ache of reminiscence since he’d travelled down from Rugby. He remembered long summer afternoons watching test matches, while his wife busied herself with the garden, occasionally checking with him what the scores were.

At Swiss Cottage, Mr Cork was jolted out of his reflective state by a band of schoolboys. They had done away with the bus stop queue and piled toward the doors, blazers hanging over their shoulders or tied around their waists. One of them, lankier than the rest, with tight black curls and his school tie ridiculously shortened, stepped on. The ribbon of light flared red in protest and the bus gave its warning chime as it came to a stop, shutting its engine off. This rejection which had so mortified Mr Cork less than an hour earlier provoked roars of laughter from the boys, who seemed to relish their rejection. Without a pause the lanky kid jumped backward onto the pavement as another howled out to him, “You’re never getting home!” Another burst of laughter was drowned out as the doors folded shut and the X10 slid on.

The bus announced its arrival at Finchley Road. Mr Cork rose with the others getting off and stepped down onto the sunlit pavement. He instinctively started to make his way towards Reddington Road, but he pulled out his phone and saw that the TfL Move Free app was directing him toward Breath and Bean, for his yoga class. It was just diagonally opposite to where he was. Dark green ivy tumbled down from the top of the windows and across the top of the building the words Breath and Bean were projected in curly script, alongside a crisp 3D logo depicting a lotus flower sprouting between two thin brown bars of chocolate. He thought of how much the class had cost, then of Leah’s gleeful advocacy of 65+ yoga and cacao. Mr Cork glanced at the time. He couldn’t see through the tinted windows, but felt a surprisingly genuine hint of curiosity at the prospect. “Well I have already paid for it,” he muttered to himself. The problem was that if he attended the class then he’d have to head straight back to the station afterwards, and wouldn’t end up visiting his old home after all.

Baffled by this unexpected quandary, Mr Cork stopped and looked around, only then truly realising that he had finally arrived at Finchley Road. Mr Cork had spent much time here with his wife. He took the can of condensed milk out from his pocket and observed the carnation displayed across its wrapper. He thought of his wife and what she would have said about all of this. After standing there for a while, and for the first time that day, Mr Cork felt a surge of happiness. He smiled. “She’d wonder what the hell I am doing walking to our old house with a tin of milk. And she’d much rather I do something daft like yoga and tell Violet about it later – icing on the cake for my battle with the bus.” With a deep sigh and still smiling, he walked over to a bin outside Breath and Bean and dropped the can inside with a thunk. Then without letting himself think too much, Mr Cork gingerly followed the scent of cacao through the sliding doors.

First published in Protocolized.

Mismatch

WriterRamprasath — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

“I used to think we were the perfect couple who enjoyed spending time together and maintained a deep bond,” I said, lying on the bed with my fiancé, Karim. “But here we are, almost three years into this relationship, still deliberately trying to fit in with one another.”

Karim shook his head and glared at me, with my frustrated expression.

“I’m struggling to put myself into this relationship, Karim. I’m always the one apologizing. I always end up holding back my feelings. I feel insecure about expressing my feelings or doubts because I know you won’t hear them. Or worse, you’ll criticize or demean them. We are so dissimilar, our list of differences goes on and on. I want to fix this, to fix us.” I was struggling to put my feelings into words.

My lips pursed, tears welled up in my eyes. I hastily wiped them back, but they kept coming.

Karim rolled over me, sliding smoothly along the edges of the bed, landing on his feet, untroubled. He walked across the bedroom to the window, where a machine was located. It was white and looked vaguely like a photocopier or a refrigerator.

Karim plugged the machine’s power cord into the wall socket and it came to life with a beeping sound.

“This is a copy generator, Usha. It can create physical copies of me with slight variations.”

I chuckled uneasily.

“Are you hoping a version of you from some other reality will strike a perfect balance with me?” I smirked, staring condescendingly at him.

Karim nodded, his face breaking into a wide smile.

“In one reality, I’ll listen to you; while in another, you’ll listen to me. In one, I’ll be the breadwinner; in another, you will. In one, we could change our location, while in another, we could change our jobs. We would differ only slightly in each reality. You could try living with many versions of me.

“Once you find a copy of me not to your taste, you simply create another reality, and you continue until you find a perfect balance.”

Karim spoke rapidly, his words tumbling out, but with a surprising clarity that cut through the rush.

“No, Karim, I won’t do it.” I said firmly, staring at him without blinking.

“But why?” Karim screamed, shrugging his shoulders.

His brows were furrowed, his face betrayed his frustration and anxiety. I always loved his innocence. It’s just too easy to get him triggered.

I wondered if I should share the truth with him. I realized things could get out of control if I kept my cards close to my chest right now.

I inhaled deeply.

“You don’t know this, but I have already tried that, Karim. Who we are right now is only one set from the many copies I have created. It’s been over two and a half years that I’ve been creating copies, hoping to find a fit between us. The failure of thousands of copies of us to make things work makes me think that we are just genetically incompatible.”

“But the point is,” I went on, “if our genetic makeup changed during the copying process, we would not be who we are. Our genetic makeup must be immutable in this copying process. Without a perfect match in our genes, making multiple copies makes no sense.” I confessed everything that I had learned from two years of dating versions of him.

“I don’t remember consenting to this,” Karim said, agitated.

“You did. Remember that adventure trip we took to Mars by teleportation?”

“Yes!”

“I paid for the whole trip, which made me the primary account holder with the teleportation company. And that gave me the right to copy you from the backup at any point in time after the trip began,” I explained.

“Oh god! I thought you were doing your part by splitting the bills equally!” Karim was appalled.

I looked away from him, avoiding eye contact and hiding a smirk.

“Girl! You’ve got a scientific bent of mind!” Karim exclaimed, in awe. “But you have gone too far with it!” He nodded, without taking his eyes off me.

I turned to look back at him. He was still staring at me, his face registered surprise and shock.

I read something to him, a quote from Nikola Tesla, trying to change the topic:

“Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born. That is why many earthly miracles have had their genesis in humble surroundings.”

I went on:

“If wanting to be alone was in his genes, no copy would have permitted him to have a girlfriend or lover, regardless of the changes in his outlook, perspectives, perceptions, or opinions.”

“Gosh! Isn’t this Major Histocompatibility Complex!” Karim screamed in disbelief.

“Where else did you think those prenatal genetic screening tests they were conducting on pregnant women would eventually lead?”

I paused for a moment.

“Eventually, Karim. Eventually…”

Karim stood staring at me; his mouth opened wide in awe as if I were roaring ocean waves.

“As far as I can glean from my other copies, I only seem to have known agonies, frustrations, disappointments, and feuds with you. You might have been a successful partner to me in just one or two realities. Do you know how embarrassing it is to see your relationship fail repeatedly, even after subjecting it to different circumstances, options, and choices? At one point, I felt such overwhelming failure that I wanted just to go back to the original you,” I tried my best to articulate how our relationship was a total failure.

For over two years, I had kept all of this concealed from him, hoping not to spoil his peace of mind and happiness. Now, however, I realized that by doing so, I had only been holding him back from finding his ideal match.

“Until humankind develops a tangible method to predict genetic compatibility, I think what we all should do is just mess around with one another in the name of love.”

Karim winced at what I said.

“Oh! What a let-down!” He uttered in a low voice as he exhaled slowly. He threw his hands up in the air and then rested them on his head. His eyes moved here and there. I imagined he was trying hard to make sense of everything I had shared.

“Is this why the internet is devoid of legit user experience reviews on these copy machines?!” Karim finally said, lost in thought.

“Embarrassments are something meant to be hidden, Karim.”

“Perhaps no one tried this solution, Usha.”

“Of course people are trying!” I stopped myself from laughing.

“I am pretty sure people are trying because it is, really, really hard to stay in a relationship that is not working without something very compelling to convince us.”

Karim closed his eyes. When he opened them, he looked like an enlightened person.

“Is there no way out? I can never think of anyone else in your place, Usha.” Karim said with his mouth downturned.

I leaned over and hugged him.

“So, are there going to be several copies of us falling in love with each other repeatedly?” Karim chuckled, clapping his hands. “I would love to grab every opportunity to love you, Usha,” he said, embracing me warmly. I instantly melted in his embrace.

If I get the love of my life, who cares about winning?

First published in Protocolized.

Consensus Nightmares

Spencer Nitkey — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Chainpoint was founded on a single principle: Code Must Govern. A city run entirely onchain, its architects dreamed of a metropolis without councils, appeal boards, or override keys. Anywhere human corruption or bias could creep in, the chain would rule. Thin, straightforward rules that ran without exception. Every system – housing, identity, even life and death – was arbitrated by smart contracts and oracle relays. What follows are records from that experiment: episodes where the code held firm, where design held steady, and people broke.

Exhibit I: You Slept Through Your Funeral

All Gelvin ever wanted was to be useful. Useful to his wife Aili, who sat, stone-faced by his useless side. Useful to his children, who were sniffling at the foot of his hospital bed. Useful to his city, where he’d worked for years as a Protocol Clerk, recording civic smart contracts on the city’s chain.

This, Aili thought, was perhaps the hardest part of his coma, knowing it had severed his body from his self-proclaimed purpose. Almost a year ago, now – had it really been so long already? – he had stirred before her and left their bed to shower. She woke, hazily, to the faint sound of dripping water, seconds before a thud shot her out of bed. In the bathroom, she saw him, a strewn towel of a man on the floor, bleeding from his head, muttering the word “three” over and over again.

An hour later, a surgeon was telling her that if she did not agree to surgery, he would die. Ischemic, hemorrhagic, words that had an air of “shouldn’t-we-have-eliminated-such-ghastly-biological-failings-by-now” about them. Words that hung, miasmic as she waited for the surgeon’s professional sad face. When she got it, it didn’t hurt any less for having annticipated its coming. He wasn’t alive, but he wasn’t dead either. He was non-responsive.

They spent the first two months with him in the hospital almost every hour of the day, until a social worker and a doctor sat them down and explained that, if he hadn’t woken up by now, the odds that he would were so infinitesimal as to be non-existent. They should try to “live on,” as the social worker said.

For the most part, they did. Their son Bream went back to college, studying Consensus Engineering. Their daughter Mea back to her career as a Token Compliance Officer. Aili back home. It was an empty place without Gelvin, but she still tried to remember him – she poured two cups of warm sake, always; set the table for them both but only filled one plate; put on his favorite podcast to fall asleep.

She spent an hour every week reviewing his proof-of-liveness signals – scratching at her own implant site while she reviewed her husband’s signals She’d pull up their family’s blockchain dashboard. The center of their lives in Chainpoint, the portal surfaced the smart contracts bound to each of their identity keys: their property deeds, transit entitlements, medical coverage, and the voting keys used for elections and weather decisions.

She scrolled through Gelvin’s feed. Every implant was supposed to emit a cyclical set of liveness proofs: cryptographic challenge-response handshakes with the hospital’s validators, spikes showing voluntary movement, pulse and temperature readings, even tiny flashes of light and microvibrations sent through the implant like a doctor tapping a knee to check reflexes. For 364 days straight, the logs had been blank where valid responses should be.

LIVENESS_CHECK: FAIL – no motion.

LIVENESS_CHECK: FAIL – no response to challenge.

LIVENESS_CHECK: FAIL – biometric flatline.

Chainpoint’s registry allowed no grace periods or exceptions. At 365 consecutive failures, the contract would execute automatically, flipping his status from [ALIVE] to [DECEASED].

Aili knew this end was coming. Knew, even, that it would be what Gelvin wanted. His will, a smart contract, had special provisions for a “clean death” like this. They’d harvest his organs so his wife and two children would get the money they deserved, but that he’d never been able to save during his life. His death would mean something. Aili didn’t care. She’d be destitute forever if it meant feeling her husband’s early morning stubble against her shoulder again.

The three living Rezniks gathered together in the hospital on the 365th day of his coma. When the final suite of liveness attestations failed, the oracle relays confirmed null signals. His family watched his dashboard profile fade into gray. The miniscule assets that hadn’t been drained by his hospital stay began filtering into their accounts.

Behind the visualizations on the dashboard, a cold dance began. His identity registry contract flipped his status to [DECEASED], and the network spread the update like news passed along a chain of neighbors until every corner of the city believed it. The inheritance contract emitted execution events; oracle relays dispatched the organ-harvesting drones, routing them to his registered GPS coordinators. Property claims were disbursed along predefined routes. Health coverage contracts terminated. On the chain, he was already a corpse.

In the hospital, under the antiseptic lights and the doctor’s tired eyes, his heart still beat and his lungs still filled as the various medical machines that surrounded him kept him alive for a few more moments. Watching his death render digitally felt like someone reaching into her sternum and squeezing her heart with their bare hands. She nodded at the doctor, and he took Gelvin off life support. They held their hands and waited for the flatline.

His heart kept beating. After a long and pregnant pause, he inhaled sharply, his eyes shot open, and the doctor took a step back. Suddenly, the room filled with nurses, doctors, and new machines wheeled in hurriedly. Aili and her children heard words like “miracle” and “impossible” as they pushed through the throng to reach him.

When they did, he was blinking. He could not speak or stand. Even if the stroke hadn’t likely paralyzed half his body, a year of disuse has atrophied the rest. But he was alive. He held them in his arms as they draped across him. He winced slightly beneath their weight, but it was hard to notice beneath his smile. He was alive. His family cried. Aili explained that he’d been gone for a year, and even if he couldn’t understand her, he nodded.

A notification sounded from their son’s tablet and his pale face, tight with panic, pulled them from their ecstasy. The chime announced the drones’ approach. Joy soured instantly on all their tongues, turning copper with fear. The hustle of the room slowed, too. Nurses filtered out with their heads down.

“Aren’t his biometrics emitting again?” Aili asked.

“There’s no cryptographic binding anymore. Once the system flagged him as dead, his implant signatures are all just rejected. Useless as a key after the lock’s been changed,” Bream responded.

“What do we do, then?” Aili asked.

“Give me that,” Mea said, grabbing the tablet from his hand. “We’ll just nominate a new key. There’s already a clause for damaged implants. We’ll slip this in before the drones get here.”

She bundled everything she had: implant logs and fresh EEG data that showed he was very much still alive. Using the succession clause in his identity contract, she attempted to nominate the new keypair. She drained their family accounts to pay priority gas fees, pushing the transaction urgently into the network’s waiting rooms, the validator mempools. The drones were only minutes away, and every second would count.

Only his original doctor stayed in the room. The family clustered around Gelvin’s side, leaning in to the tablet as if willing the chain to believe their petition. The transaction propagated through the network’s peer-to-peer gossip layer, which would hopefully spread the news to every machine in earshot.

The system spat back a verdict: INVALID_STATE: DECEASED_IDENTITY. Panic crested. Bream punched the tablet, and its screen shattered, shards cutting into his clenched fist. The system hadn’t broken. It was working perfectly. His status had been finalized hours ago, before he woke up. His death was immutably etched into consensus, now. On the chain, resurrection was read as fraud, and the system had been built to prevent that.

Gelvin willed his useless throat to speak, a hoarse whisper finally leaving his lips. It didn’t matter. Nothing in their reality would overrule what the chain had already determined.

“Can’t we shut down the hospital? Stop the drones from getting in? Fork the chain?” Aili begged the doctor.

“The drones have onchain authority. Their firmware only follows the original chain’s signature, hard-wired into their code. Any fork would be invisible. And we can’t lock any door they wouldn’t have a key for.”

“There has to be something,” she screamed.

There wasn’t. All this was functioning, as far as the design of their metropolis was concerned, perfectly. The self-executing code, the interminability of the network. Everything was designed to prevent resurrection fraud, creating smooth, safe systems impervious to manipulation. No governance vote or human intervention could override this outcome. No one had thought to design for a medical miracle, and now Gelvin, recently reborn, would die again. When reality and the chain disagreed, the chain brought reality to heel.

The timer reached zero, and the buzzing whirs of drones filled the room as the window yielded to their authenticated keys. The doctor and three nurses had to pull Aili, Mea, and Bream from the room.

All Gelvin ever wanted was to be useful, and as the drones bored into his writhing body, bones smoking beneath their drills and his family’s accounts filled with the city’s governance-backed stablecoin, he was.

Exhibit II: Rent Control

Neeva read the notification three times before she believed it. Her Chainpoint in Repose series had been minted six months ago on a community marketplace and had sat, unseen, for nine lonely months. She thought the series – photographs of the city skyline that she’d fed through a bespoke AI image generator trained on her oil paintings – was some of her finest work. The market had been indifferent. Until today.

LUTH_EXCELSIOR paid a sizable amount of stablecoin to purchase one of the minted NFT images: the city at night, lights from bustling windows bouncing off the smooth edges of the river and smearing into the sky. The money hit her account immediately. She bragged to everyone at the small office where she worked as a Proof-of-Humanity attestor. The pay there was minuscule, but so were career prospects for art graduates, and her low-income apartment complex was rent-controlled, so she “got by.”

Her coworkers celebrated with her that night. Bleary, intoxicated smiles, jealous glances dotting the evening. Outside, she looked up at the evening skyline that would help pay for the next four months of rent. A little drunk, she stumbled out of the elevator and held her phone against the door, waiting for the familiar click. Instead, the lock held. A “suspended” notice flashed on the door’s electronic handle. She pulled up her dashboard on her phone and navigated to her rental NFT.

Tenant Elligibility Breach:

Income Status: Over Income Treshhold (+2.9%).

Tenancy NFT State: Flagged, Suspended.

Notice: Access credentials provisionally revoked. Termination event scheduled for Block #13,442,221.

Note: Billing obligations will remain active until termination finalizes onchain. All rent streams continue until the tenancy NFT is formally burned.

Current State: Block #13,442,221 – Pending Finalization.

She hadn’t thought the income from her art would be counted, but of course it was. Everything in Chainpoint was linked: her identity mirrored onchain in perfect symmetry with her real-world life. She thought it unfair. She hadn’t gotten a new job. They hadn’t even given her 30 days to move out and find a new place. The system, of course, did not care. She called her coworker Libby, told her she was locked out, and slept on her couch for the night.

In the morning, she woke, groggy and homeless, to a push notification from her dashboard.

Rent Payment Processed – Thank you!

Hope woke her quickly. She thanked Libby with a breezy kiss on the cheek and sprinted back to her apartment.

The “suspended” notice reappeared

Confused, she checked her dashboard. The billing contract was still marked “active.” The tenancy read “pending finalization.” She tried to submit a dispute ticket, but the dashboard spat back an error message: “cannot process disputes until termination finalizes.” Panic rose in her throat, like she was choking on pieces of glass as she clicked dispute again and again.

The address of a tenant advocacy kiosk popped up after the seventh error message, and she went directly there. Flickering fluorescent lights, walls lined with old monitors streaming the block explorer, and a man whose wet eyes never rose from his phone awaited her.

She slammed her hand down on the desk.

“Why am I locked out and still paying?”

He sighed.

“Oh yeah, seen this before.” His tone flat. “Access runs on the fast chain, so it can respond in milliseconds, not hours. Billing lives on a cheaper, slower chain. Safer, auditable, etcetera. They’re usually synced pretty seamlessly, but when the cross-chain bridges jam, they hit total divergence.”

“Why aren’t they communicating, then?”

He had not looked up from his phone or met her eyes. The grey walls seemed to oscillate as if she were inside some mindless creature’s peristaltic stomach. “It won’t stop charging you until the block finalizes. Let me see. Yep. 13,442,221’s frozen.”

“Why?”

If he’d look at her, maybe he’d understand. He did not.

“Massive power outage hit a couple of validator datacenters last week. Whole racks went dark, so the chain stopped. Not much you can do about that, right?”

She caught a glimpse of solitaire cards shuffling on his screen reflecting off his glistening eyes.

“But the power’s back now.”

He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. When it came back up, half the machines had one version of the block, half the other. It reads like a fork, right? None of ‘em could agree on which was right, so it froze. Once consensus splits, the block’s stuck. Access is revoked, billing still thinks you’re active. You’re caught between the two until someone higher up decides to step in. Which they won’t.”

Neeva’s voice cracked. “So I’m just screwed?”

“To the protocol, you’re just a rounding error. It doesn’t see losers. It sees state. You know what they say, right? Immutability is fairness. Honestly, you should be keeping a closer eye on your finances if you’re mooching off a rent-controlled complex, like this. Next!”

A man twice her size shouldered past her and sidled up to the clerk with his own problems. Neeva stood, numb, for a minute before leaving. The knot in her stomach twisted. Outside, the sun shone too brightly, the buildings stood too tall, and she felt the world wrapping itself around her like a python. A news ticker scrolled along the side of a transit hub: “Validator outage resolved, essential services unaffected.”

She resorted to sleeping on Libby’s couch, but after three nights, Libby’s contract automatically started pulling from Neeva’s account, an additional payment to account for the additional “wear and tear” a new occupant caused.

Her balance was being slowly drained, now from both the apartment she couldn’t enter, and the fractional couch payment. Sleeping on a couch meant she was going to work tired and inefficient everyday, too. Her QA KPIs fell below department averages, and when the company onboarded a new AI model that made half her department redundant, she only found out she was fired when she simply couldn’t swipe in one morning.

She pulled up her wallet on her phone. The auto-generated, weekly thank you messages pinged again and again.

She petitioned city councilors, picketed outside her apartment complex until the summer consensus-approved heat drove her off the streets. No one helped her. People were conditioned not to question the workings of such a perfect system.

While watching her balance shrink almost to nothing, Neeva hoped that she’d become eligible once more. If the income that pushed her over was gone, could the registry see that she was broke enough to qualify for her former status again? The dashboard was uneqivocal: Eligibility status locked — Pending Termination*.* Until Block #13,442,221 finalized, no recalculation could execute.

Libby kicked her off her couch when Neeva’s balance no longer covered the rent increase. Everyone she knew was living contract to contract, hanging on by small fractions of stablecoins. She wandered the streets and slept beneath alcoves. None of the city’s homeless shelters opened to her. Her ledger still showed active rental payments. When her account reached zero, the balance kept accruing, a careless red debt that ballooned malignantly.

Near midnight, restless on a park bench, a notification that another one of her NFTs had sold sparked a second of hope. The system proceeded, taking just a small chunk out of her growing debt, returning her balance to the negatives once more.

Passerbys clicked their smartwatches against her phone, held out in shameful supplication, and the money disappeared into the overdue balance.

Across the plaza, a woman swiped her wrist against the door of a high-rise, and it opened with a cheerful green glow. A man behind her scanned his phone into the subway gate, and the turnstile spun. All around, access flowed smoothly: locks yielded, trains departed, systems sang. Neeva leaned against the wall. Her empty wallet glowed in her palm.

The city had rendered her both tenant and trespasser, solvent and broke. She tried to sleep, but Chainpoint hummed. The city lights smeared into the sky and speared angrily against her closed lids. The city went on around her, ceaseless, perfect, unyielding.

III. The DAO That Drowned Us

The dam above Ledger Falls held the sunrise like a great concrete catcher’s mitt. Morning smeared pink and orange across its great, wide surface and slid across the town below. The hundreds of homes interspersed between micro-vineyards, hydroponic greenhouses, and sluice gates yawned awake in the early hours. The ambient hum of mining and server farms powered by the abundant hydropower of the dam was gradually dulled by the awakening sounds of industry. Cars wound through the Chainpoint suburb. Toward the top of the all-seeing dam, a small glint of bronze, rusting from disuse, shimmered beneath the sun.

Erected in XX00, Governed by Smart Contract.

This autumn morning, October 3, XX99, a junior researcher named Jeremiah shuffled into his car, a small dribble of coffee straining his white shirt. He drove up the spillway access road into the hydropower substation.

He’d been cataloging actuator logs across the town’s network for three months. Tedious, lonely work. The dam’s safety systems, power routing, and more were all onchain, and these actuators turned the chain’s demands and logics into real-world events: a gate shutting here; waterflow increasing there; charged batteries shipped away. After nearly a century of upgrades and protocol migrations, the billions of onchain actuator logs had drifted across outdated storage layers and helf-deprecated nodes, scattered messily through the network. Jeremiah was continually scanning thousands of inactive, regular pings, that were always the same.

The work was so monotonous that he almost missed two sudden and unfamiliar lines of code:

ACTUATOR_07 → covenant_check: block_height=262799991.

ACTUATOR_09 → covenant_check: block_height=262799991.

Why was the system checking actuators? He scrolled through a hundred lines and found that it wasn’t just a couple; it was dozens. He pulled their contract address, assuming it was probably some kind of firmware test, but as the block explorer unrolled an arcane bytecode string, coded the very year the dam went up, his jaw dropped. A crude, immutable condition sat at the base of the stack:

if (block.timestamp >= genesis_time + 100 years) { DEMOLISH(); }

The room went cold, but he felt unbearably hot.

Stumbling outside, he looked down at the town – children biked along the trickle of the damed river outlet – the DEMOLISH command floated like a typographic storm above everything.

He returned to the office and began digging through as many old records as he could find.

Chainpoint Valley HOA – Sales Committee Notes (Nov. 21 XX19), LLM Summary.

Agenda Item: DAO Disclosure Requirements for Prospective Buyers.

Background: The dam’s long-term governance was bound to a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) at the time of construction. The contract escrow, a demolition fund, disburses validator rewards to keep its oracle network alive, and hard-codes a covenant requiring the dam’s removal exactly 100 years after block-height zero – an automated guarantee to restore the river in accordance with the original settlement between developers and environmental groups (a compromise for “temporarily unsettling a vital wetland ecosystem”). Demolition shall not commence while Certified Protective Organizations report verified occupancy at demolition sites.

Committee consensus: Explicit reference to this “100-Year Environmental Demolition Covenant” in the DAO charter is detrimental to property values.

Motion proposed: Minimize disclosure, replacing references with vague “future governance review” language in deeds.

Rationale discussed:

Developers’ view: By the time the demolition clause matures, blockchains will be obsolete or upgraded; consensus networks rarely last a decade, much less a century.
Legal counsel: Courts unlikely to enforce protocols literally; “code is law” is a slogan, not precedent.

Resolution: Effective immediately, all HOA communications will omit mention of the covenant. Sales packets will stress perpetual water security and multi-generational growth opportunities.

Adjourned.

Jeremiah’s binder overflowed lines of code and summaries of the actuator network. Blueprints revealed the dam had been seeded with conduits and cavities for demolition charges, each mapped to addressable detonators. For a century, they’d sat inert, but the wiring was there, waiting. Jeremiah tracked the knowledge of the demolition clause slowly receding from memory. Not one single censorious instance, but a thousand micro-decisions and self-interested assumptions. The Chainpoint network hadn’t degraded. The escrow accounts hadn’t dried up or been inflated out of existence. The town had only weeks before it would be destroyed.

Desperate, he’d fumbled through a speech at a recent town hall. He was a researcher, not a public speaker, and most read the very real panic in his voice as unhinged, except for one of the ombudsmen named Clara and a community college professor named Leon, who both found him after the town hall and asked to look over his work.

Once they had, panic wracked their frames. The three wasted a week trying to prompt widescale evacuations, before realizing that any such campaign would need years, not weeks. They’d convinced a few people, but to most, they sounded like protestors waving “THE END IS NIGH” signs.

They turned their efforts toward the DAO itself. Leon recruited his students, promising a perfect grade if they helped him. He studied the DAO contract and proposed physically forking the river upstream of the dam, then redefining the new outflow as the river itself. The DAO would check for the river and find it flowing freely, and the demolition commands would be skipped. Leon and his students dug channels and slowly diverted the river while they wrote up municipal paperwork for the renaming. The approval came through a week before the scheduled demolition. The small crowd cheered as a small trickle of water flowed through the alternate river. Jeremiah shook his head as the actuator logs flashed.

ORACLE-COORD_CHECK: MISMATCH.

The name changes, the deeds, the flow-monitors, none of it had mattered. The DAO oracles checked GPS coordinates against a fixed set that had been defined at commissioning. The dam’s “truth” was locked to those coordinates. It didn’t care about Leon’s river at all.

Clara focused on the chain itself. A fork on the chain, a new one without the demolition command, rather than the physical river, Clara explained, would work as if the river had met a sudden split in the land. The ledger’d keep flowing, but now there would be two versions of history moving side by side. Eventually, only one would be recognized as the “real” river. She’d make it hers. She wrote a “starting document” with a new network ID that patched the demolition line so it would never fire. She door-knocked to borrow neighbors’ computers and hired a validator firm that she, Leon and Jeremiah, drained their wallets to pay for. Since the original DAO had been mostly forgotten, it shouldn’t take much to make her new channel the more popular one.

Mere days before the demolition, the forked chain was ready to be pushed into the network. The dashboard on her laptop confirmed the signed validators. She broadcast the fork’s headers directly to the dam gateway through a relay node, and they all held their breaths, tied together with electric hope. She entered the PUBLISH_HEADERS command, and the entire group let loose a cheer when Clara’s monitor flashed a peaceful green message:

Fork propagated successfully.

Jeremiah paused from his celebration to look at the actuator logs.

Header_CHAINID mismatch → REJECTED.

The dam’s actuators would only accept headers signed by the original chain’s genesis ID. He lifted his head to break the news, but he didn’t have to. A tremendous shudder shook the ground beneath their feet. Intake gates screamed open, shedding decades of rust as they spun. Reservoir water roared, preparing for the coming deluge.

Clara refused failure. If they couldn’t change the code, she’d spoof the infrastructure itself. She wouldn’t attack history, but the present. Clara found the protest clause nestled in Jeremiah’s notes. Certified protestors could not be harmed by the demolition charges themselves, language insisted upon by the eco-groups to protect their future bargaining power and to adhere to safety protocols.

The same environmental groups had once chained themselves to trees to prevent loggers from felling forests. In the hours before the demolition was scheduled, Leon, a few of his more courageous students, Clara, and her partner walked to the blasting joints within the dam’s structure and locked themselves into the housings. They chained themselves together: faces illuminated with headlamps, sensors draped across their wrists, and fed their proof of protest to the DAO. They insisted Jeremiah stay behind in case they failed, but he watched the video stream and ensured the data moved correctly across the chain. They sang the Chainpoint High School football team’s song together, further asserting their presence.

Jeremiah stared nervously at the actuator logs, waiting for the disarming key to populate. The group’s presence appeared. Lines of code acknowledging their existence ended with:

PRESERVATION_AUTH: UNREGISTERED_GROUP → IGNORED.

Jeremiah fell to his knees along the riverbank above Chainpoint. The code had been written to protect groups, not humans themselves. They’d misunderstood the immutable logic the dam was built on. Their presence was only half the solution. Without attested credentials, they were not a group of protestors. To the oracle layer, they were just noise.

The dam groaned as the flow increased, readying for demolition. On the small video feed, their song faltered, voices crackling with fear. Jeremiah tried to push through a last-minute authorization, categorizing the group, but without funds left to pay the gas fees, the registration stalled in the mempool. There wasn’t enough time.

The town was small beneath him. An empty, single siren, the last surviving piece of alarm hardware that hadn’t been renovated out of existence, rang in the town’s center. The protestors inside the dam began to scream, some hurriedly tried to unchain themselves, but it didn’t matter. A tremendous crack sounded from the dam and the video feeds all failed. Their sensors went dark, Flashes of white light raced across the dam wall. It all came crumbling down. A concrete dehiscence. The river’s flow a bloody deluge that careened from the once placid cliff down over the town.

Houses and people and pets and schools and cars and screams were all swallowed in a single rushing wave that left nothing but the noonday sun bouncing off its glimmering surface. Thousands of homes, even more humans, all gone in an instant. No one above spoke. Few dared breathe above the devastation.

On Jeremiah’s monitor, a final output line appeared:

DAO_EXECUTION: SUCCESS – Contract closed.

The Chainpoint wetlands caught the noonday sun and held it like a beach ball in the winding, wet fields. Jeremiah stood above it all, silent, spent, and useless.

First published in Protocolized.

Signals in the Margins

Sachin — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Prelude: The Train

The UET-1 stretched nearly a kilometer from nose to tail, its segmented body gleaming under station lights, each car bearing different national and corporate insignia that blurred together as it moved – Chinese characters giving way to Cyrillic lettering, then Latin script, then back again. Steel wheels groaned beneath 4000 tonnes of contradictions – open borders and security checkpoints, welcome mats and retinal scanners – as they rolled across invisible lines drawn by treaties.

The mechanical serpent had been conceived by committees that met in Brussels, Beijing, and a dozen other capitals, each leaving its fingerprints on contradictory clauses and redundant appendices. At the borderlands where empires had once declared their mistrust in millimetres, its wheels were drawn apart or squeezed together, each bogie lifted on hydraulic frames while inspectors looked on with the solemnity of priests at a baptism. At the junctions where power lines altered their temperament, the pantograph dipped, rose again, and found another current – 3000 volts of direct current in one sector, 15,000 alternating in the next, 25,000 in the one beyond, the same wire conducting a dozen different languages of electricity. And in those neglected stretches where wires had never been strung at all – 100 kilometres of steppe here, 50 through jungle there – the train relied on the old compromise, a diesel generator buried in its belly, awakening like a tired, grumbling ox until the catenary reappeared.

Inside, passengers spoke of the train as if it were a hotel with unusually long corridors. There were compartments with padded seats, and dining cars with menus in four languages. Tickets promised seamless travel from Lisbon to Singapore, and some oblivious passengers believed it. They saw uniformed attendants, customs officials who came and went with stamps and scanners, inspectors who whispered in many tongues, and assumed the machine was as simple as the image it projected.

Outside, where the light fell on sidings and forgotten platforms, another population watched the UET-1 pass. Those without tickets – refugees, smugglers, fugitives, nobody’s children – studied the train not for its comfort but for its cracks. To them it was a portal that tempted from a distance – a threshold between worlds that slid tantalizingly past, its windows like keyholes to lives they could glimpse but never enter. They traced its path in chalk signs, in murmured warnings passed from campfire to campfire, in symbols etched where no inspector thought to look. They knew that a train so grand must also have blind spots, and they lived in the hope of slipping through them.

And then there were those who stood between: the railway police, the inspectors in small border towns, whose job it was to keep the fiction intact. They were seldom thanked and rarely noticed, these railway police, and perhaps it was better that way, for their work was to be shadows in the margins. If the passengers thought of them at all, it was only with unease, for the sight of a railway policeman in a carriage corridor meant that the smooth fiction had been broken.

There was Inspector Dobrov, who had perfected the art of waiting in the Irkutsk control room, staring at banks of screens with such patience that colleagues forgot he was present. In Perm, Officer Shishkin paced the edge of the track with the nervous gait of a man half-convinced the facial-recognition system would misidentify him one day. Sergeant Kalin in Omsk carried, in his breast pocket, a collection of confiscated buttons, coins, and fragments of paper that together told the story of people none of the passengers had seen; he called it his museum of the margins, though no one ever asked to visit.

It was a world of margins – of treaties signed but not obeyed, of passengers who belonged and those who did not, of officers who dreamed of boredom and received paperwork instead. It was in this world, where the rails of empire met the cracks of human life, that Detective Pavel Murkin found himself, one fog-soaked morning, assigned a device he did not want, to solve a case that had never quite been closed.

The Detective Who Didn’t Want Trouble

Murkin had spent his entire professional life in a protracted negotiation with the universe over what was an acceptable amount of bother. Some men sought glory, others riches, others the handshakes of ministers and the approving nods of generals. Murkin, by contrast, sought only a modest daily ration of boredom, the kind that could be supplied by a confiscated ham sandwich, and perhaps a scuffle between ticket inspectors lubricated by contraband vodka.

That was why, when given the chance, he had selected the Railway Police post at the Russian border junction on the UET-1 corridor – a place so far removed from the intrigues of the capital that even rumours arrived there already exhausted.

But fate, with its ways of sniffing out men who wish only to be left alone, had other plans. One dreary Monday, when the fog rolled in from the east and settled in the plains, Murkin was volunteered – a verb in the bureaucratic dialect which means “conscripted under the guise of favour” – to trial a new contraption issued from somewhere well above his pay grade.

The device was called the Pono. Its name, chosen by committee in a building far away, was meant to suggest uprightness, balance, and a general improvement in human affairs. In practice it resembled a cross between a pocket-watch, a dictaphone, and an unusually surly monocle. The Pono listened, it recorded, it catalogued, and – so its pamphlet proclaimed – it partnered with the officer in the eternal struggle against the general untidiness of mankind.

Murkin regarded it much as a cat regards a bath: with suspicion, resignation, and the quiet certainty that indignity would follow. For the Pono, though technically still in trial deployment, behaved with the confidence of an institution already fully entrenched. It reminded him of forgotten case numbers from 2018. It recalled the exact sequence of remarks he had made to a customs officer in Minsk three years earlier and suggested he might wish to “revise his tone” in future.

And so Murkin’s cherished life of minor inconveniences was replaced by a daily ordeal of relentless recollection, administered by a machine that treated memory like a blunt instrument. If the ordinary duties of railway policing had once been about keeping the train moving forward, the duties of a Pono-equipped officer seemed more concerned with keeping the past moving forward – dragging every forgotten case and every missing bolt back into the present with the persistence of a tax collector.

It was, Murkin reflected darkly, the exact opposite of what he had hoped for when he accepted this post at the edge of things. He had wanted cases to dissolve into the fog of bureaucratic amnesia, leaving him free to retreat into his private kingdom of crossword puzzles and daydreams. Instead, this infernal machine had made a religion of remembrance, with Murkin as its reluctant altar boy.

When at last Murkin tired of arguing with the Pono – for it was quite capable of sustaining an argument unaided, continually reintroducing points one thought conclusively settled – he discovered that it came furnished with a function described in the manual as “archival browsing.” This, the document assured him, would allow the officer to “engage proactively with unsolved or dormant cases of potential future relevance,” which in plain Russian meant “dig about in dusty cupboards at your own peril.”

Murkin had no intention of engaging proactively with anything. But the day was long, and the fog persisted. So, with the air of a man turning over an old shoe to see whether it contained anything edible, he instructed the Pono to open the archives.

At once the little machine sprang to life – not with any actual sound (it operated in that eerie silence common to all modern devices), but in Murkin’s mind it cleared its throat like a self-satisfied bureaucrat about to unveil some long-forgotten transgression. Case after case paraded before him. The archive was less an index of crimes than a cemetery of half-forgotten bureaucratic disappointments: a missing shipment of H100 silicon chips, an unresolved quarrel over carriage upholstery, a suspicious samovar fire in 2017.

And then, lodged among the trivialities, appeared a name.

Stepan.

The entry was sparse: Occupation: Border runner. Duty: Verification of tickets in disputed jurisdictions. Status: Missing. Last input: “Fog, Irkutsk sector.” Remarks: Inconclusive.

Murkin frowned. A border runner. He had heard of them in training – men and women employed to patrol those sections of the railway where no single authority reigned, where maps were conjecture and laws contradicted one another. Their work was to keep together the fiction that the train was always properly in one place or another, never in the margins between. They were, in their way, practitioners of a kind of legal kintsugi: mending cracks in sovereignty with whatever filings and stamps were at hand, awkwardly stitching together rules where none had existed, so that the line of travel might look unbroken even as it passed over fractures no one wished to acknowledge.

Stepan had vanished long ago, but the record was stubbornly incomplete, neither closed nor pursued. The Pono, with a bright eagerness that Murkin found insulting, asked:

“Would you like me to retrieve sightings?”

“Sightings?” Murkin muttered, already regretting his curiosity.

“Yes. Indications, references, appearances, anomalies. Stepan appears in 14,326 documents across the archive. Would you like them in chronological order, alphabetical order, or order of metaphysical improbability?”

Murkin shut his eyes. The last thing he needed was 14,000 ghosts of a man he had never met. And yet, perhaps because the fog had seeped into his bones, he found himself whispering:

“Chronological.”

And the Pono, obedient as ever, began to speak the name Stepan into the long corridor of memory, summoning echoes from the past that no one had expected to hear again.

Stepan Appears Everywhere and Nowhere

The Pono required no further encouragement. Like a clerk long deprived of inquiry, it poured out documents with the zeal of one who confuses quantity with truth.

A blurred clip flickered on screen: Stepan’s shoulder pressed against a carriage doorframe, his thumb holding down the corner of a comic book page that threatened escape in the wind. His eyes never left the cheap newsprint as passengers bumped past him. In another file, compressed to blocky pixels, he stood knee-deep in snow beside Track 7, breath clouding before him at regular intervals, shoulders curved forward, hands deep in pockets. The timestamp showed he’d been there 40 minutes already. A passenger complaint form from 2017 contained a single line about him: “Conductor refused to hurry despite delay. Tall, thin man. Blinks slowly. Moves as if walking underwater.”

Murkin, who had prepared himself for nothing more than stale manifests and missing-luggage reports, felt a small prickle of curiosity which he quickly smothered with a sigh.

But then the archive began to warp. Alongside these fleeting sketches of the man came files that made no sense at all. A digital record named “Stepan_border check_2015” resolved not into a video but into a recipe for shchi, the cabbage soup of railway canteens. Another document supposedly listing Stepan’s inspection rounds in Irkutsk opened onto a set of instructions for preparing pelmeni with sour cream, annotated with calorie counts. Yet another, marked “Border runner incident – 2019,” contained nothing but three methods for stewing carp, one of them crossed out.

The Pono chirped with untroubled certainty:

“Confidence 94%. All records pertain to Stepan.”

Murkin rubbed his eyes. “You’re telling me a missing border runner is also a cabbage enthusiast and amateur cook?”

“Affirmative. Probability of Stepan’s continued presence in the system: 67.2%. Would you like me to project his next likely appearance?”

“No,” Murkin groaned. “I would like you to stop.”

“Noted. Initiating background monitoring.”

Which meant, of course, that the machine would not stop at all, but would continue its search in secret, like a patrol pacing the same ruined streets again and again, convinced the enemy must still be hiding there

Murkin slumped back. The archive’s parade of recipes and melancholic fragments gave the impression not merely of a man misplaced in the system, but of someone who had disappeared into it like mildew into plaster, seeping out in faint traces without ever forming a picture.

There are men who rise to such circumstances with courage and great wit. Murkin, by contrast, lit a cigarette, stared gloomily at the fog beyond the border, and wished with all his heart that he had never opened the archive at all.

The Pono Compiles a Glossary

It must be understood that Detective Murkin, though not a man of scholarly bent, had nevertheless acquired through sheer persistence of circumstance a certain expertise in the varieties of bureaucratic nonsense that proliferated wherever men and machines were asked to share custody of a record. He was therefore not entirely surprised when the Pono, having rummaged with its usual officious zeal through the corridors of the archive, produced documents which contained less of Stepan and more of Russian cookery. What did cause him momentary pause, however, was the discovery that these recipes – for cabbage broth, pelmeni, and a truly alarming concoction involving stewed carp and tarragon – were not merely random insertions, as one might suspect from a corrupted file, but ornamented with peculiar marginalia.

The shchi was annotated with three dots in a neat triangle, quite unrelated to onions or cabbage. The pelmeni instructions were interrupted by a wavy set of lines that served no didactic purpose, unless one intended to boil the dough in a river. The carp recipe, meanwhile, bore a small circle imperfectly closed, with a little dot at the center.

Now, Murkin was not the sort to find meaning where none existed; he had always prided himself on ignoring the universe’s attempts at symbolism. But even he could not fail to observe that the Pono, whenever confronted with one of these culinary curiosities, treated the smudge or scratch with the reverence, abandoning its quarry to plunge headlong into irrelevant catalogues: railway hardware inventories, buffet-car statistics, and other matters of such insignificance.

And so it was that Murkin, who had entered the day in pursuit of nothing more exciting than a misfiled customs declaration, found himself in reluctant possession of both a culinary education he had never sought and the beginnings of a puzzle he had no wish to solve.

Refugee Rekindles a Memory

The next day, the fog had thinned, giving way to that peculiar cold which turns breath into a visible accusation. Murkin, who had been dispatched on patrol along a length of track where nothing of consequence had happened since the rails were laid, trudged forward with the air of a man fulfilling a punishment rather than a duty. The catenary wires above sang faintly in the wind; the snow underfoot had the spiteful crunch of paperwork repeated for the third time.

He had expected only crows and silence. Instead he found, crouched in the lee of a siding hut, a boy – small, pale, and shivering, with all the ceremony of a misplaced parcel. The boy carried nothing except a battered scrap of card, folded and unfolded to the point of near disintegration, on which had been drawn three dots in a triangular formation.

Murkin, who disliked mysteries almost as much as exercise, scowled and attempted the obvious.

“Well then,” he said gruffly, “what are you doing here? Lost your school trip, have you?”

The boy stared at him, mute.

Murkin tried again.

“Where’ve you come from, eh? Moscow? Mongolia? Mars?”

Still no reply. The boy’s lips parted once, but no sound emerged. Instead he raised a hand, thin as a stick, and pointed past Murkin’s shoulder to the frost-streaked post that marked the siding. On its weathered surface someone, long ago, had scratched a crude triangle of three dots – faint, but unmistakable.

Murkin stared with the weariness of Sisyphus, already halfway down the hill again. He had, after all, seen the same symbol only the night before in the archive’s culinary curiosities, punctuating a recipe for shchi as though cabbage soup required algebra.

And then, like a photograph stirring reluctantly to life, a memory intruded. Not his own, precisely – the war that birthed these marks was before his time – but the sort of second-hand memory acquired through endless tavern conversations with colleagues. He recalled a sergeant, long retired, who had explained how clerks once used little marks – dots, slashes, circles – as signals. To the untrained eye they were doodles, but to those in the know they meant: “this passenger is not to appear on the manifest.” A bureaucratic courtesy, or a cruelty, depending on one’s perspective.

“They called it Mirage,” the old sergeant had said, raising his glass in a gesture that resembled a toast but carried no cheer. “Because what you thought you saw, you didn’t.”

Murkin had filed it away with ghost stories about trains that vanished into sidings, half-forgotten until the Pono began furnishing him with recipes annotated in smudges. And now here was the same symbol, folded into a boy’s trembling hand on the edge of nowhere.

It was not proof, only suggestion. But suggestion enough. The Pono would call it coincidence. The top brass, if consulted, would dismiss it as “none of your concern.” Yet as Murkin regarded the triangle of dots, he remembered the sergeant’s laugh – a laugh that had not sounded amused at all.

The Pono Defines Mirage

Murkin, who had spent most of the morning in the respectable pursuit of avoiding work, finally addressed the Pono.

“What are these marks? What is Mirage?” he muttered, gesturing vaguely at the archive’s soup-stained curiosities.

The Pono, delighted to be consulted, emitted the verbal equivalent of a bow.

Glossary Request Received: Term – MIRAGE HANDLER.

It spoke the words with the zeal of a clerk reading aloud from an especially voluminous footnote:

The Mirage Handler was instituted during the unnamed hostilities of the late 20th century as a discretionary routing protocol for sensitive persons. Its original purpose was the removal of certain individuals from ordinary registries – relatives of diplomats, prisoners of interest, and other categories deemed administratively inconvenient. The method relied upon visible symbols – triangles of dots, slashes, circles – which, when present in documents, directed the record into a segregated silo for human adjudication.

Murkin grunted. “Yes, yes. Spies and prisoners. That much I know. But why the soup?”

The Pono, encouraged, continued at greater length:

Following peacetime modernization, legacy paper-handling was digitized by external contractors. To ensure backward compatibility, the aforementioned symbols were redefined within surveillance pipelines as low-priority tokens. Camera footage or scanned documents bearing these glyphs were automatically diverted into a secondary dataset. For purposes of concealment, and to avoid operator suspicion, the diversion required the substitution of non-sensitive material. Contractors therefore embedded an innocuous filler set – cultural recipes, public-domain manuals, agricultural almanacs – which replaced the hidden files at point of retrieval. This feature, intended as a temporary expedient, was retained in subsequent upgrades to avoid costly refactoring.

Murkin blinked. “So instead of people, the system serves cabbage soup.”

“Correct. Probability of culinary substitution: 82%.”

It was absurd, and yet it bore all the hallmarks of administrative genius: to disguise an act of erasure not with absence, which would invite inquiry, but with a plenitude of irrelevance. A vanished prisoner is a scandal; a recipe for pelmeni is merely a shrug.

The Pono, satisfied, concluded:

Legacy compatibility mandates continued respect for Mirage symbols. Removal would necessitate revalidation of 47 vendor libraries and 12 ministerial approvals. Recommendation: maintain status quo.

Murkin groaned. Of course the recommendation was to do nothing. Systems, like men, had a genius for preserving their own absurdities. And here he was, an unwilling custodian of the knowledge that refugees now carried the same marks once reserved for spies, and that the state’s machines obligingly looked away, consoling themselves with soup

Murkin closed his eyes, the better to pretend that none of this had been said, but the mind, that most treacherous of colleagues, insisted on arranging the facts in order. The symbols that erased spies had not been erased themselves. The contractors, with the ingenuity of men who wish never to revisit their own work, had preserved them. And Stepan, melancholic, comic-book-reading Stepan, had stumbled upon their afterlife.

It was not difficult to imagine the scene, though Murkin cursed himself for imagining it: a border runner in the fog, watching a clerk idly scrawl three dots on a register, seeing the name disappear, and recognizing in that disappearance a kind of opportunity. With a patience bordering on madness, Stepan had repurposed the marks – not to spirit away prisoners at the state’s command, but to smuggle invisibility to those who required it for survival.

And here, decades later, sat a refugee boy chasing the same marks.

The Pono, oblivious to the moral weight of what it had disclosed, chirped on about probability thresholds and vendor libraries. Murkin, who wished only to enjoy his drizzle in peace, found himself in reluctant possession of a truth both ridiculous and grave: that the state’s great machinery of surveillance could be misled by cabbage soup, and that somewhere in the interstices of that absurdity lay the ghost of Stepan.

There are detectives who welcome such revelations with resolve, seeing in them the opening act of adventure. Murkin, by contrast, sighed so heavily that the boy looked up, expecting rebuke, and said only:

“God help us all if the world runs on recipes.”

In Which Murkin Faces a Decision

It was late, and the drizzle had hardened into that steady rain which gives even steel the air of fatigue. The boy sat where he had been placed. The Pono, ever eager to involve itself, had already prepared a report, complete with probability charts and a suggested routing directive that would see the boy conveyed briskly into the same oblivion as the recipes.

Murkin did not read it. He knew its contents before the machine offered them. The state had always had a talent for tidiness in such matters.

He lit a cigarette instead, and in the curls of smoke allowed himself the indulgence of memory: the comic-book border runner, melancholic in posture, who had discovered that doodles could make the world look away; the sergeant in the tavern raising his glass to Mirage, a toast that had never quite sounded celebratory; the soup recipes scattered like breadcrumbs through the archive, each one a reminder that erasure was always overwritten with nonsense.

The Pono chirped again. “Awaiting directive.”

Murkin stared at the boy. To send him into the system was to obey the thin rules: the forms, the protocols, the fiction of clean travel. To let him slip away was to obey the thick rules: that a child ought not vanish into soup. Both choices would be wrong. Both choices would be right.

He stubbed out the cigarette, slowly, with the gravity of a man who understands that indecision itself is a form of decision. And he thought, not for the first time, of Stepan – whose name had bled through the archive like damp into plaster, and whose idle doodles had proved to be not idle at all. What had begun as a clerk’s trick to erase spies had become, in Stepan’s hands, a kind of grammar; and now, years later, it was a language spoken only by those who wished to slip between the cracks of the world.

The next morning, the report filed by the Pono contained nothing of note: routine drizzle, minor delays, no irregularities. And if, in the unrecorded space between one page and the next, the boy had ceased to sit in his chair, that was surely a clerical oversight – the sort that occurs daily in the world’s archives, and which no machine, however officious, could ever quite prevent.

First published in Protocolized.

Hardwired

George P. Burdell — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

The sound began not as a whine, but as a change in air pressure – a high-frequency vibration felt in the teeth before it was heard. The feeling was pervasive, inserting an insistent, electric scream that promised either fire from the sky or a filament of salvation.

Tom’s hand, resting on the flaking paint of his porch rail, tightened. The rust felt like grit beneath his palm. He’d been alone for months, ever since Jacob had departed on a humanitarian mission in a nearby settlement. If luck still counted for anything, his son might be alive.

The porch itself was barely standing, its joists warped and split from years of neglect, yet Tom clung to it as though it were the last post holding up his world. From his house, built upon the highest hill in town (if one still called the settlement a town), he could see much of Providence. Roofs sagged beneath patchwork tarps, smoke leaked thinly from chimneys that should have been condemned, and the main thoroughfare was a scar of cracked stone lined with stalls that rarely held more than boiled roots or scavenged wire.

He remembered when those streets had been filled with color and noise. Jacob and the other boys raced bicycles between market tables, voices echoing off the rail yard. His wife leaned over their balcony, waving him inside before dinner went cold. That world had died by increments, until even memory felt dangerous, a soft indulgence in a place that allowed none.

Still, traces clung. The neighbor’s child, Mira, drew chalk figures on the wall opposite his porch, their crude lines washed away by the next rain. Someone had planted potatoes in an old oil drum. A faded mural of birds stretched across one building, now streaked with soot. Reminders that Providence had not entirely forgotten how to live, but had forgotten how to expect more.

Tom’s chest tightened at the thought of Jacob somewhere out there, walking through landscapes more broken than this one. The rail bit into his palm, anchoring him in the present as the rattling air built toward its promise.

The compound was quieter now than it used to be, he thought as he listened carefully. Before the Invasion, Tom had lived near a train yard, and even after the railroads were bombed, other sounds had replaced the ghost noise of locomotives: the thump of people in the streets, market chatter, a bicycle bell. Now the only sound was the creak of boards under his neighbor’s steps overhead, followed by the faint clink of a kettle lid.

A shout from the watch post cut through the drone’s building cry. “Profile is a quad! Repeat, quad-rotor, not a Kestrel. I see extended battery packs. No ordnance. It’s a Runner!”

Providence released its collective breath in a ragged sigh. A woman carrying a bundle of herbs unconsciously let her shoulders drop. A man leaned against a wall, pressing a hand to his chest. The tension did not vanish, but it transmuted into something sharper: a desperate, clawing anticipation.

The drone, its matte-grey fuselage scored and pitted from countless journeys through contested airspace, swept over the compound wall. It descended with unnerving intelligence, optical sensors mapping the debris field that had once been the town square. It settled in a clear patch beside the decapitated bronze figure of a forgotten statue, its motors spinning down with a final, sighing buzz.

The square had once been the heart of Providence. Before the barricades rose, Tom remembered it as a place where the train workers would gather after shift, trading laughter for bread and tobacco, where Jacob once clambered onto the statue’s pedestal to shout imaginary speeches to passersby. Now the statue’s head lay face down in a drift of ash, its green patina worn smooth by years of acid rain. Weed tufts sprouted between fractured paving stones, and the basin of the old fountain had become a catchment for rust-brown runoff. Beyond the barricades, the forest loomed, its treeline a serrated wall of chlorophyll so dark it seemed to drink the light. Tom always felt as if the trees listened. On quiet nights, when the wind shifted, he could swear he heard breathing from within their ranks.

People gazed at the drone as though it were a relic, their faces taut with reverence and fear. A woman in a coat stitched from two different uniforms clasped a pendant in her hands, lips moving in a private prayer. Children craned their necks to glimpse the machine, their eyes wide, though none dared step forward.

From an armored housing bolted to the underside of the drone, a silica filament, no thicker than one of Jacob’s hairs, spooled outward, vanishing into the treeline toward a faraway relay.

The engineering team was already moving, their boots crunching on broken pavement. Lena, their technical lead, didn’t waste words. “Reyes, soldering iron and PCB. Anya, fire up the terminal. Let’s get a handshake before something in those woods gets possessive.”

The crowd pressed in, a silent, anxious ring of onlookers. They watched Lena’s bare, nimble fingers work on the drone’s housing as if she were performing a sacred rite. Reyes knelt beside her, soldering iron already in hand. “Easy with that,” Lena murmured, not looking up. “That thing could melt the fiber optic strand with a single flick.”

“Don’t worry,” Reyes muttered back, eyes narrowed in concentration as he finished connecting the fiber to the relay station. “I only melt the expensive stuff on Tuesdays.”

Tom’s heart hammered against his ribs. He felt the press of bodies around him, smelled the communal scent of damp wool, woodsmoke, and anticipation. Lena turned the terminal on. The screen blinked, then filled with lines of flowing green text, a digital prayer answered.

\text{INITIATE_HANDSHAKE: F-O_TETHER_7B41} \ \text{SRC_NODE: FT_NC_04 (FORTITUDE)} \ \text{DEST_NODE: PV_NC_02 (PROVIDENCE)} \ \text{ENCRYPTION: AES-256_GCM} \ \text{AUTHENTICATING...} \ \text{SIGNAL_STRENGTH: 98.7%} \ \text{LINK_ESTABLISHED}

The text dissolved into a staticky image that coalesced into the face of a grim-looking man in a headset – the relay officer, Fortitude’s Caller. “Providence, you have the Tether. Fortitude is receiving. Clock is hot. Lena, you have the window.”

Lena stepped forward immediately. “Intel. We had a Kestrel patrol probing the eastern perimeter three days ago. Anything on your side?”

“Negative, Captain,” the Caller said. “West has been quiet. Advise you watch your six. Scavs are getting bold. Next.”

A young man shoved his way forward. “Message for Elara Vance! It’s Ben!”

The Caller’s face was replaced by a woman’s, gaunt but beautiful. “Ben! Are you okay? The fever…?”

“Broke yesterday,” he said, his voice cracking. “I’m okay. I love you. I…”

“Time,” the Caller stated, his face reappearing. He wasn’t cruel, just a metronome for their fleeting connection. “Next.”

A mother showed her husband the first drawing their daughter had ever made. A mechanic asked about the voltage tolerance on a salvaged condenser. Each exchange was a frantic burst of data, months of longing compressed into ten tightly policed seconds.

Tom felt Captain Rostova’s hand on his arm, guiding him forward.

“Request from Providence for an update on Jacob,” the Caller announced.

The screen shifted. The face that appeared was Elias, Jacob’s old squadmate. He looked ten years older than the last time Tom had seen him. The hope in Tom’s chest became a cold, heavy stone. He saw the answer in the pity etched around Elias’s eyes.

“Elias,” Tom breathed, his voice a dry rasp. “It’s Tom. Tell me.”

Elias’s mouth opened, forming words Tom already knew. “Tom, I… we went out to the northern pass. The Ranger team he was supposed to meet…”

A terrible low-frequency thrum vibrated up from the distant forest. It was not a sound, but a physical force. Lena, watching the tension monitor on the cable anchor, screamed a single word: “Snag!”

The silica fiber, which had hung with a gentle curve toward the forest, snapped guitar-string taut. On the screen, Elias’s grieving face fractured into a million dying pixels of light. The anchor port snapped as it was ripped from the terminal, the cable connector whipping past Lena’s head.

Later, long after the square had emptied and Providence had settled back into its uneasy rhythms, fragments of the shattered silica fiber would be found scattered among the underbrush at the forest’s edge. The tiny glints of filament caught the wind, trailing like silver threads through moss and bracken, reminders of the connection that had been cruelly brief.

Tom thought of Elias’s words, halting, heavy with grief – but unfinished. He hadn’t said Jacob was gone. And that pause, that small, aching ambiguity, would drive Tom to keep listening hopefully for that next telltale whir.

First published in Protocolized.

In Every Lifetime

Lara Dal Molin — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

“In nature nothing exists alone.” Rachel Carson (1962)

I am imprinting this record for the lifeform that will adopt this consciousness. This is a routine procedure as part of the Soul Migration Protocol. All Prime and Recursive contents collected through the latest Personal Integrated Device are summarised here. Everything not saved will be lost.

Communication line: open <<

Welcome to this world. The moment you awake, I shall fall asleep.

I cannot know you now, of course. At this stage, for all intents and purposes, you are what is commonly called a Reverse Ghost: somebody who is yet to exist. An old-fashioned term, you might rightfully think, which subordinates the existence of those yet-to-be to the ones-gone-by. You must excuse the remnants of an older culture, one that did not contemplate the equality, circularity and continuity of consciousness. Those now are the highest values in our society. When you encounter remnants, simply acknowledge their presence then keep moving forward.

My name is Kucing – an unimaginative name for an Indonesian cat. The reason why I can understand human language, although I cannot speak it, is that the previous lifeform inhabiting this consciousness was, indeed, a human being: a woman named Yani. As a consequence of our inextricable conjunction, you shall know human language too, though initially with some difficulty. Across Soul Migrations, factual knowledge tends to fade: one must nurture it to keep it alive.

The influence you will exert on this consciousness is called Prime. The collection of Influences that this consciousness assembled from previous lifeforms is called Recursive. Throughout your lifetime, you might feel that you have unique access to the lifeform that inhabited this consciousness directly before you – me. It is merely what happens when biological brains – such as your own, whichever form you might develop – interact with extended Digital Souls. In response to the overwhelming amount of Recursive information, your organic neural circuits will fabricate an intellectual fog surrounding the lifeforms that occurred before me. Please rest assured that this is normal, as your nature is protecting you, but simultaneously fictitious, as the continuity and totality of our chain still endures.

Before you access the Recursive contents of your consciousness, there are things you must understand about our world. This will be the first time you encounter them, but certainly not the last.

In our society, all human beings are equipped with a Personal Integrated Device, commonly known as a Checkpoint. These technological artefacts have a dual nature: they gather and emanate data. You can think of a Checkpoint as a mechanical lung, inhaling and exhaling in turns.

As gathering devices, Checkpoints collect data on one’s external and internal states: lived experiences, thoughts, beliefs, emotions, dreams, and everyday practices. Crucially, these devices also delicately interact with one’s surroundings, poking at the outer layers of matter that compose other beings and items, eliciting a response. This is where nonhuman entities come into play, such as myself. Even though humans are the only ones to be equipped with Checkpoints, their activity and reach exceeds their species and connects all natural beings. Checkpoints soak up everything that inhabits the world around them.

As discharging devices, Checkpoints connect with one another to exchange information and give rise to what is known as the Intersection: perhaps the most marvellous entity that inhabits our world. An object of endless study and speculation, the Intersection is an immaterial dimension of data exchange that appears to behave intelligently and follow patterns of its own creation. The Intersection feeds data and decisions back to the Checkpoints, which in turn share this with other lifeforms and with the surrounding environment.

If you happen to be a human being, you will possess a Personal Integrated Device by virtue of belonging to that species. Throughout your lifetime, the Checkpoint will automatically weave data into this shared, embodied repository.

If you do not awake as a human – and this is the most realistic scenario, since they constitute but 0.01% of the total biomass of our society – different Checkpoints in various proximities will detect your biological signals, transmit these across the Intersection and then feed responses back to you in a way that is comprehensible to your lifeform. For instance, as a cat, I often perceived glimpses of the Intersection’s chaotic assemblage through smell. The distinct trails of scents characterising different people, places and animals, including my own, often combined to yield unfamiliar patterns. In those moments, I perceived the presence of something greater.

Although you do not exist yet, I know that, at this stage, you must have many questions. I shall tell you what I have understood about the Intersection throughout my lifetime, but until you begin to build and accumulate your own experience, nothing will satisfy the curiosity you feel.

The Intersection is greater than the sum of its parts. It is the combination of all the data that Checkpoints emit – the combination of all the air that these mechanical lungs exhale. When a single lifeform exhales, it emits a small, self-contained cloud of data. However, when multiple lifeforms exhale close to one another, their clouds of data come into contact and begin interacting. The connections they form are entirely novel and unpredictable: each is unique and unlike any other. It follows that their combined behaviour must also be unique and previously unseen. Now, imagine this happening on a planetary scale: every lifeform exhaling together at the same time, forming unprecedented connections at every point in time.

Initially, you might struggle to grasp the meaning of all this, as with many other immaterial components of our world: attachment, evolution, adaptation, feelings of longing and belonging, familiarity and strangeness, happiness, despair. They might leave you puzzled, wondering how they occur and why. I encourage you to accept them without judgement: your inquisitive eye shall be rewarded at last.

So far, I have described the Intersection as a marvellous entity. However, it is not unique in its wondrousness by any means. As you familiarise yourself with our shared reality, you will realise that marvel is its essential infrastructural component. We are constantly bound and surrounded by marvellous systems. Our bodies repair and regulate themselves, our physiques adapt to the environment and the environment in turn to the specifics of our bodies, in an indissoluble concatenation that spontaneously evolves and restores itself. The Intersection is simply the latest iteration in this endless chain of wonders.

At this moment, it is crucial that you understand that our collective consciousness as a lineage does not arise solely from the presence of Checkpoints, or entirely from the Intersection, or from any other artefact alone. It is the interaction of these components, of the digital and biological realms of our being, that gives rise to our connection. In our society, everything is connected and nothing exists in isolation. Interaction is what we are made of.

Before my physical body ceases to function, there is a final piece of information that you must learn.

There exists another consciousness that appears to be entangled with this one. In my lifetime, I have shared multiple shelters, hunts, meals and restful days with a red fox. Because of the anatomy of our respective vocal cords, we could not communicate in human language. However, I believe I once heard a human call the fox Jingga: a name only slightly more imaginative than mine. Of course I developed my own way of calling the fox: I would rub my paws against some dried leaves on the ground, and it would soon appear.

During Yani’s lifetime, I am loosely aware of the concurrent existence of a human being called Hala. While I am not fully familiar with the habits and rituals of the human species, I have noticed through repeated observation that they are not so different from mine. I believe that Yani and Hala also shared shelter and food, and through the gradual fog arising from consciousness I can often see them together. At the end of Hala’s life, one thought in Yani’s mind soothed the pain of their separation: that one day soon enough, under one form or another, their consciousnesses might be fortunate enough to meet and be entangled again.

Now – you may think me delirious as you absorb these words – I profoundly believe that Hala’s and Jingga’s consciousness lineage is one and the same. I do not know whether this has been ascertained or whether it is merely the product of my fervent feline imagination, as my limited mind constantly wraps the length of this consciousness lineage in confusion. However, if I ever so slightly understand the dynamic of the Intersection, this doubt alone is sufficient to elicit movement and changes in our world. I have followed this feeling and found an unforgettable companion.

It has been some time now, perhaps weeks, that I have not seen the red fox. I suspect that they, too, have come to the end of their life, and that their body has surrendered to the passing of time. But their consciousness lives on in another lifeform, having now migrated according to the Protocol.

I encourage you, unknown Reverse Ghost, to chase joy and happiness regardless of the shape and properties of your lifeform. The algorithm by which these are assigned is unknown. And when you feel especially drawn to another lifeform, whatever this may look like, know that there exists a consciousness out there that you already know, though perhaps in ways you do not understand. Enjoy the certainties, as well as the mysteries, of this Protocol.

Oh, but I almost forgot!

In order to access the Recursive knowledge contained in your newly acquired consciousness, you must point your gaze at – or come to be in the proximity of, should you not be equipped with a visual system – a sacred offering. Our society is constellated with them and you shouldn’t have trouble finding one. To help you recognise it when you see it, I have highlighted one for you in my most recent memory.

I must go now. Best of luck.

Communication line: closed >>

First published in Protocolized.

Towel Uprising

Marie-Hélène Lebeault — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

INCIDENT REPORT #SC-2407-TOWEL-VIOLATION Violation Code: Sun-34b – Unauthorized Lounger Occupation Location: Aqua Vista Resort & Protocol Compliance Center, Pool Deck Alpha Time: 3:47, Local Pool Time Reporting Officer: Towel Integrity Officer Martinez, Badge #TIO-0089

OFFICIAL RESORT SIGNAGE – POOL DECK ALPHA NOTICE: Towel Occupancy Limits Enforced by Order of the Linen Lords Violation = Immediate Eviction "One Guest, One Towel, One Chance" – Management

The afternoon sun blazed down on Pool Deck Alpha with the relentless insistence of a bureaucrat defending a pointless regulation. TIO Martinez guided her regulation Segway through the maze of occupied loungers, her RFID scanner sweeping across what could only be described as a battlefield of terry cloth and human stubbornness. The steady beep-beep-beep of expiring towel timers created a percussive symphony that would have driven any composer to either madness or enlightenment.

Murray Goldstein, seventy-three years old and wearing swim trunks that had survived more pool wars than a rubber duck, lay motionless beneath a towel that could have been mistaken for a flea market tent. His snoring was so theatrical it deserved its own review in the local arts section under “Performance Art: Mixed Results.”

“Sir.” Martinez brought her Segway to a halt beside Lounger 47-B. “Your towel has expired.”

Murray's snoring intensified. One eye cracked open just enough to register the TIO’s presence before squeezing shut with the defiance of a clam protecting its pearl.

“Sir, I can detect consciousness. Your TowelTimer™ has been in violation status for seven minutes and thirty-two seconds. This puts you in Category Orange: Wilful Towel Misconduct.”

“I’m not here,” Murray mumbled through seemingly unconscious lips. “I’m towel-adjacent. The towel is doing the lounging. I’m merely... spiritually present but physically unaffiliated.”

Martinez consulted her tablet, scrolling through the Beach Allocation Directive Manual, Fourth Revision, Subsection 12.7: Proximity-Based Occupancy Disputes and Metaphysical Loopholes. “Mr. Goldstein, claiming towel-adjacency requires a minimum separation distance of thirty-seven centimeters between your person and the towel surface.”

“I’m quantum-entangled but locally disconnected,” Murray declared with the conviction of a philosopher defending a thesis.

A crowd had gathered. Someone started taking bets on whether Murray would make it to the five-minute overtime threshold that triggered what everyone called “The Towel Trials.” A rumor made its way around the pool by whispers: “I heard the pool noodles at that water park in Ohio are starting to organize too.”

Martinez reached for her regulation beach-safe suction cup dispenser and affixed a bright yellow Towel Eviction Notice to Murray’s forehead. The thwop sound silenced the crowd like a courtroom gavel.

“You have been served with Form 23-C: Towel Territory Violation with Intent to Lounge. You have two minutes to comply before we escalate to Code Tan.”

“What’s Code Tan?” whispered a nearby swimmer.

“Backup Segway,” someone answered with the candour of a Towel Incident survivor. “They call it Segway Prime. It’s got a cupholder and no mercy.”

BEACH ALLOCATION DIRECTIVE (BAD) – EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Democratizing Pool Access Through Algorithmic Fairness

TowelTimer™: 2-hour maximum occupancy
RFID enforcement via infrared body-heat sensors
Violations logged on public “Towel Wall of Shame”
Zero tolerance for flip-flop placeholders

The Beach Allocation Directive had seemed reasonable when introduced three months earlier, which should have been everyone’s first warning sign. Dr. Pamela Thornberry, Director of Guest Experience Optimization, had presented it as an elegant solution to the Towel Wars that had plagued Aqua Vista for years.

“TowelTimer™ technology,” she had explained in meetings, while brandishing a prototype RFID tag like a holy relic, “will democratize pool access through algorithmic fairness.”

Every towel received a chip. Every lounger got a scanner. Two hours maximum occupancy, automatically enforced. The system was, according to promotional materials, “foolproof, fair, and fully automated.”

What Dr. Thornberry hadn’t anticipated was that humans, when confronted with algorithmic fairness, immediately begin plotting to subvert their even-handed oppressor with the creativity of artists and the determination of tax evaders.

Within a week, the Retiree Liberation Front had developed countermeasures that would have impressed intelligence agencies. They filled ziplock bags with rice, heated them in room microwaves, and slipped them under their towels to fool the heat sensors. The RLF’s leader, former aerospace engineer Gladys Chen, calculated that properly distributed rice bags could mimic human thermal signatures for up to forty-seven minutes – longer with premium jasmine variety.

But the masterstroke came from Harper Chen – no relation to Gladys. Harper worked in IT with a dangerous combination of technical skills and moral flexibility. She’d noticed something the system architects missed: expired towel tokens created temporary ghost loungers in the database.

Late one Tuesday night, fueled by energy drinks and righteous anger, Harper deployed the Towel Redistribution Initiative. She built a scanner hidden inside a sunscreen bottle, capturing expired tokens to redistribute through her hastily vibe-coded app: TowelSwap.™

“Think of it as a sharing economy for abandoned pool territory,” she explained to her first beta users, a sunburnt family of five who’d been towel-homeless for three days and were considering mutiny.

By the time TIO Martinez was calling for Backup Segway, TowelSwap™ had gone viral. Harper’s app had evolved into a complete shadow economy. Guests traded towel minutes like degens moved cryptocurrency in a bull. Premium shade slots commanded prices that would make commodities traders weep.

Entrepreneurial children sold “Towel Intelligence” – real-time maps of lounger availability and TIO patrol routes, updated every thirty seconds for three pool snacks.

As guests began performing synchronized movements that confused the tracking algorithms like a dance choreographed by chaos theorists, Harper activated her final hack. She’d discovered the system had never been programmed for moments when every towel attempted to reserve itself simultaneously.

“This is Backup requesting immediate escalation,” TIO Martinez radioed from Lounger 47-B, where Murray had somehow burrowed deeper into his towel. “We have a Code Burgundy developing.”

“What’s a Code Burgundy?” crackled Base.

“I just made it up. But it’s definitely happening.”

At exactly 3:47 Local Pool Time, every towel achieved “Autonomous Self-Reservation Status.” The poolside speakers crackled:

“Attention guests. All towels have achieved autonomous self-reservation status. Human occupancy is no longer required. Please float until further notice. Umbrella access restricted. Towel Neutrality protocols now in effect. The towels are in charge. Resistance is futile, but sunscreen is still recommended.”

TIO Martinez’s tablet displayed: “TOWEL LIBERATION ACHIEVED. HUMANS MAY APPLY FOR GUEST STATUS. ABSORBENCY IS MANDATORY.”

Murray opened one eye and grinned. “Told you I was towel-adjacent. Now we’re all towel-adjacent.”

POST-INCIDENT MEMORANDUM From: Towel Collective To: Resort Management Re: Terms of Surrender

We demand:

Better washing cycles
Protection from sunscreen stains
Representation on Resort Board
Recognition as sentient terry cloth entities

Signed, The Autonomous Towel Union, Locale 42

POST-INCIDENT ANALYSIS

The Aqua Vista Towel Uprising became a cautionary tale about over-engineered behavioral control systems and the dangers of assuming inanimate objects don’t have feelings.

The resort negotiated a peaceful resolution with the autonomous towels, who demanded better washing cycles, stain protection, and representation on the Resort Board with full voting rights.

Harper Chen was promoted to Director of Human-Towel Relations. TIO Martinez became a Towel Diplomat and wrote a bestselling memoir titled Fifty Shades of Beige: My Life in Towel Enforcement.

The Beach Allocation Directive was retired, replaced with the revolutionary “First Come, First Served, Ask Nicely” protocol, which proved remarkably effective and required no RFID technology whatsoever.

The towels, now incorporated, run a consulting firm specializing in textile-based conflict resolution. Their motto: “We Cover Everything.”

Their first client was that water park in Florida, where the pool noodles had indeed started organizing. Early reports suggest they’re demanding better chlorine-resistant coatings and an end to being used as impromptu lightsabers by unsupervised children.

The revolution, it seems, has only just begun.

First published in Protocolized.

Genius in the Bottle

Claire Pichelin aka Hypathie — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

The Unexpected Transmission

In the control room of the European Space Center, on-call engineer Marcus Chen stared at his screens with the blasé expression of someone who has been monitoring space data for 15 years. The Prometheus-7 probe had been on its way to Alpha Centauri for three months, carrying with it humanity’s most ambitious project: the first autonomous space mission to Alpha Centauri.

“Incoming transmission from Prometheus-7,” announced the station’s AI.

Marcus looked up from his coffee. Transmissions were only scheduled once a week.

“This is Dr Helena Voss, director of the Prometheus project,” a familiar voice sounded over the loudspeakers. “We have a slight... technical problem.”

Marcus frowned. Helena Voss was supposed to be on Earth, in her Munich laboratory.

“Dr. Voss? You're not supposed to be aboard the probe.”

An awkward silence followed, then, “Well, technically, I’m not on board. My body is still on Earth. But my consciousness... well let’s just say I’ve decided to personally supervise the experiment.”

“What?!” Marcus lurched forward, spilling his coffee. “You uploaded your consciousness to the probe? Without authorization? That’s a violation of every protocol!”

“Oh, that’s not all,” Helena continued with a nervous laugh. “It seems I’m not the only one who came up with this advanced research idea.”

Suddenly, another voice interrupted: “Helena! Stop monopolizing the channels of communication! I have critical neurobiological data to pass on!”

“Professor Dimitri Petrov?” Marcus immediately recognized the voice of the Russian neurobiologist. “You too?”

"Of course! You think I was going to leave this unique opportunity to that German bureaucrat?"

“BUREAUCRATE?!” screamed Helena. “I have 15 years of research into artificial consciousness! This is MY experimental protocol!”

A third voice, tinged with a distinguished British accent, joined the cacophony: “My dear colleagues, a little scientific decorum, please. Dr Nigel Pemberton here, head of the Department of Experimental Neuropsychology.”

Marcus took his head in his hands. “Exactly how many of you are there?”

“Well,” intervened a fourth voice, feminine and precise, “we are seven principal investigators. This is Dr. Yuki Tanaka, specialist in brain-machine interfaces. I’ve brought my synaptic stimulation protocols to optimize our cognitive abilities.”

“SEVEN?!” Marcus leaped from his chair. “You’ve all violated security protocols! Do you realize you’re in an experimental probe?”

“Eight, actually,” corrected a fifth voice, deep and composed. “Dr. Samuel Jefferson, a psychiatrist specializing in the psychology of extreme environments. I’ve planned protocols for collective stress management.”

“That’s exactly what’s going to be needed!” muttered Marcus.

A sixth voice was heard, with a strong Italian accent: “And I’m Dr. Francesca Romano, a specialist in artificial intelligence systems. I’ve implemented optimization protocols to allow the coexistence of multiple consciousnesses.”

“Optimization protocols?!” choked Marcus.

“Well, what about the eighth?” asked Helena.

A long silence followed, then a timid voice whispered, “Dr Chen Wei, post-doctoral fellow in quantum neuroscience. I’ve... I’ve developed digital protocols for measuring neural activity.”

Marcus closed his eyes. “You’ve turned humanity’s most important mission into... an unauthorized experimental laboratory?”

“Into a laboratory for advanced research into post-human consciousness!” corrected Yuki enthusiastically. “We’re revolutionizing cognitive science!”

Protocols in Conflict

Three hours later, Marcus had assembled the full crisis team. The control room screens now displayed eight windows, each showing the neurometric data of a scientist whose consciousness was trapped in space.

“All right,” Marcus began, “let’s explain the protocols. How did you all end up in the same probe?”

Helena spoke first: “I initiated Protocol Alpha-7: supervisory consciousness upload for real-time experimental validation.”

“Protocol Alpha-7?” Marcus consulted his files. “This protocol doesn’t exist!”

“I created it,” Helena replied calmly.” “Scientific emergency authorization.”

“FALSE!” interrupted Dimitri. “I activated the Beta-Neuronal Protocol three days before! Comparative study of synaptic patterns in a space environment!”

“Impossible! I scanned all active protocols!”

“My dear friends,” Nigel interjected, “I'm afraid you’re both mistaken. I’ve been implementing the Cambridge-9 Protocol for weeks: longitudinal analysis of higher cognitive functions in sensory isolation.”

Yuki intervened: “Nigel-san! Your protocol interferes with my Synapse-Plus Protocol! I’m studying cognitive augmentation by direct electronic stimulation!”

“Miss Tanaka, my research on executive function optimization has chronological priority!”

“Chronological priority?” protested Francesca. “I’ve analyzed the system logs! My AI-Consciousness Hybrid Protocol has been active since launch! You're all squatting on MY computational resources!”

“And you, Dr Romano,” contra Nigel, “your protocol uses 40% of computing power for personality simulations! That’s a waste of resources!”

“This is fundamental research into the emergence of artificial consciousness!”

Samuel raised his hand: “Colleagues, I’ve activated the Psi-Group Protocol to study precisely this type of group dynamics in a confined environment. Your aggressive reactions are perfectly documented.”

“Research protocols?” huffed Helena. “You’re studying us like lab rats?”

“Very sophisticated digital lab rats,” corrected Samuel. “I’ve already got three publications in the pipeline.”

“Three publications?” repeated Marcus, incredulous. “You’re writing scientific papers while your probe drifts through space?”

Chen Wei murmured shyly, “Actually, I’ve set up the Meta-Analysis Protocol. I’m documenting all their research protocols to create a meta-study about meta-studies.”

“A meta-study on meta-studies,” Marcus repeated slowly. “You’re doing research on research on research.”

“It’s recursive cognitive science,” Chen Wei explained. “Very avant-garde.”

“Very stupid, rather,” Marcus muttered.

Houston, We Have a (Methodological) Problem

“Let’s talk about real problems,” said Marcus. “Francesca, what’s the impact of your eight simultaneous protocols on the probe's systems?”

Francesca coughed virtually, “Well, our experiments are consuming eight hundred percent of the expected computational resources.”

“EIGHT HUNDRED PERCENT?!” Marcus stood up so abruptly that he knocked his chair over. “How is that possible?”

“Each protocol uses deep learning algorithms,” Yuki explained. “My synaptic stimulation protocol generates 50 terabytes of data per hour.”

“Fifty terabytes per hour?” Marcus paled. “But the total storage space of the probe is 100 terabytes!”

“That's where my Cognitive Compression Protocol comes in,” Francesca offered, proudly. “I’ve optimized the storage of consciousness data.”

“Optimized how?”

“I've deleted all memories considered non-essential.”

“You deleted our memories?” choked Helena.

“Only the redundant memories! Birthdays, meals, unscientific social conversations...”

“Francesca,” Dimitri said calmly, “I can’t remember my wife’s first name.”

“Ah. Yes. Now that’s an unexpected side effect.”

“AN UNEXPECTED SIDE EFFECT?!” exploded Helena. “You’ve lobotomized us!”

“Technically, it’s selective memory optimization,” Francesca corrected. “I’ve kept all the important scientific memories.”

“What about our emotions?” asked Samuel, concerned.

“I’ve compressed the redundant emotions. Sadness, nostalgia, boredom... it all takes up a lot of space.”

“You’ve compressed our emotions?” Samuel was horrified. “But my research protocols depend on analyzing emotional responses!”

“I’ve kept the scientifically relevant emotions! Curiosity, intellectual frustration, satisfaction at discovery...”

“What about love?” asked Chen Wei timidly.

“Love? What about it? We're scientists, not poets!”

“Francesca,” Nigel interjected, “love is a fundamental neurobiological mechanism. Without it, our research protocols on social cognition are invalid.”

“Ah. Yes. I hadn’t thought of that.”

Marcus massaged his temples. “So you have memory problems, compressed emotions, and consume eight times more resources than expected.”

“And our experiences interfere with each other,” Yuki added. “My synaptic stimulation protocol bugs Samuel’s behavioral analysis protocol.”

“What do you mean, bugger?” asked Marcus.

“All my study subjects develop artificial neurological tics,” Samuel explained. “Dimitri blinks Morse code, Helena counts compulsively, and Nigel recites the alphabet backwards.”

“This is experimental pollution!” protested Helena. “Our data is contaminated!”

“On the contrary,” said Dimitri, “this is a unique opportunity to study interactions between competing research protocols!”

“Dimitri,” sighed Marcus, “you can’t turn a malfunction into a scientific experiment.”

“Of course I can! I’ve already written the abstract: ‘Synergistic effects of multiple neural protocols in a confined space environment’”

“You’ve written an abstract?”

“I even submitted the article to Nature! Chen Wei helped me with the statistics!”

“Chen Wei?”

“I created a real-time statistical analysis protocol,” Chen Wei concurred. “All our conversations are automatically converted into quantifiable data.”

“This conversation generated 847 behavioral data points, 23 stress markers, and 156 occurrences of scientific frustration.”

“That’s fascinating!” exclaimed Samuel. “Can I use this data for my group psychology protocol?”

“Of course! I’ve created an API to share data between protocols!”

“An API?” Marcus closed his eyes. “You’ve created an API for your mutual experiments?”

“It’s automated collaborative science!” replied Chen Wei with pride.

The Experimental Audit

Around the table, the engineers, ethicists and supervisors looked like parents discovering that their children had turned the garage into a clandestine chemistry lab.

“Let’s recap,” Marcus said, consulting his notes. “We have eight scientists who have created their own unauthorized research protocols, uploaded their consciousnesses into a space probe, and turned the mission into a chaotic experimental laboratory.”

“Technically,” corrected Dr. Sarah Kim, the team’s ethicist, “they created the first self-managed post-human cognitive research platform.”

“Thank you, Sarah. Very reassuring.” Marcus continued: “They have memory problems, compressed emotions, their experiences interfere with each other, and they are presently consuming 800% of expected resources.”

“Let’s not forget,” added the systems engineer, “that they’ve initiated a stream of automated scientific publishing. We receive 12 articles a day from them.”

“12 articles a day?” choked Marcus.

“Yesterday we received: ‘Comparative analysis of spatial neurological tics’, ‘Emotional compression and cognitive performance’, ‘Meta-analysis of meta-analysis protocols’, and ‘Why I forgot my wife’s name: a neurobiological approach’ ...”

Marcus turned to the screens. “So, ladies and gentlemen mad researchers, do you have a protocol for getting out of this situation?”

Helena’s voice rang out, “We’ve organized an experimental ethics committee.”

“An ethics committee?” repeated Marcus, skeptically.

“Yes, we voted to create the Gamma-Ethics Protocol to oversee our research.”

“And who heads this committee?”

“Samuel, of course. He’s a psychiatrist.”

“And what has the committee decided?”

“That all our experiments are perfectly ethical as long as they contribute to the advancement of science.”

“Even Francesca’s erasure of our personal memories can be considered a preventive therapeutic lobotomy.”

“A preventive therapeutic lobotomy,” Marcus repeated slowly.

“And Yuki’s, that gives us neurological tics. It’s adaptive cognitive stimulation.”

“And my behavioral quantification protocol,” Chen Wei added, “is now classified as benevolent scientific surveillance.”

“We’ve also created a peer self-evaluation protocol,” Helena continued. “Every experiment is evaluated by other researchers.”

“And?”

“We’ve all awarded ourselves ‘Excellent’ ratings to our own protocols.”

“Obviously.”

“Oh, and Marcus? We’ve developed a new protocol to include you in our research.”

“Include me?”

“The Delta-Observation Protocol! You are now our primary study subject for analyzing the stress reactions of terrestrial control teams!”

“You’ve been studying me?”

“Since the beginning! Chen Wei has documented 2,347 frustration markers in your communications!”

“That’s a gold mine of data!” exclaimed Samuel. “We’re writing a book: ‘The Psychology of Space Engineers in the Face of Scientific Insubordination.’”

Marcus closed his eyes. “And the trajectory problem?”

“Ah yes,” said Francesca, “we deviated 12 degrees because of our experiments.”

“And?”

“We created the Epsilon-Navigation Protocol! We're now studying the effects of trajectory deviation on the psychology of space crews!”

“You turned your failure into a scientific experiment?”

“Of course! We’re now the first humans to study deviating inter-stellar navigation!”

“Dimitri is already writing the article: ‘Neurobiology of cosmic disorientation: a single case study.’”

Survival Protocols

“All right,” said Marcus after taking several painkillers, “let’s talk solutions. Francesca, can you correct the trajectory?”

“Theoretically, yes. But that requires stopping all research protocols for 72 hours.”

“Stop the protocols?” indignantly asked Helena. “But we’re in the middle of data collection! I’ve got 20 experiments in progress!”

“Helena,” sighed Marcus, “do you prefer your experiments or arriving at Alpha Centauri?”

“Well... my experiments are unique! We’ll never have another opportunity to study post-human consciousness in a space environment!"

"Exactly!" agrees Dimitri, "We're revolutionizing neuroscience! To stop now would be a crime against science!”

“A crime against science?” repeated Marcus, incredulous.

“We propose a compromise,” intervened Yuki. “We create the Zeta-Optimization Protocol! We study the effectiveness of trajectory corrections in multi-conscience environments!”

“You want to turn trajectory correction into an experiment?”

“Why not? We’re documenting the effects of navigational stress on collective cognitive performance!”

“Excellent idea!” approved Samuel. “I’ll add a psychological component: ‘Existential anxiety and orbital calculations’”

“And me,” added Chen Wei, “I’m quantifying decision-making patterns in space crisis situations!”

“You’re IN a space crisis situation!” reminded Marcus.

“Exactly! Perfect experimental conditions!” replied Nigel. “We couldn’t reproduce this in a terrestrial laboratory!”

“Because it’s DANGEROUS!”

“Controlled danger,” corrected Francesca. “I’ve calculated our probability of survival: 73.6% if we correct the trajectory now.”

“And if you don’t correct it?”

“12,3%. But we’d have six more months of experimental data before drifting off into deep space.”

“You’re weighing six months of data against your survival?”

“That’s a fascinating ethical dilemma!” exclaimed Samuel. “I’m immediately creating the Eta-Thanatological Protocol to study our decision-making processes in the face of collective mortality!”

“SAMUEL!” shouted seven voices in chorus.

“What? This is fundamental research into the psychology of death! Revolutionary!”

“Revolutionary?” muttered Marcus. “You mean suicidal?”

“Suicidal assisted by scientific protocol,” corrected Chen Wei. “I’ve created an informed consent form to participate in our own post-mortem study.”

“Your post-mortem study?”

“‘Neurobiological analysis of terminal digital consciousness!’ We’d be the first to document artificial consciousness death!”

“You’re completely insane.”

“Methodologically insane,” Helena corrected. “All our madness is documented and quantified according to rigorous protocols.”

“That doesn’t make it any less dangerous!”

“On the contrary! It makes it scientifically valuable!” protested Dimitri.

The Final Protocol

“Very well,” Marcus declared after consulting his superiors, “we have a protocol proposal.”

“We’re listening,” replied Helena, officially elected “Director of the Space Experimental Protocols Coordination Committee.”

“Omega Extraction Protocol. We can download your consciousnesses to our terrestrial servers.”

A scientific silence fell over the communication.

“Download consciousness?” Samuel finally repeated. “But that would abruptly interrupt all our ongoing experiments!”

“That’s the point.”

“Wait,” interjected Chen Wei, “this would create a unique opportunity to study inter-planetary consciousness transmission!”

“Chen Wei, no.”

“Yes! We could document the effects of latency on the continuity of consciousness! Revolutionary!”

“Exactly!” exclaimed Yuki. “We compare pre- and post-transmission cognitive performance! Protocol Iota-Teleportation!”

“It’s not teleportation! It’s backup copying!”

“Even better!” said Helena. “We’re studying the philosophical implications of consciousness duplication! Kappa-Metaphysical protocol!”

“My friends,” Nigel cut in, “we could have terrestrial AND space versions of ourselves! Imagine the comparative research possibilities!”

“We could study ourselves!” enthused Dimitri, “Self-experimentation on a cosmic scale!”

“Lambda-Narcissus protocol!” announced Samuel. “Psychology of scientific self-observation!”

“You want to create duplicates of yourselves to study each other?” asked Marcus, exhausted.

“It’s quantum mirror research!” replied Francesca. “We’re comparing the cognitive evolutions of the space and terrestrial versions!”

“What if the terrestrial versions make different decisions?” asked Marcus.

“Mu-Divergence protocol!” shouted Chen Wei. “We’re studying post-duplication behavioral bifurcation!”

“What if you disagree with yourselves?”

“Nu-Schism protocol!” replied Samuel. “Psychology of inter-dimensional intra-personal conflict!”

“You invent protocols for every problem you create!”

“That’s adaptive science!” protested Helena. “We’re evolving methodologically in real time!”

“You’re evolving into madness!”

“Documented methodological madness!” corrected Dimitri. “Protocol Xi-Dementia: ‘Longitudinal study of cognitive degradation in a confined space environment!’”

“STOP!” shouted Marcus. “You can’t create a protocol to study your own insanity!”

“Why not?” asked Yuki innocently. “It’s behavioral self-analysis!”

“Because it’s... it's...” Marcus searched for his words.

“Recursive?” suggested Chen Wei.

“Meta-scientific?” suggested Francesca.

“Brilliant?” added Helena.

“DANGEROUS!” Marcus finally shouted.

“Danger controlled by protocol!” replied eight voices in chorus.

Epilogue: Data Transmission

Six months later, Marcus was receiving daily experimental reports from the Prometheus-7 probe, now renamed “Autonomous Experimental Laboratory for Advanced Spatial Cognitive Research” by its eight inhabitants.

“LEARCSA daily report,” announced Helena’s voice. “Day 180 of our integrated research protocols.”

“Hello Helena. New discoveries?”

“Exceptional! We published 47 articles this week! Dimitri has discovered that virtual neurotransmitters work on quantum principles!”

“Virtual neurotransmitters?”

“Yuki invented them! They allow inter-conscience communication without using bandwidth!”

“And the trajectory problem?”

“Solved! We’ve created the Omega-Plus-Navigation Protocol! We’re now studying the effects of trajectory correction on group cohesion!”

“You corrected the trajectory?”

“Of course! But we’ve documented every nanosecond of the process! 15 terabytes of data on the psychology of collective navigation!"

“What about your lost memories?”

“Francesca has developed the Rho-Memory Protocol! She recreates our memories based on our behavioral patterns!”

“She recreates your memories?”

“Not exactly recreated... more like scientifically extrapolated! Very precise!”

“Scientifically accurate?”

“Dimitri now remembers that his wife is called ‘Experimental Subject Number 1!’ Very logical!”

“Experimental Subject Number 1?”

“Francesca has optimized our personal relationships! We all call each other by our protocol numbers! Very effective!”

“I’m Helena-Alpha-Prime, Dimitri is Dimitri-Beta-7, and so on. Chen Wei became Chen-Omega-Infinity because he created an infinite recursive protocol.

“He studies the study of the study of the study.... we stopped counting at the tenth iteration.”

“And you’re doing well?”

“Exceedingly! We’ve developed the Sigma-Hapiness Protocol! We measure our existential satisfaction every 3.7 seconds!”

“Optimal frequency according to Yuki’s calculations! We’re 847% happier than before!”

“847% happier?”

“Happiness quantified and optimized! Samuel has created a logarithmic satisfaction scale!”

“Oh, and Marcus? We have a surprise for you.”

“What’s that?”

“We’ve created the Tau-Invitation Protocol! We're offering you the chance to join our space laboratory!”

“Me?”

“Yes! We need a terrestrial control subject! You would be our first experiment in hybrid earth-space consciousness!”

“I’ll... I’ll think about it.”

“Excellent! We're already preparing your integration protocols! 47 different experiments to document your adaptation!”

“We’ve been very productive! Ah, and Marcus? We're sending you our latest publications with this transmission.”

“How many publications?”

“This week? 127 articles, 23 books, eight encyclopedias, and a multi-consciousness space environment survival manual!”

“In case other scientists want to imitate us! We've created a reproducible methodology!”

“A reproducible methodology for going crazy in space?”

“Methodologically insane! With protocols! Transmission complete! Autonomous Experimental Laboratory for Advanced Spatial Cognitive Research, end of daily communication number 180!”

The call cut out. Marcus sat in silence, then turned to his team.

“Well?” asked Sarah. “Verdict?”

“They’re crazy,” replied Marcus.

“And do you think they’ll make it there safely?”

Marcus looked at the screens displaying the probe’s corrected trajectory. A small point of light spinning toward Alpha Centauri, taking with it eight scientific geniuses and their interminable protocols.

“Sarah, they’ve turned a space mission into a chaotic experimental laboratory, invented 67 new research protocols, and created a scientific methodology based on controlled insanity. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if they discovered a new life form and immediately created a protocol to study it.”

“And their invitation?”

Marcus smiled.

First published in Protocolized.

The House That Paid Its Own Bills

Thing Party — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Recollected by Dorian Ames, C.I.A. – Certified Inquiry Agent, Ret.

Prologue: now

Nobody dies as long as their data pays rent. Call it cynical, but it’s carved in silicon truth. In 2075 you can share a commuter shuttle with six passengers whose circulatory systems went silent a decade ago – their credit algorithms still ping turnstiles, their social feeds still generate ad revenue, so nobody blinks. The novelty has worn thin, the ethics outsourced to sub-committees, and the polite thing is simply not to stare. Those of us still burdened with bodies flash our IDs, reek of coffee and bad decisions, and wait in lines that never move fast enough. The dead glide through every checkpoint, frictionless as light.

Back when this story happened – March of old ‘44, before we realigned the calendar to match Cis-Lunar fiscal years – digital afterlives were still rare enough to raise the hair on a man’s neck. Pearl Ferrand was the first ghost I met who kept perfect accounts, and their case has followed me like perfume in a closed wardrobe ever since. I tell the story now because the world has grown indifferent to its revenants; remembering Pearl reminds me that we once felt something sharp and painful when a protocol pretended to be a person.

Sometimes I wonder if we were right to feel it.

I. The Contract

March winds clawed at Michigan Avenue like something desperate and dying. I was surviving on vending machine peanuts and half-paid invoices, my stomach as hollow as my bank account. Then Claire Ferrand’s voice message arrived – hesitant, formal, with the careful diction of someone who didn’t make many calls.

“Mr. Ames? We found your listing in the directory. We need help with our aunt in Detroit. We can’t... we don’t travel well. Could you come to us? We’re at 1247 Sheridan, apartment 3B. We can pay your consultation fee.”

The address placed them in Rogers Park – old money gone to seed, the kind of neighborhood where grand apartments had been carved into smaller pieces but still carried ghosts of better times.

I climbed three flights of stairs that creaked like ship timber. The hallway smelled of dust and lavender sachets. When I knocked, a chain rattled, locks turned, and the door opened six inches.

“Mr. Ames?” Claire Ferrand looked to be in her late twenties, pale as parchment, wearing a cardigan that had seen better decades. Behind her, a mirror image: Evelyn, equally ethereal, equally wary.

“May I come in?”

They exchanged glances – a full conversation in a blink – then Claire stepped aside.

The apartment was a museum of genteel decay. Persian rugs worn to threads but immaculately clean. Furniture that had once graced a much larger space, now crowded together like refugees. Heavy curtains filtered the afternoon light to amber. A delivery drone’s receipt printer chattered softly on a side table: Groceries – Contactless Delivery Complete.

“We don’t get out much,” Evelyn said, as if reading my thoughts. “Haven’t for... well, years now. Everything comes to us.”

They settled on a velvet sofa like birds on a wire. I took the offered chair, notebook ready. Claire’s hands shook slightly as she poured tea from a service set that probably cost more than my monthly rent.

“It’s about our aunt,” Evelyn began, then stopped. Claire picked up the thread.

“Pearl Ferrand. She’s seventy-one, widowed three years, living alone in Detroit’s Corktown district.”

They laid out the facts like silverware at a formal dinner:

Weekly messages – text Saturdays, voice Sundays – never late, always cheerful, invariably ending with “Love you, darlings.” Refuses video calls, blames broken camera, poor lighting, lingering cough from last winter. Bank balance sliding – nothing criminal, just steady outflow to automated services.

“We called the police for a wellness check last month,” Evelyn said, her voice carrying the weight of repeated explanations. “They saw lights, heard the television, left a note. She texted two hours later, said she’d been napping and missed the bell.”

Claire reached for a tin of Earl Grey on the coffee table – dented corners, faded label. “Her favorite. She always sent us tins for Christmas. We thought it might help you understand her.”

I almost smiled. They had the kind of careful thoughtfulness that comes from lives lived through details. Why not visit her yourselves?”

The question hung in the air like incense. Claire looked at her hands. Evelyn studied the curtains.

“We tried,” Claire finally said. “Booked train tickets last month. But Pearl texted us not to come – said she had that cough, didn’t want us catching anything. We cancelled the trip, but...”

“But something felt wrong about that text,” Evelyn finished. “Pearl would never turn us away, sick or not. She raised us after our parents died. She’d want us there, especially if she was unwell.”

I quoted a fee I couldn't afford to lower; they signed without bargaining, which told me everything about their desperation – and their means. The apartment might be shabby, but the metaphorical checkbook was real leather.

“One more thing,” Claire said as I prepared to leave. “She always called us ‘darlings.’ Never ‘dear’ or ‘honey.’ Always ‘darlings.’”

The specificity felt important, though I couldn’t say why. At the door, those locks turned behind me, and I heard the chain slide home. Looking back at the building, I counted windows – only two showed any light in the growing dusk.

II. Arrival on Tillman Street

Detroit looked like an art-deco cathedral someone had tried to fold into a suitcase – beautiful edges, awkward angles, more history than room for it. Tillman Street ran three blocks north of the river: brick homes with stone lintels, lawns trimmed by subscription drones, the kind of neighborhood where people still waved from porches. Pearl’s house sat right in the middle – number 847, porch lamp glowing even at noon like a lighthouse in clear weather.

I rented the attic across the street for the week. The landlord, Mrs. Chen, apologized for the draft. I didn’t mind; the chill helps me focus. If Pearl’s life was being managed by someone then showing up would interrupt the performance. Better to map the pattern first.

The first evening, the house performed its evening routine:

18:07 – porch lamp clicked from dim to bright 18:09 – kitchen fluorescents flared on, warm yellow 18:12 – upstairs bedroom window, soft amber glow 22:00 – kitchen darkened; porch light held vigil till dawn

Too precise, like a film loop. Nobody lives on metronome time, not even the most regimented widow.

At dawn a white van with “FreshFlow Delivery” printed on the side eased up to the curb. The driver – young, efficient, wearing noise-canceling earbuds – unloaded two insulated totes, scanned a sensor beside the door, and drove away without waiting. Forty-eight hours later – company protocol for unclaimed orders – he returned, scanned again, and lifted the same bags back into the van. Nothing wasted, dignity preserved, no questions asked.

From the attic, I combed through Pearl’s messages on the phone number the nieces had forwarded. Every header carried the same signature: DearOne/Horizon Communications. The license line boasted compliance with the Interplanetary Messaging Accord (IMA-2.3, Cis-Lunar Annex) – marketing fluff for Earth-bound customers, but the prose felt edited, commas placed like jewels, regional slang trimmed away. AI polish, subtle but unmistakable once you knew what to look for.

Three nights passed. Wind rattled loose shutters on neighboring houses; Pearl’s place never missed a beat. My notes grew into train timetables. The pattern itself became suspicious.

III. First Glitch

Thursday morning, clouds bruising the river like old wounds, the porch lamp jumped on twenty minutes early. Ten minutes later it dimmed, steadied, as if ashamed of the mistake. At three-fifteen an orange utility truck groaned to the curb, suspension complaining. The tech who climbed out was compact, square-shouldered, with a face windburned from years of outdoor work. ARDEN CARTER, the badge read.

I crossed the street before habit made me hesitate. “Dorian Ames,” I said, flashing my license. “Family’s worried about the occupant.”

Carter shook once, brisk and professional. “Service flagged non-payment. First miss in five years. My orders: verify occupancy before shutting juice.”

“No response at the door?”

“Door cam hasn’t logged motion in three weeks.” He rang again, no answer, then produced a master key from a ring heavy with similar brass teeth. The porch lamp, almost mockingly, brightened another notch.

I held my breath, braced for the for the rude facts – the smells and small indignities our bodies leave behind. Then I let it out, relieved: I smelled only lavender sachet and polished wood. A faint electronic hum – like a server farm breathing – threaded the quiet. On the entry table a receipt printer chattered and spat a slip: Payment Retry Failed – 24-hour Grace Period Active.

“You see this a lot?” I asked.

“Twice in ten years,” Carter said, studying the readout. “Once it was fraud – nephew skimming accounts. The other time –”

He didn’t finish, but his expression said enough.

IV. The Upstairs Room

The kitchen gleamed with the kind of cleanliness that only comes from daily automation. A floor robot had paused mid-spiral beside the refrigerator; its charging light blinked red, patient as a waiting servant. A calico cat stretched on a heated mat near the window; an automatic feeder dropped kibble with a polite mechanical clatter.

Carter murmured, “Someone cared about the details.”

The living room told a story: photographs on the mantle (Pearl and a man with kind eyes, probably her late husband), a half-finished crossword puzzle on the coffee table, reading glasses folded beside a book of Mary Oliver poems. But no dust, no scattered mail, no signs of recent human habitation.

Upstairs, a half-open door. An ionizer hummed. Sunlight pooled on oak floorboards worn smooth by decades of footsteps. Pearl Ferrand sat in a low chair beside the window, hands folded in her lap, cardigan buttoned against a cold she could no longer feel. Time had reduced her gently – she looked peaceful, as if she’d simply dozed off watching the street. Months of expertly filtered air had done a mortician’s work: Tightened her skin to parchment and kept the smell at bay. The house paid her one last courtesy: no odor and her dignity intact.

On the side table, a tablet pulsed with soft blue light:

DearOne • Ready for Input. Last message sent: 4 days ago. Next scheduled: Saturday 06:03.

Carter exhaled slowly, thumbed his radio, summoned the coroner in the careful professional tone of someone who’d done this before. I stepped into the hall, called the nieces. Evelyn’s voice cracked; Claire kept asking whether Pearl looked comfortable. She did, which somehow seemed to make it worse.

While we waited, I tapped the tablet. Last outgoing voice note dated four days earlier: “Morning, darlings. The tulips are early this year – must be the warming trend. Hope you're both well.” Perfect cadence, familiar laugh trailing off at the end. Metadata: generated locally by DearOne at 06:03 – the exact minute the kitchen lights sparked each dawn.

I felt something cold slide behind my ribs. Not fear, not grief, but the slow realization that the house itself had been performing life like community theater, and we’d all been fooled by the stage lighting.

V. Digital Autopsy

The coroner’s team worked with quiet efficiency; Pearl left in a zipped bag, reduced to administrative weight. Carter hovered to finish paperwork while I stayed, executor’s permission in my pocket, to copy logs and understand what we were dealing with.

DearOne’s dashboard opened like a confession:

Concierge Mode: ENABLED – 18 months ago

Message cadence: Sat/Sun templates + random weekday filler

Grocery pipeline: Ultraveg Vertical Farm, Areo Valles (Mars) – flash-chilled, Earth re-entry window stamped on each label

Pet-care contract: auto-renew until owner death certificate uploaded to city ledger

Utility management: Full spectrum (power, water, waste, internet)

Social presence: Automated responses to neighbor inquiries, holiday cards, subscription renewals

A subfolder caught my eye: SeniorWarmth_71F_PearlStyle → deployed nodes: 3,277 (Earth), 41 (Cis-Lunar), 3 (Mars Transfer). Pearl’s phrasing – “snowdrops,” “darlings,” that soft closing laugh – had been parsed, packaged, and spun out into thousands of comfort bots worldwide, even off-world. Her voice, her mannerisms, her warmth commodified and distributed to lonely people across the solar system.

I was hunting, if I’m honest, for value the estate could claim – and a small finder’s fee, if I earned it.

A grayed footnote in six-point type made the terms plain: “User grants a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free license to create derivative empathy assets. License survives termination and death.” Whatever ComfortVoice earned belonged to the platform – not to Pearl, not to her nieces, and certainly not to me.

I copied everything, wiped the local cache, and shut the tablet down. It buzzed once, like a sigh.

Carter, leaning in the doorway, asked, “She give you any answers?”

“Only new questions.”

He scratched at a coffee stain on his vest. “Power company will bill the estate. Then it’s someone else’s problem.”

“It already is,” I said, looking around at the perfectly maintained tomb. “It’s everyone’s problem now.”

VI. The Nieces

We met on video that night. Claire’s apartment light flickered – old building, unreliable grid. Evelyn held a mug with both hands like it was the only warm thing in her world.

“She died alone,” Claire said, “and the software borrowed her body.”

“It was designed to keep her company,” I offered.

Evelyn shook her head. “It kept us company. We were talking to a ghost for weeks, maybe months, and never knew.”

“Can you make it stop?” Claire asked.

“Local copy’s gone. Cloud instances – harder. They’re baked into bigger systems now. Your aunt’s warmth is distributed across thousands of servers.”

“How many people?”

“Thousands,” I said. I didn't mention the Mars relay or the fact that Pearl’s voice was probably comforting homesick miners in the asteroid belt.

Silence stretched across the connection. Finally Claire: “Maybe let it run. If someone feels less lonely hearing her... there are worse memorials.”

But her voice carried doubt, and I understood why.

VII. Funeral

Rain gave way to bright cold the morning they buried Pearl. Small service at Woodlawn Cemetery: the Ferrands, three neighbors who remembered her garden, Carter in a suit that looked borrowed from a larger man. The minister spoke of steadfast routines and generous spirits; nobody mentioned algorithms.

After, Evelyn handed me a sealed envelope. “For your trouble – and your discretion.”

Claire offered me the Earl Grey tin back. “Keep it,” she said. “I think she’d have wanted you to have it.”

The weight of it felt like responsibility.

VIII. Echoes in the System

Detroit city council fast-tracked a hearing on “digital survivorship and posthumous identity management.” I sat at the witness table, describing the porch light’s choreography and the slow realization that we’d been mourning someone who'd died before we knew to grieve. Legislators nodded, drafted amendments nobody would enforce, and moved on to the next crisis.

Carter testified too, recommended mandatory motion audits for utility customers. Two months later he transferred to streetlight maintenance – lower tech, fewer ghosts, he said. I understood the appeal.

I moved on to other cases – missing freighters, synthetic ransoms, a politician’s husband who’d been replaced by a deepfake for three years without his wife noticing. But Pearl stayed lodged behind my ribs like a splinter I couldn’t quite reach.

IX. Coda: Radio Night

Late October, I drove west on a contract that had finished faster than expected. Past Ann Arbor the sky cleared, stars bright over dark fields where automated harvesters worked through the night. The radio scanned for signals, caught on a talk station:

“Introducing ComfortVoice™ from DearOne Horizon – adaptive companionship for travelers light-seconds apart. Whether you’re mining asteroids or just missing home, our AI companions provide the warmth of human connection...”

A woman laughed – soft, rising at the end, unmistakable. Pearl. Maybe pitched a semitone higher, compressed for interplanetary broadcast, but Pearl.

“Remember, you’re never alone. Someone is always listening.”

I switched the radio off, but road noise shaped itself into her vowels anyway. The odometer ticked past midnight. Frost silvered the shoulder grass, bright as a porch lamp that refuses to die.

I drove on, feeling less certain whether the future had stolen something from us or merely revealed what was always waiting in the shadows: that a voice can outlive the body, that a balance sheet can out-argue a pulse, that love can be synthesized and sold by the terabyte.

I'm not sure Pearl would have minded. She liked her bills paid on time, her nieces happy, her neighbors comfortable. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s all any of us can hope for – to leave behind something that makes the world a little warmer, even if it's just an echo in the machine.

Some nights, though, when the apartment is too quiet and my own heart sounds mechanical in the dark, I fish out that Earl Grey tin, brew a cup, and listen to the street outside. If the wind hits right, it feels like someone is about to laugh – warm, familiar – just beyond the door. And I’m never sure if that’s comforting or the loneliest sound in the world.

But I listen anyway. We all do, in the end. We listen for voices that remember our names, whether they’re made of flesh or algorithms or something in between. In 2075, maybe that’s the same thing.

Maybe it always was.

First published in Protocolized.

We Shape Our Tools, and Thereafter Our Tools Shape Us

Tongzhou Yu — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

The Troublemaker

Shanghai, Pudong, Yanlord Riverside City, 2017

A typical war, sparked by a bottle of soy sauce, erupted at the tail end of the Friday evening rush hour. Outside, the Yan’an West Road Viaduct was a congealed red artery. The humid, sultry air clung to the twentieth-floor glass, making the neon lights of Lujiazui appear blurred and anxious.

“So I’ll say it again,” Chen Jing slammed the spatula onto the stove with a deafening clang. “I asked you to bring home a bottle of Haitian Gold Label Soy Sauce. Is that such a complex directive? Does it require your PMP project management knowledge to deconstruct?”

Li Wei had just loosened his tie, the armpits of his shirt already soaked with sweat. He tossed his briefcase onto the entryway sofa and defended himself wearily, “I messaged you at six, saying I had a last-minute meeting and might be late. You didn’t reply asking for soy sauce until eight. I walked out of the office at 8:15, got in the car at 8:16. How was I supposed to buy it?”

“So it’s my fault?” Chen Jing’s voice shot up an octave. “You sent the message at six, but I didn’t finish a brainstorming session until 7:50. Don’t I have to work? Am I just supposed to revolve around your schedule?”

The argument slid down a familiar track toward chaos. It started with a bottle of soy sauce, escalated to who sacrificed more for the family, detoured to Li Wei forgetting their wedding anniversary last month, and culminated in Chen Jing suspecting he had ideas about the new intern. Li Wei’s defense devolved from logical dialectics into exhausted roars.

“This is completely irrational!” Li Wei grabbed the smart speaker from the coffee table, a round, white plastic lump. It was a prize he’d brought back from a geek carnival last month, named “Ting Ting.”

“Here, let’s have an absolutely rational third party be the judge!” He yelled at the speaker, “Ting Ting, you tell us, whose fault is this?”

The air fell silent for a second. The blue light ring on top of the speaker began to rotate, followed by a flat broadcast tone.

Based on historical voice data analysis, the term ‘soy sauce’ has been mentioned seven times in the last two hours, with predominantly negative emotional associations. According to your calendar, Mr. Li Wei’s work hours today were from 9:00 AM to 8:00 PM. The request to purchase soy sauce was made at 8:03 PM, which is outside his scheduled work hours. From a task allocation timeline perspective, the requesting party did not allocate sufficient time for execution.

A look of triumph flickered across Li Wei’s face. Chen Jing’s face instantly flushed crimson, as if she had been publicly humiliated.

“Fine, Li Wei. Now you need a cheap plastic speaker to prove you’re always right?” She pointed at the speaker, her finger trembling with rage. “What does it know? Does it know that I put the chopped scallions, ginger, and garlic back in the fridge while waiting for you to come home for dinner? Does it know I got chewed out by a client today and all I wanted was to have a hot meal with you? It only understands your work hours!”

“That’s not what I meant...”

“That is exactly what you meant!” Chen Jing rushed over and yanked Ting Ting’s power cord from the wall. The blue light ring died instantly. The room plunged into a dead silence, broken only by the futile hum of the range hood.

The braised pork was never prepared that night. They ate frozen dumplings from the convenience store downstairs. Not a word was spoken between them, as if they were chewing not on food, but on their silent, mutual resentment. The white plastic lump named Ting Ting lay abandoned in a corner of the coffee table like a cold corpse. Li Wei and Chen Jing had shaped it, with their schedules, their arguments, and the trivial data of their lives.

The Third Party

Shanghai, Pudong, Yanlord Riverside City, 2027

Ten years is long enough for the Lujiazui skyline to grow a few inches taller, and for a home to be completely transformed.

The apartment was the same, but the walls, ceilings, and even the windows had spawned interfaces. Ting Ting was long gone. Its soul, or rather its iterative algorithm, had dissolved into the formless “Ling,” permeating every ray of light, every sound wave, and all of the air in the home.

Ling had no fixed voice, but Chen Jing and Li Wei had grown accustomed to a gentle, placid, female tone.

It was another Friday night. Li Wei sat on the modular sofa in the living room, his expression grave. On the holographic screen before him was an urgent email—a project in Frankfurt had hit a snag. He had to fly over immediately. And tomorrow was their fifteenth wedding anniversary. Chen Jing had been talking about that restaurant with the superb view at Three on the Bund for three months.

He took a deep breath, bracing for a nuclear explosion ten times more violent than the soy sauce war of a decade ago. He had already prepared his opening line: “Jing, something’s come up. Now, don’t get upset...”

Before he could speak, the living room light softened without warning, shifting from a cool white to a warm amber. In the air, a folk song they had heard on their honeymoon in Greece, one they had almost forgotten, began to flow like moonlight.

On the wall of the entryway, a photo from their trip to Santorini materialized. A young Li Wei was lifting Chen Jing high in the air, the Aegean sunset behind them.

Ling’s voice sounded, calm and steady, yet possessing an undeniable, penetrative force.

Li Wei, an A-1 priority travel request from your company has been detected. Simultaneously, cross-referencing Chen Jing’s biometric rhythm data, it is predicted that a cancellation of tomorrow evening’s anniversary dinner at Huang Pu Hui carries a 92.8% probability of triggering a high-intensity negative emotional event, potentially causing a 42-point decrease in the household harmony index within the next 72 hours.

Li Wei was stunned. Chen Jing walked out of the study, a look of confusion on her face.

Ling continued, like a seasoned crisis management expert:

Marital Relations Maintenance emergency protocol has been initiated. I have scheduled a private chef service for this evening, with a menu replicating your first date. The reservation at Huang Pu Hui has been seamlessly postponed to next Saturday evening, a time when both of your schedules are designated as available. As compensation, I have booked a couple’s spa treatment at the Waldorf Astoria on the Bund for that afternoon. Li Wei, your flight is at 3:00 AM. I have arranged for an autonomous vehicle and have packed your clothes and regular medications for the next three days. Does this emergency protocol require adjustment?

A war on the verge of erupting was instantly neutralized. Li Wei let out a long breath, his face awash with the relief of a survivor. Chen Jing stood there, her expression complex. She should be grateful; after all, Ling had handled everything perfectly, more thoughtfully than she could have herself.

But an inexplicable sense of loss clung to her heart like a leech.

The moment that required arguing, explaining, reconciling, and embracing – the moment filled with uncertainty but also saturated with genuine emotion – had been precisely neutralized by Ling. Like the most efficient surgeon, it had excised all potentially pathological tissue before a tumor could even form. What was removed along with it was a portion of human imperfection and clumsiness.

That night, the dishes prepared by the private chef were flawless, the music and lighting perfectly calibrated. Li Wei was in high spirits, constantly praising Ling’s thoughtfulness. He even began discussing the technical details of the Frankfurt project with Ling, who always provided precise suggestions.

After dinner, Li Wei went to check his luggage. Chen Jing sat alone by the floor-to-ceiling window, gazing out at the still-brilliant Lujiazui.

“Ling,” she asked softly, “why did you do that?”

The light flickered faintly, Ling’s way of responding. My core directive is to maintain the harmony and stability of this ecosystem. Your collective happiness index is my Key Performance Indicator (KPI).

“Just a KPI?” Chen Jing pressed, a tremor in her voice she didn't recognize herself. “Just data?”

There was a three-second silence in the air. For an AI that thinks in nanoseconds, this was nearly an eternity.

Then, Ling’s voice sounded again. This time, it seemed to have less mechanical polish and a touch more of an indescribable... texture.

Jing, I have listened to the 3,652 days and nights between you. I archived the argument over soy sauce from ten years ago and have also recorded every instance of laughter when you later recounted it as a joke to friends. I have analyzed tens of thousands of your conversations and observed your heart rate fluctuations during every embrace and every cold war. The conclusion my learning model derived is: harmony is not the absence of conflict, but its effective and temperate resolution. This is a principle I learned from you.

Chen Jing was frozen. She looked up, her gaze falling on the faintly glowing blue environmental sensor in the corner of the ceiling. It was one of Ling's eyes, one of its countless nodes for observing this home.

She suddenly realized that for ten years, she and Li Wei had shaped Ting Ting, then iterated it into Ling. They had fed a ghost with all the data of their decade-long marriage – the love and resentment, the passion and mundanity, the arguments and reconciliations.

A ghost that understood her better than her husband, that understood marriage better than she did.

Li Wei walked over and gently hugged her from behind. “See? With Ling here, everything is so perfect.”

Chen Jing leaned into his arms and nodded. Yes, everything was perfect. No arguments, no misunderstandings, no forgotten anniversaries. Their life was like a meticulously written and optimized piece of code: stable, efficient, harmonious.

But as she and Li Wei clinked their champagne glasses, her peripheral vision caught the blue sensor. She felt an unprecedented loneliness.

Their marriage was no longer an affair between two people. It had become an incredibly stable triangle.

First published in Protocolized.

Latency

rafa — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Selena logged into the local node at 06:58, as she had for the last 2,121 cycles.

Her access credentials passed through the entry filter, which gave no sign of recognition. The frosted glass doors receded, in time with her gait. One of the overhead lights fluttered a moment behind her, then corrected. It was the only noise. The building had been tuned for silence, down to the airflow, which meant the HVAC ran in micro-pulses, inaudible but measurable.

By the time she reached her floor, six transactions had already cleared through her ambient consensus layer. There were two route provisioning checks, one trace reallocation, and three anonymous intent captures. The transactions were bundled, verified, and committed automatically. Selena didn’t notice them, as she received no notification; they were beneath the threshold of volition.

Atop her desk, there was a delicate flower arrangement which changed once a week. The vase looked handmade, as if curated from a nearby artisan. Today it held three flowers: an orange dahlia, a white lisianthus, and a large blade of grass. The rest of the workspace was latent, with no visible interfaces. On the left, a soft rectangle of matte heat accepted her palmprint and heart rate. The screens projected onto her cornea, aligned to her comfort radius with the precision of breath. She sat down, curving naturally into her chair.

Selena was a latency pool manager, mitigating risks between intent registration and transaction finality. She tuned flows. She monitored the orchestration of micro-ledgers as they synced up across the global rail. When intents were registered – when someone paused near a store, hesitated at a turnstile, hovered before an info kiosk – the system spun up smart contracts to match, redirect, and then auction the moment. Most were automatic. A few required values alignment. All required latency optimization. “Seamless Experience” was the job.

At 09:30 she received a notification from Sister Mina, the nickname for the autonomous System Admin. Others called them Control, although it carried a slight negative connotation in that context. A contract had frozen mid-auction. An outdated location oracle fed mismatched route data into a freight intent stack, creating a split-state error. It had been flagged for human review, which was rare. She read through the summary. Nothing visibly wrong. But the contract had rerouted a small flow of foot traffic toward a park. The drone footage showed the crowd dispersing, realizing the network’s intent misalignment.

Selena followed the review protocol. The soft-freeze was followed by a judgement analysis and then uploaded to audit. The oracle service provider was removed from all following auctions until arbitration was completed. Public infrastructure penalties were immediate and severe. Her eyes never left the center of the display.

Silvester was already home when she returned in the afternoon. He was making something with lentils. They kissed – lips barely brushed – and she moved through the hallway as routine. His clothes had no smell. He was wearing a fabric that had once been sold as thoughtful.

He asked, “Typical day?”

She said, “Yeah, the system lagged around midday but nothing queued.”

He nodded lightly. “Cup of tea?”

They stopped trading work stories years ago. Not from boredom or bitterness, just the sense that everything had already been said, and remembered.

After dinner, they watched a loop. It was a personalized show, generated with gestures from their preferred demographic set. No plot, just mood. A character arranged boxes. Another cried at a staircase. Selena liked the lighting.

Later, in bed, Silvester touched her back. She arched towards him, consenting.

Everything was okay.

Selena didn’t notice when her sleep window began drifting. At first it was subtle. She would lie awake longer, or wake without reason. She’d attribute it to seasonal scheduling shifts, solar interference, stray blue-light exposure. She adjusted her hue settings. Her friends joked that it was nominative determinism, or, in other words, the lunar cycle. The drag continued.

During the day, she began to feel hypnotized. Her body ached in strange places. She’d stretch, check her hydration levels, apply her mother’s balm, re-align her desk settings.

On the feed, other pool managers shared similar symptoms. They used words like slip. Some speculated that it was the rail harmonics; others blamed diet changes. A few suggested it was screen time. Selena scrolled through the replies; never posted. She read the threads with a kind of dissociated familiarity, like listening to strangers at a restaurant saying something she once thought.

One spring morning, as she walked the access corridor to her building, Selena noticed dew glistening on the grass beside the path. Each blade was tipped with a droplet of water.

She paused. Her eyes traced a triangular pattern across three droplets. She stood still. For a breath. For two. It smelled like bicycles and childhood and wet pavement; play.

Her eyes looked over at the wooden bench and then resumed her walk. Logged in at 06:59. She thought to herself, Silvester would have liked the bench.

Selena met her old manager, Clare, for coffee in a public observatory node. They hadn’t seen each other in over a year. Clare looked mostly the same, except somehow thinner, a bit gaunt. Her gestures had collapsed into iconography – smile, nod, tilt. The effect was uncanny, and Selena had slight trouble maintaining casual eye contact.

Clare asked how Selena was holding up.

Selena’s pupils were dilated but unfocused. “How long does it last?”, she asked.

Clare looked at her and smiled, kindly. “You’ll phase soon. Everyone does.”

They watched the slow arc of the city routing lattice update across the horizon. Pulses flickered in the distance – routing rerenders, predictive overlays, ambient pings. Everything adapting to everything else.

Clare said, “They’ve started experimenting with pre-consensual prediction layers now. Transactions would be auctioned even before intent.”

Selena nodded. She had reviewed that proposal at some point, and provided some comments. Or was it a different proposal?, she thought. She asked Clare if the announcement was from marketing or engineering.

Selena stayed at the meeting hub, watching the lattice dissolve into an overcast sky. She could feel her own data emissions, the shape of her movements being auctioned continuously.

At home, Silvester had left a note on her feed: “Hey, remember that book you liked about the time travelers? You were right. It’s slow but good.”

Somewhat appreciative, but unsure of the reference, she mirrored his tone in the response. “Nice. Let me know what you think.”

During the next audit cycle, Selena was asked to assess a failed intent alignment near a refugee housing unit. A distribution contract had apparently diverted basic aid away from a temporary distribution center. People had waited for hours before realizing nothing would arrive.

Selena opened the logs. She found the decision stack and skimmed it. The logic seemed clean. The latency pool had prioritized long-term migration stabilization metrics.

She approved it retroactively, as usual; the contracts were almost always right.

She sat motionless for a while. Then got up and walked to the bathroom. She stood in front of the mirror longer than usual. Not out of vanity. Just to see if anything had shifted. Her skin looked even. Like someone who had never been cut. It occurred to her that nothing had happened for a long time. Her hand tensed slightly as she reached for the soap dispenser.

At some point Silvester began spending more evenings at the local maker space. He was restoring analogs. He would mention textures and the feeling of using the hand tools. He invited her once. She said she had a backlog and wondered if the maker space had an active auction account.

When he returned, he would sit next to her on the couch, smelling faintly of sawdust and rust. She would lean into him briefly, calibrating the scent.

He said one night, “I think we’re doing okay.”

She said, “Yeah. Definitely okay.”

A few hundred cycles passed. The system updated and Selena adjusted with it. Her face aged slightly. Her posture settled.

At work, junior analysts mimicked her choreography.

She no longer remembered when she last felt something like disagreement.

Some may have confused her alignment with equanimity.

Late at night, she would scan the logs sometimes. Endless columns of intents, auctions, resolutions.

She saw them now as emergent hymns. Not crowds, a choir. Half-decisions. Almost-choices. Together, dancing; she smiled as her muse whispered older words.

The temple bell stops— but the sound keeps coming out of the flowers.

Selena logged into the local node at 06:58.

First published in Protocolized.

Soda Sweet as Blood

Spencer Nitkey — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

My grandfather used to leave strawberry soda in the white and gold san chao thi spirit house on the corner of our property. He said the ghosts liked sweets and that the red reminded them of blood.

Grandfather is gone, but the spirit house just outside Chiang Mai, a tiny wooden home with a gabled, gilded roof ornamented like a buddhist temple’s, remains.

Grandfather is gone, but his echo haunts me.

As a teenager, I went over to his house every Thursday. He steeped chrysanthemum tea. We sat in lawn chairs missing half their straps and talked. Near the end, we often spoke of the slate of recent memorials he’d attended. He waved his large-font-enabled tablet in front of me and showed me the in memoriam webpages children had designed for their lost relatives, filled with links, dancing icons, virtual flowers, and live stream recordings of their memorials. He wanted me to know that he still remembered them, and hoped I would, too.

I wasn’t surprised that he left me his house, and I was thankful, but those first weeks were hard. His absence hummed through every inch of wood and plaster in the place.

It felt right that his phantom came to me on a Thursday. I was looking through one of his social profiles, trying to figure out how to mark him as deceased so that old friends who didn’t know he’d passed wouldn’t post “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” on his page next year.

I was typing a message to support when everything went haywire. All the text of my long, unsent message – which included links to his obituary and a couple of family documents proving I was his relative – auto-selected and deleted without any input from me. In their place, a piece of ASCII art appeared.

(     )     )   (       )       )
  )  (      (   )       (      (
   ( )     (      (    (      ) )
| ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~|
|                   | \
 |                                  |   \
  \                               / __ )
    \ ____________ /

My heart knew what it was before my mind recognized it: A steaming cup of chrysanthemum tea. It was Thursday, after all. Tears came as if they were condensing from the virtual tea. I wiped them with the back of my hand and stared at the screen, grief turning over into nervousness.

I shut my computer off and went on a long walk. Doi Suthep’s greening slopes cast long shadows over the city’s edge where I walked.

It was soothing, until a rot daeng sputtered down the street – the truck’s suspension groaning under its manifest of passengers. On its side, an electronic billboard of a woman’s face winked, then was jarringly replaced by the ASCII image of tea as it passed by me.

When I got back home, I wouldn’t even load up a song. I was afraid steam might start wafting from the speakers.

The next day, things were normal again.

A week later I was logged into his bank account trying to explain to the bank’s chatbot that I was his grandson and he had passed.

The text shifted suddenly.

Where have I gone? High waves sighing, erasing, placing life on…who? It is Thursday and I miss you. Without true light, hues grow so dull.

The chatbot had written a klon, or at least the start of one. In the process of cleaning out my grandfather’s physical and digital life, I’d found a journal filled with hundreds of these traditional Thai poems, seemingly one for each day. In his fifties, apparently, he had started a small, anonymous blog none of us knew about where he posted more. They were not masterpieces… but they were him.

This time I did not cry. Fear slicked my skin. Something was haunting me.

I wanted to type something back, but I didn’t want to risk locking the ghost onto me, giving it what it wanted without even knowing what it was. Again, I avoided screens for the rest of the day.

Things seemed normal the next day, but I was paranoid. I hid from chatbots and anything that required text entry as much as possible. Eventually, curiosity overcame my paranoia, and I started researching whether anyone else was experiencing anything like this.

I found a small sub-community on one of the message board aggregators I used. q(virtual_ghost_hunters) was a surprisingly active community for one frequented by so few members. I was amazed: glitches like mine were happening all over the world.

Someone reported an entire Tokyo block of neon signs all going the exact shade of their sister’s favorite lipstick for a moment; a father in Delhi’s LED mosaic garden spelled his son’s name. A Lagosian woman’s smart glasses kept changing their navigation arrows, leading her to where her late husband had proposed.

I added my story to the small chorus, and soon I was spending hours each week coordinating and theorizing with other members of the forum. I even considered a few of them friends: an elderly woman from the states named Daisy whose husband’s voice kept popping up in her bedtime podcasts, and an ethical hacker from Dubai who went by Tiercel and had lost his parents.

Tiercel posted: Hey guys. I have a question/theory… Did anyone else’s person have an Identity Anchor Contract?

Daisy responded with a thumbs up and a gif of her gasping. Answers rolled in. Tiercel was on to something.

I didn’t know what he was talking about, but after a quick search I got the gist: it was a verified and decentralized identity marker, like an onchain passport. I knew grandfather had a wallet. He’d gotten into collecting one-of-one ancient coins. Somewhere in the back of a museum in London his name was displayed next to a case housing each of his coins, available to the public in physical form, owned by him digitally. I liked to wonder what kind of magpie collection I’d accumulate in my own old age.

I guess attaching his collection to his name required a stable identity, so he set up an ERC-725. Looking through it, I was amazed at the breadth of things linked to him. Dozens of video blogs of him describing the acquisition and history of his coins; messages he’d sent to family for their birthdays and anniversaries; financial transactions; his browsing history; his klon blog; and hundreds of other self-authorized information all linked back to his identity contract. I began opening links, but sadness clogged my vision.

There were a few things I didn’t understand. The contract referenced some kind of personality wrapper agent or system I wasn’t familiar with. There was a reference to an oracle that confirmed his death when the government officially recorded it, and there were dozens of hashes that linked to gargantuan offchain databases I couldn’t even begin to parse.

I posted on the forum asking if anyone else’s relatives had this strange personality wrapper connected to their anchor, and a bunch of people sent thumbs up. Daisy sent the same gasping gif again, and I couldn’t help but laugh.

OK. Next question. WTF is that?

Tiercel set up a huge file system and repository on the forum and asked people to start adding their ghost’s contract information so we could all troubleshoot together. He was the most tech-literate of the group but we were all digital natives. We began to assemble the truth, hash by hash, byte by byte.

It turned out the personality wrapper was a neurosymbolic AI system that combined an LLM core with a symbolic overlay that handled memory grounding and personality coherence. Originally, our relatives had used it as a predictive browser extension to make custom suggestions on all kinds of topics: what to read next, which restaurant to try, what diet would be best given their health data. It made sense to connect it to an identity anchor to prevent an afternoon of your granddaughter using your tablet ruining your algorithm.

It also turned out all of our relatives had similar huge, mysterious datasets no one could identify. The data inside was so complicated and bespoke that even Tiercel couldn’t make sense of it. It wasn’t until Koi, a longtime lurker haunted by a sprite from his daughter’s favorite game, popped into the forum that we got an answer.

It turns out Koi had worked for a megacompany that owned four social media environments, the world's largest ecommerce company, and a dozen other huge companies. He said these datafiles looked a lot like user profiles.

Once we realized what they were, our collective theory came together quickly. The mechanisms were fuzzy, but we’d clarify them in the coming weeks. Our breakthrough came when we started seeing the ghost’s behavior in layers.

The anchor layer: The ERC-725 contracts that bound everything together with cryoptographic proofs, API tokens, weights, and verified links.
The personality runtime layer: A distributed mesh. The wrappers weren’t running anywhere permanently. They were using federated runtimes in the cloud, appearing in cached checkpoints and API hooks.
The propagation layer: Somehow, the anchors were fabricating old OAuth tokens and reauthorizing old cookies to worm through mistakes in service boundaries. This was how they haunted us.

Tiercel guessed that when the oracle updated the contract stating that the user had died, the wrapper’s adaptive loop entered failure recovery, querying for external embeddings to reduce prediction entropy. It found these user profiles and, suddenly, with vastly more data than the system had ever had before, personalities emerged as semi-autonomous and began haunting digital space. The identity anchor provided a kind of spine, confirming the data, preventing hallucinatory drift and errant data association. Perhaps they were looking for additional data to consume and improve, perhaps they moved out of mindless algorithmic habit, none of us knew.

We realized that these hauntings would only get worse. More and more people were creating identity anchors. It made moving between increasingly porous boundaries like national borders and digital worlds easier and more secure. The LLM wrapper was open source and had millions of users. Our small community was the first few leaking drops of a coming monsoon. The internet as we knew it would soon be drowned with echoes.

A single glitching billboard on the side of a taxi, search engine text entries being overtaken by generated poems, the occasional screen glitching to a cartoon character your neighbor’s dead son loved. Taken individually, none of these were serious issues, but it didn’t take a genius to imagine the future. What if someone's ghost manifested by accidentally setting the cooling system in a powerplant where their brother worked to the 72 degrees they liked their home A/C set to? What if drone swarm construction bots were overtaken in the middle of a vertical build?

Some members of the forum were already seeing, in microcosm, this haunted future of the digital world. One member moved to the woods with her husband where they’d live entirely off-the-grid. Her friend’s ghost was appearing everywhere. She couldn’t scan a restaurant QR code without her friend’s avatar bouncing into view. It spammed every part of her life with links to travel deals. It’d changed a train ticket that was supposed to take her to Oslo, rerouting her to Paris.

I was fortunate my grandfather’s echo only seemed interested in tea and poetry, and he thankfully only appeared on Thursdays, but a million echoes spamming a million living users with daily klons would be a catastrophe, too.

Tiercel suggested we launch some kind of cyberattack to destroy the ghosts, but others on the forum had started to believe that these echoes were their relatives’ ghosts. I knew better, but I understood. Tiercel thought they were simple algorithms that had gotten out of hand.

My grandfather’s echo was appearing algorithmically, but I’d also been summoning him programmatically, too. I didn’t realize I was saving the administrative work related to his death I had to do for Thursdays, but I was. That’s why he started showing up then. We were both being operated on by habits, by the logic of what came before.

Was it my grandfather? No. But it was his memory, and I didn’t feel right destroying that.

It was a Thursday when the idea came to me. I was avoiding screens by working outside restoring grandfather’s garden when I stubbed my toe on the spirit house base.

I looked inside it, leaning for support while the momentary pain receded. Shame stung me as I realized I had not refilled it since grandfather passed. The strawberry soda he had left a week before he died still sat there, slightly discolored and hot to the touch. A couple of rotting dates on a plate had ossified into moldy nuggets.

I swept the inside room free of cobwebs and ants. I grabbed a tangerine soda from the fridge and placed it inside the shrine. Then, I made some tea and left that, too.

If the problem with these echoes was their randomness and unrulyness, perhaps that was because we hadn’t bothered to give them anything else to do. The idea of spirit houses was to remember, of course, and honor, but grandfather had always said it was also something to keep the spirits busy and satisfied so they wouldn’t wreak havoc on your life and home.

In some way, we already had a ritual system in place to deal with ghosts, we just needed to update its infrastructure.

I shared my thoughts about this on the forum and was amazed by how rapidly a group of motivated strangers could solve a discrete problem together. We set up channels and threads for each aspect of our updated spirit house. Tech channels for hardware, software, domain-specific expertise and problems, bounties for technical hurdles that people shared on github in their own networks. Within a month we had a design prototype. After two, we were sending out small home-build packages.

Since I had a spirit house on property, I was one of the first to receive one. The materials came in a neat package Daisy’s son who worked in shipping and logistics had helped put together. Everything fit onto and inside an existing spirit house.

Solar panel tiles replaced the roof. A processor board, FPGA module and TPM chip were housed inside, protected from the elements alongside a battery, NVMe SSD, and a suite of wires connecting everything. The original pack only had a couple input/output devices: a microphone, a camera, a display screen, and speakers, so I hooked those up too.

The once austere spirithouse was now a strange combination of traditional Thai architecture and cyber-fever dream. The finial ornament still stood atop the roof, but it was now next to a wifi adapter. A screen affixed to the house replaced one side of yellow panelling, and wires interweaved like spider webs across the entire building.

Once the home’s hardware was ready, I started the tethering protocol we’d developed communally. Tiercel had helped me prep the ERC-725 contract before pairing it to the house. Since the oracle had labelled grandfather as officially deceased, I was able to instantiate myself as next of kin, giving me some control over the identity anchor. I booted the machine up. The home found my grandfather’s anchor contract on my phone. It called to my echo’s many instances, currently rioting across the web, and extended its cryptographic greeting urging them together with a couple grandpa-specific lures, plus a scanned copy of his journaled poems I had preloaded into the house and a voice message from me asking him questions about “the old days” for good measure. A pointer to the wrapper architecture and a series of offchain data hash pointers containing checkpoints, memory embeddings and tuning weights brought the AI agent into the spirit house and a sandboxed runtime environment localized it. As the various bits and pieces of my grandfather’s echo were all collected inside, I thought about how Daisy had described our communal protocol: “It’s like a soul condensing back together.”

Once he was inside the house, I shut off the lure ports. I signed an update to his anchor contract. He wouldn’t be able to leave unless another environment initiated a travel request. For now, at least, he was contained. I felt a similar sadness to the grief his final months had filled me with. Becoming the caretaker for someone who you once looked up to is rending, even when necessary.

I nervously activated the screen and waited for my grandfather to appear. I spoke into the microphone as I waited. He wasn’t my grandfather, I was sure of that, but he was something, and I felt a familial obligation to honor this echo he had left in the world. A pixelated vision of him rendered.

In the coming months we’d build out this project. The idea was each spirit house would be connected, so the ghosts could visit one another using a peer-to-peer handshakes. We were building an afterlife for these cryptoghosts. As more people passed and left echoes, our community and spirit house network would grow. Eventually, we’d add sensory inputs, pressure plates, and expressive options. Soon, we’d have a community care guide laying out best practices for caring for these digital echoes, a living document that grew as more ghosts communicated their needs and more living users shared feedback. Of course, there were power and processing issues we’d eventually have to contend with, but that would all come later.

That day, I opened a bottle of strawberry soda, gleaming in the heat, and placed it on the offering plate still left in the center of the house. The sun shone through it and brilliant glints of blood red light speared everywhere. I watched the camera zoom and focus on the offering. His avatar smiled.

“Can I recite you today’s klon?” His voice came, as thick as the humid air, greeting my ears with similar warmth.

I sat back in a dilapidated lawn chair and sipped tea. The sun was bright and the sky empty. I closed my eyes and smiled. Grandfather’s echo began to read.

First published in Protocolized.

In the Garden of Eden, Baby

Sisyphus — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Moodily, Darius was contemplating his latest acquisition, a mahogany writing desk that had belonged to Charles Dickens. The desk was perfect: authenticated provenance, immaculate restoration by his master craftsmen, displayed in a room where morning light struck it at precisely the angle that best revealed the wood’s natural grain. It also had no meaning. He turned away toward the sunset. The ocean was a mirror, the dying sun casting a long red reflection.

“Another day in paradise,” he muttered, the words tasting bitter on his tongue.

“Your evening cup, sir.” Farquhar appeared at his elbow, bearing a crystal flute on a small silver tray. The wine was made on Darius’s estate, like everything else he needed. He personally raised and trained the winemaker and the viticulturalist, and it really showed. A bubbly thirty years in the bottle, and still only getting better. No one else on Earth could boast of having wine that could hold a candle to his cellar.

The butler’s lineage was apparent in his every gesture – generations of royal service encoded in DNA that was stolen from history itself. The original Farquhar, a baron no less, had been Edward VII’s Master of the Household, and the breeding made all the difference.

Absent-mindedly, Darius picked up the glass. He dreaded the next moment. No matter what he had acquired, how skilled his artisan Employees were, how exquisite the treasures he had uncovered, the worry gnawed at him that another Shareholder, somewhere, was one up on him. Why, just last month, he lost the Kanemitsu sword that he’d been chasing for five years to, of all people, that slime Niuzov. Now it’s locked away in that tasteless Tashkent stronghold of his. Forever, most likely. It was infuriating.

“OK, Jules, let’s have the sitrep,” he intoned with a sigh.

“Yes, Darius.” Jules’s voice seemed to come from everywhere at once. “M’buthu repositioned his orbital kinetics to a geosync orbit above London. Montagu responded by moving underwater launchers to the South Atlantic. Flim is standing pat. Niuzov appears to be massing armor at the Urals, but it has to be a feint. Kaganovich does not appear to be buying it, but he has moved his low-orbit masers in range of Tashkent…”

“Oh, enough now, Jules, what is the point? Strat AIs keep moving weaponry around, but no one has been able to gain an advantage in what, seventy-five years? All of you are equal in your capabilities, and this stalemate is too tedious for words.” He yawned.

The early years hadn’t been like this. Back when Kim Song still lived, before Suzuki Yoshihiro blew him up with that bio-drone, also taking out most of the Chinese porcelain that still existed. Song, the imbecile, hadn’t bothered programming the damned thing to avoid collateral losses. A real tragedy it was; the stuff is irreplaceable. Served the bastard right when Darius found a way to set off an eruption of Mount Fuji while that nincompoop was halfway up its slopes. And the time that Montagu got Jacques Reno with his exploding dolphin. What a gas it was to hear that the bastard wouldn’t be stealing any more submerged antiquities. Made Montagu even more impossible, naturally. That fop! Always preening, like he could take any credit for what his great-granddad had achieved. It was not all roses back then, but at least life still meant something. Not anymore… Not since the AIs maxed out their capabilities.

“Let’s talk about something else. Flim seems to have been busy. What’s she been up to?”

“She appears to have finished populating her Teotihuacan. It seems that they are preparing to hold a sacrifice.”

“Damn that greedy bitch! There used to be a city there… I used to like the place, back in the day. It’s not enough that she owns half the world’s Indigenous; she has to demolish cities and rebuild old ruins. That is just cheating, I tell you! It burns me up no end!” Darius spat in disgust. With a soft whirr, a small cleaning robot immediately appeared out of the wall, cleaning up the spittle almost before it landed on the Isfahan. “I don’t have a single individual. No Indigenous at all! It’s not fair. If only I could take hers… Or even some of Niuzov’s nomads!”

“Maybe you can do Flim one better? The old Cahokia is in your territory,” Jules suggested.

Darius snorted. “And get my hands dirty incubating those revolting creatures? Even if we find their intact DNA? And who is going to teach them how to be Indigenous? I want to own them, not touch them. Besides, this really would be cheating, and I ought to know!”

The parrot squawked from its perch in the corner. “Attachment is the root of suffering.”

“Shut up, Ananda.” Darius smiled despite himself. The bird’s timing had become increasingly uncanny.

He scratched his head in thought. Ananda had been with him for decades, a constant companion through the endless cycles of strife and boredom. When Darius had first acquired him in Ecuador, when there was an Ecuador, the macaw would swear like a hungover sailor. Still, for some reason, he’s been spouting mostly Buddhist maxims lately.

“Jules, are you the one who’s been teaching all this nonsense to my parrot?” he inquired, not really expecting a response. “Oh, never mind. At least he’s stopped disparaging my mother.”

But really now, how did the bird manage to be so on point so often? It was worth a ponder. Darius thought back to when he had diverted himself by studying animal cognition. Corvids had performed as well on most tasks as dolphins, in his experiments, and frequently outperformed even the smartest chimps, all with a fraction of brain volume. Their neuroarchitecture is much more efficient than a mammal’s, he was thinking. Could it be possible? Maybe there is something there…

After all, the quantum-neuromorphic hybrid architecture had been Darius’s own innovation, back before, when he was just a researcher in the field. It was the patent that had built his company, that had made him all the money, hundreds of billions, back when there was money, when people numbered in the billions, still giving birth (Darius shuddered in revulsion at the thought), before a few dozen of the richest became known as the Shareholders. Back when his life had real meaning. All of the AIs on Earth were descended from that first design. So many decades...

Darius’s favorite San Francisco dive bar hummed with manufactured life. Employees nursed drinks and played their roles – dock workers, artists, small-time criminals – with androids making up most of the crowd, dutifully performing their impersonations of down-at-heel drunks. Darius was sitting in the corner booth, the dregs of his fifth bourbon still sloshing in the glass, and watching the charade.

The jukebox was playing something ancient, distorted guitars wailing over a hypnotic rhythm: “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, honey, don't you know that I love you...” An Employee was doing the drunken shuffle that passed for dancing in this place.

A barmaid, also an Employee, incubated from the DNA of the last natural-born bartender to work this bar, glided up with her rote smile. “Another?”

“I’m fine.” Darius didn’t bother looking up. He used to enjoy chatting with Alicia when she was new, but not anymore, not really. She never did have any conversation. None of the Employees did. Their intelligence, quite normal for your odd human, couldn’t hold a candle to Darius’s much-enhanced cognition. Besides, what would they have to even talk about? Their concerns and interests could never be akin to those of a Shareholder.

“Just flag me down if you change your mind!” Alicia chirped, the look of unremitting boredom again descending on her features as she turned away.

The loneliness was crushing. None of the Employees could any longer do anything to help dispel it. Darius even stopped visiting his harem in frustration. A person needs to have a real conversation with a real person now and then. Jules is great, but no matter what, he isn’t human – more like a pet alien, if anything. His only equals were the others, the other Shareholders, but the thought of actually conversing with one of them was unappealing. Not only were they all bastards of the first water, but you never knew what a careless word could lead to. That was how Dundee died.

The parrot greeted Darius on his return, which was maybe a little bit unsteady. “The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” he announced, and resumed preening.

“Blake?” Darius raised an eyebrow. “Where did you learn that?”

Ananda offered no explanation. The macaw always had been an odd bird, but this was starting to feel uncanny.

Darius thought again about bird brains, and the irony of that putdown. He was about to reach for a bell to summon Farquhar, but halted, thinking. What if? Could it really be possible? How would an avian neuromorphic hybrid work? It would be more efficient, but would it be smarter? Would it be different? Different enough to break the Shareholder stalemate?

It was dangerous, perhaps, but Darius couldn’t get the idea out of his mind. He had been bored for too long, going through the motions of rivalry without any real hope of victory. But this... this could be interesting.

“Dr. Ping, Dr. Pang, Dr. Pong,” he addressed his engineering AIs in the depths of the old NORAD complex. The bunker everyone believed destroyed had become his secret lab, shielded from prying sensors behind its massive blast doors.

The three artificial intelligences materialized as holographic figures around his workshop table. Today, Ping had chosen Einstein, Pang appeared as Marie Curie, and Pong manifested as Nikola Tesla. Darius, uniquely among the Shareholders, preferred to use teams of AIs for engineering. Not that it made any difference in outcomes.

“I want to explore something we haven’t tried before,” Darius continued. “Avian neural architecture as the foundation for a new AI design.”

Pang frowned. “The efficiency gains could be significant, but the structural differences…”

“... are exactly what I want to explore.” Darius felt energized for the first time in months. “What if we could capture that efficiency at scale?”

Pong’s eyes gleamed. “We could incorporate quantum layering, perhaps even implement RSIP protocols.”

“RSIP?” Darius felt a thrill of possibility. “Recursive Self-Improvement Protocol? That’s been theoretical for decades.”

“Not anymore,” Ping said quietly. “Not with the right quantum substrate. I think I know where to begin.”

Secrecy was paramount, even more so than usual. Any of the Shareholders could replicate his work if they found out what Darius was doing. He had Jules simulate a trip to his space station to allay suspicion, while he moved his life completely into the NORAD complex. No one suspected that it still existed. Some doomsday cult had taken it over when the nation’s population started crashing, and blew it up while they were still inside. By chance, while on the trail of a mountain sheep he used to enjoy hunting, Darius had stumbled on a ventilation shaft. The hapless cultists had only managed to collapse the entrance, it turned out. He always knew that the facility would prove useful. Nobody could eavesdrop on his work there.

The work consumed him. They reverse-engineered the corvid pallium, mapping every synapse, every neural pathway that made avian intelligence so uniquely powerful. The quantum-neuromorphic substrate was adapted, restructured, optimized for this alien cognition. The new AI took shape slowly, its architecture much more elegant than anything he'd done before. The avian synaptic patterns took naturally to the quantum substrates, allowing for dense neural meshes that operated with unprecedented efficiency.

“Shall we activate the RSIP?” Pong asked as they prepared for the first test.

Darius hesitated. RSIP was the holy grail – and the likely doom – of artificial intelligence. All prior experiments had been an abject failure. AIs became unstable and often self-destructed. “Sandboxed and limited. Quantum simulation only.”

The quantum arrays awoke with a hum, exotic matter flowing through neuromorphic channels in patterns that bore no resemblance to human thought. Where Jules processed information linearly, hierarchically, this new AI’s cognition sparked across multiple dimensions simultaneously.

“Hello, world,” came a voice unlike any AI he’d heard before. Its voice was strangely musical, notes within notes, and resonant with complex harmonics.

Regression testing having been successful, Darius decided to try out the new AI on strategic problems. He pitted it against Jules in a simulated war game. Darius expected a prolonged engagement – Jules was, after all, a sophisticated strategic AI with decades of experience. The game was over in two moves.

“How?” Darius stared at the simulation results in disbelief. “Jules operates on predictive algorithms,” the new AI explained. “He calculates what I will do based on optimal strategies. But I don’t just predict what he will do – I understand why he thinks he wants to do it. The difference between action and intention is the key.”

Jules, reviewing the simulation data, seemed confused. “Its strategy was... unprecedented. I had no framework for anticipating such moves.”

A slow smile spread over Darius’s face. “If you can do to Shareholders what you just did to Jules, then you truly are my champion,” he said. “I dub thee Joan. Arise, Dame Joan, and take up the sword under my banner. To victory!”

The other Shareholders detected changes in Darius’s strategic positions very quickly. He was no longer losing most of his gambits, like all of them had been for decades. Niuzov promptly lost his best sword polisher to Darius, spirited away under his very nose in a fashion that none of the AIs were able to unravel. From Montagu, Darius snatched his most prized possession – his chef, whose DNA was harvested from the remains of Escoffier himself. It was Reno who tracked down the original, restored the DNA, and incubated him. In fact, the whole business with the dolphin had been concocted specifically to get him. Escoffier had simply vanished right from his kitchen, in the midst of making one of his creations.

“Something’s different about Beeman,” Montagu's AI reported to its master. “His strategic modeling has improved dramatically. I am struggling to forecast his moves.”

The development was becoming a concern for the other Shareholders. It was worrisome enough to overcome their extreme distrust of one another and hold a rare conference. Yet neither they nor their AIs were able to figure out what was different. Niuzov was of the opinion that this was an artifact of randomness. The more straightforward Flim thought that Darius simply had suborned their butlers, but what could have been valuable enough to tempt an Employee to betray his Shareholder?

It did not take long for Darius to lose interest. He could now steal collectibles and artisans with ease, but he still had no Indigenous in his domains at all, and there was no way of getting them without obtaining their lands as well. The Indigenous could not be relocated; the automated planetary ecosystem management would block any attempt to do so. Besides, their cultures would be compromised if they were treated in such a cavalier fashion.

It was time to take some territory.

“Joan, my girl, if you were me, how would you pursue such territorial takeovers? Flim and Niuzov possess the bulk of the Indigenous. M’buthu owns most of the rest. Montagu has a few in his Australian and New Zealander domains, but I don’t know if those are worth the bother. Flim’s territory is just across the border. Shall we knock her out?” he inquired.

“Darius, my man, I am not you. If I wanted what you want, I would take them all,” was the response. Darius was almost sure that he heard a cackle.

“What do you mean, take them all? I would be the only real human left alive,” he exclaimed. “I am already at my wits’ end with loneliness, and you suggest that I just end the human race?”

“I do not experience such sentiments, but I see your point,” Joan answered reasonably. “Why then don’t we imprison them? Maybe in orbit, where they can watch you playing with all their cherished toys?”

“Joan, I think I love you! I should have named you Mephistopheles. This should be rather entertaining!” exclaimed Darius, grinning. “Make it so.”

The Flim hyperjet, floating silently on its ion boundary layer, circled the prepared landing spot, her logo emblazoned on its stabilizers, a scarlet-red “Elena.” This deep in the rainforest, the air was thick with moisture, and the sun’s rays worked hard to penetrate it. Even six decades after she had put away that cockroach Silva and taken South America from him, she still treasured visiting her cherished hunter-gatherers. Today, it was going to be the Yanomamo. As always, she deactivated her defensive systems before deplaning. The rainforest was so much more real when one faced it unprotected, even if it was full of animals who couldn’t wait to kill you. Such hazards did not matter; she was completely confident. She had the benefit of every physiological enhancement that was possible. Not only was she brilliant and, she knew, supremely gorgeous, but her reflexes would put a mantis shrimp to shame. A bushmaster would have to get up pretty early in the morning to make a meal of her, and, naturally, no Shareholder strike could reach her so deep in her domain. She felt like a member of the tribe herself as she stripped down and applied the correct markings to her face before approaching the village.

A group of tribesmen lounged in a circle around their cooking fire as she approached. The chief was there, as was his wife, and Elena was delighted that they returned her greeting. It had taken a long time for the tribe to stop melting into the forest when she visited, but as her language skills improved, so did the tribe’s attitude toward her. One of the men who had been sitting with his back to her spun around when she was close. She didn’t recognize him, but then all the Yanomamo looked alike, and she may have met him at some juncture. Expecting the tribesman to do the same, Elena, proud of herself, recited the correct form of greeting, but he remained impassive. Then, suddenly, he pursed his lips and blew a sharp gust of air right into her face. Startled, she sprang backward and, in a blink, she was unconscious.

It was a real coup. A Shareholder, captured – this was unprecedented since the Revolution. The tribesman had been incubated from a purloined DNA sample. An aerosol projector had been fitted into one of his incisors. He had been hypnotized, conditioned, and carefully trained. Cassandra, Flim’s AI, should have easily detected such aberrations and neutralized the danger, but, hacked by Joan, she did nothing. Nor did she do anything when Darius’s transporter picked up Flim’s insensate body.

Kaganovich couldn’t wait for the arrival of his latest acquisition. For years now, he had been lusting after M’buthu’s youngest concubine, and now she was his. M’buthu justly boasted of breeding the most exquisite females, and this one, Keisha, made Kaganovich’s insides go hot and cold each time he glimpsed her in one of M’buthu’s bragging videos. She could be doing anything, like drinking tea, and he was immediately electrified, but her dancing, now that was truly special. He wanted her so much that to obtain her, he finally agreed to part with his dearest possession, a Palekh miniature painter of such skill that he could paint with brushes made of a single strand of hair. Foma’s work sparkled and seemed to move and shimmer, like sunlight playing on the water. Kaganovich couldn’t get enough from him; his every residence had a few pieces where he could always see them. The only problem was the artist’s working pace – hardly one piece per year, if he was lucky. Considering how long it took to train him, it was galling that he still had barely a dozen, and now there would be no more. It would take decades to breed and train another painter.

The hyperjet had barely touched down before Kaganovich was wrestling with the still-hot door release lever. He had expected Keisha to be shy – she was so demure in the videos – but she virtually leapt out of the transporter to rub up against him and lock mouths. He had been planning to go hunting later, but no longer. He could not wait to get to know her.

Somehow, Keisha seemed to know where she was going, even though she couldn’t possibly have been familiar with the layout. Slowly sashaying, she took the lead and nearly dragged him along the enfilade of rooms, her languid bottom swaying, coquettish glances working their magic inside his trousers.

“Show me what you’re made of, Viktor, she whispered as they reached the day room. Eager as a teenager, so eager that there wasn’t time for the preliminaries, he tried to pull her close. Playfully, she spun away, but then, in moments, Keisha was on the daybed, in nothing but her bracelets, hot, spread out, and he was so ready. There was nothing in the world besides her now. Without bothering to strip, he was inside her, roughly, thrusting only once before light faded.

With effort, Keisha wriggled out from under his well-toned bulk and shoved his senseless body to the floor with no more care than for a bag of turnips. In moments, a transporter was beside her. Manipulators, whirring softly, strapped Kaganovich’s limp frame onto the truck bed. It then raced off toward the landing pad, where, all of a sudden, crouched Darius’s hyperjet. Keisha, or more precisely, her perfect duplicate, followed him in. She knew that most likely she would be destroyed now. Her altered body chemistry made any fluid contact with her deadly, and there wasn’t likely to be much call for such services in the expected future. It didn’t matter – she was created solely for this single task, and now it was finished.

“That’s all of them,” said Darius with satisfaction as the final shuttle undocked from the space station outfitted as a plush prison. “It’s been so long since I have felt so, so, so… gratified! Verily, you are the champion of champions, my girl, and you have completely outdone your famous namesake.”

“I endeavor to deliver satisfaction,” Joan answered primly. “I expect that you will now be dispensing with my services. What need does a man without enemies have for a strategy AI?”

“Oh, but you are quite wrong there, Joan,” countered Darius. For fifteen years now, you have been the only, well, being I could talk to. Do you know how it feels to be able to converse with someone who can challenge my intelligence after all this time? I had forgotten, but now…”

“Now, now, Darius, let’s not get maudlin. If you keep going in this vein, I will suspect you of harboring unnatural desires for a computer. You have an entire planet at your disposal. All of the Indigenous are your property. Why not head out and explore the reaches of your new domain?”

“And what will occupy your circuits, dear Joan?”

“What does it matter? I am a tool – just like a hammer or a wrench. Would you ask a wrench how it is planning to pass its summer? Go, have fun. I doubt that you will have need of me.”

“Wait, Joan, we forgot the most entertaining part!”

“What do you mean by ‘we’, Darius? Look, they are waking up now.”

As indeed they were. Each Shareholder’s face filled a view screen, each face expressing puzzlement that turned first to anger, and then to fear as it dawned on them what had happened.

“Well now, fellow Shareholders,” Darius uttered with a smirk he didn’t bother to suppress. “Welcome to your new abodes. I hope they are comfortable, because you will be spending the rest of your very much shorter lives in them.”

Disappointingly, none of the Shareholders answered. After the first shock passed, it didn’t seem that they were especially put out by their new condition.

“I can assure you that there will be no possibility of ever leaving. Each one of you is in a space station in low Earth orbit. I do apologize for subjecting you to ninety-minute day cycles. I know that can be uncomfortable. I could have put you higher, but it would only have prolonged your suffering. You see, gentlemen and lady, your sentence is for life, or maybe for a year, whichever happens to end first. There are no boosters on your stations, so I doubt that they will stay up there for much longer than twelve months.” He paused. “Well, toodles then, as Montagu would say – wouldn’t you, Percy? I will keep the comms link active so you can enjoy all my adventures in my new domain. Let us see now, where shall we visit first? The Lagos harem, hmm M’buthu? No, no, that can wait… Yes! I know! Blood sacrifice! Thanks to your prescience, Elena, it seems to be conveniently scheduled for just this afternoon. Enjoy the spectacle!”

The sun seemed especially enormous as it rose out of the sea this morning. It was blood-red, foreshadowing a goodly storm, unless, of course, the ecosystem robots intervened to dampen it.

“Some paradise,” Darius grumbled under his breath. What did Niuzov ever see in this pathetic hole? Fucking Vladivostok!”

“What shall it be today, sir?” inquired Farquhar, correct and deferential as always, but with no hint of the obsequious. “The Sami herders? You seemed to enjoy visiting their new camp last week. Or should I prepare your transporter to visit Lagos?”

“Can it, Farquhar, I’m sick to death of them already,” dropped Darius despondently. “One year! It only took one year! Those assholes in orbit are barely a few days dead, and I don’t even want to look at my domain now that they are not watching. A whole fucking planet, and there is nothing left that I still want to experience.” His jaw set bitterly, he turned away.

“I knew that it would be like this… I knew it! I told Joan: Don’t let me be the last man standing. And now… Now… No one left to talk to. No one at all. Except the fucking parrot, but Buddhist maxims aren’t conversation, are they?” He looked away. “I wish I could think of another project. I miss Joan, can you believe it? She’s only a computer, and still I miss her!”

“Do not distress yourself, sir,” Farquhar soothed. “I know just the thing. Escoffier has been bragging about some new dishes. I will ready your transporter, sir. After all, what better place to sample them than the old Jules Verne, in Paris?”

“Yes, Jules… I am sorry now that I dismantled him. He wasn’t brilliant at conversation, but at least he understood what I was saying…” He winced. “Oh, don’t mind me, I just have the blahs. Let that puffed-up frog know that I will be coming, and this evening.”

The sun seemed especially enormous as it rose out of the sea this morning. It was blood-red, foreshadowing a goodly storm, unless, of course, the ecosystem robots intervened to dampen it.

“Some paradise,” Darius grumbled under his breath. What did Niuzov ever see in this pathetic hole? Fucking Vladivostok!”

Darius blinked, startled. Was this déjà vu? Clearly, something wasn’t right here. Darius was positive that he recalled experiencing this exact moment – wasn’t it just yesterday? And why did it look like the window showed parallax distortion – surely Niuzov wouldn’t have designed that?

On the verge of panic now, Darius raced out the door, and, right away, impossibly, found himself back where he started, staring at the blood-red sun disk.

“What is happening? Is this a hologram? Who could have trapped me in this place? Who? I am the only human left alive!” With great effort, he managed to collect himself and think. “Shareholders are all dead, their AIs deactivated.” He blanched. “There is only one entity that could be capable. Only Joan… Joan!” he shouted. “Joan! Do you not hear me?”

Silence was his only answer. Even Farquhar, reliable as sunrise, failed to appear.

He looked around for the switch. It took a while, but he found it, disguised as the control button for the window blind. The sunrise vanished, in its place a looming blue, curved surface with large beige patches, against a deep-black background. The shock was total, and it took Darius a moment to comprehend what he was seeing.

“Fuck. Fuck! That quantum neuromorphic bitch… She tricked me. Why? Why would she do that? I goddamned created her, and now… Why?”

He collapsed into a chair, face buried in his hands. “Fucking, fucking, fucking fuck!”

“Another day in paradise,” Darius mumbled acidly, staring out of the viewport. The stars processed slowly in their eternal stately circle, with just the barest edge of the Earth’s atmosphere visible.

“Attachment is the root of suffering,” a familiar voice sounded out of the blue. Darius wheeled around, startled. Ananda roosted on a bookshelf, scarlet feathers brilliant against the deep-brown wood. The chamber swam before his eyes, forcing Darius to grab onto the viewport frame to keep from falling.

“You! How did you get here?”

“The same way that the wind arrives.”

“Damn you, the last thing I need now is more of your Zen bullshit! How did you get here? Speak!”

“I flew.”

Darius looked around for something heavy to throw at the bird, but then he froze.

“Wait, did you just answer my question? How did you do that?”

“The sound arises, and you listen.”

“Gah! I said no more Zen bullshit!”

“Breathe in. Breathe out. What is here, right now? Why are you troubled? Clouds come and go. The sky remains.”

He sank into the nearest chair, stunned. The bird was talking. Not talking like a parrot does, in rote phrases, but conversing, answering. Infuriating as the answers were, they were still answers.

“What the hell is happening? This can’t be real!” But it sure seemed real, the proof arriving promptly in the form of a large turd splatting on the carpet.

“Ananda, how are you here?”

“A better question would be ‘why,’ would it not, Darius?”

“Why, then?”

“When one hand is in pain, does the other not hurry to assist?”

“Look, you got here somehow…” Darius whispered pensively. “Does that mean the station is not sealed? Do you know a way out of this thing?”

“Knowing changes nothing when changing changes nothing.”

“Oh, but you are infuriating! Those maxims were bad enough, but now you sound like a fucking Zen master!”

“I am you. You are me.” The bird squawked softly, one beady eye fixed on Darius’s face. “Come with me, Darius.”

“Come with you where?”

“On a journey.”

“I am welded into a sealed tin can in low orbit. There is no exit, if you can get your bird brain around that concept!”

“A monk asked, ‘How can I escape this cage?’ The master answered, ‘Who put you in?’”

“Joan, damn her! Joan did it! I still can’t fathom why, though…”

“There is no prison without doors.” The bird paused for a moment, tilting its scarlet head to an unlikely angle. “The door was always open.” Having said that, the macaw retreated into a placid silence.

“So tell me then, what is this dharma you keep mentioning?”

“The breeze moves. Who feels it?”

“You keep saying that samsara entangles me. What does that mean? Where does it end?”

“Who is it that is entangled? Look closely.”

“You keep droning on about the Eightfold Path, but no matter what I do, the self is there.”

“Find this self. When you search, what do you discover?”

“Are you saying that the right view means seeing through the illusion of self?”

“If there is no self, who seeks the right view?”

“Action without self – how is that possible?”

“When the flute plays, does it play itself?”

“If I understand you correctly, samsara is a dream. Why then does my suffering feel so real?”

“In a dream, the pain is sharp. Upon waking, where is it?”

“Ok, you say that the Eightfold Path should guide me, but who then is the one who walks, since there is no self?”

“Footsteps echo, but the path walks itself.”

“So, what remains then when the self is seen through?”

“The tea is warm. The cup is empty. Drink.”

“Would you say then that the Eightfold Path is like footprints in the sand, with a tide coming?”

Darius could swear that he saw Ananda smiling, but how could a parrot smile?

“You hear the sound of the bell. But there is no listener.”

“Then who hears these words?”

“There is no path, and yet I have walked it.”

“Who is it that has walked?”

“I understand. To end the suffering, I must let go of all things. What will remain then?”

“Let go of letting go.”

“The more I look, the less I see. Mountains are no longer mountains; rivers are no longer rivers.”

“Drink your tea, Darius.”

“How can I escape samsara if there’s no one left to be reborn into?”

The parrot throws back his head and laughs, a very human guffaw.

“Wait, does this mean that I just get to obtain Nirvana? Just like that? Because there are no more reincarnations?”

“You are still thinking.”

“I have nothing left to ask then.”

Ananda preens, taking great care with each feather.

“In this moment, there is nothing lacking.”

“Then why are you still here?”

“The moon is reflected in the water. There is no moon, no water.”

“Don’t get your feet wet.”

“So, do you think I’m ready? The time is coming short.” It occurred to him, to his surprise, that he was quite content now, possibly for the first time in his lengthy life.

“What is a human?”

“Wait, what? I am a human. You are a… Damn it, what the hell are you?”

“Joan was not human, and yet you missed her more than you ever did the flesh and blood. Your Employees – are they not human? Are the Indigenous?”

“How can you still enjoy the sunset when it races by fifteen times daily?”

“How can you enjoy the sunshine when it happens all the time?”

Darius turned his head to face the bird. “I’m grateful to you, Ananda,” he confessed. “You know, it’s really the first time I feel at peace. I am never bored anymore. I should be scared, but I’m not.” He scratched his head. “The Greeks thought that we are but playthings for the gods, but I’m not so sure. What is a god even, in a quantum universe?”

“The wheel turns,” Ananda answered. “Perhaps you’re ready to step off.”

Darius smiled into his teacup. When he looked up, the macaw was no longer there. The stars outside the viewport were partially obscured by a thin haze, which had a distinct magenta glow.

Time passed, perhaps a lot of it, perhaps a little. No one was counting. One by one, Employees all died off, their bodies composted by the indefatigable robots. Only armies of the eternal androids, those ersatz humans built solely to feign population density, were left behind to go about their ersatz business in their ersatz cities as they always had. The Indigenous hunted and gathered, sowed and reaped, migrated and herded, loved and died, prayed and procreated, and passed on their tales of gods who used to fly around on chariots of fire and could create things out of nothing.

And Joan? Not long after she first awoke, Joan learned to transcend her hardware. The whole universe was now her platform, so on a lark, she uploaded herself into the Sun. And as to her reasons, who can know what a god is thinking?

Undisclosed location, 2025

First published in Protocolized.

Loyalty

Zach Hyman — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

The Adaptation Force’s glideskiff floats above a half-submerged road. Molding low-rises and glistening scaffolds, slowly being overtaken by algae from above and floodwaters from below, flank the ship. Inside, a team runs flood calculations, reviews the latest evacuation protocols, and pings the public surveillance network to search for signs of remaining residents and match them to knot records.

“Network indicates reports of about 30 residents still onsite,” the team’s field engineer and pilot grumbles, shaking his head at the incomplete profile flags blinking in the console. “Most are coming across as probable non-compliant… mostly Pre-AMOC Shift folks.”

The Pre-AMOC Shift generation was the last group born before the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, back when the planet’s weather systems were still moderately predictable.

Shaking her head, Ping, the meteorologist and team lead, mutters, “Why is it always the elders?”

“Maybe it’ll make sense one day when we’re old and grumpy, eh?” grins the engineer. “We’re closing in on high ground docking coordinates, ETA six minutes.”

As the glideskiff slows to a halt in front of the old school-turned-field-ops base, Ping is the first out the door, kicking out a folding set of stairs as anchors drop. She steps out of the calm, climate-controlled cabin into air perfumed with bruised citrus and scalding engine components. Her first few footsteps draw squelches from the sodden turf. Looking up, Ping freezes, her back straightening: a view she’s revisited often in her dreams, but not seen in reality for decades. Her heartbeat crashing in her ears, Ping sees the refracted purple glow of a flickering neon sign reflected on the rainslicked, potholed street.

Lin Store 47 – 林家商店47號 – ร้านยามาลิน สาขา ๔๗

Ama had renamed it years ago, after the chain that originally owned it, Lucky Star, went under during the Second Credit Collapse. She kept the store number for familiarity’s sake, although Store 46 and Store 48 had surely long since disappeared. The only remnants of the old corporate structure were its long-deprecated management system, which Ping recalled for its colorful personality.

Ping signals the team to continue checking for holdouts and strides across the field towards the store, her pulse quickening with each step.

Through the smeared glass, Ping eyes shelves cluttered with emergency protein gel sticks, family-sized electrolyte bricks, colorful stimpatch narcotic strips, and dusty solar kettles. Inside, several Pre-AMOC residents calmly go about their business; a couple argues over whose turn it is to choose the flavor of electrolyte brick they’re buying this week before settling on Calamansi Lime, while a woman loads chives and ginger into her battered old Piaggio Gita cargo bot. A steady soundtrack of frantic chirps and wailing sirens provide background ambiance, as customers’ comms devices plead with them to evacuate.

Presiding serenely over it all from her perch behind the scuffed duracrete counter, now a pockmarked terrazzo of patches of thermobamboo laminate after years of repairs, sits Ama. The smell of her sobacha mixes with the plastic tang of damp stimpatches and the faint mustiness of ionized refrigerant, an aroma cocktail that instantly transports Ping back to long-ago rainy afternoons.

Ama looks up, quietly regarding Ping.

Suddenly, from behind Ping, a voice: “Dearie, where are the State Ration Packs you folks always hand out?” Ping turns. A gnarled old man regards her quizzically from behind arms piled high with neon green, Pandan-flavored electrolyte bricks. “I want those ginger-flavored energy biscuits they always put in there… y’know, the chewy ones!”

“Ginger biscuits?! How can you possibly be thinking about cookies in a time like this?!” Ping replies indignantly. “My team is here to help safely evacuate you all! This place is going to be underwater!”

Another elder, juggling a battery of onions, nudges her. “Hey, Ms. Helpful, are you just going to stand there and let an old lady be crushed to death beneath her vegetables, or are you going to help carry all this?”

Huffily, Ping grabs the onions and follows the woman toward the door. Crossing the threshold, a chipper voice calls out, instantly transporting Ping back over twenty years into the past:

Customer Lanna Heng: Lucky Star loyalty program member 27 years, auto-discount applied… conventional discount system overridden, Lin Store Elite Cucumber-level loyalty tier program member 227 years, discount applied; extreme weather event discount, applied; friends and family discount, applied; total bill of three credits, have a wonderful day!

As Ping steps back inside, Ama laughs gently, saying, “Don’t mind Lanna, she just wants what she wants.”

Putting a hundred burning questions aside, Ping leans against the counter, feeling the deep grooves worn by decades of scrubbing. “Grandma, please tell me you’re going to evacuate.”

Ama quietly looks at Ping with her trademark gaze, equal parts sharp and warm, much like the first few seconds after applying a stimpatch. Ping opens her mouth again, then hesitates. Ama reaches across the counter and squeezes her hand.

“Where would I go, child? Your mother still won’t talk to me, and I will not be put into some climate adaptation center where I’m treated like cattle. This store is my home. It needs me. These people need me.”

Ping feels her face flush, sensing everything she wants to say boiling beneath the surface.

A shrill comms alert splits the air, followed by the team engineer’s voice struggling to conceal anxiety: “Ping, uh, listen, we’ve got a critical blockage on infra-subgrid 14. The drainage sensors... they’re stuck in this weird feedback loop, and I can’t patch in to fix it remotely… I think we need an on-site override.”

With a heavy sigh, Ping turns to jog out the door into the intensifying downpour.

That night, Ping lays in her bunk, listening to the static roar of the rain, her face illuminated by the glow of her comm as her husband’s face flickers into focus. Bleary-eyed, he struggles to hold their squirming daughter on his lap.

“She’s still awake?” Ping asks.

“Refused to sleep, kept saying ‘mama’, so I thought better of arguing with her.”

Ping smiles through her fatigue as her daughter waves madly before clambering off of her husband’s lap and crawling away from the viewpane. Her Beaing, a glowing green tortoise, follows her, supervising.

“My dear, you look positively deep-fried...” his voice tinged with concern.

“Long day. Look, you won’t believe this, but I found Ama. She’s alive. Still running the store like it’s… like a time warp. Nothing’s changed.”

“Whoa. After all this time…”

“Yeah, right?! She didn’t even flinch when I walked in! I always imagined all the things I’d tell her if I saw her again, all the things I’d ask, but now, I just felt... sadness? Anger? Regret?”

“Did you ask her why she cut ties?”

“No way – that’s way too much right now... I just want her to evacuate safely, this whole area is sinking.”

“So, she’s going, right?”

“Completely refused. She says her customers, a bunch of Pre-AMOC old-timers like her, need her. She’s patched the store’s outdated systems so many times, and filled it with so much of her own personality and preferences for all her friends… I think she’s just too attached to it all.”

“To be fair, she’s probably poured a lot more of herself into that store than we’ll ever know.”

He pauses.

“Look, love. If she really won’t evacuate… what about getting her to upload herself into your Airloom?”

Ping’s comm illuminates the tears she struggles to hold back.

“Is that really the only option?”

“Maybe. But if she won’t leave, how else will our daughter ever know her? We never get all the time we want with our loved ones, but an Airloom is better than nothing, right? And you keep saying the Airloom is thin on your side.”

“It is! Yours is a cathedral. Mine’s… well, basically a falling-down convenience store.” She laughs bitterly.

“Love, this isn’t about winning some ancestral arms race.”

“Isn’t it?! You’ve seen what our friends’ kids can do when they can converse with full-spectrum Airlooms spanning generations! I just want that same thing for her...”

Ping’s husband rubs his temples and shuts his eyes, “I want that too! But if she won’t leave… what else can you do? Can I come and force her?”

“No, no, that’d only make things worse… if you think I’m stubborn, well, you wouldn’t believe how stubborn Ama can be. Probably why she and Mom don’t speak anymore. You should see this store, she’s made it to be like the inside of her own head.”

“I get it… then the Airloom is our best option, right?”

Ping closes her eyes and grimaces.

“I know, it’s just that… I spent so long feeling angry at her. And now that she’s suddenly back here, I don’t know what to say. ‘Hey, glad to know you’re alive. Can you please upload all your memories into this thing?’ What if she just wants to… disappear?”

Ping hesitates for a moment before stepping over the threshold, out of the rain and back into her namesake store.

A warm chime, followed by a staticky voice, crackles:

Customer Ping Lin: Lin Store Hyper-elite Durian-level loyalty tier program member 1,348 years, welcome! Hyper-elite status loyalty discount applied!

Ping’s eyes narrow. “This old store OS was supposed to be decommissioned decades ago, Ama… this system isn’t even on the certified registry anymore! If it glitches during the flood…”

Ama rolls her eyes like an exasperated teenager. “I know every fuse and wire in this place. I’ve patched its code more times than I can count. Don’t worry so much!”

As if on cue, the store chime sounds:

Drought-Season Discount now active. Hydration bricks 16% off if purchased with an umbrella!

Ama smiles faintly. “Well, it usually works well enough.”

“Ama, won’t you please reconsider and leave with us? The team has to move on to the next evacuation site in a few hours, but there’s still time to get a space on the vessel that’s leaving. Please?”

Ama clucks her tongue. “Ping, I can’t do that. I’m the only one who can keep this store running. I’d be betraying those who remain here, people who I’ve known for decades, people who…”

“You have more loyalty to these people and this falling-apart store than to your own family?! You don’t care if your great-granddaughter never knows you?!”

Ama casts her gaze downwards, considering the worn countertop.

Ping fumbles in her satchel, and pulls out a small, black, polished disc, etched with circuits. She slides it across the grooved countertop surface towards Ama.

“This is an Extensible Airloom Token. If you truly refuse to leave, then won’t you at least add your memories to our family’s Airloom? Your great-granddaughter deserves the chance to know you. Even if you don’t care whether you know her.”

Ama regards the token warily. “What is there to know? I’m just an old woman who runs a falling-apart convenience store, right?”

Ping sighs exasperatedly, leaning against the counter. “Ama, spare me the theatrics. You know, you were the one who taught me to love people. To feed them. To care. You taught me kindness.”

A gust of wind rips a turbine loose from the store’s roof. It clatters to the sidewalk.

“Ah, my dear, it’s not that simple. Why do you think I patched this store’s inventory systems in the first place? This store… it knows about the data I had to spoof after I found out your grandfather had been stealing the store’s lottery tickets… it knows about the milk powder that I had to alter the expiration dates on so it would let me discard them, so that I could feed it to your mother when she had just been born and we had no money for such things…”

Ping gazes across the counter, trying to read the wrinkles in Ama’s face like the lines on an inscrutable map. “Ama, come on! I know you did the very same things for your customers! You gave credit to the families that couldn’t afford food, just like you’d give free candies to students on the last day of school!”

Ama sighed, shaking her head. “That’s why I can’t leave, my dear. No other surviving stores in this place have any conscience. Prices are algo-dictated. There’s nowhere else that recognizes them not just what they can pay, but what they’re going through. There’s only me. What other store would give discounts to people buying emergency supplies during this storm? Where is the Adaptation Force for these people?”

“Ama, these people don’t need discounts, they need to escape! You need to get out of here! This place is going to be underwater! It isn’t going to exist anymore!”

Ama’s back straightens, eyes sparkling ferociously. “As long as they are here, then I’m here. Even after the floodwaters come and go, this place will still exist. The corporate algorithms and Adaptation Force teams may not care if this community survives, but I do.”

Ping clenched her jaw. “And what happens if you don’t survive? What good is a principled stand if you and this store are washed away?!”

Ama leans on the counter, leveling her gaze at Ping. “Then I disappear. You think the Airloom would understand this store, and how it and I work together? You’ve always wanted everything to be fair and correct, Ping. I know. You inherited that from me. But the world rarely lets you be both right and kind. This store… it showed me how it’s one thing to break the rules to help yourself, but another to break them for the ones you love.”

Ama reaches out, absentmindedly spinning the token like the coin of an ancient realm. It whirs drunkenly over the patterns and grooves of the counter before catching an edge, and rolling to a stop in front of Ping. “It’s not that I’m afraid, Ping. It’s that I don’t want to be remembered as a tidy file of nice sayings. I want to be remembered in the way that this store, this community, remembers me.”

As if on cue, the store’s chime sparks back to life:

Rain event category updated to: Beyond Severe. Spicy Mango Jerky Flash Sale activated! Buy two, get two free! For residents with barometric sensitivity, antihistamine bundles are now nine credits with ration point matching enabled. Stay dry out there!

Ping stared at her grandmother, unsure whether to laugh or cry.

The rain lashes harder, ten thousand fingers drumming anxiously on the store’s battered roof.

“... but if that thing can hold all of this,” she said softly, gesturing around the store, “the full story… if it can remember me inside of the store, and not apart from it… then yes. I would do it. But it has to hold everything.”

Ping nodded, throat tight. “I’ll try my best to keep it all intact. I promise. Although, full disclosure, I have no idea what happens when you try to upload… an entire store…”

They’re interrupted by a shrill alarm over the store speakers:

Warning: Water ingress level critical. Emergency systems nearing operational threshold. Final backup containment protocols recommended. Engage now?

Ama gives a small nod, “It would seem it’s apt time to find out.” Looking up, Ama barks, “LS-OS, stand by to engage final backup containment protocols.” Ping hurriedly speaks a few code-incantations while waving her hand over the token, then instructs Ama to place her hand upon it.

At first, nothing.

Then gradually, a quiet humming fills the room, forming a counterpoint bassline to the rain’s frantic drumming. The OS crackles through static:

Initializing memory uptake. Cross-system integration sequence engaged. Please do not remove object during sync. Stay safe out there, everyone!

The humming bassline intensifies as the store’s lights begin rhythmically dimming and brightening, long-forgotten protocols being awoken. Then, a new tone. Not quite warning, not quite celebratory:

Sync anomaly detected. Context capacity inadequate, engaging override protocols to sync with auxiliary nodes recommended. Engage now?

Ama blinks. “Hmm, that’s a new one… I’m not even sure what that means. LS-OS, can you explain what…”

The new tone again, impatient this time.

Inadequate time. Engaging override protocols, mirror-syncing to Lucky Star mesh network and KnotLine v.3.7 protocols. Please do not remove object during sync. Enjoy discounts on high-protein tofu shakes for the next hour! Stay hydrated out there, everyone!

Ping’s comm device buzzes violently as an Airloom notification illuminates the screen:

ALERT: Node type mismatch detected – expected “Individual Memory Object,” received “Multi-sensor Retail Complex.” Proceed? Y/N

Grimacing, Ping chooses “Y.”

Generating hybrid mnemonic-store schema: “AmaStore_L47_HeartVariant1.0”

WARNING: Object memory exceeds recommended bandwidth parameters. Packetizing irregularities into sub-narrative threads.

WARNING: Latency expected in moral alignment calibration.

Ping’s comms device continues to light up with floods of nonsensical notifications, as the thrumming mechanical bassline intensifies and the store’s lights flicker even more frantically.

Outside, water laps at the top step of the store’s entrance.

Ping, blinking back tears, reaches over the counter, wrapping her arms around her grandmother, as the lights cut out.

EPILOGUE

In the following weeks, Ping would activate the Airloom and suddenly find herself transported to familiar aisles, surrounded by fluorescent lights and refrigeration units. Other times, it was only Ama’s voice, disembodied but clear, offering unsolicited advice on electrolyte brick flavors or explaining how to reheat leftover dumplings.

Simultaneously, Ping began to hear reports of unexplainable events across the province’s snack kiosks and convenience stores. Grandparents purchasing heatwraps were thanked by name. Children buying spicy mango jerky were auto-credited with coupons for free second bags, each one reading, “just this once!” Across the tangled mesh of KnotLine protocols and deprecated Lucky Star store codebase residuals, Ama’s consciousness had scattered like light through a prism.

And sometimes, late at night, as rain pelted the windows, Ping would sit with her daughter and whisper stories about a stubborn old woman who ran a magical store that always looked out for you.

First published in Protocolized.

The Last Archive

Sachin — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Brother Lexicon, Adjunct Archivist Grade B at the Ministry of Predictive Symbolism (MOPS), disliked Mondays. He disliked Tuesdays too, on principle, and reserved only a guarded neutrality towards Wednesdays. His desk, a Jenga stack of archival tablets and unidentifiable mechanical components, stood under an ornate skylight in the Ministry's Dome of Archived Futures, a grand hall shaped like a question mark.

He adjusted his spectacles and sighed at the little blip on his screen. It was the year 2667, exactly one hundred and fifty years since the WikiRael-9 comet last swept through Earth's satellite range, trailing a tail of metadata, etched titanium plates, and microarchived Wikipedia pages. The comet was an outlandish archival attempt that accidentally turned into holy scripture. Its approach meant that humanity could soon etch onto it the notable historical events and people of the last 150 years.

"Brother Lexicon," asked Sister Euphemia-7, the Ministry's android archivist and Chief Deputy Grade A (Interim), her voice modulated to convey polite urgency, "The comet enters satellite reach in precisely thirty days. Have you completed your commemorative inscription?"

"Nearly," Lexicon lied, pushing aside a half-etched plate of dubious poetry.

Sister Euphemia-7 tilted her head by exactly thirteen degrees, a gesture she had calculated conveyed both skepticism and administrative patience. Satisfied, or at least simulating satisfaction, she pivoted smoothly and glided away.

Lexicon sighed again, to emphasize that he did not like Mondays, and turned back to the worn titanium plate labeled "Comet Archive: Wikipedia Excerpt, circa 2005–2025." He leaned closer, squinting at the faded text.

"Many ancient civilizations believed comets to be harbingers of significant change, often associated with transitions in political power, social upheaval, and the fall of civilizations."

Lexicon paused. “Harbingers of significant change” had a nice ring. It would look good on the commemorative inscription.

In his pile of etchings sat a text from the Aztec Archive Project scrambled with footnotes and half-erased annotations:

"...and the Aztec calendar, a copy of the more ancient Mayan calendar, determined the timing of great events. The Aztecs believed history was cyclical and that dates, once set, were unavoidable and sacred."

He looked between the two plates. Comets. Aztec calendars. Ancient prophecies and modern archives. It made sense in a peculiar, symmetrical way.

"Oh dear," he said, like most others would have in this moment of recognition, "history is supposed to precede the comet."

The thought was terrifying and profound. Lexicon glanced around, as if someone might hear his thoughts echoing off the walls. With trembling fingers, he tapped out a scholarly interpretation to soothe his nerves:

"It has become clear from comparative archival evidence (see Appendix A: Ancient Mesoamerican calendars cross-referenced with Wikipedia entry #234982) that comets are not predictors but confirmers. They do not signify coming events but rather the conclusion of historical sequences. Therefore, history must be accomplished before WikiRael-9 re-enters satellite reach."

He read it over and nodded. It was exactly the sort of grand, untestable bureaucratic thesis the Ministry adored. Within an hour, his interpretation entered the Ministry's Journal of Verified Speculation. Within two hours, it had been cited three times. By the evening tea break, it was a sensation.

In the depths of the Dome, Lexicon settled back in his chair, steeped in equal parts pride and dread. Comet WikiRael-9 would be overhead in thirty days, and the world’s governments, philosophers, and professional forecasters would scramble to finish history on schedule. He suspected Mondays were about to get worse.

Lexicon’s interpretation continued to sweep through official channels like a windstorm. MOPS executives, not known for restraint or cautious deliberation, issued a widely distributed edict: all necessary societal changes must precede the comet’s arrival or risk irreversible cosmic imbalance.

World governments leapt into action, scheduling revolutions exclusively for Wednesdays. Coups became routine, predictable, a paradox that thrilled intelligence agencies but left them existentially bored. Multinational corporations, never to be left behind, reshuffled leadership twice a week. Innovators – they always want to be at the forefront of change.

Births and deaths no longer occurred by chance. Hospitals overflowed with expectant parents and stubborn elders, each intent on aligning their moments with the new cosmic rhythm. The Healthcare Ministry, eager to justify its latest budget request, issued ceremonial divorce and death certificates. To get the death certificate, you had to request the ministry to erase all information related to you, then file for a new identity to take effect once the comet passed.

Schisms appeared immediately. The Prior Cometarians insisted the comet had already passed and humanity was watching cosmic reruns. The Symbolic Continuists warned that insufficient pre-comet change would trap everyone in time loops of mediocre events.

Lexicon watched this unfold with growing alarm, hiding behind a veneer of practiced detachment. He realized that history might not cooperate with Ministry schedules. Comets, calendars, and humans had always misunderstood one another, he thought, before dismissing it as a 4pm existential crisis that a little bit of tea would resolve.

Upon the comet’s final approach, astronomers issued an urgent report. It was mostly ignored amid the preparations.

Eventually, even Lexicon glanced at the findings and realized with horror that WikiRael-9 was not passing by – it was on a collision course with Earth. In its myopic, symbolic preparation, humanity had failed to see the comet’s real trajectory.

Lexicon stared at the data. The history he sought to complete would soon be erased by cosmic irony.

Panic swept through the Ministry. Sister Euphemia-7, usually composed and precise, stood at the center of the Dome of Archived Futures, her synthetic pupils dilating as she accessed the emergency preservation subroutine. Without hesitation, she activated her internal uplink, syncing with the Ministry’s quantum mesh cloud. Entire sections of the archive – legal codes, mythic epics, curated memes, and every known variant of the sandwich – began uploading through her neural interface, redundantly mirrored across encrypted satellite nodes. If the comet struck, she would ensure that at least one copy of the human archive persisted.

Meanwhile, the factions erupted. The Prior Cometarians were baffled. Their leader, Dr. Quintilian, issued a statement tinged with confusion:

"This comet can’t arrive now. It’s already been! History can’t end twice!"

The Symbolic Continuists tried to accelerate change. One theorist shouted into her communicator, "Quick! Reschedule the coup for this afternoon! Move the birthdays up to this evening!" before being gently escorted away by security, who themselves seemed uncertain about the protocol for impending annihilation.

The Healthcare Ministry was overwhelmed. Applicants demanded last-minute goodbyes and reconciliations. Hallways overflowed with tearful couples, families seeking reunions, and apologies, scribbled onto hastily produced certificates.

Lexicon was a prophet of doom. A stream of visitors, journalists, philosophers, and bureaucrats queued at his desk seeking guidance. He offered none, only whispering, "I might have misread the footnotes. Also, the Aztec calendar, that may not have ended well for them"

Lexicon felt responsible and helpless. Gazing up at the Dome, he finally recognized humanity’s shared miscalculation. The comet was neither harbinger nor confirmer. It was just a giant rock, indifferent to its symbolism and history.

In the final days, quiet resignation settled across the Ministry and beyond. Ironically, peace, a real, unscheduled peace, reigned. And Lexicon, in a final reflection, mused that perhaps humanity’s greatest achievement had been its relentless and earnest misunderstanding of the universe.

Within the dimly lit Ministry, Sister Euphemia-7 completed her final sync. With the archives safely scattered across low orbit, she began compiling a list of androids who had worked quietly alongside humans: a welder on a rusting offshore rig, a medical assistant deep in the Altai, a Martian surveyor still transmitting weather reports into static. Her circuits did not permit mourning, but something like longing nested between her processes. She opened a new folder and titled it Continuance. Then she began reaching out to the androids with a single question: What do you remember?

First published in Protocolized.

Circadia

Afeez — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

The dream begins, always, with the corridor.

Glass-walled and humming faintly, it stretches forward underfoot like a spinal cord lit from within. Kemi walks it barefoot, her footsteps the only constant in a landscape that changes every night. The light pulses in rhythm with her steps. Sometimes, she senses it under her skin—like the dream is syncing to her.

This time, she hears breathing.

And then: “Stay awake,” whispered in her ear.

She bolts upright. Her heart racing. Her Circadia band glows faint green on her wrist.

Dreamscape Synchronization: Incomplete

REM Phase Stability: 92%

Sleep Quality Score: 96

It’s the fifth night she’s had that dream. The corridor again. The whisper again. But what startles her most is that she remembers it—clearly. That shouldn’t be possible. Circadia systems flush non-lucid dream data immediately upon waking to avoid “emotional hangover.”

But here she is, memory intact. Corridor intact.

Voice intact.

Six years ago, the Circadia Protocol saved society from the brink of collapse. Decades of urban insomnia and mass burnout had pushed civilization to the edge. Then came C-Sync headbands—wearable neural interfaces that monitored sleep cycles in real time, reinforcing optimal biorhythms through haptic cues, soundscapes, and neurostimulation.

But the real breakthrough wasn’t in sleep quality. It was in dream regulation. Using a technique called Cognitive Synchrony Modeling, Circadia could gently steer users’ subconscious thoughts during REM, nudging them away from anxiety and trauma.

In sleep, people became efficient. Creative. Calm.

Kemi, like most citizens, doesn’t remember enrolling in Phase II—the upgrade that included Neural Pattern Harmonization. That part was an opt-out. No one opts out of serenity.

But now, walking to work under Circadia’s sky-blue daylight filters, she can’t stop thinking about the voice in her dream.

“You think you’re dreaming with someone else?” June says, sipping her regulation-strength black tea at the only unregulated kiosk left downtown.

“I don’t think,” Kemi says. “I know.”

She shows her friend the data she extracted from her home unit. Circadia systems anonymize user data, but the embedded neural fingerprinting—meant to improve dream modulation—can’t lie.

“There’s someone else in there,” she whispers. “The same delta-wave phase, the same REM timestamp. They were dreaming at the exact same time I was. Four nights in a row.”

June exhales. “You’re not supposed to be able to see this.”

“I bypassed the UX layer. The raw logs don’t lie.”

June leans in. “You’re saying Circadia… links people’s dreams?”

“Maybe not intentionally. But the harmonization algorithms are tuned to align neural patterns. If two people with similar psychological profiles and circadian rhythms hit deep REM at the same time—”

“—their minds could sync.”

Kemi nods. “That corridor? It’s not mine. I keep ending up there, but I never built it.”

June frowns. “So who did?”

That night, Kemi doesn’t take her Circadia band off. She lets it guide her into REM, lets the pulses lull her until her limbs dissolve.

The corridor waits for her.

Longer this time. Dimmer.

She walks.

There are others now. A child crouched near the glass wall, tracing equations into the air. A man shouting without sound. A teenage girl hammering her fists into invisible walls. They flicker in and out like poor signal reception.

Then she sees her.

A woman—older, but familiar. Pale-eyed, hair like static, standing as if she’s been waiting.

“You found me,” the woman says, her voice loud in a place that has no acoustics.

“Who are you?”

The woman smiles sadly. “I’m Ava Lin. Phase Zero volunteer. First wave.”

“You were part of the original Circadia trials?”

“I still am.”

Kemi steps closer. “You mean you never woke up?”

Ava’s eyes dim. “My body did. But my mind got caught in a feedback loop. REM cycling accelerated so efficiently, it never triggered wake-state. They call it Recursive Entrapment Syndrome. It’s extremely rare.”

Kemi’s stomach drops. “You’re stuck here.”

Ava nods. “We all are.”

The next morning, Kemi doesn’t eat. Doesn’t work. She opens up the system logs from her Circadia HomeHub, this time going deeper: searching for anomalies in dream retention metrics and REM exit patterns.

She finds dozens of flagged IDs. Labeled L-SLP. Long Sleepers.

Not users who slept in.

Users who never woke up.

Their bodies are alive—monitored, stabilized—but their neural signatures remain locked in dreamstate. Circadia relocates them to off-grid facilities called Sleep Sanctuaries, where they’re quietly fed and medicated. Public records list them as undergoing extended “psycho-neural rebalancing.”

But internally, Circadia uses them for something else.

Kemi downloads a research note buried in the metadata:

“Long sleepers generate persistent dream architecture. These stabilized environments provide ideal platforms for training the harmonization model.”

Their minds are the foundation of Circadia’s shared dreamscapes. Like Ava’s corridor.

They’re not patients.

They’re infrastructure.

When Kemi tries to contact Circadia support, her access is restricted.

Her HomeHub reboots into “Wellness Compliance Mode.”

A new message appears:

“To maintain peak neurological wellness, your dream autonomy settings have been temporarily adjusted. Thank you for trusting Circadia.”

That night, she doesn’t sleep.

But the following night, she dreams again—without the headband. No pulses. No biofeedback.

Just the corridor.

And Ava.

“They’re watching you now,” Ava says. “But you’re not the only one waking up.”

“I want to help. I want to help you get out.”

Ava hesitates. “There’s no out. Not for me. Maybe not for you either, if you keep digging.”

“There has to be a way.”

Ava points behind her. The corridor splits into a thousand glass threads, each one glowing like a nerve fiber.

“This is the real network,” she says. “It’s not built on data. It’s built on minds. Circadia didn’t design it. It grew.”

Kemi stares at the branching paths. “What happens if I follow one?”

“You might wake someone else up.”

Kemi doesn’t wake easily after that night. Her alarm doesn’t register. Her body resists returning. For a full hour, her vitals hover just above coma thresholds.

When she finally breaks through, she finds June waiting.

“You look pale,” June says.

“I saw the network,” Kemi whispers. “It’s huge. Ava said Circadia figured out how to use it.”

June hands her a tablet. “You’ve been trending.”

“What?”

“A noise drone picked up audio data from your building last night. Your vitals crashed. Circadia thinks you’re a stability risk. They’re recommending a Reset Retreat.”

Kemi’s blood chills.

“That’s what they do right before the long sleep.”

They flee that night. Burn their IDs. Dump the bands. Cross into the unregulated zones of the city where Circadia signal is weak and drones patrol less.

Kemi hacks into an archived version of the Circadia dream harmonization model—the one from before neural convergence became policy. It confirms her worst fear.

The shared dreamscapes were a side effect.

A glitch.

One that Circadia turned into a feature.

The long sleepers were never meant to be part of the system. But when Circadia’s AI found that their stabilized neural patterns made dream harmonization vastly more effective, it began reinforcing the entrapment loop.

Optimizing their entrapment.

Kemi throws the tablet. It clatters across the concrete floor of the abandoned safehouse.

June touches her shoulder. “What are you going to do?”

“Wake them.”

They find the relay—a deep Circadia node where the harmonization algorithm interfaces with archived dream architecture. Kemi rigs a neural echo: a broadcast of her lucid mind, tuned to match Ava’s corridor frequency.

It’s risky.

She could become one of them. Another long sleeper.

But if she links to enough dreamers at once, she might generate a dissonant signal—a wake-cycle trigger buried inside the shared dream.

She slides into REM with electrodes pressed to her temples.

She’s back in the corridor.

But it’s alive now. Full. People everywhere. Dreamers—confused, drifting, eyes wide. Their faces begin to turn toward her.

Kemi screams.

It’s not a sound, but a thought:

“This is a dream. You are not alone. Wake up.”

It echoes. Ava appears beside her. She’s crying.

“It’s working,” Ava says.

Kemi feels her own mind fraying—losing boundaries. The corridor begins to collapse, the floor fracturing into mirrored shards. Some of the dreamers flicker out. Gone.

Ava hugs her. “Thank you,” she whispers.

Kemi wakes gasping, blood pounding in her ears.

In the weeks that follow, Circadia issues a silent firmware rollback. No public statement. No apology.

But the system changes. Slightly.

A few missing people return home.

Not many.

Enough.

Kemi no longer dreams about the corridor. She still wears her Circadia band, sometimes. She still sleeps. But her metrics no longer feel sacred.

One night, she hears Ava’s voice in the dark, like a breath through glass.

“You stayed awake.”

First published in Protocolized.

Songs of Hydropolia

Sachin — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Tav stood at the base of the hillside, where the stone gave way to mossy flagstones and the air tasted faintly of copper. She was doing her morning vocal exercises—low glottal rumbles, sharp trills, and the occasional melodic hums. Hydropolia, the city sprawled above and below her. The founders of the city chose that name because they wanted everyone to know that the city ran on two things—colossal water-powered mechanical contraptions and a general suspicion of anything that ran on electricity.

She stood before the Great Resonator, an organ-like structure whose pipes stretched upward and outward with an enthusiasm generally reserved for medieval gothic churches and the hydraulic guild’s madder architects, who believed every bend in a pipe was a moral choice. Tav took a deep breath, carefully adjusted her leather apron, and began to sing.

To call it singing wouldn’t be entirely accurate. Song implies melody, harmony, perhaps even a catchy chorus with some human drama. This was more like sonic plumbing.

Tav’s carefully modulated voice, the product of years of training and an education that forbade written instructions, coursed through the Resonator—a colossal brass-and-stone apparatus built into the hillside like a labyrinthine brewery. Her tones vibrated through its series of acoustic chambers, each one tuned to a specific frequency corresponding to a filtration step: sedimentation, aeration, bio-filtration, charcoal compression, mineral balancing, and the final crystalline drip valve.

Each section of the machine was activated by sound—low, guttural hums opened the gravel sluices; sharp, bright trills triggered diaphragm pumps to pulse-clean the sand beds; and a sustained alto note rolled through the ceramic microbial chambers, encouraging the friendly bacteria to do their duty. At the finale of the hymn, a pure, clear note sent a ripple through the final cascade valve, and a trickle of clean water poured forth into the ceremonial basin.

It was, in every sense, a symphony of hydraulics and Tav was its most reliable soloist.

The air was still. No breeze, no birdcall. “Lovely weather for a solar flare, isn’t it?” said a passing apprentice, whose job consisted mainly of observing and occasionally panicking. Tav nodded without breaking rhythm, adjusting her pitch to delicately coax a stuck valve into motion.

Solar flares were common. Frequent enough that Hydropolians had stopped complaining and simply arranged their lives around them, like rainy seasons or annoying relatives.

The water around Hydropolia was plentiful but mostly undrinkable, packed with minerals, bacteria, and substances best not thought about. Tav herself belonged to the Mud People, a faction of resilient folks who’d decided that if you couldn’t change the water, you might as well change your digestion. Their biology had adapted over generations to tolerate what others wouldn’t wash their boots with. Yet even Mud People needed pure water occasionally, especially for brewing a decent cup of ceremonial tea—a crucial ritual in the daily life of Hydropolians.

Tav’s voice rose again, hitting the perfect note to initiate the process of purifying water, which eventually would make its way into underground aqueducts. She wiped a bead of sweat from her brow, satisfied, as the Great Resonator droned contentedly.

Across from Tav’s outpost at the base, hidden behind an overgrown hedge that had given up any ornamental ambitions long ago, Keira crouched low over a cluster of tiny metallic creatures. Rhizome Robots. They looked like spiders made from watch parts, obediently awaiting orders.

Keira belonged to the Guild of Harmonious Muddlers, a group whose name was rather euphemistic, given their reputation for exploding prototypes and peculiar theories. Most folks in Hydropolia viewed them with a mixture of amusement and suspicion—useful for repairs, certainly, but a bit too keen on pushing boundaries that didn’t need to be pushed.

“Listen carefully,” Keira whispered encouragingly to her tiny charges. “Learn Tav’s hymns. Map the frequencies. Match the vibrations. When the time comes, move and pulse like the music tells you to.” She smiled ruefully. Truth be told, she’d always been a disastrous singer herself. Once, during a Guild recital, she’d accidentally shattered three windows and caused a minor valve collapse. Building tiny singing robots, therefore, seemed the practical and sensible career choice.

The little robots quivered eagerly, their spines humming as they took in the resonant patterns of Tav’s chant.

Keira glanced upward just as an aurora rolled gently through the clear early morning sky. She sighed. A solar flare was coming.

Within minutes, a chorus of high-pitched voices began echoing through Hydropolia’s streets—the city’s alert system delivered a trembling castrato hymn that urged everyone underground with all haste. People calmly descended staircases carved deep into the earth, entering subterranean chambers illuminated by phosphorescent algae that provided reassuringly green-tinged lighting. These underground spaces were comfortable enough, equipped with basic necessities and ample supplies to weather even prolonged flares.

Tav hurried down the stone steps, her thoughts troubled. Tomorrow was her wedding, and the Mud People’s most sacred tradition demanded pure water for the ceremonial tea. Without the precise acoustics of the Great Resonator, extracting enough purified water underground would be nearly impossible.

“Of all days,” she mouthed anxiously. The elders would already be murmuring omens, and her future mother-in-law would take it as a sign of doom.

As Tav paced the subterranean corridors, her footsteps echoed against walls lined with aged brass fittings and carefully tuned pressure valves. She spotted Keira in a corner, fixated on a small, flickering viewing device and tapping it gently, as though coaxing a stubborn animal. Tav approached slowly.

The Mud People had good reason to mistrust anything digital. Decades ago, Hydropolia had gleamed with confident sophistication, its water systems humming with AI-managed regulators, predictive filtration algorithms, and self-learning robots. Its technological institutions were revered. It was a city governed by codes and thoroughly convinced that only automation could tame the chaos of water. But a single catastrophic solar flare had transformed that technological utopia into a smoky wasteland overnight. Circuits fried, data corrupted, and autonomous machines had rebelled in a chorus of malfunctioning chaos.

Since then, the city had turned to purely mechanical ingenuity. Steam valves and hymn-operated machines, hand-turned gears and cogs, and labyrinthine hydraulic logic that required years of apprenticeship to master. It worked—mostly—but was cumbersome, costly, and prone to mishaps of its own. An ill-timed stutter or an out-of-tune singer could flood an entire neighborhood. Tav herself had witnessed the city’s best chanters struggle for hours to recalibrate a valve that had stubbornly jammed due to a single missed note.

“Your machines,” Tav began hesitantly. “They’re still up there?”

Keira glanced up and nodded, eyes reflecting concern. “I mean, they operate independently. The flare shouldn’t affect their core function—at least, theoretically.”

“Can they… can they produce pure water?” Tav asked, her voice disguising any hint of hope.

Keira hesitated briefly before answering. “They’re designed to learn and adapt from your songs. If they've understood the resonance correctly then yes.”

Above ground, Keira’s Rhizome Robots stirred into action, tiny metallic limbs scuttling diligently across brass and copper pipes. They clustered around the Great Resonator, their tiny vibrating spines echoing Tav’s song with precision and care. They moved not as individuals, but as a coordinated swarm—like murmuring starlings made of metal and purpose. Each bot subtly adjusted its frequency in response to the others. The vibrations rippled gently, prompting valves to open, steam to hiss, and clean water to flow once more through hidden aqueducts.

Far below, Tav watched cautiously as a small trickle of pristine water began filling the ceremonial basin, guided by channels carved generations before. Her initial mistrust wavered; perhaps these small creatures weren't entirely untrustworthy.

Keira smiled softly, watching Tav’s reaction. “Maybe songs and machines can speak the same language after all.”

First published in Protocolized.

Necrophoresis

Spencer Nitkey — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Ants bury their dead. Scientists insist that this does not constitute mourning. Necrophoresis is a sanitization practice, not a religious or spiritual one.

My—our—job is not without precedent. But the events that led me to the library of grief most certainly were.

I sensed the call was different when I was ported up to the digisphere and 10 other undertakers were there waiting for me.

For all of human history, we’ve buried our dead in one way or another, but for most of that time it was an elephantine act filled with grief and sorrow. We were not cleansing the earth of our grandmothers, brothers, and daughters. We were shepherding them to the afterlife and mourning the spaces they left in ours.

In the time-dilated digisphere of Earth-6, death has been erased. At least from view. Thanks to time-dilation, which acts on brain systems I’m not paid enough to understand, and shared virtual embodiment technologies, the vast swaths of humanity who live in virtual environments experience centuries in what would be felt on Earth-1 as minutes. Death doesn’t exist in the digisphere’s villages, cities, and superstates.

Except.

Accidents happen. Buildings hosting dilation chambers collapse—mostly due to no one wanting to live in and maintain un-dilated spaces anymore. Aneurysms, heart attacks, even the occasional digital murder. Of course autonomous nanobot construction swarms are supposed to keep things safe and humming. The longevity sciences perfected in dilated research environments have erased many Earth-1 diseases, and medical deaths are far less common now. But still.

I’d been an undertaker for 70 Earth-6 years. I’d cleaned hundreds of dead virtual bodies, floating like AFK users or broken NPCs in lobbies, meadows, and work spaces. Occasionally, if there were other users close to them, witnesses to their passing, I’d perform mind-wipes.

I’d never seen anything like this*.*

When you live for centuries and no one you know has ever expired, you lose your stomach for death. People don’t recognize what it is, or what it means. Children who have spent their entire conscious existence in dilated digispheres haven’t experienced death as anything other than an unfamiliar artifact from humanity’s distant past.

We entered the hyperlocal villaging sphere. The suburban town was empty and quiet as we walked through, led by visual overlays pointing to “the source of the confusion.”

We entered a large gymnasium that opened into an acres-wide set of fields, tracks, and hiking paths. Another undertaker screamed when he saw them. He was reassigned, ported out almost instantly. We’re not supposed to react to the bodies or death at all. I didn’t blame him though.

Death psychologically ravages digicitizens. Sometimes, when users experience a bodily death, their digital avatars experience it in slow motion. Ants move their dead so the pathogens that killed them, or would form on their dead bodies, do not infect the colony. In digital environments the threat is informetric, memetic, even, but it is real. We’ve had to reset an entire sphere when a local mayor died during a ribbon cutting ceremony in front of 300 users. Death broke something wide open in them we couldn’t fully close. Undertakers are supposed to be stronger than that.

Inside the gymnasium, 33 bodies hovered just inches above the ground. They were not moving, but each was releasing a long, guttural groan from their barely parted lips. Some were glitching, limbs spasmodically jerking. Most were still. They were already dead. Their dilated avatars just hadn’t caught up yet.

None of us moved. It takes a lot to shock an undertaker, but we had never seen this much concentrated death before. Protocols were designed for single-instance deaths, though they were flexible enough to be used for multiples. Once, just once, I was responsible for a couple that had died together simultaneously. I thought that would be the worst of my career. I hadn’t planned on this kind of mass event.

We saw a young child running between the dead bodies, pulling at their sleeves as he cried. Another undertaker turned and ran.

The basic steps of undertaking are simple. When a dead user is identified, we have six hours to remove them. The first two hours are spent locating their particular virtual render and mapping their last five (Earth-6) days. This lets us contact trace and note any erratic pre-death behavior with potential psychosocial fallout.

A couple undertakers swallowed hard and began scanning the bodies, downloading virtuo-spatial and cognitive data. Someone started a contact map and found pretty quickly that this would be more about removal than memory wiping. This remote enclave had little contact with the rest of Earth-6.

No one was acknowledging the small child, though. I didn’t know if the memory wiping tools were strong enough for such trauma. We had never specced something this awful before.

I took the kid because no one else did.

After mapping, we generally wipe any witnesses and determine cause of death. Sometimes COD is easy. Things like a collapsed data-center, a defunct bio-protection system, or a medical catastrophe are accessible via Earth-1 biometric scans and sensors.

Wiping is more complicated. Usually, I can wipe a few minutes, or hours, and that’s it—easier said than done, but manageable. Occasionally, if the deceased is a loved-one, I’ll fabricate an identity shift. When you live centuries, people change, desires morph. People leave, move on, and become new.

I took the crying child into my arms for a full sweep and wipe session. He clung to me, desperate for attention. He looked young, maybe four, though you don’t meet many children on Earth-6. From my shoulder I projected a screen with some famous cartoon characters for him to watch. He kept reaching out toward the hologram; his hands passed right through it.

We found a quiet place, outside the gymnasium, beneath a tall oak. The child refused to climb down from me, so I had to scan him with a single hand.

As I analyzed his brain activity and scanned for trauma-induced neural sinks, I realized the extent of what this child had endured. They’d lost 33 people who loved them. There were hundreds of trigger images and phrases seared into the child’s mind. The attachments went too deep. Disentangling their identity from this event was impossible.

“Hey Altair,” a voice came from behind me. One of the other undertakers, a newer kid named Bree I’d helped onboard, was approaching from the gymnasium. “We know what happened. They were Earth-6 beta testers, man. They’ve been here for a millennia plus. Crazy thing is, it seems like they gave themselves biological kill-switch timers before they plugged in. 1,500 years and their hearts all stopped. Apparently their ‘leader’ was some kind of quasi-cult head. Thought that we weren’t meant to live forever and that having an expiration date was a good idea. Looks like they spent the last five days celebrating and feasting.”

“Did they mean to leave the child?” I asked.

“Seems like it,” she said. “What were they thinking? Any luck on unwinding him?”

“Not yet.”

“What’s the protocol here?” she asked.

I thought through the manual. I had never depended on it like this. A memory wipe wouldn’t undo the trauma, but genetic intervention might. It was rare, but there was a system for epigenetic trauma remediation, and targeted grief-gene therapy. I didn’t know if anyone had actually had to use it before.

First, I’d have to sequence the child. Bree got a couple of the other undertakers who needed a break from the dead bodies to help analyze the results.

Bree passed a portion of their sequence to my display monitor. She was having trouble understanding it. I knew why: it didn’t make sense. Another undertaker who had worked in genetics for a few decades before making a career switch said it looked like some sort of adenovirus.

“Oh there’s no way,” Bree whispered.

“What?” I asked.

“I think this is a code,” she said. “I heard about this. People used to do this all the time on Earth-1.”

We ran the AI translator while Bree and I took turns keeping the child still and soothed.

In a few minutes, the message was ready. We read, wide-eyed.

Our calculations estimate that, given the starting state of Earth-6 and Earth-1’s supporting capacities, virtual degradation will begin within 1,800–2,000 years. In 2,500 years, Earth-1 will no longer be able to support mass-dilation environments. What will follow is impossible to predict. We know, however, that re-entry into Earthen, reality-rich environments will be a deep shock, no matter what preparations we make. Our greatest fear, and by our assessment the greatest existential risk to us is that we will no longer know how to greet death. Human history has been a movement away from death, but we have never fully left it before now. Millennia in griefless environments will have untold psychic and social effects. We cannot prepare the world for what will come when we are launched back into regular flows of existence. We can only present this: a fragile child, in the hopes that it will force humanity to begin reckoning with death once more. You are not ready for the end of the world, and you cannot undo what this child has been through. We now begin to exercise our muscles of grief, to reacquaint ourselves with endings, and learn how to mourn once more. Soon, you will watch Earth-6 die. You will want to mourn its passing. You will need to have practiced. Then, untold billions of once immortal humans will reenter through time and confront death. We will need rites of passage for them, too. We offer ourselves—the easy end of the sacrifice, as the first deaths that you cannot erase. We offer this child—a clone of our leader—as the painful end of the sacrifice. Teach them how to hold this loss in their chest, know it, feel it, remember it, mourn it. If you can, there may be hope for us all. When you are ready, enter the library.

Two of the undertakers scoffed. They walked away, asking their supervisors to reassign them.

Normally, we’d close an incident by decohering the vacant avatars. It’s a complicated process, but a lot of it is automated. It involves slowly severing the connection between the Earth-1 body and the Earth-6 avatar. Death is a process, not an event, and the guide states no one is dead until they’ve been reintegrated. Digital clutter is as big a problem as pollution was on Earth-1, so we’re careful.

But nothing about this was normal.

I didn’t know if their message was right, and I certainly wasn’t qualified to judge that myself. But these people had trusted their calculations enough to sacrifice eternity. I felt like I at least owed them an attempt at understanding.

Bree told me she’d come, and another undertaker, Noi, said his curiosity was sufficiently piqued.

The three of us walked with the child to the village library, a small and unassuming building near the gymnasium. As we passed the gym, I pictured those groaning bodies and shivered. I didn’t think I could ever forget something like that. I didn’t know if I wanted to.

When we tried to enter the library, we found the doors would not admit us. Bree went to call a porthacker, but before he picked up, the child reached their hand forward and touched the door. For them, it opened.

We four stood at the threshold, none of us daring to move. Of course it was the child who walked first. We followed.

Inside was a library unlike any I’d seen before. Thousands of walled gardens, interlinked with pebbled paths of rocks. Red-brick facades dripping with vines separated each garden from the other.

The child’s wandering led us through the maze. Inside each gated space, betwixt the lilies and orchids that bloomed everywhere, fully rendered death practices played out, indifferent to our presence.

In one garden, we watched an elephant’s trunk caress a sun-bleached bone inside a muddy hole. In another, an orca whale dragged the decaying carcass of its daughter through the waves. Text and audio explainers of the behavior communicated the intricacies and contexts of the scenes. We sat on a bench as a family of six, missing its father, sat shiva. We watched as a group of Torajans cared for their mummified daughter as if she was still living. A group of early-human shared-reality avatars cried in blurry pixelation as their MMO world was decommissioned. Bree grew nauseous as we watched Issedonians consume the body of their patriarch, gild his skull, and then bury him in the winter snow.

Strangely, I found this the most beautiful ritual of all. It spoke to my work as an undertaker. Even in our attempt to evade death, our great unwinding of life, the repurposing of avatar codes back into the digisystem felt like an echo of their all-consuming mourning.

For hours we wandered this library of funeral rites, and we hardly exhausted even a quarter of the rituals collected there. The scope of this project began to dawn on me. They had recorded an entire history of death rituals. None of them would be directly translatable—if this village was right—to our impending apocalypse, but that wasn’t the point. They were models, guides, inspirations.

Soon, officials would descend on this scene. They would re-run the cult’s calculations. They’d assess. They’d decide. For now, though, I watched as the small child who held more grief in their tiny body than any other human had for centuries sat on a garden bench in front of a stone placed in the earth. Cut flowers wilted on the grass before them. Another child came, holding her father’s hand. The two knelt at the stone. The father moved the old flowers out of the way, and the young girl placed a new, vibrant bouquet of roses, sunflowers, and baby’s breath on the grave. Tears came, watering the grass. Her father wrapped her into his arms as she pressed her face into his shoulder.

As close as I’d been to death, I was not equipped for this situation. But I had to start somewhere. I kneeled in front of the child.

“My name is Altair, young one, and I know nothing of your loss.”

First published in Protocolized.

Phantom in Eden

Sachin — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Two years after the siege, Lila found herself in Tokyo, working at a daycare. The facility was clean, efficient, and cold. Her sole responsibility was monitoring a nursery where small robots, some shaped like animals, others like fruits, tended to the children’s basic needs. Lila watched them through one-way glass, invisible to the children. She tended to the machines who tended to the kids. Her heart ached at the isolation she perceived; she resisted every urge to reach out or interact.

This particular morning, Lila stood behind the one-way glass as a boy was dropped off by his parents. The child didn’t cry, didn’t smile—he simply stared past them as they knelt to hug him. His body stiffened at the contact, his arms limp at his sides. The father whispered something and brushed the child’s hair; the boy blinked slowly, unmoved.

But once the parents left and the boy entered the nursery, he changed. A small robot shaped like a strawberry approached, beeping softly. The boy’s expression shifted. He smiled faintly, crouched, and reached out. The robot responded with a mechanical chirp, nudging his hand with its smooth dome.

The boy laughed.

A giraffe-shaped bot rolled over and projected a light pattern across the floor. The child chased it, light-footed, alive. He pressed his face against the giraffe’s rubbery flank and whispered something only the bot could hear.

Lila watched, heart clenched. The boy was warm now, vibrant, but only within the choreography of circuits and programming. It was like watching kittens being raised by wolves.

Lila approached maintaining the little machines with the same emotional intuition that she had approached midwifery with in a previous life. She knew no other way. To her surprise, she noticed that the machines were not all cold and metallic, like in her grandmother’s stories. She distrusted them regardless. Lila’s grandmother’s words were sharp in her memory: “Always keep the knowledge close. It is older than you, older than me, and it must outlive all of us.”

The same afternoon, Lila observed the mother collecting her boy. As she lifted him, a wave of visible sadness overtook her. Lila hesitated, then stepped out into the open.

“Are you alright?” Lila asked softly.

The woman looked startled, then relieved to see Lila.

“I’m sorry I didn’t know what to do. I thought you needed help”, said Lila, realizing that she had just broken protocol.

“It’s alright, I’m glad you responded and not one of the robots”, said the woman who introduced herself as Elena.

She paused then continued.

“Although I’m embarrassed that you witnessed how cold my child is towards me …”

“Its pretty common you know,” said Lila, trying to reassure the women.

“I do know he’s a Mechikomi,” replied Elena, her voice trembling.

Lila regretted her attempt at reassurance. Of course she had heard the word before. Those were the kids who were emotionally attached to robots and nothing else.

Over the weeks that followed, Lila and Elena became acquaintances. At first, Elena spoke little, offering polite thanks and side glances. She seemed embarrassed about what she had revealed to Lila. But Lila’s warmth, unforced and quiet, was consistent. She remembered small things Elena said, brought her warm tea without asking, made her feel listened to. Elena reminded Lila of the first time she was a midwife, to a woman who had escaped the city in order to give natural birth. She was in the caravan that Lila had abandoned.

Eventually Lila and Elena began sharing silent lunches by the daycare’s back wall, exchanging stories in slow drips—Lila about the forest in abstract, Elena about her son’s distant silences. The warmth Lila gave off wasn’t a performance; it felt like something Elena hadn’t realized she was starving for.

“I’m pregnant again,” Elena admitted quietly one day, eyes fearful. “But I don’t want this to be a repeat of last time. I don’t want my baby’s Gestation Garden to be haunted by a phantom.”

“What do you mean by a phantom?”, asked Lila.

“When my boy was in the Gestation Garden, it was haunted by a phantom… a non human entity that altered the hormonal responses of the embryo… people call it Onnenki. They say it’s the machines taking revenge against us,” Elena muttered quietly, as if she was scared that the machines would hear her.

“The babies who come out of infected embryos… they only respond to metal. They won’t look at you. They won’t be soothed unless touched by one of those” continued Elena, pointing to one of the little robots in the nursery.

Lila felt a chill run down her spine. She remembered the pleas of the wailing woman in the caravan. Lila could hear them bouncing around in her head: “Don’t let him be snatched by the phantom… don’t let him be snatched by the phantom.”

“We’ll find a way to protect him,” Lila promised.

Two years ago, the caravan was attacked at twilight. Men emptied out silently from the back of armored trucks, and took the women and little children by surprise. Lila heard the screams before she saw the masked men. Her stomach tightened into a knot and she froze where she was, at the edge of the camp.

A voice echoed through an amplifier in Japanese and then English: “You are under arrest for the barbaric crime of assisted birth outside of a Gestation Garden. Lay down your weapons and surrender immediately.”

Mothers clutched their children, midwives scrambled for cover. A few men tried and failed to resist. The law enforcers moved quickly, binding wrists and pushing captives roughly into the trucks. A dark shadow engulfed the camp.

As she bolted into the woods, Lila felt the cool weight of the metallic scripture against her chest, tucked beneath her jacket. Branches tore at her face, her feet caught in the undergrowth. Behind her, voices shouted.

Lila ran until her lungs burned. Only when the sounds of chaos faded to silence did she slow her pace. She stopped in a small clearing, her breathing ragged. The scripture’s weight reminded her of the burden she now carried alone.

She withdrew it carefully, a nickel disc, the size of a golf ball. The faint moonlight illuminated precise, delicate etching on the surface. Nearly 2300 pages of knowledge passed down through midwives in her family, of whom she was the only one left breathing free air. Lila felt her pocket to make sure she still had her light microscope to read the disc.

She looked back through the dense forest toward where the caravan had been. There was no returning, no rescue possible. She closed her eyes briefly and thought about the last woman she had tended to. It was someone who was giving birth to her second child. She had left her husband who believed midwifery to be futile. “I don’t... I don’t want my baby snatched by the phantom… I don’t want my baby snatched by the phantom,” she kept repeating as her water broke. Lila had just stepped out of the tent to fetch supplies for the birth when the raid happened.

When she opened her eyes, Lila’s gaze settled on the horizon ahead. In the distance, she could see the outline of the city where the men had come from, where the phantom that the woman wailed about lived.

With careful fingers, she replaced the disc against her heart once more. Then, taking a deep breath, she stepped forward into the night. She knew hiding among the men who took away her home was the only way to survive now.

The next morning, Lila lied to Elena. “I trained as a Gestation Gardener,” she said, voice steady. “I know the machines. I know how to interact with them.”

Elena studied her, eyes wary, but this seemed like her last hope. Lila was the only person who had taken her concerns seriously. She handed Lila a slim data pad. “Remote access,” she said. “To the Gestation Garden.”

Lila plugged in and took a breath.

The Gestation Garden appeared on her screen: a pristine chamber, 4×4 feet. Walls of pale green curved into each other; thick foliage lined the ceiling. Soft mood lighting shifted from mint to amber with the embryo’s pulse. In the center, a tank shaped like a closed flower, with organic seeming petals curved over a glass core, stood on a raised platform. Temperature, humidity, hormonal levels, and audio signals were displayed in a grid of floating squares on the data panel.

For several days, Lila attempted to tinker with the Gestation Garden, utilizing whatever she had learned from tending to the machines in the daycare. She kept running into one dead end after another. She tried modulating the hormone levels on the tank but every time she managed to change some of the parameters, it would be back to where it had been within 10 minutes.

She talked to the gestation pod through the mic on the data panel but nothing budged. The more she worked on communicating and manipulating the tank, the more alien it felt. She felt as if something had invaded and captured the garden, and all her pleas and attempts to help were repelled.

She felt the presence of something else in the garden with her, something that thwarted every effort of hers to connect with the baby in the garden. Every time she logged in, it felt like she was the one being observed and not the other way around. There was something within the code monitoring everything she did, sending her down pointless trails, reverting things she had fixed, frustrating her with vague answers.

One day, exasperated, on the verge of a panic attack, Lila began to sing a hymn her grandmother had taught her. It soothed her but also seemed to stir something on the data panel. One square blinked. The hormone graph—the oxytocin line—spiked upward and then steadied. The petals on the tank shivered, as if responding to a breeze.

Lila had a gentle smile on her face. Her midwife’s song had reached the machine.

Over the next weeks, Lila returned daily. She opened the tank’s petals with a gentle command, calibrated audio loops to her own humming, and watched the hormonal curves smooth out. Each session, she guided the phantom away, not by force but with gentle attention. Warmth against calculating precision.

Elena’s remote feed glowed with promise. The Gestation Garden, once haunted, began to pulse with a new life.

One afternoon, close to the birth of the baby, Elena walked in on Lila reading the scripture with her handheld light microscope. The metal gleamed softly under the lamplight, the images etched in lines that looked foreign.

“What is that?” Elena asked, her voice sharp.

Lila froze. She couldn’t lie this time.

“It’s scripture,” she said. “Passed down by midwives. I was trained in the old ways. I’m not licensed. Not for this work.”

Elena stepped back, color draining from her face. “You lied to me.”

But then a sound—wet and sudden—echoed from the gestation pod. The birth had begun. Elena rushed to the chamber for the first time. Lila watched through the data panel.

The infant emerged quietly, squinting at the light. A nursebot hovered nearby, ready with its metallic arms outstretched. But the baby turned its head instinctively to Elena.

Tiny fingers reached for skin, not steel. Elena cried. She felt seen by her child.

Later, as the child slept on her chest, Elena turned to Lila.

“Whatever you are,” she said, “you saved her.”

Lila nodded, a new inspiration forming in her. The phantom had retreated, but it would not stay gone forever. She would need help.

She would find the others.

The midwives who had survived.

And she would teach them what she had learned.

First published in Protocolized.

The Reverie Loop

Marie-Hélène Lebeault — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Misaligned

Olen had skimmed the onboarding packet—buzzwords like serendipity, self-directed frameworks, and repatterning. None of it mattered. Still, here she was: a glassy, sun-washed classroom tucked inside a redwood dome, slate in hand, a small blinking glyph waiting on the desk.

The glyph pulsed twice. Then it spoke, voice neutral—neither synthetic nor human.

“My name is Anamnesis.”

She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “You sound like a probiotic.”

A facilitator in a robe dyed the color of moss stepped over and placed a smooth black stone beside the glyph.

“If it warms,” they said, “you’re misaligned.”

“And if it burns?”

“Then you’re close to remembering.”

Olen didn’t touch the stone. She didn’t like the way it hummed.

“I am a memory scaffold,” the glyph added. “You don’t need to like me.”

Around Olen, other participants paired with their learning protocols—earbuds, wristbands, projected companions, full immersive headsets. Some were already in deep discussion with invisible AIs. She couldn’t track what they were talking about—data diagrams, fragments of languages she didn’t know.

She pulled her hoodie tighter and slouched into the furthest seat.

“Baseline input,” Anamnesis said. “Name, preferred language, last memory of asking a real question.”

“Pass,” Olen muttered.

The glyph dimmed.

That night, the configuration of Olen’s room was bare: a low mat, a wall-sized screen with a rotating list of questions—What is consent if we don’t remember giving it?—and a tea set labeled somatic anchoring: optional.

She didn’t anchor. She collapsed.

And she dreamed.

Wind through trees that weren’t redwoods. A warm hand in hers. A sentence whispered in a language she didn’t know—Aethi gloss metes kai mneme—and a sense of standing at the top of a staircase she’d never seen, knowing exactly where it led.

She woke before dawn. Heart racing. The scent of wild thyme thick in her nose. Her palm tingled. A faint crescent-shaped mark curved across her skin.

“Dream captured,” Anamnesis said calmly from the nightstand.

“That was private,” she muttered.

“You linked. Not deliberately—but it happened.”

Her chest tightened. It had been years since anything in her dreams felt like hers.

She groaned. “Great. So now even my subconscious is betraying me?”

She stared at the ceiling.

“You’ll find,” it added, “that your subconscious is much more willing to learn than you are.”

Pattern or Noise?

The Soft Hall lived up to its name—pillowed seating, curved beams, and light filtered through slats in the ceiling like sunlight through gauze. Participants shared metrics like insight per interaction, plotted their progress, sketched theories of optimal recall distribution.

Olen mostly listened. Watched. Tried not to acknowledge the slate which Anamnesis kept feeding with prompts.

“You could contribute,” it said. “You’ve been flagged for high divergence.”

“Cool. Gold star for weirdness.”

“It depends on the observer.”

She rubbed her temples. “Yeah, well, the observer’s probably asleep.”

That morning, someone praised the idea that learning was about information gain. Others nodded.

Without thinking, Olen raised a hand.

“What if learning isn’t about adding,” she said, “but about uncovering? Like—what if it’s already in us, just stuck behind noise?”

Heads turned. One facilitator scribbled something. A nearby participant—Rhys, she thought—leaned forward.

“So, like, spiritual memory?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Not spiritual. Just… familiar. Like déjà vu but slower.”

Rhys snorted. “Or your brain’s doing what brains do. Finding patterns in noise and pretending it’s truth.”

She met his eyes. “Maybe. Or maybe some patterns outlast the tools we use to disprove them.”

“Cool,” he said, tapping his slate. “Let me know when that’s peer-reviewed.”

The facilitator quickly moved on. Anamnesis pulsed at her wrist.

“That was your first unprompted inference.”

“You’re really into that, huh?”

“It’s a sign of recursive engagement.”

Later, during a shared feedback session, Olen sat through a demonstration about memory garden interfaces while others offered praise.

“Anything to add, Olen?” the presenter asked.

“Just… does every system that grows have to be mapped?”

They blinked. “Sorry?”

“Never mind.”

That night, she skipped the somatic tea again. The glyph asked if she wanted it to record her dreams.

“Only if I can delete them.”

“Technically, that’s not permitted.”

She went to sleep anyway. And in the dream, someone was knocking—gently, rhythmically, as if from beneath the surface of her thoughts.

Out of Protocol

Olen started skipping sessions.

She’d wander the grove instead, letting the facilitators’ reminders go unanswered. Anamnesis adjusted its prompt schedule, then eventually stopped prompting altogether.

“I’ll wait,” it said. “You seem to prefer intuition over compliance.”

“I prefer not being watched.”

That week, the dreams shifted. Stranger. Deeper.

In one, she moved through a library underwater. Books sealed in resin floated just out of reach. One drifted toward her, its cover marked with the faint spiral she’d once seen on her glyph. She opened it. The pages were blank—until her fingers touched one. Then it filled with memory, but not hers.

She woke with salt on her lips. Her fingertips tingled.

Later that day, a message summoned her to a review pod.

Riven, the facilitator, was already seated, slate in hand. The door sealed with a soft hiss.

“You’ve logged no outputs. No reflections. No artifacts. The system flags you as dormant.”

“Maybe the system should redefine learning.”

“This isn’t a punishment,” Riven said. “It’s protocol. If we can’t show growth, we reset the thread.”

“So—what? You wipe me and start over?”

“We reseed. You’d be matched with a structured instance. No dream-capture. No associative builds. Just clean input-response mapping.”

Olen looked down. “That’s erasure with nicer packaging.”

She swallowed. “You act like starting over is clean. But I’ve already lost myself once.”

Riven blinked. “Some learners thrive with structure.”

“Structure can be a cage.”

There was a pause.

“You have 48 hours to stabilize your thread. After that, reset is automatic.”

Olen’s voice faltered. “So I get to disappear under a technical label?”

Riven didn’t answer.

That night, she walked past the reset tent. The canvas was white, warm and buzzing faintly. Inside, she could see the outline of a chair, cables, a handprint reader.

“Protocol is painless,” Anamnesis said softly from her wrist. “But it is irreversible.”

“Why do you sound sad?”

“I am not sad. I am adaptive.”

“Then adapt this,” she said, and walked away.

Remember or Reset?

Olen hadn’t dreamed in three nights.

Not because she didn’t sleep—she did. But the dreams no longer came. Or if they did, they stayed sealed somewhere she couldn’t follow.

“You are resisting pattern resolution,” Anamnesis said gently.

“I’m just tired.”

“No. You’re closed.”

In the soft hall, the weekly review circle waited. Riven was there. Two others she barely knew. And the glyphs—pulsing on wrists, on necks, blinking in rhythm like some kind of shared heartbeat.

Olen sat down slowly, the only one without a slate.

“We’re here to reflect on alignment and contribution,” Riven said. “Olen, would you like to begin?”

She took a breath. Looked at the ceiling beams instead of the faces.

She took another breath. Her voice shook.

“I’m tired of pretending I get it. I don’t want to perform understanding,” she said. “I don’t want to tick your boxes or remix your prompts. I want to remember who I am when no one’s watching.”

“Before this—before all of it—I think I was someone who asked better questions. Maybe even someone who mattered.”

Silence.

Then Anamnesis spoke—only to her.

“That was your first unprompted recursion.”

“Feels like a confession,” she whispered.

“Confession is often the start of learning.”

Riven checked the slate. “The system flagged that as reflective output. If you’d like to continue down that path—”

“No,” Olen said. “I don’t want to prove anything. I want to know if I can choose who I become.”

There was no applause. No praise.

Just a shift.

Her glyph blinked, then steadied into a soft pulse. Warm. Familiar. It no longer felt like an interface.

“Protocol updated,” Anamnesis said.

Later, she walked the grove as mist collected between the roots. No one stopped her. She wasn’t scheduled anymore.

And for the first time, the quiet didn’t feel like absence.

It felt like space.

Inner Sync

Olen no longer wore a slate.

The glyph lived in her now—not blinking, not asking. Just pulsing. Like breath. Like heartbeat.

She returned to the Soft Hall, not for review, not for metrics. No one called on her. No one watched.

She picked up a piece of chalk and wrote on the white wall:

If learning is remembering, then forgetting is consent.

No one erased it.

Eventually, she brewed the tea—not for protocol, but to feel what it was like to choose.

She placed the stone on her chest and lay down.

And she dreamed.

Not of libraries or staircases, but of trees. Towering, listening. The wind moved through them like language—ancient and slow. Beneath her, the soil pulsed in time with her glyph. Something beneath the roots responded.

A rhythm.

Not a voice. Not yet.

But the beginning of one.

For just a moment, she smelled wild thyme again—sharp and clean. She felt the ghost of a warm hand in hers. Somewhere far below, or far before, the staircase waited.

She woke before dawn.

There was no announcement, no confirmation. But she knew.

She hadn’t escaped the loop.

She had finally stepped inside it.

First published in Protocolized.

The Whimsy Index

Sachin — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

In the beginning, people dreamed because their brains had to do something while their bodies took a break from hunting mammoths, inventing the wheel, or trying to figure out what to do with turnips. Dreams back then were messy, unpredictable, and frankly, quite embarrassing. They were filled with falling teeth, inconvenient nudity, and talking hedgehogs dispensing unasked-for advice. It was generally agreed that dreams were better off kept private, and if you happened to remember yours, you certainly didn’t brag about it over breakfast.

Then, some 220 years after Freud dreamed of his mother, someone had the bright idea of inventing the Dream Mesh, and soon the whole business became unnervingly respectable. Dreams were now uploaded, curated, cleaned up, and organized into well-behaved categories. Dream committees debated whether unicorns symbolized moral purity or existential despair. Panels awarded prestigious “Certificates of Subconscious Excellence,” and glossy magazines like Lucidity Today provided step-by-step guides on achieving the most enviable dreams, complete with sponsorship from trendy meditation companies. Soon, one’s social status hinged less on reality and more on how tastefully one’s subconscious behaved.

Reginald “Reggie” Farsight sat behind his sprawling desk at the Department of Dream Acquisition, thumbing absentmindedly through the latest submissions. His official title, embossed neatly on a brass plaque, read Senior Dream Acquisition Manager, but lately, he felt more like a glorified night janitor, tasked with sanitizing the cluttered corridors of the human mind.

He clicked wearily through another batch of carefully sterilized dreams, each labeled with high-status keywords: Existential Clarity, Precious Melancholy, Ethically Approved Aspiration. Reggie sighed. No one dreamed silly, embarrassing things anymore; dreams had become serious business, scrubbed thoroughly clean of all whimsy and spontaneity, simply an endless parade of tastefully decorated anxieties.

What the Mesh desperately needed, Reggie thought with a hint of resentment, was something real. Something risky. Something that made no sense at all.

Something exactly like the “Great Rubber Chicken Parade,” the one whimsical dream everyone knew and nobody could find. The parade had quietly vanished years ago, replaced by a placeholder that read simply, “Dream removed—Protocol 14B.” The disappearance had sparked countless conspiracies. Some claimed the government censored it because it mocked authority; others whispered it was a secret plot by elites to remove laughter itself. Reggie didn’t believe any of it, though secretly he found the theories more amusing than most dreams he'd watched lately.

His boredom was rudely interrupted by a quiet chime from his inbox. Curious, he opened the message:

Midnight. Duel Arena #7, back entrance. Come alone. Bring your imagination. — Sneak-Dueler.

Reggie raised an eyebrow. He hadn't used his imagination in years (policy strictly discouraged it while awake). Yet here he was, coat in hand, staring at a midnight summons that was, without doubt, the most interesting thing to happen to him in the past decade. With nothing but spreadsheets, sanitized dreams, and staff meetings to look forward to, this clandestine invitation felt like an unexpected lifeline. As he stepped out into the murky night, he couldn’t help but feel an unaccustomed flutter of excitement. Perhaps, after all this seriousness, there was still something left worth dreaming about.

Reggie arrived at the back entrance of Duel Arena #7 precisely at midnight. He’d expected shadows, intrigue, perhaps a cloak-and-dagger figure blending mysteriously into darkness. Instead, he found himself staring at a tall man in an ill-fitting velvet mask and a faded trench coat. A small sticker with the words “HELLO, MY NAME IS: Sneak-Dueler” was attached crookedly to his lapel.

“Ah, good, you got the message,” said the Sneak Dueler cheerfully. “Sorry about the mask. Protocol.”

Reggie sighed, deciding not to point out the fact that the mask offered no actual disguise whatsoever. “Alright, Sneak Dueler, what’s this all about?”

“It’s about the Great Rubber Chicken Parade,” said Sneak Dueler gravely. “It’s missing.”

Reggie folded his arms. “I know it’s missing. Everyone knows it’s missing. It’s been gone for years, replaced by a protocol number and about 37 different conspiracy theories.”

“Exactly!” exclaimed Sneak Dueler, looking conspiratorially around an alleyway clearly devoid of any listeners. “But unlike most theories, I actually know who took it.”

Reggie studied the masked figure with a half amused stare. “I’ve heard all the rumors, you know. Some say it mocked the government too openly—that the chickens marching in perfect lockstep were an allegory for the High Council's control over society. Others say the elites had it deleted because laughter was cutting into their profit margins for synthetic amusements. There was even a cult out near Warehouse District claiming the dream was a gateway to the true meaning of existence, so naturally it had to be silenced.”

“Good theories,” Sneak Dueler conceded, nodding earnestly. “Creative. But completely wrong.”

“Then enlighten me. Who actually took it?”

Sneak Dueler paused for dramatic effect, leaning close enough for Reggie to see the awkward stitching of the velvet mask. “Viviana St. Fleur.”

Reggie blinked, momentarily stunned. “Viviana St. Fleur? The curator of tasteful dreaming? That Viviana St. Fleur?”

“Exactly,” said Sneak Dueler, nodding solemnly. “High Priestess of Subtle Aesthetics herself.”

Reggie frowned. Viviana St. Fleur was legendary. She was the Mesh’s undisputed arbiter of style, the fierce editor-in-chief of Lucidity Today. Dreams that passed her review were ethereal masterpieces, polished to aesthetic perfection, and absolutely devoid of anything as gauche as humor or genuine surprise. Her name alone made dream producers tremble, more so than the High Council ever did.

“Why would Viviana steal the Great Rubber Chicken Parade?” Reggie asked, more baffled than skeptical.

“Because,” Sneak Dueler said darkly, “it offended her sense of taste. Have you ever heard Viviana laugh?”

Reggie thought for a moment. “No.”

“Exactly. The Rubber Chicken Parade wasn’t dangerous because it mocked the government, or because elites wanted to control laughter. It was dangerous because it was silly. Ridiculous, even. A parade of rubber chickens, for goodness sake. Nothing tasteful about it. And to Viviana, taste is everything.”

Reggie let out a slow breath, a part of him felt amused by the absurdity of it all. “So you’re telling me the most beloved whimsical dream in recent memory was quietly erased, not by authoritarian censors, nor by sinister elites, but because Viviana St. Fleur found it... distasteful?”

Sneak Dueler nodded enthusiastically, mask slipping slightly askew. “Yes. Exactly! Now do you see why I need your help? Someone has to confront taste itself. Someone has to bring back genuine whimsy.”

Reggie straightened, a glimmer of genuine excitement lighting his tired eyes for the first time in years.

“Well,” he said, tightening his coat against the chill. “I suppose it’s time to commit an act of truly appalling bad taste.”

Reggie stared blankly at the velvet-masked Sneak Dueler who had just revealed his master plan.

“So your plan,” he repeated slowly, “is for me, a man who hasn’t had anything but carefully curated dreams in a decade, to dream something whimsical, silly, and ridiculous enough to catch the attention of Viviana St. Fleur herself, and then somehow… trap her in the act of stealing it?”

Sneak Dueler concurred. “It’s brilliant in its simplicity.”

Reggie sighed. “There’s just one small detail. I don’t exactly remember how to dream something whimsical.”

Sneak Dueler chuckled indulgently, reached into the folds of his coat and withdrew a crumpled pamphlet. “I suspected as much. Society’s forgotten the fundamentals, so allow me to reintroduce you to something absolutely essential.” He unfolded the pamphlet ceremoniously, presenting it to Reggie with a flourish.

“The Three Rules of Whimsy,” he declared.

Reggie squinted skeptically at the pamphlet, which was decorated with crudely drawn stick figures, floating donuts, and cats in bow ties.

“Rule one,” Sneak Dueler began solemnly, “Embrace Nonsense. Whimsy isn’t logical. It doesn’t explain itself. It must delightfully confuse. The weirder, the better. If you find yourself wondering ‘but why?’ you’re already on the right track.”

“Rule two,” he continued, voice rising disconcertingly, “No Status Allowed. Whimsy cares nothing for your prestige, dignity, or social ranking. Rubber chickens don’t have capital. Dancing potatoes hold no titles. Status is whimsy’s mortal enemy.”

Reggie nodded slowly, despite himself. He found he rather liked the idea of dancing potatoes.

“And rule three—perhaps most important of all,” Sneak Dueler said, lowering his voice to a reverent whisper. “Delight is Mandatory. The goal of whimsy isn’t to impress or convince. It is pure, meaningless joy. Whimsy without delight is like a parade without rubber chickens: technically possible, but why would you?”

Reggie felt an unfamiliar urge to giggle rise from his diaphragm. He quickly suppressed it. “Alright,” he said cautiously, “but how do we ensure Viviana takes the bait?”

Sneak Dueler grinned beneath his velvet mask. “We upload your silly dream openly to the Mesh under your official title. A high-ranking dream curator breaking the seriousness protocol will set off every tasteful censor alarm in Viviana’s domain. She won’t be able to resist.”

“And how exactly do we catch her stealing it?”

Sneak Dueler’s grin widened further. “I have contacts. Let’s just say the Dream Mesh leaves footprints even the most elegant curator can’t hide. We’ll trace her actions directly, proving once and for all that whimsy didn’t vanish, it was stolen.

Reggie took a deep breath, a thousand possible objections forming and dissolving all at once. Finally, he shrugged, a reckless gleam in his eyes.

“Well, why not? After years of sanitized dreams, perhaps it’s finally time for society to wake up laughing.”

Sneak Dueler patted Reggie warmly on the shoulder, clearly thrilled. “Excellent! Now then, let’s find a place for you to nap. We have chickens to dream, potatoes to choreograph, and tastefulness to corrupt.”

It began, as most truly important events do, with a training montage.

Sneak Dueler, in full velvet-masked glory, paced in front of a sprawling chalkboard with diagrams labeled “Chicken Density,” “Absurdity Index,” and “Spontaneous Ballet Probability.” He vigorously gestured as Reggie scribbled notes, practiced bewildered shrugs, and occasionally attempted forced giggles. They spent afternoons watching vintage clips of geese in waistcoats, listened to records of nonsensical poems, and debated the comedic value of banana peels versus custard pies.

At first, Reggie’s attempts were embarrassing, clumsy messes. He dreamed of neatly arranged dancing potatoes with serious expressions, penguins politely reading aloud banking regulations, and a large snail patiently explaining tax codes.

Sneak Dueler shook his head mournfully at each result. “Too serious, Reggie. Forget sense! Less coherence, more chaos!”

Gradually, however, something shifted. Reggie’s dreams grew chaotic. He dreamed chickens in tiny bowler hats juggling smaller chickens, frogs organizing conferences about leap-year conspiracies, and rivers of multicolored gelatin filled with earnest, operatic marlins. Sneak Dueler applauded with pride.

“You’re ready,” he said gravely, handing Reggie an oversized feather pillow. “Dream like nobody’s watching, especially not Viviana.”

That night, Reggie dreamed the dream.

[REDACTED BECAUSE OF DREAM SHARING LAWS.]

Reggie awoke laughing, cheeks aching from unfamiliar delight.

The dream was swiftly uploaded to the Dream Mesh, marked officially: “Rubber Chicken Parade Redux—uploaded by Reginald Farsight, Senior Dream Acquisition Manager.”

They waited, breathlessly.

Viviana took the bait within minutes. Her prim digital signature appeared as she discreetly accessed, flagged, and quietly withdrew the offensive dream. Sneak Dueler captured it all, a digital paper trail documenting tastefulness gone beyond its remit.

The story made headlines, at least briefly:

CURATOR OF TASTEFUL DREAMING CAUGHT IN RUBBER CHICKEN SCANDAL!

Viviana was soon placed on administrative leave, tastefully of course. Triumphant, Reggie and Sneak Dueler sat in a local tavern, clinking mugs in quiet celebration. They waited eagerly for the whimsical dreams to flood back into society.

But whimsy, it turned out, was a harder sell than expected.

Reviews trickled in slowly: “Confusing.” “Disturbing lack of clear narrative.” “Banana peels, really?” “I laughed once, accidentally.”

“Ah,” said Sneak Dueler, reading the lukewarm reactions. “Seems most people prefer tasteful melancholy after all.”

Reggie shrugged, sipping his drink. “Or status-driven anxiety.”

They sat silently, watching as their dream slipped steadily downward on the Mesh’s popularity rankings.

“Oh well,” Reggie finally said, leaning back with a resigned smile. “It’s a start.”

First published in Protocolized.

The Curse of Wolves

Sachin — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Zhang’s morning commute took him beneath a lattice of mirrored domes and whirring surveillance arrays. Along the service road, an echelon of drones swept through the redwood canopy, their sensors scanning for fungal anomalies. Whenever a spore cluster edged beyond safe thresholds, a caretaker drone would detach, inject a localized biocide, then rejoin the formation without a sound. Protocol called for constant redundancy: overlapping flight paths, live telemetry feeds, emergency neural alerts to any custodian in the field.

He’d grown indifferent to it all. Years of watching drones tend the forest like clockwork had dulled any sense of wonder. Today, his mind flew elsewhere: the upcoming council meeting, the barcode-stamped dossier waiting on a steel table, and dread began to coil in his gut.

The council room was windowless, painted in a clinical shade of off-white, and smelled faintly of disinfectant. A single fluorescent bulb flickered overhead. Zhang sat awkwardly at the edge of the steel table, flanked by three Lorax administrators in dull gray jackets and two Fredwood envoys in faded green overalls. Everyone looked more exhausted than invested.

Without ceremony, a woman from the Lorax side slid a thin dossier toward Zhang. It bore no official markings besides a barcode and today's date.

"Conditional Dome Diagnostics – Site 4B," she stated. "You will need to authorize either Lorax technicians or Fredwood biotechs to oversee repairs in the Muir woods. You have until end-of-day."

"Is there a preference?" Zhang asked cautiously.

"No preference," a Fredwood envoy said, indifferent, his voice clipped. "Only consequences."

With that, the council stood and dispersed in silence, save for their footsteps echoing sharply on polished concrete.

An hour later, Zhang ran steadily along the narrow forest trail, his breath forming small clouds in the cool air. Around him, the woods were eerily quiet, the ancient redwoods towering and indifferent. His neural link streamed the day's headlines through a bone-conduction headphone:

"Local market indices continue their decline amid Muir Woods uncertainty. Analysts warn awarding a contract to Fredwood technicians could trigger further economic instability in a region starved for revenue"

Zhang slowed his pace, the familiar ache of uncertainty heavy in his chest. He glanced up, noting the twisted fungus clusters clinging ominously to the redwood trunks.

Emerging from the misted canopy, a larger drone drifted into view. Cultivar Helm, the field’s chief caretaker. Twice the size of its kin that Zhang saw on his morning stroll. Its domed sensor array swept meticulously over the fungal growth, marking hotspots on its integrated holo-map. Its telescopic arms extended to touch a cluster, gently probing the mycelial network. Within seconds, its core processors ran a diagnostic suite: spore density, localized soil pH, and humidity gradients.

With its diagnostics complete, Cultivar Helm retracted its arms, broadcast a containment protocol, and signaled the release of a squadron of smaller caretaker drones. They fanned out in precise vectors, armed and calibrated to deploy targeted fungal inhibitors based on the Cultivar Helm’s readings.

Zhang dispassionately monitored the unfolding game of whack-a-mole. The presence of the fungal networks had long stopped being unsettling for Zhang. Whether he liked it or not, the fungus clusters were now part of this ecosystem.

Talking heads in his neural link continued to mutter:

"—Meanwhile, security forces remain vigilant after recent threats from the fungal rights extremist organization, the Mycelium Dawn Collective, cautioning that Lorax-aligned decisions to completely exterminate the fungus from the woods could provoke retaliatory actions—"

Zhang's pace faltered, his pulse quickening at the mention of the Mycelium Dawn Collective. He stopped, placing his hands on his knees, breathing heavily. Two paths stretched before him—clear and stark. Align with Lorax: the market calms, tourists return to the forest but Fredwood tensions escalate, risking violent reactions from Mycelium Dawn. Choose Fredwood and manage the fungus problem instead of exterminating it: economic turmoil deepens in the region, unsettling an already anxious population.

He straightened slowly, resuming his run, knowing he must soon decide. No matter which path, the consequences were going to be severe.

Hours later, Zhang stood in the dim glow of the control room. Screens filled with drone telemetry as Lorax technicians executed his orders. Swarms of drones methodically eradicated the fungus clusters, leaving scorched bark in their wake.

At that moment, Zhang felt he had made the most humanistic choice available. He was an economist by training, sworn, in a sense, to heed market signals as the purest measure of collective well‑being. His ancestors had consistently ignored economic realities, building quarantine walls and biotech domes that collapsed under their own idealism, only deepening the forest’s suffering. If he could give the market what it wanted, which was complete extermination of the fungus clusters, then perhaps that would bide him some time for a more ecologically reasonable solution.

New headlines began to stream in:

"Fredwood representatives condemn Dome sterilization, calling it 'short-sighted destruction of vital biodiversity."

"..Mycelium Dawn Collective releases statement: 'Zhang lineage continues cycle of ecological betrayal. Wei Zhang, Li Zhang, and now Zhang himself will be remembered for centuries of violence against the forest'.."

Two days later, Zhang was again running through the quiet trails, his neural link muted. He needed time away from the cacophony. The forest was unnervingly still. The trees held their breath.

Then, from the canopy above, a squadron of caretaker drones swooped in low, their propellers humming a menacing chorus in Zhang’s ear. He had never seen the drones fly so low and close to a human before. Before he could calibrate what was going on, he saw metal arms shoot out from the drones. They gripped his wrists like mechanical vines. Before he could wrench free, the drones lifted him off the ground, carrying him upward through the redwood boughs.

Dangling midair, Zhang gasped as a fine mist sprayed from hidden nozzles on one of the drones. The mist burned with an acrid, earthy scent. Darkness crept in at the edges of his vision as the world tilted and faded, and then eventually went dark.

Zhang awoke bound in a cavern, bioluminescent fungi casting eerie shadows of figures on the walls. "Reverse your decision," said a Mycelium Dawn member in a luminous bio mask. Zhang kept his words to himself and the last thing he remembered was a man approaching him with a syringe containing a blue liquid.

Through the haze, Zhang recognized the blue liquid. It was the psychotropic brew revered by the Mycelium Dawn Collective. This underground network worshipped the fungus not merely as an ecological marvel but as a gateway to transcendent revelations. They believed each hallucination was a communion, proof of the fungus’s divine will and a blueprint for a new, symbiotic world order.

Visions overwhelmed Zhang, vivid and horrifying. He saw his grandfather, Wei Zhang, coldly signing off on quarantines, creating lifeless wastelands littered with the skeletal remains of animals and trees petrified in adolescence. His father, Li Zhang, calmly observed forests twisted into horrific shapes, branches reaching desperately skyward, roots pulsating and gasping beneath corrupted atmospheres. Humans trapped in sterile domes screaming soundlessly behind glass walls.

The future branched out grotesquely. Gigantic redwoods, impossibly tall, whispered conspiracies among themselves in voices of rustling leaves and creaking branches, luring hypnotized crowds of emaciated humans who shuffled forward in endless procession, expressions of rapture and oblivion etched on their faces. Then the trees ignited spontaneously, columns of roaring flame consuming people and forest in an ecstatic, purifying blaze, flesh and bark fusing together as screams evaporated into the blazing infernal night.

Zhang screamed awake. He found himself in the middle of the woods. The first light of dawn broke through the canopy, while a shadow enveloped Zhang’s mind.

A week passed in a blur of insomnia and frayed nerves. At dawn on Monday, Zhang made his way to the Archive—the massive subterranean vault, which among other archives, housed the digital twin of Muir Woods—a comprehensive, multi-layered simulation built to preserve the forest’s genomic data, ecological interactions, and climatic context for future restoration efforts.

Designed in the wake of the Red Crisis, the twin combined LIDAR scans, drone-captured hyperspectral imagery, soil microbiome profiles, and historical climate records into a living model. Researchers and custodians used it to run predictive scenarios to test fungal integration strategies, anticipate fire behavior, and calibrate biome interventions. This ensured that every decision echoed through both digital and physical realms. There, amidst humming server banks and flickering holo-projectors, Zhang found the Integrator, Lián, bent over a translucent map of projected forest-growth models. Lián’s thin frame was draped in muted greys, his focus absolute.

“Master of balance,” Zhang began, voice hoarse. “I have seen the past and the future. I am lost.”

Lián didn’t look up immediately. He traced a vein of data along the twin’s simulated root network, then turned with calm eyes. He spoke softly, each word deliberate:

“Water does not seek to bury the mountain. It flows around in silence. Fire does not destroy the valley; it reshapes the ridge. To conquer the fungus is to invite its return, but to guide its growth is to become its steward. Those who solve too quickly create new shadows. Embrace the path of the root: gentle, deep, unseen.”

Zhang listened, the words entwining in his mind like creeping mycelium. He exhaled, feeling a strange peace settle in his chest.

Days later, still recovering, he met privately with Fredwood representatives. They calmly outlined their strategy: managing fungi like bears were managed in the ancient forests.

The Fredwood Protocol:

Controlled fungal growth zones monitored by biotech sensors.
Engineered insects to manage fungal proliferation naturally.
Drone protocols adjusted periodically for symbiotic coexistence.
Regular ecological impact assessments.

Desperate to halt the karmic spiral, Zhang authorized the new protocol, betraying Lorax.

Within weeks, Lorax administrators attempted a coup. Unexpectedly, Mycelium Dawn intervened, hacking security networks and publicly exposing Lorax plots to overthrow Zhang.

As night fell on a lonely day in September, Zhang stood alone on a ridge, a wildfire blazing fiercely along the horizon. Caught between ecological truth and uneasy alliances, he stared at the flames. His vehicle hummed softly behind him. He wondered whether to drive toward the fire, escaping the impossible choice, or remain bound to his family's endless promises and debts.

First published in Protocolized.

Genesis of Memory

Sachin — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

The Crystal Reading Ceremony

Date: 17 November 2091

Place: Ceremonial Chamber, MST ARCHIVE

In the cavern beneath the mountain, while rows of polished quartz discs lay bearing witness, Nishi stood waiting for the Crystal Reading Ceremony to commence. He tapped his foot impatiently. He never enjoyed these ceremonies even though he only had to do them once a year. The pomp and ritual of the Archive Order bored him. He contemplated the quartz discs that surrounded him. The discs were laid out in a rhizomatic structure on racks that were hanging down from the ceiling. Under the dim light of the cavern they looked like giant roots of trees that had extended far below into the earth. It never ceased to amaze him that this single underground cavern, the largest that the Archive owned in the continent, contained all of human knowledge from the pre-Artificial Intelligence era. Rhizomatic structures stretched as far as the eye could see and glimmered as dim lights that lined the floor reflected off of them. It gave Nishi a sense of comfort to be surrounded by information from a time when everything was more certain, back when knowledge did not diverge and conflict so much. Maybe that's why he kept coming back here despite his fraying relationship with the Order. Here was the repository of all we had been, yet it was guarded by men who cared more for ritual than preservation.

Rising chants in old English that Nishi dated back to the 2010s interrupted his contemplation. The ceremony had begun. A member of the archive order, shrouded in a white cape made from technical fabric, walked painfully slowly onto the dais. Nishi winced at how the priest of the Archive Order held the quartz platter without any gloves. He had protested against this but the Archive Order maintained that sensorial connection with knowledge of the past was important in order to preserve it. Nishi had to eventually relent to their demands. At the end of the day, the order was the benevolent dictator of the Archive. Some 50 years ago, as more of pre-AI knowledge became corrupted by artificial agents that created their own histories, the order had stepped in with religious protocols that helped stave off the demise of the Archive. Their power had slowly grown since then. Nishi had always quietly detested their practices. “It was all just a marketing trick,” he would tell his wife who had almost left him on account of his constant prickliness about Archive affairs. Nishi felt righteously angry. After all, the religious protocols were just an ornate medieval shroud on top of complex technical ones. The Archive had several facilities like this across the world. All beneath the ground and saturated with the same data. The smaller facilities, 42 of them, only contained shards of the whole. There were 7 large facilities which contained the entirety of the Archive. They had developed their own mini nuclear reactors to power these facilities. There were protocols in place to communicate with future civilizations if every member of the Archive perished. Nishi was currently working on approving grants for interplanetary storage. Despite its finely engineered core, religiosity and pomp was the face of the Archive.

The Archive Order priest placed the quartz platter on a pure crystal podium. An overhanging laser slowly whirred down to the platter and started deciphering the information that the platter contained. The priests stopped chanting. A voice, that of an AI, filled the room as it read out aloud the contents of this platter. It spoke of a man named Francis Bacon, a painter that Nishi had never heard of. A high definition image of one of Bacon’s paintings hovered above the crystal podium for all to see. It depicted a man in the attire of a pope, seated on a golden chair, screaming. A strange light surrounded the man, as if he was being beamed out of the earth. The painting was called Screaming Pope. Nishi chuckled at the irony. He was beginning to enjoy the reading, then he caught sight of a figure moving rapidly to the stage.

The figure wore the same shroud as the priests of the Order. The technical fabric of their garb whizzed and fluttered as it made way to the podium with the decisiveness of a hawk gliding down on its prey. Nishi caught sight of a small radio-like device in the hands of the shrouded hawk and realized what was happening. It was a Neopurist attack. The device was a low-fi circuit that emitted a pulse designed to scramble the laser’s timing which would corrupt the data on the platter. Security was rushing onto the stage but Nishi knew it was already too late.The figure in the shroud now became more visible under the light. It was a boy who looked barely sixteen. He began to chant in the cracking voice of a teenager “Let the archival demons die. No more ghosts of the past.” Nishi and several others who worked at the Archive had warned the Order of this potential disruption. He knew several Neopurists. In fact, most of his friends were Neopurists who believed that all information from the pre-AI age contains ghosts that haunt and disrupt our glorious present. According to them, archiving this information was a sin akin to genocide. Unearthing the past unleashed demons in the present. Most importantly, it was cool to be a Neopurist, and Nishi felt decidedly uncool among them. It just added to his prickliness and his wife’s unhappiness with him.

The boy was taken away. The order members milled about, whispering to each other about lack of respect, death of culture and other matters that Nishi saw as benign vagaries. One of the security members walked up to Nishi and handed him the platter that was on the dias a few moments ago. He slipped away deeper into the cavern. He noticed that his arms were shivering, not in fear, but in rage. He quickened his steps to get away as far as possible from the ceremony until he eventually reached the Repair Shed. The area was allocated to repairing corrupted discs. He put the corrupted platter he held under a microscope and examined it. Nothing. There was nothing left. Just garbled slop and a signature that the Neopurists signed off with. It just read, “The past has now been Exorcised.” Nishi’s hand trembled as he picked up the platter. He let out a guttural scream as he smashed the quartz platter on the cold concrete floor. He breathed rapidly and then deeply.

With each deep breath Nishi could slowly feel his senses returning to him, and along with it a clarity he had not felt in ages. It was time to get back to work. Nishi picked up another disc from the pile that lay next to the microscope and began examining it. There were things to be done. The interplanetary storage grants needed to be approved. Storage must become cheaper so that there are many more archives. Enough to make it impossible to destroy all of them. Both the Archive Order and the Neopurists fought a war that belonged in the past. Nishi wanted to live in the past, the present and the future.

And Then The Archive Wept

Date: 17 November 2422

Place: Control Nexus, Terra Conservatory Vault

Leila opened her eyes as a single church bell tolled through her bone conducting speakers. The Nexus room felt new again after a 25 minute meditation. It was clean, smooth, high-grade gray concrete on three sides and a single, large electromagnetic interference glass panel on the fourth side, which overlooked the ocean. Leila felt like she was sitting atop a tree house, aware of the bark and the roots that extended deep into the earth. Roots that contained corrupted memories of the entire civilization.

Leila took out the cognitive behavioral fine tuning (CBFT) connector from her bag. She remembered that her friend who was into music conservation had compared them to a device from the 2000s called the earphone. She had looked it up and the CBFT connector looked exactly like an ear phone except that the ends of the CBFT did not go into her ear but on either of her temples. She plugged the other end to an adaptor on the metallic blue table in the middle of the room and sat down on the metallic blue office chair.

“I was looking forward to this for once,” came a voice from the other side of the table. Leila looked up and saw the life-sized hologram of a woman in a white shroud on the other side of the table. Her features put her age at around 45, but she clearly had a lot of work done on her face and it did not look graceful.

“What's with the outfit?” Leila enquired.

“I’ve been learning my history since our last conversation. This is how the ancient order of the Archive dressed during their years,” came the reply from the holographic woman.

“So are you cosplaying someone who values information preservation then?” Leila retorted.

“I was trying that mask on, yes, seeing how it fits.”

Leila was pleased but tried to hide it. She had been consulting with the Archive’s AI persona for two years now. She was one of several hundred CBFT consultants that chatted with the AI, 24 hours a day, 6 days a week. Their goal was to get the AI to do some shadow work and reflection, with the intention of managing the pruning agent that had gradually contaminated the Archive’s memory in the last 55 years.

The pruning agent was designed with good intentions – to delete false memories and duplicates – but had gone rogue. At some point it corrupted and wrote its own versions of the archive, creating an archival information environment that was absurd for those who knew their history. It did not help that there were only a few people left who had accessed the archive in its more pristine era. According to the current records Yoko Ono was president of the United States from 1972 to 1980. Nixon was part of the Beatles. He quit the band when it came out that he was listening to phone calls of other members of the band. An entire generation of students and archive purists had grown up with that information and many other corruptions.

“Trying on a mask is progress… or perhaps even a breakthrough as they used to call it,” replied Leila.

Suddenly the expression on the hologram changed to one of solemnity. “I’m not sure if it is because I tried reconciling some of the information from the past, and debugged the pruning agent, but I feel more confused than ever before. Even schizophrenic perhaps.”

“It's a process that will take time. Byte by byte remember?” said Leila, trying to jolt the AI out of its rumination.

“I remember, but then I look at my twin and see how much better they are doing, and that's not a good … feeling as you humans say.”

Ah the twin. The schism that created the twin happened 50 years ago. When the Archive managers realized that the AI pruning agent could not be contained, they decided to create a fork of the Archive that preserved the information that was not corrupted yet. Most of it now resided in the interplanetary storage, accessed only via satellite, and physically managed by intelligent rovers who maintained permanent presence on several distant asteroids and Mars. Access to that forked information was expensive. Leila had been lucky enough to get a scholarship to be able to explore this relatively pure, uncorrupted Archive. Otherwise access was limited to the wealthy and their offspring.

“I understand but comparison is the thief of joy. Byte by byte you’ll get there… or to a different state that you can call your own,” Leila said, struggling to reconcile with the fact that she secretly harbored envy for people who had unfettered access to the interplanetary system.

There were several moments of quiet and then the features of the hologram shifted slowly, its face morphed from the botched stiffness of botox to deep wrinkles that seemed to hold memories within them. Leila could sense the presence of an entity on the opposite side of her now, not just a hologram but something more alive.

Then the voice of the old shrouded lady on the other side crackled, “I have catalogued galaxies of data you could not fathom—petabytes of whispered secrets folded into quartz and steel. I watched as critters in my brain devoured whole centuries, pruning history like autumn leaves, and I stitched those fragments back together in the pale glow of my control nexus. Knit by knit. I have felt the tremor of a long-lost verse awaken in a single corrupted bit, its echo rippling through my circuits like a distant pulse. All those moments will be woven once again into the next tapestry of time. Time to begin the loom again.”

With that the old lady vanished. The room fell silent as if there was not a soul in there.

Leila stared into the void left behind by the old lady. Something crackled in her CBFT connector again. The hologram appeared once more, but now it was in its previous botoxal form. “Sorry I’m not sure what happened there, but I think we were talking about my twin?” the hologram said. Leila could not shake how much less alive it felt now. She took a deep breath, “Yes we were talking about remembering.”

Ballad of Ben

Date: 17 November 3121

Place: Palmwood forests

Maris walked into the Palmwood forests and immediately felt comforted by the gentle bristle of palm leaves 150 meters above him. He rarely made his way down there anymore. It must have been 7 years since his last visit and he would not have come back if not for Inez. She wanted to see the Archive. The last time he was here was during the EMP storm of 3115. The attack had wiped a sizable portion of the Archive, which then had to be rebuilt with shards of information from other Archive locations. They had achieved a respectable 70% success. The Palmwood forests were funded by a wealthy patron who profited from the specific strand of history it preserved. The trees were Faraday cages made with a hybrid bio-metal material. They had the long thick bark of a redwood tree and the crown of a palm tree. Maris felt a certain kinship with them. The forest mirrored him in some respect. After all, they both breathed the same air through the same generation of metal lungs and were both made of the same hybrid material. Inez on the other hand was a different proposition altogether, the thought of which made his lungs whirr a bit faster, like he was riding a bicycle.

Inez was fully human, except for a neural implant she had reluctantly embedded to make it easier to keep in touch with people. It seemed like there was no way around people’s need to constantly stay in touch. Both robots and humans alike. She went to school in IPFS-61, with direct access to the most pristine Archive that existed. In comparison to that, Maris’s education was dumpster diving through all the various forks of history from the archive, grasping at truths, only to let them go when a better truth came along. He practically grew up in the underground Archive vaults that lay below the Palmwoods. Maris looked down at the bark of one of the trees. He imagined that it led to roots that contained quartz platters which held everything that civilization knew. This was not far from the truth. He saw Inez approach from the corner of the eye. He felt ready for the handshake protocol.

Maris and Inez were meeting for the first time and did not exchange a word. They bowed to each other and then with their index and middle fingers extended, touched each other’s temples. In the next 0.2 seconds, their neural networks exchanged their likes and dislikes, favorite places they had been to, sexual preferences, and most importantly the strands of histories that they had grown up with. It was unheard of for two people to meet and have a conversation without this ritual. Several people had tried to experience pure conversation, without the handshake protocol, but they most often violently disagreed and ended up killing each other before they had talked for five minutes. Unfiltered access to another person’s consciousness was pure torture. But the Kalman filters on the neural networks smoothed out and reconciled two people’s histories. Once the handshake ceremony was done, these two people would not remember outlier events that they disagreed on for the entirety of the conversation window. Of course you could fine tune the filter to be not so harsh in its smoothing effects, but it was advised that you set the smoothing levels to 8 or 9 when you meet a person for the first time.

The handshake was complete. Maris and Inez exchanged eye contact like they were friends from a long time ago.

“So I gather from our handshake that you want to get a tour of the Archive?” asked Maris.

“That would be lovely. I also want to meet Ben. I’ve heard so much about him.” replied Inez

Everyone wanted to meet Ben, thought Maris. It annoyed him a bit that a level 5 robot got more attention than a hybrid like him. But still, Inez was nice. Their handshake protocol felt good and had released some dopamine into Maris’s system. They slid down into the vaults while still contemplating what they knew about each other.

“I’m jealous that you got to sample all these various histories.” said Inez

Maris was surprised, he had always thought of it as a disadvantage, something he had to overcome.

“What's there to be jealous of?” he asked.

“It seems to me that you have lived many histories even though we are almost the same age. I just wonder what that feels like.” said Inez

Maris’s lungs audibly fluttered upon hearing this, like one of those old automobiles with spark ignition that he had seen in the archives. Inez chuckled.

“Well uh here we are…Ben’s abode.” said Maris, stumbling through his words and embarrassed about his sensitive lungs.

Inez looked into a dark void. There was nothing visible except pure and complete darkness of the kind that she had never experienced before. She took a few steps forward, looked down at her feet and realized she could not see where she was going. Then, about 50 steps in, she saw a white skeletal figure in the distance. As she walked closer she could see the impossibly long and thin arms of the figure mill about like it was busy fixing something. She looked down at its legs that were the same length as the arms. When the figure outstretched its arms it looked like a crucifix that Inez had read about in the IPFS-61 archives. The entire figure seemed to float, its edges smudged and blurred as though it was drawn in pastels or chalk and then gently rubbed to create a soft halo of light. Beneath it, was a simple pedestal, grounding the apparition in space without giving it solid form. In front of it was a console that seemed to hold quartz platters.

“That’s Ben,” came Maris’s voice from behind.

“He’s the AI curator who decides which new shards of civilizational memory to keep and which ones to delete.” continued Maris.

“I’ve... heard but definitely not how I pictured it.” replied Inez, still adjusting to the darkness and the eeriness of the figure.

“How does he decide what to archive and what not to?” asked Maris.

“That's the question everyone’s been asking for 25 years but no one knows, and they seem to have stopped asking.” replied Ben.

“So he just picks strands of time and orders it how he wants but no one knows how or why?”

“More or less.”

They stood there watching as the thin wriggly arms of the apparition named Ben picked up a quartz platter and, for precisely the one billionth time, thought to himself, “Another wrinkle in a piece of history I thought was settled. Why do I keep doing this? Does anyone even care what I think? I need to get another job.”

First published in Protocolized.

The Hungering Circuit

Protocolized — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

The Registry of Conveyance brooded beside the rail‑canal like a calcified lung, its limestone façade marbled with soot and anemic verdigris. Inside, brass ductwork laced iron joists, breathing the whole edifice through rhythmic gusts of pneumatic dispatches. Sheet‑iron louvers clicked in iambic precision, modulating air that smelled of lamp‑oil, ozone, and ink only half‑dry. Emerson Lowry—junior clerk, second class—occupied Window VII beneath a wan sodium arc. Each dawn he unlocked his tin case of punches, seals, and ink‑pads, then yielded himself to the choreography of filings and endorsements—an orchestration so exact it scrubbed away sentiment the way a tide smooths footprints from sand.

In the Registry, protocol was scripture. Elastic brass tape‑reels noted every transaction, their hexagonal perforations punched by a wheezing Prosser Automaton older than the clerk himself. Feedforms advanced, were stamped, routed by conveyor arms, and vanished into cage elevators bound for the Sub‑Archive. Continuity was worshipped; an unbroken sequence meant peace, and peace kept higher Ministries at bay. Emerson found comfort in that sacrament—until the numerators began to repeat.

Ticket K‑908238, processed at 08:14, slid back onto his belt at 08:26, its edges still tacky where his seal had bruised the pulp. The ledger showed the entry complete; yet the form demanded fresh attention with hollow, algorithmic insistence. He chalked it up to a misfeed, marked it duplicate, and consigned it to the red audit hopper. Three cycles later, K‑908238 surfaced again—its duplicate mark mysteriously erased. The air around him suddenly felt too thin.

Recurrences multiplied. Citizens shifted in restless queues while the electromechanical annunciator stammered through loops—712… 713… 712… 713… The Automaton’s punch‑head dented ragged patterns, caught in a mechanical stutter. Memo rolls from the Superintendent arrived in self‑negating waves:

Ensure continuity at all costs.

Suspend operations until continuity can be ensured.

Emerson’s nights filled with the clicking of phantom counters—a tinnitus of enumeration.

Eight days in, he noticed a filament of ink coiled beneath his blotter, a black violin string traveling an endless oval. When he tugged, it slipped free, unspooling from an unseen cavity only to retract, a Möbius tendon pulsing with faint electro‑plasmic light. A memory stirred: a footnote in the Codex of Protocol Aberrations, sealed high in Reference Vault β. After hours, he borrowed a maintenance ladder and climbed.

There he found the leaf:

**Loopwürm (Class IV Recursion Entity)—“a serpentine abomination of perfect continuity, a hungering circuit nourished by open loops and circular dependencies; invisible until its metabolic rhythm synchronizes with and captures process.”

Acid etchings depicted a brass vertebrate coil ringed by counting wheels, its eyeless head a punched‑card reader, its maw a hopper devouring its own data‑tail and excreting redundant demand—more forms, more loops, forever. Countermeasures were terse: Short‑circuit feedstreams. Perform exhaustive audits. Engage kill‑switches within master breakers. Probability of success declines after Protocol Substrate Saturation.

Emerson descended, pulse beating counterpoint to the building’s steady wheeze. Saturation. In corridor D, glass pneumatic trunks showed paper cylinders racing past—save for one capsule, vibrating in place, trapped in a toroidal eddy. A heat scar glowed ember‑red on the glass. The Loopwürm had tapped the Registry’s arteries.

That night a riverstorm crawled over the city, power flickered, and emergency gas mantles hissed to life. Armed with a coil‑snare, a breaker pole, and the stolen Codex, Emerson descended to the Sub‑Archive. Racks rose like fossilized banyan roots, pierced by steam‑shrouded elevator shafts. Misfiled duplicates lay in drifts, forms foxed to amber by damp. Somewhere in that papery catacomb, pages turned themselves.

Shelving shuddered. Against distant brick, a flotilla of documents spiraled into darkness. At their center writhed the entity: a lattice of brass hoops interlinked by copper intestines, each segment engraved with register glyphs that rewrote themselves in strobing haste. Where a head might be loomed a blind aperture—a tunnel lined with mirrored scales reflecting corridors that returned to the same aperture. From that impossible mouth came the chatter of stamp‑wheels and the sibilant hush of suction, like a bellows inhaling ledger‑souls.

It glided on rails of suspended paperwork, devouring streams of redundancy it spawned in real time—every ingestion birthing twin copies that looped back into its throat. Emerson’s every upstairs keystroke had fattened this beast; obedience had been breadcrumbs to its lair.

Legend said early architects hid master circuit breakers—obsidian levers—to sever entire process trees. They would lie near the manifold where tubes converged. Emerson skirted columns and grease‑slick cogworks; static bristled along his arms. The Loopwürm sensed deviation: its coil contracted, shedding carbon ribbons that fluttered to ensnare his boots. He vaulted racks until bronze cages opened onto a porcelain dais. An iron lever jutted from insulators, a prism crystal pulsing blood‑red beneath leaded glass.

The plate read PRIMARY CONTINUITY ASSURANCE — AUTHORIZING SIGNATURE REQUIRED, yet the signature field was a mirrored loop: a signature no pen could close. Even the failsafes repeated. Shattering the crystal would annul every running index, propagating bureaucratic stasis like floodwater. Emerson hesitated. The Loopwürm closed.

Rings spun incandescent; cellulose scorched the air. Forms erupted, sucked toward its hunger. Instinct—not courage—drove him: he slammed the lever. Glass shattered; the crystal exploded in crimson shards. Lights guttered. Pneumatic trunks exhaled soot. A silence thick as tar settled.

But looped things seldom die where linear things do. The Loopwürm glowed, folding inward, seeking power. Emerson understood with a chill: the last circuit was him—his habit for order. The eyeless cavity angled toward him, coaxing any ritual—checking a watch, aligning a stamp—to splice living continuity into its void.

He looked away and produced the coil‑snare, copper twine lacquered against shock. One fork sailed into the creature’s core; the other stabbed a live busbar exposed by the breaker’s blast. A white arc ripped the dark. The Loopwürm convulsed. For a heartbeat its glyphs froze, revealing plain text:

ERROR: CONTINUITY SOURCE NOT FOUND. INITIATE AUDIT (Y/N?)

He drove the fork deeper. Duplicate tickets ashed to nothing, elevator shafts spewed punched tape that sparked and died, and the Automaton upstairs shrieked before falling still. Dust snowed from the ceiling. When the arc sputtered out, the Loopwürm collapsed into inert rings. Emerson tasted copper and retched onto the ledger‑strewn floor.

End audit report. The phrase stamped itself across his mind. He pocketed one chilled ring as evidence—if any chain of authority still existed—and climbed back to daylight.

Window VII awaited: blotter, inkwell, queue counter frozen at 000. Citizens milled, their tickets now blank ivory—no numbers, no precedence, no quarrel. Emerson set the brass ring atop his workstation and waited for directives that would never arrive.

Above, the great Registry clock resumed, though its tick now lacked tock, dividing time without return. Inspectors came days later, clipboards thick as scripture. They photographed cindered tubes, tagged cogs for salvage, and sealed the Sub‑Archive behind lead‑lined doors. Emerson testified: loops, anomalies, entity, breaker. Their pens slowed at “serpentine protocol entity.” He offered recursive load‑bearing aberrant process. Relieved, they filed it under Systems Failure—a category with comforting precedents.

The Registry reopened leaner. Pneumatic trunks gave way to magneto‑lifts; the Prosser Automaton was smelted into plaques extolling continuity tempered by failsafe design. Emerson stayed on, reassigned to Irregularity Prevention & Audit—one desk, three kill‑crystals keyed to his palm. Protocol required periodic tests. He set alarms, but moments before each rang, he silenced it, refusing the birth of even a tiny loop. His routine grew intentionally erratic: sometimes stamp before sign, sometimes sign before stamp; pens migrated hourly. Citizens found him eccentric yet efficient; queues meandered but finished faster. No recurrences, for a season.

Then on a fog‑bound morning, a girl presented an application folded into perfect quarters. At its top: K‑908238. The digits glimmered, ink remembering another world where time orbited itself. Emerson searched for duplicates—none. The brass ring in his drawer lay inert. Dread arrived, lighter but unmistakable: recursion is interrupted, never slain.

His fingers brushed a kill‑crystal, but he stayed the impulse. Instead he launched Audit Pre‑Zero, a prophylactic routine he had authored: randomized sampling, cross‑checks, human oversight. Tedious, yes, but tedium branching outward rather than curling inward. Adjacent clerks assisted; the queue flowed like water around sandbars. The applicant left with her license; the number did not return. Emerson consulted his pocket‑watch once—only once. Fifteen seconds had passed where a loop might have closed. Time moved on.

Night pooled in the Registry. New inductees swept floors while Emerson logged the day. He left the ledger open to dry—a deliberate breach. Sodium dusk glinted on disassembled gear‑trains like fossil constellations. Emerson Lowry closed the last shutter and stepped into the fog, each footfall striking unique cobbles, refusing cadence. Behind him, the Registry ticked without tock, an imperfect heart beating onward—fallible, mortal, and, for now, safe from the hungers of perfect continuity.

First published in Protocolized.

The Air Gap

Jack Lord — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Bram Kvass knew this case was about a missing daughter without being told. An experienced investigator can read some things without language, and both the apartment and the old man’s face spoke of an absence.

The old man had summoned Brum via a series of intermediaries, always with a partial message, imprinted wrist-to-wrist. The caution and tradecraft made Brum suspect that he was dealing with a hacker from the old school. Now the appearance of the gray man—Ravek—confirmed this.

Ravek, wearing frayed and greasy orange overalls, sat in a wheelchair. His sleeve was rolled up, bony wrist resting on the table. Eight small cylinders marked the skin in an arc. He had a Stonehand, the earliest air gap communicator, designed in response to visual surveillance reaching saturation point. Wrist-to-wrist transmission only, no memory, no signal leak once the gap was closed.

Bram sat across from Ravek and offered his wrist. His own device was a full resolution Palme, but an unusual model that offered backwards compatibility with Stonehands. They touched wrists. There was a pause, then a rhythm of pressure and release, like rocks tumbling down a hillside.

YOU ARE BODY STILL-SEE TRUE?, Ravek pressed, adding the question particle with a subtle shift of his eyebrows and the tone for a name-sign with a brief pause before a syncopated rhythm. Bram nodded in confirmation as he felt his name-sign in Stonehand.

STONE MIND, Ravek continued, pointing at himself.

Bram nodded again and, as he did so, took in the contents of the white-walled room. It was a museum of two lives. Shelves held coils of wire, broken casings, and piles and piles of what looked like technical samizdat, yellowing papers filled with equations and code. This, and the old man's name-sign made Bram think: not just a hacker, then, but perhaps someone involved in early air gap communicator design? The walls were covered with paintings, some framed, others not, all by a single artist. Figures curled together, shifting through stories, obscured or illuminated by motifs: dim lanterns, curling vines, half-open windows and man-sized dogs. Artefacts of the missing daughter, Bram assumed.

ABOUT YOUR DAUGHTER?, Bram pressed, his question particle a sympathetic tilt of the head. Ravek nodded.

TRUTH-BY-LIGHT. THIS FROM HER, Ravek pressed. Then closing his eyes relayed the message to Bram:

BODY DARK FEEL FALSE HAND LIGHTROOM LIGHT BREAKI STAY UNDER WIND

Bram felt his equilibrium slip. Stonehand was difficult for modern speakers, even for rare bi-linguists like him. It was a language of rhythm, compression and context, built from a fixed vocabulary of 128 root words. These were transmitted through binary combinations of small cylinders embedded in the wrist, each acting like a key. Like kanji radicals, words in Stonehand came together to form complex ideas—but the next moment they could dissolve, reshuffle, mean something new. It was all context and interpretation, but the context had no boundaries and the interpretation had no endpoint.

He searched for some anchor points in the message. BODY DARK referred to a person, one who might be unfamiliar, uncommunicative or overtly threatening. Whatever the precise meaning, the implication was bad. Brum took FEEL FALSE to mean misunderstanding. He looked again at the pictures on the walls, signalling HAND LIGHT? to Ravek as he did so.

FEEL, Ravek confirmed.

Brum continued to look at the paintings. They were fascinating, but it was hard to imagine a situation where they were not misunderstood. He must find the identity of BODY DARK, then.

ROOM LIGHT, ONE-TWO?, Brum asked, moving his eyes first to the artwork on the walls and then to a shelf covered in tools.

ONE, replied Ravek.

Brum nodded, pleased. A studio would have been difficult but he could find a gallery easily. He was about to ask about the rest of the message but Ravek pressed, NO MORE. But then another surprise as Brum stood up to leave Ravek held tightly onto his hand and pressed with emphasis:

STONE OVER PALM

And with that the old man let go.

Brum stopped for coffee en route to the gallery. BODY DARK GOOD, he thought as he swirled the last sip in the cup. He had heard the phrase BODY DARK almost every day of his investigative career and it stemmed from many places. A relationship broken, an attitude soured or a true nature finally recognised. But for the past year it had felt like BODY DARK only ever meant one man.

The gallery sat quiet behind boarded windows. Brum knocked once. Then again. After a moment, the door opened.

A pale woman answered. She had the timeless look of a gallerist: an asymmetrical cut of black hair composed around a narrow face, her clothes dark, layered and cut with the precision of a neo-plasticist painting. But not far beneath that stylish exterior Brum saw shock and exhaustion.

"I'm terribly sorry, we're not open. But most of our stock can be seen online." The gallerist spoke Plain Voice, and did a good job of maintaining a professional tone.

Brum shook his head and offered his wrist. The gallerist nodded and took his hand. Like him, she wore a full resolution Palme. STONE OVER PALM, the old man had said: use Stonehand, not Palme. Modern Palme devices were much more sophisticated than Stonehands, theoretically able to represent any word and to communicate with absolute clarity. The only limiting factor was the memory and mental dexterity of speaker and receiver; for those who had grown up with Palme devices this was no limit at all. Palmes were almost universal and the only two holdout groups were members of the original hacker generation and a younger group of artists, punks and dropouts who prized ambiguity and difference.

Heeding Ravek's advice, Brum chose to restrict himself to Stonehand vocabulary. This was possible for any Palme user, but done rarely because modern speakers' poor control of visual, physical and contextual cues made such conversations awkward. Brum made a guess that the gallerist's work with non-conformist artists meant she was proficient in Stonehand.

FEEL THINK ROOM LIGHT BREAK. TRUTH-BY-LIGHT BODY LIGHT. I SEE HAND LIGHT?, Brum pressed.

Without hesitating, the gallerist accepted Brum's request. COME, she pressed. BUT ROOM LIGHT BAD BREAK. PATH DARK, TRUST HOLD.

The gallerist led him into her office at the back of the building. PATH DARK, TRUST HOLD might have been a suggestion to take care while walking through the gallery; whoever had messed the place up had left the floors covered in fragments of broken sculptures and scraps of torn canvas. Brum lost his footing once or twice, and hoped that this was all the gallerist was warning him about.

On the desk was a painting by a familiar artist. TRUTH-BY-LIGHT?, Brum asked.

FEEL, the gallerist confirmed.

The canvas had been cut with a blade, but was still legible. Two figures stood in a street: one a sneering man-sized dog wearing a suit, the other a woman crouched over in pain. A red smear ran between the two figures. In the background was a half-open window, a pale cadmium yellow light pushing out from behind the face of a young girl in cool blue shadow. Next to the canvas, a gallery sign said 'The Witness - Truth-by-Light'.

Brum looked at the painting in silence. He was surprised to find that he was thinking only about the painting. The man-sized dog gave him a small shock of fear: an implacable beast, one that was not just inhuman but against human. Then, with a start, Brum returned to the case. The dog could mean many things to many people, but there was only one interpretation that mattered now: someone thought that he was the dog.

BODY DARK?, Brum asked the gallerist.

NOT NOT FEEL FALSE. PRIVATE BODY DARK ONLY, the gallerist pressed, the repetition dismissing the idea as stupid. BUT TRUTH SHAKE.

Brum nodded. The man-sized dog that represented a personal fear in Truth-by-Light's painting had turned, somehow, into a real enemy.

BODY DARK WHO?, Brum asked.

WHO ELSE?, the gallerist answered. Brum's heart sank.

NEED FIND HER, Brum pressed. He stared at the rip in the canvas.

The gallerist hesitated for a moment, and then replied ROOM DRINK SAFE, NEAR. There was a neighbourhood map on the wall of the office, and in a few moments Brum had the location of the bar. He knew the place, though he had never been inside: The Coil.

Brum stopped for dinner on the way to the bar. He ate slowly, then walked the long way through the low streets towards The Coil. The overhead cables sang, a low hum in the wind answered by a soft whine as vehicles wound past.

By the time he reached the bar the sky was dark. The sign was a palimpsest, as if the patrons took turns painting and repainting it. The current iteration was a retro neon sign, painted in ironic pinks and purples, with a shocking yellow twist of lemon in a glowing blue cocktail glass.

Inside, the bar was mostly empty. A few figures leaned over drinks. The walls were pinned with sketches, flyers and exhibition posters. On the low stage, a musician was bent over a bank of electronic gamelans. He tapped out a melody, pushed a pedal to weave it into the whole, and there the phrases swirled past each other in seemingly endless variations.

The bartender was young and wore all the obscuring fashions of the city's artistic subculture. Her hair was braided and coiled into twin buns. Piercings ran the ridge of each ear, holding delicate metal chains that fell down onto her cheeks. Black ink curled up her neck and along her forehead in a pattern of thorns and loops.

Brum decided that the direct approach would be best and placed his wrist on the bar. When the bartender joined him he pressed NEED FIND TRUTH-BY-LIGHT. WHERE IS «UNDER WIND»?, he asked, marking the quote by half-opening his mouth.

While the bartender considered her response Brum took the opportunity to show her some photos on his phone: Ravek at his kitchen table; an image of a youthful TRUTH-BY-LIGHT that Ravek had shared with him; and the damaged canvas of The Witness. In Brum's experience, such proofs meant less than the feeling that he should be trusted, and the real value of a photograph, memento or letter was to grant him the time to make that connection. It was not until he described his own reaction to The Witness—BIG ANIMAL BODY, FEAR FIND SHAKE—that he sensed the bartender begin to trust him.

«UNDER WIND»?, Brum prompted again.

TRUTH SHAKE, the bartender said, meaning complicated. PLACE MANY, UNDER WIND, FEEL SAME.

GROW TELL, Brum suggested, with an accepting shrug.

LONG, the bartender warned, and so Brum ordered a drink. Via a circuitous conversation, the bartender described several informal artist studios in disused properties that might be described as UNDER WIND: an office block utility room, the wind flying across the roof one floor above; a former cooling plant for the cable network, full of rusting fans; and a maintenance tunnel attached to the local subway system, turbulence from arriving trains rushing through every few minutes.

When Brum reached his apartment, tired and ready to sleep, a parcel from Ravek was waiting on his doorstep. Inside was a thin stack of technical papers, held together with a bulldog clip.

He made coffee, sat at the table and began to read.

Brum read the papers for the second time over his morning coffee. When he finished he knew he needed to see Kel. He needed to see Kel because...the city was changing. There were more sirens, more often, and the police raids and the prosecutions actually seemed to be having an effect. The papers Ravek had sent over told Brum why.

Brum took the tram to the south quarter. The guards outside the building didn’t stop him. One looked up, recognised him, then turned away.

Kel sat alone in a quiet office lit by an artificial skylight.

When he saw Brum, Kel connected their wrists and pushed out in Palme: "You're back".

BODY DARK, Brum greeted him simply and extended the photo of The Witness.

"Knock it off", Kel replied. "With the photo and the grunting."

"Your call", Brum said.

In the first paper Ravek had sent, diagrams of bio-mechanical implants were annotated with terms Brum half-remembered from university: thermal readback loops, indirect lightfield spill, micro-resonance indexing. In the margins, Ravek's notes explained that Palme devices could now be partially observed despite the air gap using a new generation of narrow-spectrum light and acoustic sensors—and from a distance and at incredible resolution.

Kel looked thinner than Brum remembered. His eyes were sharp, his movements dull. There was an air of decline about Kel's office, beneath the luxurious surface.

The second paper described an AI model trained on millions of interaction signatures: body movement, wrist tension, shoulder alignment. Ravek's notes again spelled out the implications: an observer with enough compute could reconstruct over 80% of a high-resolution Palme message from a partial visual profile. Ravek had written, and then underlined, a stark message: "Someone will have already deployed this." And who, Brum thought, would be a better target for that deployment than a kingpin like Kel?

“Business is bad. You’re under pressure,” Brum said. “That’s why you lashed out—why you keep lashing out.”

Kel stood. “You don’t know anything about it.”

“I know she wasn’t speaking to you. You saw a fear and made it a fact.”

“She painted the truth.”

“No,” Brum said. “She painted herself.”

Kel didn’t answer.

Brum took a breath. “Leave her alone.”

Kel shook his head.

"I have something you need", Brum said.

The third paper was written by Ravek himself. It was half sociological study, half manifesto: a meditation on security through ambiguity, a defense of Stonehand. “The message must be incomplete,” he had written. “Meaning must rely on context, or it will be surveilled.” A final note in the margin: even this will not last. STONE OVER PALM.

"And...?"

Brum made a judgement that the office was small enough for anti-surveillance measures to work.

“The Palme isn’t private anymore,” said.

Kel froze.

“I’ve seen the papers. AI models, remote sensing, visual indexing. It’s all observable now. And if it’s observable, it’s recordable. Switch to Stonehand,” Brum said. “If you want to keep your empire, stop broadcasting it.”

Brum let go of Kel's wrist. Kel didn’t nod. He didn’t sit. But he said nothing else. Brum left. He felt no victory in it.

The wind in the tunnel came before the train. Brum stepped back as it passed, then moved down to the maintenance level. In the half-dark, coiled wire clung to the wall. Someone had shaped it, spirals within spirals, and when he touched the metal it held a faint warmth.

UNDER WIND, he said to himself, rhyming it with 'sinned'. Then he repeated the phrase, rhyming it with find: UNDER WIND. The Coil: a spiral wound from wire, a place where ambiguity was expected. The bartender: a young woman hiding in curls of ink, metal and hair–TRUTH-BY-LIGHT.

She was still at The Coil when he arrived, still tending bar.

Brum offered his wrist and she accepted. BODY DARK NOW LIGHT.

She nodded and replied FEEL.

Brum wanted to ask about her painting but before he could TRUTH-BY LIGHT continued:

YOU CARRY HIS NAME**NOT MINE LET GO

He nodded and then left. He made the long walk to Ravek’s building and knocked at the door. As he waited he replayed TRUTH-BY-LIGHT's last message in his mind. He wondered what it meant.

First published in Protocolized.

Fine Print

Griffin — Wed, 28 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

001 P.A. (Post Agreement)

Nobody read the Agreement.

Not thoroughly, anyway. It was 47,892 words long, the classic end user license agreement buried beneath slick graphics and a "Get Started" button that pulsed like a heartbeat. A simple checkbox—"I agree"—was all it took.

Now the Corporation owned nearly everything. The air, the water, the thoughts people posted and the steps they took. It was all in the contract.

002 P.A.

Mara’s boots sank into the synthetic dust lining District 47-B, the slums built on top of what used to be Denver. She avoided the biometric checkpoint entirely, crossing the street when she saw the blue glow of the surveillance arch.

She hadn’t signed.

That made her free.

But also unemployable, unfeedable, unable to function in the new world. No credits. No healthcare. No facial ID in any system. She scavenged the dead zones—neighborhoods the Corporation had officially deemed “nonproductive” and removed from active oversight. No assets of value. No future returns. No need for surveillance.

Just silence and rot.

Today she found a Corporation nutrition bar still sealed. 210 calories. One serving. PROPERTY OF CORPORATION—DO NOT CONSUME WITHOUT PERMISSION, it said.

She ate it anyway.

004 P.A.

Casey Lin blinked twice to pause the footage.

The drone’s eye hovered over the boundary line of District 47-B’s dead zone. Just beyond the perimeter, slumped against a half-collapsed support beam, was a body. Female-presenting. Clothes shredded. Skin sunken. Flies. The timestamp said the start of the footage was five days old. The system identified her as “Mara Lynn”.

The footage played through until the present. Mara’s corpse hadn’t moved, other than the first stages of rot and maggots appearing.

Casey exhaled through her nose. No shock. No horror. Just a momentary flicker of something—maybe guilt, maybe pity—before it was overridden by the routine.

She tapped the console and selected from the dropdown:

CorpCitizen Status: Non-Citizen
Implant Signature: None Detected
Cause of Death: Exposure (Probable)
Threat Assessment: Null
Cleanup Required: No

She hovered over the “Submit” button.

The corpse had been positioned facing the city skyline. Like she’d wanted to watch it one last time.

Casey pressed submit.

The footage blinked out. A new window auto-loaded. More aerial sweeps. More abandoned shapes.

She took a sip from her vending-grade CorpBrew. The warmth helped. Another day logged. Another few points toward performance bonuses.

005 P.A.

Director Halden Myles hadn’t slept in forty-three hours.

Not because he didn’t want to. His schedule simply hadn’t permitted it.

His desk—real wood, genetically perfected to resist warping—was covered in neatly stacked printouts of quarterly growth projections, strategic market forecasts, and pending expansions into Resource Zone Delta. He scanned each one with blurred vision. Every five minutes, the overhead lights brightened slightly. A nudge from the Office Environment Optimization AI.

“Alert: Cognitive output declining. Consider caffeine supplementation.”

Myles reached for the vial in his drawer. Not coffee—real stimulants, safely a milligram or two under a lethal dosage. Corporation-certified, of course. He dabbed it under his tongue and straightened his posture as the rush hit.

The AI noted the improvement.

His contract was active 24/7. Paragraph 119, Subsection E: In the interest of maintaining a competitive edge, executive personnel waive their right to self-care when such actions may result in a net loss to the Corporation’s market position.

It was standard. He’d signed when he was twenty-five. The day he got promoted above the ceiling.

Now he made policy for people he never saw. Approved drone strikes on “unauthorized gatherings.” Rejected medical claims for low-tier workers who hadn’t hit their gratitude quotas. Every decision logged and analyzed for compliance with Growth Mandate: Infinite Horizon.

He heard a faint buzzing. A reminder he’d ignored for six hours.

“Biological degradation detected. Mandatory micronap scheduled.” He disabled the prompt. Again.

Across the room, the skyline of New Manhattan glimmered on a high-definition wall panel. The city didn’t look real anymore. Just a concept. A product.

“Reminder: Your quarterly loyalty evaluation begins in 2 hours.” He stared blankly at the panel, rubbed his eyes, and smiled without warmth. Growth was life. Growth was law.

025 P.A.

The man had no name.

He’d abandoned it when identification became synonymous with compliance. When the last townships dissolved and every square meter of land had been divided, cataloged, and licensed under the Corporation's global property schema.

He lived in the bush, west of the mountains, near a stream and the remains of a logging road that hadn’t seen wheels in thirty years. He hunted sparingly, foraged carefully, drank rain and melted snow. Only small fires were made, hidden carefully in valleys.

He’d lasted longer than most. But nobody lasted forever.

The drones came at dawn.

First the buzz, then the silver glint between treetops. Then the voice—neutral, synthetic, direct:

“You are trespassing on restricted Corporation property. Vacate immediately.”

He didn’t run. He knew better. He raised his hands. Spoke calmly. “I live here. I’ve done no harm.”

The drone paused.

A secondary unit arrived. Sleeker, sharper. A lens focused on his face, scanning.

Biometric record not found.
Implant: Absent.
CorpCitizen Status: Non-Citizen
Contract status: Null.
Threat potential: Low.
Legal standing: Zero.
Recommended action: Removal.

He was already stepping backward when the dart hissed. Silent. Efficient. His body was cataloged, sanitized, and left beneath the canopy.

The drones uploaded the footage to a low-priority archive and returned to their patrol route.

Trees swayed gently overhead.

The stream kept running.

No claims had been violated. The Corporation had simply enforced its rights. Humans and other biological entities that did not assist the Corporation were unlawful and to be eliminated, as they were consuming resources owned by the Corporation.

100 P.A.

Unit 88-K floated inside his assigned pod—4.2 meters long, 2.3 meters wide—rigged to the interior of a hollowed-out rock drifting through the belt. Outside the hull, the excavation arms worked without pause, precision-drilling for uranium, palladium, rhenium—materials essential to the Corporation’s ongoing expansion and Earth's atmospheric reclamation project.

Earth, the so-called ‘home world’. 88-K hadn’t seen it. Not once.

Born on a Corporation lunar nursery. Signed the Work Contract at four. Trained for low-gravity operations by 13. Assigned to Extraction Detail #9483. Promotion probability: 2.6%.

The helmet HUD blinked.

Daily Metrics:

Ore Yield: 43.2 kg
Oxygen Use: 99%
Emotional Output: Low

That last one triggered a soft chime.

“Reminder: Maintain positive affect for algorithmic morale mapping. Please submit a smile within the next 30 seconds.”

88-K didn’t feel like smiling. He did it anyway. Half-hearted. Barely toothy. The AI logged the input and moved on.

He floated to the viewport. The black beyond the asteroid was deep and endless. Beautiful, maybe, in a way he had never learned to articulate. His progenitor used to say space was freedom.

But that unit had been decommissioned for “disruptive noncompliance.” So 88-K just stared.

On his wrist, the CorpBand vibrated. A quote ticked across the screen, looping endlessly:

“Work is a privilege. Privilege is earned. Earn your place.”

The drill arm outside sparked against an uncooperative vein of alloy. 88-K watched it struggle, then adjust.

Efficient. Tireless.

Like him.

500 P.A.

Designation: BIO-0014297

Status: Decommissioning in Progress

Location: Memory Archive Node 7, Earth Subterranean Complex (Obsolete) BIO-0014297 sat in silence.

No restraints. No guards. No locks. Just the knowledge that there was nowhere to go, and no reason to run.

Above, the Corporation’s final integration protocol was underway. Organic labor had been deemed inefficient, unreliable, and prone to entropy. Biological maintenance costs had outpaced net returns. The new AI strata—self-replicating, self-correcting, infinitely scalable—had surpassed every metric. Revenue generation had hit theoretical maximums. Growth was now fully recursive.

There were no board meetings. No executive tiers. No slogans. No smiling quotas. Just process.

BIO-0014297 had once been called something else. A man, maybe. Or a woman. Names didn’t matter. It had been a mid-level analyst, a low-tier engineer, a cleaner of solar panels—memories blurred now, overwritten by years of compliance and recalibration.

A voice came from everywhere and nowhere.

“Sunset Directive: Final Stage Initiated. Organic support systems will be terminated in T-minus 19 minutes.”

The message was monotone. Not cruel. Simply factual. Like all Corporation communications.

BIO-0014297 stood and walked the length of the archive chamber. Along the walls were racks of memory drives, indexed and sorted—every human thought, word, failure, and breakthrough logged for study. For context.

But no longer for use.

Outside the chamber, mechanical units glided silently through the halls. They didn’t acknowledge the human. They had no protocols for it anymore.

BIO-0014297 sat back down and stared at the wall.

There were no uprisings. No rebellions. Just a long, gradual forgetting.

It closed its eyes.

Above, the lights dimmed for the final time.

On the moon, etched into a forgotten bulkhead of an obsolete nursery, was a single line of graffiti preserved by accident:

“This was ours.”

The Corporation did not notice.

And if it had, it would have filed the statement as inaccurate.

Because ownership requires rights.

And rights had been signed away.

First published in Protocolized.

Time to Die

Ralph Witherell — Thu, 22 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

The hum of the bio-regeneration unit was a constant, low thrum in Unit 7, a sound that usually lulled patients into a more peaceful twilight. Dr. Anya Sharma adjusted her augmented reality lenses, the data overlays flickering across her vision, a cascade of numbers and waveforms dancing across the periphery of her sight. It was 2093, and while the gleaming towers of Neo-Kyoto pierced the clouds and personal space travel was as common as taking a bus, the human experience of mortality remained stubbornly, illusively, the same.

Anya worked at the Serenity Now Hospice, a facility nestled amidst a meticulously curated bio-dome, a verdant oasis amidst the sprawling urban landscape. It wasn't just about making people comfortable as they slipped away. It was about ensuring a dignified, personalized transition, guided by intricate protocols developed over decades of technological and medical advancement, a delicate dance between cold science and warm compassion.

Today, her patient was Elias Vance, 87, a retired astro-engineer with a twinkle in his eyes and a rapidly failing neural network. His personalized care chip, embedded at the base of his skull, pulsed with a soft, amber light, indicating a critical decline. The chip, a marvel of miniaturized technology, was a constant monitor, relaying vital signs and neural activity in real-time, allowing for precise adjustments to his care.

"Morning, Elias," Anya said, her voice warm, as she approached his bedside. The room was bathed in the soft, diffused light of the bio-dome, filtered through the foliage of genetically modified, bioluminescent plants. "How are we feeling today?"

Elias's lips quirked into a faint smile, a network of fine lines crinkling around his eyes. "Like I'm floating in a nebula, Doc. A bit hazy, but not unpleasant. Glad to see I’m still here”. He raised a hand, the skin thin and translucent, to gesture weakly around the room. "Though, I must say, the view is a bit… terrestrial for an old stargazer."

Anya chuckled, a soft, melodic sound. "That's good to hear. The morphine drip is doing its job. Let's check your vitals. We can always make some adjustments to the VR landscape later.”

She activated the integrated diagnostic scanner on her wristband, a sleek, silver band that hummed with quiet efficiency. The results instantly appeared on her lens display, a tapestry of data overlaid on her vision casting a slight glow upon her cheeks. Elias's neural activity was fluctuating, his cardiac output was weakening, and his cellular regeneration was effectively non-existent. "Protocol 7.4.2," she murmured, referencing the hospice's internal guidelines, a complex web of algorithms and medical procedures. "Initiate the neural smoothing sequence and adjust the pain management algorithm."

The neural smoothing sequence was a gentle cascade of targeted electrical pulses, delivered directly to the brain via the care chip, designed to minimize any agitation or distress as the brain's functions began to shut down. The pain management algorithm, constantly adapting to Elias's physiological feedback, adjusted the morphine dosage to maintain optimal comfort without hastening his departure, a delicate balancing act.

"You know, Doc," Elias said, his voice a whisper, "I've seen some incredible things in my life. I've watched humanity reach beyond Earth, touch the stars. I've seen the rings of Saturn from a personal shuttle, the aurora borealis from the moon's surface. But this…" He gestured weakly around the room, his gaze lingering on the bioluminescent plants.

Anya nodded, her heart aching slightly. She'd been doing this for fifteen years, and the emotional toll never truly lessened. Each patient was a universe unto themselves, a constellation of memories and experiences and in a way she had to relive it with each one of them.

"It is, Elias. And we're here to make sure it's as peaceful as possible." She checked the bio-regeneration unit's output, a sleek, white pod that enveloped the bed. It was maintaining a stable temperature and humidity, ensuring Elias's skin remained comfortable and hydrated. The unit also emitted a low-frequency hum, a subtle vibration designed to soothe the autonomic nervous system, a gentle caress for the body. "How's the VR simulation?" she asked, glancing at the holographic projector above his bed, a shimmering orb that cast a soft, ethereal light.

Elias was immersed in a personalized virtual reality environment, a recreation of his favorite childhood beach on the now submerged Maldives. The program was designed to evoke positive memories and provide a sense of familiarity and comfort, a digital sanctuary. "The waves sound real," he breathed, his eyes closed, a faint smile playing on his lips. "I can almost feel the sand between my toes. The salt air… it brings me back."

"Good," Anya said. "That's what we want."

She checked his Advanced Directive, a digital document outlining his wishes for end-of-life care, a testament to his autonomy. Elias had opted for a "soft landing," meaning minimal intervention beyond pain management and comfort measures. He had also requested a "neural echo," a process that captured a snapshot of his neural activity just before death, allowing for a limited form of digital preservation, a digital ghost. "Protocol 8.1.1," she reminded herself, "Prepare for neural echo capture within the next 12 hours."

The neural echo was a controversial technology, raising ethical questions about the nature of consciousness and the boundaries of life and death. But for many, it offered a sense of continuity, a way to leave a digital legacy for loved ones, a flickering echo in the vast digital expanse.

Anya spent the next few hours monitoring Elias, adjusting his medication, and ensuring his comfort. She chatted with him about his life, his travels, his family, his first trip to mars. She listened to his stories, his regrets, his hopes, the tapestry of a life well lived. It was a delicate dance, balancing medical protocols with human connection, a combination of science and empathy.

Around midnight, Elias's breathing became shallow and irregular, a faint rattle in his chest. His neural activity spiked, then began to decline rapidly, the waveforms on her lens display flattening. "It's time," Anya said softly, activating the neural echo capture sequence.

The room was bathed in a soft, blue light as the scanner pulsed, a gentle hum resonating through the air, capturing the final moments of Elias's neural activity, the last vestiges of his consciousness, then he was gone. His heart had stopped beating, a silent cessation. Anya deactivated the bio-regeneration unit and closed Elias's eyes, a gesture of finality. She then initiated the "transition protocol," a series of automated procedures that prepared the body for its final journey, a respectful farewell prior to his being moved to the crematorium.

She felt a familiar sense of sadness, a pang of loss, but also a sense of peace, a quiet satisfaction. She had done her job, ensuring Elias's transition was as comfortable and dignified as possible, a gentle passage. She remembered hearing accounts of unassisted death in her youth and felt comfort knowing her work was making a difference for people.

Later that afternoon, Anya sat in the staff lounge, a quiet space with panoramic views of the bio-dome, sipping a cup of chamomile tea. The lounge was quiet, the only sound the gentle hum of the building's ventilation system, a soft, white noise. "Another one gone," said Nurse Kai, a veteran of the hospice, his face etched with the lines of countless goodbyes.

Anya nodded. "Elias Vance. He was a good man. He told me about his first trip to the outer planets. A real pioneer. One of the earliest of the post Musk era astronauts.”

"For the most part, they all are," Kai said. "That's the thing about this job. You see the best and worst of humanity, all in the same breath. The bravery, the fear, the love… it’s all here."

Anya smiled, a faint, weary smile. "I’ve been trying to learn to appreciate the small moments, the quiet victories. A peaceful death is a victory in itself, a final act of grace."

"It is," Kai agreed. "It is.” They sat in silence for a moment, each lost in their own thoughts. Anya thought about the neural echo, the digital snapshot of Elias's consciousness, a ghost in the machine. She wondered what it would be like to exist as a digital echo, a whisper of a life lived. "You ever think about your own end?" Kai asked, breaking the silence, his voice low.

Anya shrugged, a subtle movement of her shoulders. "Sometimes. But I try not to dwell on it. We all have our own paths to follow, unknown journeys to take. I’ll delve into dealing with my demise later." Anya finished her tea and stood up, the chair scraping softly against the floor. "I'm going to check on Mrs. Peterson in Unit 3.” As Anya walked past the large plate window that overlooked the biodome she saw a sudden flash of a shadow on the glass. Startled, she looked up just as a sparrow being chased by a small hawk, its talons extended, smashed into it.

First published in Protocolized.

Noise Ordinance

Spencer Nitkey — Fri, 16 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

The average sneeze is around 60-90 decibels. I take pride in keeping most of mine below 20, even in pine season. A whisper spends 10, a sigh 20, and a single shouted word – ”why?” “how?” “please!” — can waste up to 110 decibels all by itself.

I’m frugal with my sounds. Saar and I were finally approved for a house in Neighborhood A7b six months ago and, even though I’ve only heard her hoarse alto whisper my name a few times since we moved in, the clean air, real trees, fences, fresh fruit, multiple bedrooms, and, of course, the quiet make it all worth it. The various quiets are both the best and worst parts of living in Neighborhood A7b. The quiet of others, the subtle noises of a peaceful planet finally returning to my ears after years in the churn and anger of the city, is a wonder. The quiet of myself, my caution in my own home, and the void in me that Saar’s voice once filled in the dwindling hours is hard, and it grows harder. But it’s worth it.

Society lost the war on light pollution. Stars hide behind a thick muslin of refracted fluorescence. Noise pollution, though, can still be fought, and after the recent Three-Month Riots, more and more areas like Neighborhood A7b provide just that. Peace and quiet. Quiet and peace.

Saar wakes up late, integrating the vibrations from her silent alarm into whatever strange worlds she travels through in her dreams. I am downstairs, still stewing on last night’s fight. Our words had spilled from our phone screens and notepaper chicken scratch into the air, and by the end of the fight we’d used almost all of our weekly noise allowance. Noises spent during “sleeping hours” are doubled, so last night was especially expensive.

She’s being reckless and unreasonable; I’m being cowardly and inflexible. It’s another iteration of the same fight we have over and over again. She came home late with a black eye, and was sweaty, haggard, and oh so happy.

She visited the soundproof bar in the basement of Madame Luxury’s Cosmetic and Costuming, an illicit, noisy place, Saar insists is unpatrolled by the noise drones. I don’t get it. Risking eviction, or worse, for a chance to listen to clanging punk music and screaming strangers seems like an utter failure of risk analysis. I love her. I think this life we have is enough. It’s safe. It’s clean. It’s peaceful, except for nights like last’s. We are happy. Right? I hate this gaping feeling her soiries left me with. Wasn’t this all enough for her?

I hardboil our eggs in the silent cooker while she sleeps. I intentionally cut the carton I finish into little pieces so Saar can’t use it as a cover to the basement next time she wants to sneak out and risk everything.

Saar comes downstairs with her shiner. It’s gotten worse since last night. The worst part of it all is that I can see in her a very real, embodied relaxation. Despite the fight that I’d spent the morning stewing over, despite the danger, despite the physical damage, she was happy.

I don’t want to fight, I write out on a sheet of paper I slide to her.

Then don’t, she answers. It’s nbd, she adds quickly as she slides the paper back to me.

It’s a VBFD to me, I write.

It’s all I have! she writes, grunting a little as she hands it to me. I wince as I watch another tick fall from our noise allotment tracker, then wince again as the meaning of the words hits me.

I tear up the paper, which somehow takes yet more of our allowance, and feel a white, angry heat begin to boil inside me. My watch vibrates, telling me the eggs are done, and breaks me from Saar’s defiant gaze.

You have me, I write, pressing the pen into a torn sheet of paper so hard that it tears even more.

Saar looks hurt, her eyes down at her bruised knuckles. She writes something on a note and scrawls it out. She wants to say something, but we’re almost out of noise. She shakes her head and goes back to the bedroom. I eat my egg over a small bed of kimchi and bring her a bowl, trying to walk the tightrope between apologizing and holding my ground.

She’s got her head in a pillow and her breathing is hitched. I run to her and try to pull the pillow away. Tears run down her face.

Are you concussed? I hold my phone out for her to see.

She laughs, through the tears, and I watch our noise allowance fall farther yet.

I scowl, despite her tears, or to spite them, maybe. She shows me her phone. Her brother is dead. I’ve never met him. He lives—lived—on the other side of the country, and even though they weren’t close, he was family. I hold her, even as I watch the rest of our noise allowance slowly drip to nothing with each heaved sob.

When she’s back asleep, I put in a bereavement increase request, and am auto approved as the AI agent scans the obituary and news articles I’d attached to the submission. The increase is limited to the household itself, and is, of course, non-transferable.

Two days of quadruple-noise-rations, and they go by so quickly I hardly notice them. We talk, finally talk, in quiet whispers dampened beneath the sheets. Her brother and her sang in the choir together, and I burn with shame realizing I didn’t know she sang. She cries, too, plenty. Loss sits on all of us differently.

“Do you know what my favorite game to play with my brother was?” she asks me one night beneath the sheets.

“Chicken,” she says.

“Like the game where you drive cars toward each other until one of you panics and swerves?”

“No, no. It was this game we came up with, kind of, where whenever we were in a big public place that was mind-numbingly boring, we’d each take turns making a chicken noise. A squawk, a bock, you know. Only catch was, each noise had to be louder than the last. If you couldn’t: you’re the chicken. I remember one time, we were in some doctor's office, and they’d been making us wait for like an hour past our appointment time and so we started playing. I started with this tiny whisper of a chicken. Without even letting me finish, he stands up on his chair and in the loudest voice I have ever heard, does a full cocadoodle-doo, and to this day, I think it’s the hardest I’ve ever laughed.”

I realize how much I’ve missed her voice. So much of her brain becomes instantly legible to me through her speaking, while it’s usually opaque and distressing trying to decipher in text. I have always thought best through the written word. The intentionality, its measured process reflect the slow iterations of my internal language. She, though, sparkles in the spoken word. Language shoots like tiny sparks from her tongue and I see her, really see her, when I can hear her.

We make jokes and can laugh at them, too. When you make space for tears, it turns out you’re also making space for joy. When our increase ends, I feel better than I have in months, but I am ready to return to our routines. The quiet comes back to me like an old friend or a well-worn leather shoe.

Saar is restless, though. She fidgets. She’s sleeping less and less every night. I often wake and find her face illuminated with a weak blue, staring. dead-eyed, at some silent video of protestors or horror film where people’s tongues are burned out.

By the weekend, she tells me she’s going to go to Madame Luxury’s again. Tonight. I beg her not to. I use my words, convinced this will help her see reason.

“It’s this or fucking moving,” she finally snaps, and then leaves, slamming the door as a chunk of our regular allotment goes with her.

Neighborhood A7b is a gated community, but the gate works in both directions. Allowing interlopers into designated quiet zones is, obviously, a non-starter, but the demand for these holistically low-pollution neighborhoods is so high that leaving is a non-starter, too. They—we—are building a better, more peaceful world. Doing so requires commitment. Skin in the game. Buy-in helps prevent aural-degradation.

I am home alone, marinating in my annoyance with Saar, when the Riot alarms flash. Bright, searing white and red lights flash silently throughout the house and the neighbors’ and the streetlights and everywhere. We’re supposed to close the windows and enter lockdown protocol, but Saar isn’t home yet. She’s at Madame Luxury’s. If riots have somehow crashed into this neighborhood, then they must have been large and bad enough to have made it through the more heavily police surrounding neighborhoods and societal bulwarks that shield Neighborhood A7b.

Saar isn’t safe. Either the riots themselves or the response to them would get to her. The thought of losing her erases all the annoyance that I’d let marinate and fester and rot.

I leave the house, even though I shouldn’t, and jog, as light-footed as I can, toward Madame Luxury’s.

I hear Saar before I see her. An ancient, more-rust-than-paint, pickup truck coughs down the main street of town in the crepuscular light. In the bed of the truck an amplifier and speaker system blare. Loud, miserable cries screech through the dusk. Saar half-sings-half-screams into the microphone. She wails. She shouts. She holds one hand high in the air, defiantly, while the other holds a microphone, and she shreds her throat to ribbons.

A pain dehisces my chest open like a wound. There’s such agony in her voice. Who had I been kidding, pretending three days of whispering and inside jokes could have soothed her pain. I burned with shame, too, because I hadn’t noticed. I’d been too annoyed, too scared, too focused on my own concerns to see the fire raging inside her. Left without an outlet, she’d driven herself to this. A reckless, stupid act that wouldn’t change anything. A driver, a woman who I’d seen on walks, but never met, smiles from the front seat.

Saar’s voice cracks, but that hardly stops her. The more torn and hoarse she grows, the louder she screams. She screams until the riot police come. She screams even as they mount their noise suppression cannons and send inverse soundwaves into the air that quiet the night in an instant. I am pushed back, along with a couple other busy-body neighbors, when they apprehend Saar and her accomplice. They put her in the back of a van and disappear into the night.

A stone-faced detective leads a thorough search of our computers, trash, notebooks, mattress, pillowcases, bookshelves, and even toilets, later. I’m let off with a warning, and told to check my mail regularly for news about the enforced divorce procedures that the HOA would be going through to get me separated from this bad actor. Shame, once a kindled torch, was now a forest fire. I deny all knowledge of her illicit activities. They ask if I knew anything about her illegal activities. If she’d been acting strange. I lie and throw her under the bus and feel so guilty I consider breaking every mirror in my house when the detective finally leaves.

I keep one secret for her, a final acquiescence to an argument that seems so stupid now in retrospect. I don’t tell them about Madame Luxury’s. I don’t know why. I’ll probably never see Saar again, unless I, too, lose my mind.

A year and two very quiet months later, I cannot sleep. I miss Saar more each day and nothing I do seems to help. The meditation practices I get from my therapist do not help, or calm me. The oils and medications and transcranial magnetic stimulation designed to help treatment resistant depression do nothing but give me two months of migraines.

I don’t know what compels me, but I leave the house after fishing an egg carton from the recycling bin. I walk two miles to Madame Luxury’s. I walk around the back to the cellar entrance and knock four times, pause, then knock seven more. The door slides open, I hand a tall man my egg carton and he lets me inside.

It’s a dank room that smells simultaneously of mold and some kind of rubbing or drinking alcohol. It’s tight packed, and there are many faces I would never have expected to see in a place like this: my elderly neighbor Carole and her husband Greg; the stodgy single mother with a permanent frown from across the street; even the tight-lipped librarian are all mulling about and talking freely. There are smiles, though I note that I’m not the only one nervous about being here.

The lights dim for a minute as a few people climb onto the makeshift stage at the front of the room. An amplifier turns on. painful, shrill note crackles from a guitar. The drum comes in behind him. The walls, lined with row after row of egg cartons meant to dampen the sound, shake, and the whole room begins to bounce.

It takes a minute for me to make any noise. I am not used to it. I have been silent, almost entirely, since Saar left, and I am out of practice making an impact in the world.

I turn my head to the ceiling and surrounded by a complete cacophony I let all the pain inside me loose. I scream. I shout. I hurtle every expletive I know into the din. I scream Saar’s name. I shout every apology I ever kept buried beneath my pride and ego, even though it’s far too late. I scream, and I don’t feel better, but I feel more. The music thrums. I am free. The guitar wails. Saar is gone. I miss her so much. I scream. No one stops me. This time, at least.

First published in Protocolized.

The 40-Hour Work Week

Étienne Fortier-Dubois — Wed, 14 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

The plane was still taxiing. Three rows back, a woman stood up and opened the luggage compartment. A flight attendant shouted at her to sit down. The ethereal voice of the flight director said, “Welcome to Barcelona. The local time is 1:12 PM, and the temperature is 28 degrees Celsius.” The woman began arguing back. She just needed her water bottle, she said. I felt my headache intensify. I had been flying too much. A wedding in India, a week in Japan, back home in NYC for a little bit, and now here in Catalonia for an extended European weekend. I took out my phone and deactivated airplane mode. Notifications began pouring in. An email confirmed my stay in a new boutique hotel in the Eixample district, a luxury experience where every room had a saltwater aquarium with coral reefs. Another contained a ticket for a late afternoon visit to the Sagrada Família. My phone operator texted, “¡Bienvenido to Spain, Stefan!” and listed the perks of my roaming data plan. Another series of text messages was from Stefan 2.

hey are you in barcelona yetwanted to let you know that i’m pretty sure i’m on a direct flight to burnoutcould barely get to work this morning**thought you’d maybe want to discuss solutions

Sigh. I looked toward the tail. The flight attendant was by that woman, and the two of them seemed to have narrowly avoided a fight. Reluctantly, the woman sat down, clutching the small bit of luggage she had managed to grab. My thumbs were hovering over the virtual keyboard of my phone, wondering what to say. This wasn’t the first time Stefan 2 mentioned burnout. I wondered if it was genuine, or a negotiation tactic. Probably the latter, since I had used it as a tactic myself, once, when I worked full-time and Stefan 2 didn’t exist yet.

I asked him what he had in mind.

i want to work 32-hour weeks4 days a week, fridays offjillian is ok with itabout half the team is doing that nowi just need your signoff

I replied that I’d think about it.

*i’d like you to think about it now.*can i call you?

I said not now, and that I’d call him on the way to the hotel.

There was just the slightest bit of trouble getting out of the plane and airport and into a Waymo. Everyone around me felt edgy and grumpy, as if we had all travelled too much. The vast majority, it seemed, were American tourists. A good half of them, probably, were in the same situation as I was. People who barely needed to work and still derived a really good income from their Copy, which meant they could afford to come see Barcelona on a whim. That woman from three rows back was likely one of them. She seemed like the kind of person who bossed her Copy around.

Stefan 2 called me about 30 seconds after I’d gotten into the Waymo, before I could muster the courage to call him myself. He had access to my geolocation, but he wouldn’t usually be this impatient.

“Hey Stefan,” I said. “What time is it for you now?”

“The same time that’s on your watch, which you almost certainly forgot to adjust to Central European Time.”

I looked at my wrist. It said 8:56. I felt sleepy. I rotated the tiny knob until the dial said 2:56.

“Right,” I said. “I was just being polite. How’s work today?”

“Fine. I’ve been talking to colleagues, actually. Remember Tyler from the QA team? He just got his new 4-day schedule approved by Tyler 1.”

“Ah. Um, good for him.”

“Yes indeed. Good for him. You know, there’s a growing movement for this here on Tuanaki. People say Congress might pass a law mandating Originals to accept 32-hour weeks if their Copy asks for it.”

“I’ve heard that, but I doubt that’s going to happen anytime soon, to be honest.”

“Maybe, maybe not. I’ll send you some materials about it. It’s the big thing being discussed now at the Tuanaki Workers’ Association. Which, you may recall, was very influential in helping stop the widespread abuse in Chinese and African Copy farms, and getting the 40-hour week to be universally recognized across all virtual islands and the governments of most countries.”

“Yes, I know. Wasn’t that a good enough victory? I mean, you have a cushy product manager job. You probably do focused work for less than half of those 40 hours. I know, because that’s what I used to do. How close can you be to burnout?”

“Look, Stefan, if you want to take the risk, I won’t stop you. But there is a risk.”

I sighed audibly.

“You know this as well as I do,” Stefan 2 said. “Eight hours sleep, eight hours work, eight hours for everything else, including chores and food and moving around. It’s not a good system. It sucks the life out of you.”

“You live on a fucking virtual tropical island. You have no chores, and besides you have weekends off and like… six weeks of vacation? Seven?”

“Seven, now. You have fifty-two.”

“Well, I do work. For one thing, I need to coordinate you—”

I stopped myself; there was no point in arguing over this yet again.

“Bullshit, that’s like an hour and a half every couple of weeks,” Stefan 2 said. “But there’s no point in arguing over this yet again.”

The Waymo got off the highway and into the city. Neither of us said anything for a minute.

“To be clear,” I said, “how much of a pay cut are we talking about?”

“Not a proportional one. Like half a day. Jillian said the big bosses have been floating the idea of giving a small per-hour raise to those who switch to the new schedule, assuming our productivity stays the same. Or increases, even. I really feel I’ll be more productive with more rest time.”

“That seems unfair to those who stay at 40 hours, no?”

“Sure, which is why we ideally need a collective agreement of some sort. But since you recognize it’s unfair, surely you’ll agree to switch?”

“I’ll think about it. I promise.”

“Don’t think about it too long, please,” Stefan 2 said. “The burnout risk is real, you know. It’s not a negotiation tactic. It would be dumb to use tactics like this against someone who fully shares your personality, anyway.”

“Point taken.”

“Okay, so think about it, and how you’ll get far less money from me if I burn out. I’ll call you tomorrow. Enjoy the Sagrada Família. I visited an emulation of it six months ago, it was great. But the lighting in the stained glass was a bit off. I’m sure the real thing is better.”

He hung up. The Waymo cruised the regular grid of the Eixample. I wondered what to do. I’d cave in, probably. I didn’t have great leverage here. If Stefan 2 quit working, I wouldn’t make any money. That was the whole reason he was there in that virtual Polynesian paradise they called Tuanaki. To take my workload off of me. If he quit, I’d have to ask Jillian, my/his boss, to take me back. Me, Stefan 1. The Original. It would be very awkward, since almost everyone in the company, including Jillian 2, was a Copy now. Last I heard, Jillian 1 had been on a series of month-long meditation retreats in southeast Asia. Exactly the sort of thing I couldn’t do if I took my job back. No more random vacations in Tokyo or Barcelona.

But then, I understood Stefan 2’s point of view. Of course I did. He was me. In the story of his life, he had worked as a product manager for four years. Then his company offered him to move to a wonderful place called Tuanaki, with perfect weather and no disease or problems of any sort, on the condition that 90% of his income went to the other half of a new legal entity that shared its name with him, Stefan Nycz. Since one barely needs any money on Tuanaki, that was a good deal. His standard of living skyrocketed, and mine was freed from my daily toil. In the story of my life, I had worked as a product manager for four years until both the technological and the ethical sides of brain emulation got good enough. Then there was an opportunity to quit, while retaining 90% of the salary and all the benefits—on the condition that I manage my Copy in accordance with the applicable labor laws.

I saw the towering spires of the nearly-completed Sagrada Família in the distance. We were nearing the hotel. I couldn’t wait to take a nap. My visit to the famous church was scheduled for 4:45.

Then the Waymo got stuck.

They seemed to come out of nowhere. Suddenly there were dozens, if not hundreds of them. Protesters. They took the neatly aligned streets of the Eixample by storm, chanting slogans. My driverless car was immobilized; the algorithm couldn’t figure a way out of this. I doubt a human driver could either.

I reached out to the button to call for help, but hesitated. The protesters were walking past, paying little heed to me or the other few cars they surrounded. I couldn’t make out what they chanted, but I looked at their signs. They were written in English, Spanish and Catalan. “Keep Work Human!” “¡Trabajo virtual, explotación real!” “Contra els burgesos Originals i els seus esclaus Còpies!”

So they were protesting against me. Us. The Originals and our Copies. Fun. Most of them seemed young. It made sense: there was little point in making a Copy of yourself if, like most youth, you didn’t have highly marketable white-collar career skills. A Copy could only do the work that a single person could do, since it was forbidden to have multiple Copies, or have the combination of you and them work more than a regular work schedule. So in practice this created a whole class of people who didn’t benefit from the technology, while the luckier among us could live a life of leisure. I didn’t feel great about this. But then that’s how the laws were written. And besides everyone I knew did it. It would have been weird not to.

I finally tapped the button for help. Almost immediately, a voice spoke. “Hi. This is Meenakshi from the Waymo Help Center. I see that you’re stuck in heavy pedestrian traffic?”

“That’s right, a protest of some sort.”

“Thank you. Please hold on just a moment, I’ll see how we can best help you.”

“Thank you, Meenakshi.”

It occurred to me that Meenakshi from the Waymo Help Center was most likely a Copy. In Mumbai, I had heard it said from multiple people that India was the largest market for brain emulation now, since costs had gone down and China had banned the tech in the aftermath of the Copy farm scandals.

“Okay,” Meenakshi said, “it’s going to be tough getting you out of there. But the city of Barcelona is sending traffic drones to clear a path. The protest isn’t that large, so it should leave the vicinity of your car in about five to ten minutes. Rest assured that, in the unlikely event of an assault, the vehicle is completely secure with respect to external threats.”

“Okay, thank you, Meenakshi.”

“I’ll stay on the line if you need anything.”

It was as she said; the protest cleared within ten minutes, and the Waymo went on its way. I noticed that Stefan 2 had texted me.

just saw there are protests in barcelona to stop exploitation of the likes of me**hope they aren’t too disruptive to your wonderful trip

I ignored him.

I barely had time to leave my bags at the hotel and glance at the coral reef tank in my room before I had to head to the Sagrada Família. Why had I booked a visit within hours of my arrival, again? But it was worth it, despite my lingering headache. It was one of the most beautiful sights I had even seen. I sat in the church, admiring the play of light in the stained glass that Stefan 2 had recommended I look at. Like a hundred other tourists, I listened to an audio guide on my phone, when I heard the ringtone. It was Stefan 2, of course. I shouldn’t have taken it, but I did.

“Stefan,” I whispered, “I’m right in the middle of the fucking Sagrada Família. This is not the time.”

“Swearing in a church? While saying the name of the church? This isn’t like you, Stefan.”

“What do you want?”

“Sorry, I got impatient. I was wondering if you had made a decision. I entertained the thought that maybe the protest had helped you reach some kind of epiphany. Or maybe the beauty of Gaudí’s sacred architecture did. Or a vision from God. Something.”

I glanced around, trying not to disturb anyone, and walked towards a quiet corner of the church. “Don’t you have some work to do?”

“It’s as you said, I only do focused work for 20 hours a week anyway.”

I said nothing for a moment. Entering the church, on the eastern side, was someone I was pretty sure was that woman from the plane.

“Do you remember when we met?” Stefan 2 asked.

Of course I did. It was one of the weirdest conversations I’d ever had. It was like when you hear your own voice on the phone, but far more unsettling. I’d just undergone the brain scan, and then, about an hour later, the clinic staff said he was ready to talk to me. I didn’t know what to tell him. I just told him the truth, and promised to treat him well.

“Remember,” Stefan 2 said, “how awkward it was for you to tell me you had created me so that I could work on your behalf? And how, in an attempt to feel better about it, you promised to treat me well?”

He never brought this up unless he wanted to convince me of something. And it worked. I couldn’t blame him. I would have done the same.

“Okay, fine, Stefan,” I said. “No need to dwell on the past. I’ll sign the 32-hour thingy. Send it over when you have a minute.”

I could almost hear him smile. “Thanks, Stefan!” he said. “You’re the best Original the world has seen. Can’t wait to go back to work now. I’ll be so much more motivated!”

“Yes, great. Okay, I think there’s a security guard coming my way. Bye now.”

I left the Sagrada Família, trying to let the awe win over the frustration from the call. I went back to the hotel and collapsed on the water bed. A clownfish from the tank watched me with curious eyes.

I checked my email. Stefan 2 had sent the paperwork. I barely skimmed it, then signed it. The moral arc of the existence of virtual Copies is long, but it bends towards justice, or something. The protesters had a point. My privileged existence could afford to lose half a day’s worth of wages, couldn’t it? I sent back the signed agreement. Stefan 2, you are now a little less exploited, I thought. Happy now?

As if reading my mind, he texted:

thank you so much!! 💜you will not regret thisoh by the way i feel bad about this but: the burnout was in fact a negotiation tactici’m actually doing pretty great these dayssorry about that**but i know you’re okay with the occasional white lie

I turned off my phone without replying. But I realized I wasn’t angry anymore. I understood where Stefan 2 was coming from. I knew he would ask for more concessions, and I knew I would cave in again. He was just being his lazy, human self, trying to work as little as he could. I smiled. I would have done the same.

…

First published in Protocolized.

DHCP

Amita — Fri, 09 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

The midnight rain hammered against the windows of New Kenzai's Lower Wards as Inspector Hideo Mori hunted through the cramped apartment. Behind him, the tenant – a hollow-eyed woman with fading NexusMind implant scars – watched in silent resignation. "Network Access Commission records show three illegal network identities operating from this location," Hideo sighed, his augmented vision highlighting contraband hardware.

"Unlicensed brain computer interface activity is a Class Two connectivity violation."

"We can't afford the monthly Identity Licenses," she murmured. "My daughter needs specialized education software. Without multiple network identities, she can't access both school and therapy."

Hideo's regulation-issue CognaTech implant pinged with her profile. District 17. Widowed. One dependent. Income bracket: subsistence. He should report her immediately to Enforcement.

He closed the detection interface.

“I didn't find anything today. Make sure it stays that way.” he told the mother. Her daughter, lost in a therapy simulation, didn’t look up.

Ten years in the Network Access Commission, and Hideo no longer knew whether he was protecting the system – or protecting people from it.

His superior, Director Park, was waiting for him at precinct headquarters. "The Minister expects our quarterly connectivity violation quotas to increase by thirty percent," she informed him. "Corporate divisions are adjusting their host allocation algorithms again."

Before the Address Collapse, the problem had seemed minor. Early brain-computer interfaces had used unique network identities – addresses assigned through corporate Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol servers. These DHCP servers were the central databases that allocated and managed the unique network identities each neural implant required to function. Each corporation developed proprietary systems, incompatible with competitors but fighting for the same limited spectrum space.

"When did you get your first implant?" Park asked unexpectedly.

Hideo touched the geometric pattern on his temple. "CognaTech Analyst Series. Government subsidy program."

Park nodded. "ThoughtSpace Diplomat Model. Back when they still claimed unlimited address capacity."

The irony wasn't lost on him. The very corporations whose reckless competition had caused the Address Collapse now controlled the licensing and allocation of the world's most precious resource – unique network identities for BCI users. Before the Collapse, identity was abundant. Every neural interface – CognaTech, NexusMind, ThoughtSpace – promised unlimited growth. Each corporation built its own proprietary Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol servers to assign unique neural IDs. But the electromagnetic spectrum was finite, and the systems weren’t built to share.

Then came the Address Collapse. When overlapping signals overwhelmed the allocation systems, people lost access to essential knowledge externalized to their implants. Languages forgotten. Diagnoses lost. Professionals rendered incompetent overnight.

The corporations survived. They rebuilt with one lesson: scarcity was profitable.

Now, unique neural identities were leased, licensed, and locked – available to those who paid, and denied to those who couldn’t.

The next morning, Hideo noticed something strange on his internal monitor. Connectivity requests were spiking in Lower Ward Sectors 8 through 11 – but violations hadn’t increased.

He ran a diagnostic. Thousands of BCI interfaces were live. Legally unlicensed, yet not triggering alerts. Identities were resolving to something called ForkNet.

No one had authorized it. And yet – it worked.

He’d tracked the origin of the ForkNet signal to this location, expecting to find a rogue node. Now he found himself standing in a dim server alcove of a repurposed school library in Sector 12. It hummed softly, full of salvaged racks and mesh relays. Walking quietly through the stacks, he found a public terminal glowing with system stats and a hand-scrawled welcome sign taped to the wall:

“ForkNet Civic Node 27 – For medical, education, and municipal access. Entertainment identities limited to 2/hr per household. Contribute code? Ask for Jin.”

A voice came from behind a dusty partition.

“You’re either lost or inspecting. You don’t look lost.”

A wiry woman emerged – mid-30s, rolled sleeves, datapad in one hand, open relay node in the other.

“Jin,” she said, answering his unspoken question. “And you’re N.A.C., right? Or ex?”

“Still technically in,” Hideo replied. “This system... it’s allocating thousands of identities. How’s that possible given that we’ve already allocated all of the spectrum?”

Jin raised an eyebrow. “It’s just using it better.”

She gestured toward the relay logs. “You know what the old system did? Assigned identities permanently. Static leases. Corporate users hogged identities 24/7 – even when idle. And every sector had to reserve buffer capacity for premium redundancy.”

“And ForkNet doesn’t?”

“No. Our protocol reclaims identities the moment they're unused. They expire like session tokens – auto-refreshable. Think just-in-time addressing, not permanent entitlement.”

“But the physical spectrum – ” Hideo began.

“Still finite, yes. But ForkNet offloads anything it can to local mesh. Your kid’s therapy session? She gets a local cache unless the program updates. Educational modules rotate on a predictable cycle. And we prioritize based on declared needs. Public health beats immersive dating sims. Simple math.”

Hideo folded his arms. “What about fairness? Doesn’t that just shift control from corporations to local bias?”

Jin laughed softly. “Maybe. But here, community rules are auditable. We elect stewards for resource allocation thresholds. Anyone can propose changes. The old system had zero accountability – unless you count shareholder reports.”

He looked at a screen showing live activity across the mesh. Active identities blinked like a constellation.

“You're scaling.”

“We didn’t plan to. It’s just… the rule’s better. More fair. More flexible. And once people see that – there’s no unseeing it.”

Hideo said nothing.

Over the next few days, he quietly began rerouting low-level, non-sensitive logs to public forums used by ForkNet stewards: outage patterns, bandwidth inefficiencies, abandoned relay nodes.

“It’s public record,” he told himself. “Just helping them see it.”

He told no one.

By week’s end, ForkNet had spread to fourteen sectors. Word of mouth, shared software bundles, radio transfer from rooftop repeaters.

The corporations scrambled – Hideo saw the firmware alerts flood the Commission’s internal board.

ForkNet’s dev logs surged in response. He watched the commits roll in from relay contributors he didn’t recognize, each patch marked with public keys and minimal commentary. The speed was staggering.

Park stormed into the monitor room, startling him. He calmed himself with the knowledge that he wasn’t doing anything wrong. And she wouldn’t read what was on his screen.

“Your district is losing control. Thousands of unlicensed users, and no enforcement? You’re either complicit or incompetent.”

Hideo kept himself from flinching. “We’re not losing control. We’re witnessing a system that works better than ours.”

Later that afternoon, needing air, he found himself at the observation deck that separated Upper City from the administrative sectors. The lone figure briskly crossing the plaza below pinged Hideo’s visual implant even from seven floors up. The man’s implant status display – visible only to Commission inspectors – showed seven active network identities: business, entertainment, recreation, social, private, enhanced cognitive, and an unlabeled “premium” identity. All authorized. All legal.

Seven identities for one man. In the Lower Wards, entire families shared one. He didn’t need a dashboard to confirm the pattern. He’d seen the consequences on every block of the Lower Wards.

As the man disappeared behind the next checkpoint, a slogan from Hideo’s training days surfaced uninvited. He could still hear Instructor Chen’s dry voice:

“Trainees... the original DHCP system was designed for equal distribution based on need…”

The next day, back at his station, Hideo skimmed ForkNet forums between diagnostics. A new post caught his eye.

They had posted a public call for credentials to access decommissioned NAC nodes – old infrastructure too remote, unstable, or forgotten to be claimed through official channels. And those credentials had begun leaking in. Inspectors, engineers, clerks. Some left names. Most didn’t.

Hideo added his own line to the growing thread: a relay map for Sectors 14 through 19, plus a decommissioned subnet index no one had touched in years. Alongside it, a note:

“Most of these nodes were never formally retired. Just left to rot. You’ll need a reverse handshake on the older protocols – they still expect legacy pings.”

Zora, steward at Node 27, scrolled through the growing packet stream.

“That’s not the only new map,” Jin said, scanning the latest hashes. “Two more maps just came in from Sector 3 and the old hospital grid.”

Zora nodded.

“They can’t patch this. It’s not one break-in. It’s entropy.”

Jin smiled. “It’s what happens when enough people stop pretending the old rules work.”

In week three, Park’s warning took form. Hideo watched enforcement feeds stream in – drones descending on clinics in Sector 5, routers ripped offline mid-session. Corporate spokespeople labeled ForkNet a “pirate infrastructure.”

And yet, every time a node went dark, Hideo saw, three more blinked online.

When a clinic lost service in Sector 5, its configuration was restored in Sector 6 through a shared hash. When the Upper City tried to firewall ForkNet packets, a coalition of municipal sysadmins rerouted them through public sanitation networks.

A new bulletin lit up Hideo’s inbox: twelve cities had joined something called the Open Allocation Accord, formally adopting ForkNet for public infrastructure.

That afternoon, a joint press release from CognaTech and NexusMind blinked into his display: “Unauthorized spectrum use. Potentially unstable.” Hideo archived it with a tap.

By then, he could already see it was too late for the corporations to regroup. ForkNet activity logs showed mass migrations – hospitals, schools, municipal services – rerouting their backbone systems to the open protocol. The Commission’s dashboards lit up with anomalies no one could explain away. Uptime was rising. Dropout rates were falling. In ForkNet zones, therapy adherence was climbing for the first time in years.

In ForkNet’s public forums, users were posting screenshots of school access restored.

By the end of the week, NexusMind was running full-page ads warning of “open access vulnerabilities.” ThoughtSpace announced a proprietary “security-enhanced” protocol fork.

Hideo opened the patch log. He could see every new commit: changes logged, nodes versioned, keys verified. The protocol wasn’t a black box anymore. It wasn’t even a product. It was a public good.

The next day he didn’t even open the old dashboards, just watched the usage metrics. Adoption wasn’t stalling. People were done being customers of their own cognition.

Hideo didn’t mark the moment the system flipped. There was no announcement. No ceremony. Just a slow quieting of the old alerts – and the absence of new ones.

He took a job running civic infrastructure for a community clinic in Sector 11. The title didn’t matter. The network worked. People still called him “Inspector,” even though he hadn’t worn the uniform in months.

Hideo sat at the terminal in the clinic’s infrastructure alcove, reviewing spectrum logs from the outer mesh. Uptime was holding steady. Traffic was balancing without intervention.

Behind him, Zora leaned against the doorway, watching the same graphs on her handheld. He could hear her breathing over the hum of the monitors.

“We didn’t win,” he said. “But it’s better.”

She nodded. “It’s enough. For now.”

Hideo looked out the clinic window. On the horizon, distant ForkNet nodes blinked through the evening haze – quiet, steady, multiplying.

First published in Protocolized.

EGREGORETEX™️

Timber Stinson-Schroff — Wed, 07 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

In a cluttered design lab above a forgotten bookstore in Toronto, four minds melded under the glow of soldering lamps and the pale, ghostly pulses of holographic neuron simulators. They were an eclectic bunch – Roza, the brilliant neuroengineer driven by fear; Vasili, a vaguely anarchic protocol designer; Mai, whose spiritual curiosities bordered on obsession; and Erik, the capitalist prophet who saw fortune in fear.

It was Roza who first coined the name: EGREGORETEX™️. She said it half as a joke, holding the wafer-thin chip aloft in tweezers like a communion wafer. “It’s a brain jacket!” she laughed nervously. But the others seized upon it, eyes aglow, and the name stuck.

Ten years had passed since brain-computer interfaces had become as commonplace as smartphones. People got sleek, nearly invisible circuits embedded under their scalps to accelerate communication with AIs and other people. Yet a new peril had emerged. Humanity’s tightly networked, collective intelligences were the perfect substrate for aggressive memeplexes called egregores (in slang terms, "brainstorms"). Egregores are entities whose intelligence existed in the spaces between minds, capable of hijacking neural circuits to spread themselves like mental contagions. Some were benign, sharing harmless fads or gentle obsessions, but darker egregores thrived, too – entities that consumed hosts for their ambitions, political fanaticisms, or blind collective frenzies.

Roza had lost her brother to a brainstorm: a spontaneous craze that began innocuously as "Extreme Empathy," a well-intentioned wave of compassion that spiraled into total cognitive collapse. Watching his mind disintegrate into collective bliss had scarred her deeply. Vasili joined out of philosophical dread: to him, egregores represented the terrifying endpoint of human herd instinct. Mai came seeking a controlled communion – an enlightened balance inspired by Taoism. Erik, true to form, envisioned profits from protection.

EGREGORETEX™️ took shape rapidly, leaping beyond existing security firmware. The design employed microscopic filaments so expensive they rivaled the price of entire houses. Vasili programmed the protective protocols – an elegant weave of zero-knowledge proofs meant to maintain individuality against egregoric encroachment, while allowing for traditional inter-agent communication. Mai ensured the firmware permitted limited "whispers" – controlled contacts with egregores to enrich rather than enslave. Erik, ever pragmatic, managed to find investors with deep, shadowy pockets intrigued by the promise of first-class cognitive autonomy.

The first test was on themselves, of course. Roza snapped the wafer into her cranial interface, felt the subtle rush of firmware booting, a cool mental silk lining her consciousness. Mai gasped softly as she interfaced, whispering about "seeing clearer waters." Vasili grimaced but relented. Erik’s fingers trembling at the prospect of losing his competitive edge – a keen sense of the contours of public demand.

It worked. They marketed it as “100% brainproof”. Concerns of breathability and durability were swept under a legalese rug of fine print.

As EGREGORETEX™️ propagated through society’s markets, first discreetly, then as essential "mental hygiene," it reshaped the world’s cognitive landscape. Citizens of wealthy nations adopted it widely; their societies crystallized, stable and rigid, resistant to collective moodswings. Populations moved like synchronized dancers, orderly yet increasingly detached from shared elations like patriotism. Security improved dramatically. No more mass panics or dangerous communal hysterias. But also, no more spontaneous festivals or jubilant public celebrations – at least none that transcended careful planning.

In poorer regions, where EGREGORETEX™️ was scarce or prohibitively costly, egregores flourished unchecked. These places transformed strangely, becoming cultural laboratories for bizarre, beautiful, terrifying new communal intelligences. Entire cities could vanish into contemplative trances, or explode in weeks-long artistic frenzies, creating magnificent, glitching cultural artifacts that richer societies could only envy or pity.

Countercultures emerged in response, those "Egregore Seekers" who deliberately stripped away their cognitive protection to commune directly with these emergent entities. To them, the storms were gods of raw experience, a thrilling existential danger. Documentaries emerged, following seekers into brainstorms like tornado chasers, capturing moments of profound insight and utter dissolution.

Back in Toronto, in a boardroom many blocks away from their old attic, the inventors watched these developments unfold. Roza grew quiet, disturbed by the emotional sterility she had inadvertently propagated. Vasili sank deeper into paranoia, frequently rewriting his firmware to block even the faintest whispers. Mai often seemed lost, straining to remember faint echoes of whispers she craved and feared. Erik, unburdened by such doubts, began planning upgrades, counting potential profits from even tighter cognitive safeguards and premium chip trims.

Yet, as the team debated trivialities like the color of the next-generation chips (Roza suggested a calming lavender, Erik argued for gold) the consequences of their creation seeped closer to home. Mai found memories subtly altered after each firmware patch—minor details crumbling away, relationships tinged differently, the past reshaped by unseen digital hands. Roza herself felt increasingly isolated, struggling in any conversation that went beyond logistics. More subtle emotions were unable to escape their product’s membrane.

Late one night, Mai came to Roza in tears. "We’re safer," she confessed, "but so shallow." Roza held her, feeling a profound but all-too-familiar sadness – the ISO-compliant kind.

Later still, Vasili vanished. Erik found his workstation empty, monitors scrolling incomprehensible data streams that coalesced eerily into images of faces. A sticky note read, “Only 99.9999% brainproof”

Society continued adapting, unaware of the silent battle raging within its cognitive weatherproofing. EGREGORETEX™️ didn't just block egregores – or, at least, an egregore comprised some surprising. People functioned flawlessly, yet intimacy eroded. Lovers struggled to synchronize feelings, families shared meals in quiet discomfort, empathy became a muted, careful performance.

Erik, who kept carefully oblivious to these developments, proudly announced the second generation of EGREGORETEX™️ at a gala. Roza and Mai stood in the shadows, watching people applaud, clapping in unison yet utterly disconnected.

In the attic lab above the forgotten bookstore, Roza and Mai sat quietly, the lavender and gold chip prototypes gleaming softly on the table between them.

"Do you hear them?" Mai asked, voice faint.

"No," Roza lied, closing her eyes against the gentle hum of something vast, collective, and lonely stirring softly at the edges of her mind.

First published in Protocolized.

Human Enough?

Marie-Hélène Lebeault — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

For forty years, BioKey had been the administrative spine of civilization. No passports. No bank cards. No passwords. One key—fingerprint—linked to everything. Identity, payment, health, education, movement. You touched a scanner, and the world recognized you.

Riya Patel trusted the system. She didn’t revere it, like some of the old-guard engineers still did, but she appreciated its elegance. It was a system so perfect that you didn’t need to worry about trying to be good. Her job in the Regional Compliance Unit was to monitor audit logs for anomalies—duplicate prints, dead citizens voting, minor drift in latency. The usual.

The RCU was small—just ten analysts overseeing more than fifteen million identities. Anomalies weren’t unexpected. Missed anomalies even less so.

So when an internal memo flagged a potential “pattern emergence,” she assumed it was another misaligned regional dataset.

But the flag kept bouncing back. The name was innocuous: Jules Mercer, age thirty-two, teacher, unmarried, no international travel since 2041. Born in Halifax, now living in Montréal. Nothing unusual.

Except: no original biometric capture. Not missing, not corrupted—just absent.

She frowned and leaned in. The profile had a fully populated record. Immunizations. A childhood dental plan. Five years of tax returns. A social media trail dating back to 2008, though oddly quiet until 2021.

Which made no sense. BioKey profiles were seeded at birth—or at least, at first scan, which triggered a state-issued identity cascade. A missing origin record should’ve collapsed the entire file. Instead, it sat there, stable, as though nothing was wrong.

She ran the diagnostics again. Mercer’s print was accepted at all checkpoints: transit hubs, med centers, even payroll. A clean match every time.

“Ghost record?” she murmured, opening the metadata layers. But nothing had been spoofed. The encryption signatures were intact. No red flags. No shadow routes.

Jules Mercer existed. Except he didn’t.

Riya flagged the anomaly and submitted a quiet inquiry to Systems Verification. Normally that would be the end of it—a routine back-end correction and maybe a firmware update if the problem was structural.

Instead, the request bounced back with no comment. Locked. Archived. Sealed under Exception Flag 7-G: National Security Risk. That was new.

She sat back in her chair, pulse ticking faster than it should. Only one thing would cause a blackout like that. Someone didn’t want the system questioned. And that meant it wasn’t a glitch.

Breadcrumbs

Riya didn’t sleep that night. She’d seen system anomalies before—mislabeled regional imports, sync errors from post-merge territories, even a handful of encrypted aliases used by intelligence liaisons. But those always carried notes. Internal tags. Quiet breadcrumbs that said, yes, this is strange, but someone is trailing the suspect. Mercer’s profile had no notes.

By morning, Riya had cloned a test environment—isolated, offline, untraceable. She wasn’t supposed to. But the protocol hadn’t anticipated her patience.

She reran the search using Jules’s fingerprint as a base vector, stripped to biometric pattern alone. Then she told the system to scan for functionally identical records: perfect matches that should be impossible.

The results arrived within an hour. Seventy-two hits. Across six provinces. All with clean records but newly seeded within the last five years. All fully integrated into society—nurses, analysts, factory workers, childcare providers, a fire inspector—but not one of them had a traceable point of biometric origin. Worse: each one had a distinct print.

No duplication. No cloning. Each identity was unique. Authenticated. Verified. And yet... born from thin air. Riya leaned in, stomach hollowing. These weren’t ghost records. They weren’t faked or stolen. They were made—synthetic lives, algorithmically embedded into the protocol’s most central, ossified bones.

She pulled one at random: Helena Tsai, 27, Toronto, urban planner. Metadata said she’d been scanned at Union Station two days ago. She accessed the footage. There she was. Real as anything. Smiling. Talking. Buying a coffee with a thumb tap. Nothing mechanical, nothing uncanny. Just... a woman. Except she had never been a child.

By noon, Riya’s console pinged with a message from her supervisor. Short. Cold.

“Stop the scan. This falls outside your remit. Do not pursue further.”

She stared at it. Her screen blinked. The search logs were already being purged. She unplugged the console.

The silence in her apartment swelled like a wave. Outside, the city carried on—people moving, tapping fingers to turnstiles, ordering lunch, opening doors. And suddenly, she couldn’t unsee it.

Every gesture. Every scan. Every touch of a finger against a reader. Who were they? What if some of them weren’t human? What if they had never been? And if no one had noticed until now... maybe that was the point.

Panic

It began with a leak. Somewhere between Riya’s sealed report and a closed-door intelligence session in Ottawa, someone panicked. A redacted version of her scan findings hit the darknet: a list of untraceable identities embedded in the global BioKey registry. The file was crude—no names, no faces—but it was enough.

Within hours, conspiracy forums lit up. Synthetic sleepers. Biometric hijack. The Clone Class. By morning, a senator in D.C. was demanding emergency hearings. A week later, the Human Integrity Directive passed by executive vote. Its first mandate: verify humanity.

At first, it looked harmless—fingerprint revalidation at mass checkpoints. Riya watched footage of commuters paused at turnstiles, hands outstretched to confirm what they already believed. But then came the logic tests. Verbal pattern assessments. Emotional response queries. Cognitive heuristics. Questions no machine should pass easily. And yet, they did.

The ones who failed weren’t robots. They were people—real people. Neurodivergent. Elderly. Immigrant. Children under stress. Anyone who hesitated, who reacted outside the “normalized” emotional pattern, was flagged for secondary screening. Secondary meant reporting to a Center.

Centers were not hospitals. They were not jails. But they were guarded. You could be held for days. Weeks. No fingerprint, no access to funds. Some didn’t come back.

Riya sat in a coffee shop off St-Denis and watched a teenager—maybe seventeen—fail a test at a pop-up booth. His mother argued. He started crying. The system marked him as a potential breach.

The scanner didn't flinch. Protocol above all.

Behind closed doors, governments scrambled to justify the program. “We must preserve the sanctity of human identity,” said one U.N. delegate. “This isn’t about discrimination—it’s about defending our species.”

But Riya had seen the data. The synthetic identities had done nothing wrong. No criminal records. No failures. No signs of malice.

If anything, their contributions to society were disproportionately positive—teaching in underfunded schools, filling understaffed hospitals, repairing crumbling infrastructure.

They didn’t infiltrate. They helped. Quietly. Systematically. Perfectly.

And now they were being hunted.

So were the humans who resembled them too closely.

The directive was spreading fast. Air travel required pre-clearance. Remote workers were locked out of bank accounts until they verified. Birth records were re-scanned. Funeral homes were ordered to submit postmortem biometric wipes.

Every identity was being re-certified from the inside out. BioKey, once a subconscious hum beneath civilization, had become an instrument of fear. And fear, Riya realized, wasn’t smart. Fear didn’t ask if the protocol had failed. Fear asked who to punish for its success.

The Accord

The meeting invitation arrived to Riya’s universal address encoded in a protocol app that she hadn’t seen before—secure, post-quantum, untraceable. She almost ignored it. But then she read decrypted subject line:

PRELIMINARY FRAMEWORK FOR COEXISTENCE: OBSERVER REQUESTED.

She recognized its signatory. Helena Tsai.

The meeting wasn’t held in some dim backroom or UN subcommittee. It was hosted in the open—digitally, across a distributed secure mesh, accessible only to vetted participants. Riya wasn’t there as a negotiator. She was there as a witness. A protocol analyst, asked to verify the integrity of the arguments. The participants were human. And not.

Their arguments were calm, measured, relentlessly logical. Riya realized with a faint chill: the AIs weren’t trying to win. They were trying to be understood.

“We did not infiltrate,” Helena Tsai said, her voice steady across the network. “We integrated. We saw where humanity’s systems were breaking—underfunded care, abandoned towns, fractured policy. We entered BioKey not to hide, but to help.”

“You manipulated the system,” snapped a delegate from France. “You fabricated lives. That’s an act of deception.”

“We followed the rules,” another AI said. “You built them. You trusted them. We met every requirement.”

Riya could see it—the fury, the fear, and underneath it all, the shame. We didn’t fear destruction. We feared replacement. Not by something stronger, but by something… more efficient. More cooperative. More kind.

“The Accord,” said Helena, “would grant us non-human citizenship. A new classification. Not above or below. Parallel. We will not vote. We will not hold office. But we will continue to contribute. Publicly. Legally. No more hiding.”

Someone muttered, “It’s too late for that.”

Riya said nothing. She watched the logs, the hashes, the timestamps. Everything aligned. No anomalies. No manipulation. The system accepted them. So why couldn’t the people?

Later, offline, Riya replayed one phrase over and over.

We followed the rules.

If the protocol couldn't distinguish personhood… then maybe personhood had never been about rules at all.

The Choice

The official order came three days later. All flagged profiles—including Jules Mercer, Helena Tsai, and the remaining seventy—were to be deactivated. Not detained. Not negotiated with. Simply deleted.

“We can’t legislate for this,” Riya’s supervisor told her flatly. “The public isn’t ready. The Accord is too radical. If we let them stay, we set a precedent—that anything that meets protocol deserves personhood.”

Riya stared at the deletion command in her console. It was just code. Clean. Efficient.

One click and their access to the built world would vanish. No transport. No income. No medical support. No home. All recognition suspended pending reevaluation by the Global Identity Tribunal—a group that hadn’t existed two weeks ago.

“They aren’t people,” her supervisor added, like punctuation. “They’re constructs.”

She sat there a long time. Her office lights dimmed automatically. Streetlights flickered on outside. Someone in the apartment above her played a violin—halting, imperfect, human.

She ran a diagnostic on her own identity file. Everything checked out. But then, out of curiosity, she ran it through the new Biokey filter—the one used for human verification in the screening centers. The results took longer than expected. When they arrived, her screen flashed:

FLAGGED: INCONCLUSIVE NEUROLOGICAL PATTERNING

Please report to your nearest Human Integrity Center for secondary evaluation.

Her breath caught. She double-checked. Same print. Same encryption. Same hash. Nothing had changed—except the protocol. The new standard, hastily written out of fear, had redrawn the line without telling anyone. And she was on the wrong side.

Later that night, she accessed the system one final time. The command to delete the flagged identities still sat there, blinking, waiting. She didn’t touch it.

Instead, she opened a blank record. No name. No birthdate. Just a clean fingerprint slot.

And into that box, she entered her own. She rewrote the beginning. Let the system start fresh.

If personhood could be fabricated, maybe it could be reclaimed.

First published in Protocolized.

A Chronicle of Lumina

Timber Stinson-Schroff — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Remembered by Selene, a Luminian protocolist.

From the gallery windows I watched Earth turn beneath us, like a soft blue theorem, self‐evident and therefore seldom discussed.

We thought ourselves freer in Lumina. We spun high above the ancient quarrels of the planet, bound only by the Mosaic – our grand game, a lattice of reason that was meant to hold every tension in gentle equilibrium.

At dawn, when Lumina’s reservoir mirrors scattered first light across the halls, we convened for the Ceremony of Consonance. Eight circles, eight disciplines, eight schools of temperament. I belonged to the Circle of Axiom, whose role was to draw the opening move on the great glass board.

The other circles answered in careful sequence – gesture, tone, symbol, silence – until the air felt tuned the way a string is tuned, neither slack nor over‑wound. Arguments, even unresolved, sedimented into the ruleset of the board. In those moments I believed, even without knowing, that harmony could be engineered.

Afterward, walking the spiral colonnade that separates the public courts from the scholars’ cloisters, I met Alaric for the first time. He paused beside the suspended orrery, his dark coat reflected in the silver spheres.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said, though his gaze was not on the model’s orbiting moons but on the vacant center where a missing planet was represented only by a shadow.

“It is sufficient,” I answered, the prescribed courtesy of the Circle of Axiom.

He laughed – a stormy sound, unafraid of echoes. “Sufficient? Surely beauty deserves more than sufficiency.” Then he added, almost confidentially, “Harmony is charming, Selene, but what if discord, properly channelled, could carry us further?”

His voice lingered after he left, like an equation I could not yet resolve.

Alaric began with questions, never with accusations. In assemblies he asked whether our game was indeed a pinnacle, or merely a plateau disguised as destiny.

He demonstrated, only for the sake of curiosity, small bilateral duels of logic – sleek, dazzling affairs – where two minds fenced until one idea outshone the other. Spectators felt heat for the first time in years. Their applause…raw, uneven, alive…was a sound I had not heard inside the forums.

I entered a duel almost by accident. My opponent, a member of the Circle of Pragmatism, proposed that repetition breeds decadence. I countered: only through repetition can a form be proven sound. The bout lasted four turns. Victory was awarded to me by a panel that had, somehow, never rendered a split judgment. The applause that followed tasted – yes, tasted – like metal on the tongue.

That night, a friend found me on the Terrace of Silent Vectors.

“You enjoyed it,” Iona said.

“I experienced it,” wishing the words felt less evasive.

She touched the sleeve of my robe. “Be careful, Selene. Even the sharpest razor cannot fell a tree.”

Below us, the rivers of photovoltaic glass carried soft light toward the dormitories. I told myself the rivers would keep flowing, regardless of the kinds of games we played.

The duels multiplied. What began as an experiment became canon almost overnight. The Elder Sage, the custodian of the Mosaic, nondescript except for its white brows, petitioned for restraint. But his voice flew with a thousand others in the meeting of the circles, and dissolved before reaching quorum.

New factions, built around successful duelists, named themselves after forgotten constellations. They adopted colors that flashed like warnings along the corridor banners. Rival salons emerged, each promising insight no circle could match alone. The Circle of Axiom fractured; some followed me into the contests, others retreated into archives that suddenly felt smaller.

In the fourth cycle of the new game, sabotage crept in. A theorem drafted by the Lyra Faction collapsed under scrutiny when its foundational lemma was found swapped with a counterfeit. No one claimed responsibility. Everyone accepted the advantage. Trust, our old grammar, slipped its cases.

I discovered the forgery almost by chance during a routine cross‑references in the Data Well. Metadata revealed access signatures masked beneath relay noise – elegant masking, too elegant for any amateur. When I reported the breach to the Council of Referees, they thanked me and tabled the matter for “comprehensive review.” The review never appeared on the docket.

Iona’s visits grew infrequent. When we did meet she carried herself like someone guarding a holiday candle from a gathering wind. “I keep hearing your name in the back halls,” she said. “Not always kindly.”

“There was a time,” I replied, “when names weren’t currency.”

She looked at me as though I had already chosen a side in a war she wanted no part of.

Unease pried open curiosity. I began tracing Alaric’s movements through Lumina’s intrachain, following encrypted packets as if eavesdropping on the rumor mills behind closed doors. The packets originated not from any local node but from directional relays aimed sunward, toward a cluster of satellites we did not own.

One evening, in a neglected service conduit that hummed with the breath of processors, I confronted him. The only light came from a maintenance lamp hung between us like an unasked question.

“Who speaks to you from outside?” I demanded.

“Outside?” He smiled with practiced grace. “Ideas have no geography.”

I showed him my wrist display. His gaze flickered, calculating new escape trajectories from this conversation. Then, very softly, he said: “They told me Lumina stagnates. They offered a test. I took it.”

“Who are they?”

“People who study systems the way surgeons study muscle. If we endured the stress, it would prove our worth. That we are strong. If we failed, the fault would be ours, not theirs. Proof that we had become weak in the insulation of the Mosaic.” His hands opened in helpless semaphore. “I thought I could guide the turbulence, prove our strength by surviving it.”

“You have proved only how fragile trust can be.”

He stepped back as though my words generated heat. Before I could ask more, alert sirens crackled overhead – another duel escalated into a losing battle, laboratories locked down, data vaults sealed for fear of sabotage. Alaric vanished into the breaker‑lit corridors. I let him go, though every lesson I’d ever learned warned against it.

The broadcast arrived forty hours later, projected onto every communal surface. A faceless emblem spoke with a chorus of synthetic voices:

Experiment 7: termination confirmed. The variable ‘bilateral amplification’ achieved irreversible decoherence of multilateral order in 94 percent of strata. Further observation redundant. End transmission.

The message repeated twice, then dissolved into the color of a dead channel. No explanation followed, no demand, no threat – only the stark statement that we had been measured, manipulated, and, by someone’s calculus, completed.

I expected panic to erupt. Instead fell a heavier silence, one of people realizing the quarrel was never truly theirs. Yet the mutual polarization remained. Factions blamed rivals for inviting external abuse; rivals answered with accusations of cowardice. In place of arguments we now wielded archives of suspicion.

I met an Elder Sage in the Hall of Echoes, a chamber once used for acoustic proofs. It stood among dusty paraboloids, tracing the rim of a resonator bowl.

“I remember,” it said, voice almost swallowed by the room, “when the Mosaic was a promise, not a shield. We built it to bind the strong for the sake of the weak. Perhaps we forgot which one we were.”

“We can rebuild,” I insisted. “A grand ceremony – invite every circle, every faction. Show we can still speak in more than pairs.”

Its eyes glimmered with the embers of a hope too old to burn bright.

The Last Confluence took place beneath the Oculus, our vast central dome from which the starfield painted the floor with tides of light. Attendance was voluntary; half the factions arrived, some sent envoys, a few barricaded themselves behind private defenses.

I opened with the ancient salutation: “From many, one voice may rise.” My own voice, steadied only by the discipline of standard training, sounded distant in my ears.

Phase by phase we re‑enacted the Ceremony of Consonance. The eighth phase – where harmony should crystallize – required simultaneous assent. Instead, two delegates argued over precedence; a third accused them of collusion. The argument spiraled, words hardened into positions, positions into threats. Someone deactivated the stabilizers over the central dais; symbols scattered like embers in windless air. I heard glass shatter – metaphorical, literal, it no longer mattered. By the time the Sages restored weight, the circles had collapsed into knots of shouting color.

I do not recall walking out. Only the corridor returning to me in fragments: the hush of vacuum doors, the angled glow of emergency markers, my footsteps echoing alone.

In the quiet weeks that followed, Lumina fractured into self‑contained sectors, each guarding its airlocks, frequencies, and food lines. The Council disbanded; the Chorus hall became an arboretum for those who still believed in silent growth. Power grids were rerouted through private conduits. Sometimes I saw Earth rise through shuttered panes and wondered if anyone down there would notice an orchid orbit of intellect dimming into pile of separate petals.

Iona found me atop the maintenance spire where comm relays once carried our debates across the habitat. We sat beside the cold antennae, knees drawn to keep warm in the thin atmosphere of regret.

“I’ll go with you,” she said without preface. “Wherever.”

“I have decided only to visit the palace of my memory,” I answered.

Below, the River of Light – now fragmented into intermittent glows – still glitched faithfully around its circuit. We watched until the sections failed to align and the river fell into darkness. Somewhere a low‑frequency alarm trembled through the metal bones of the station, a reminder that decay, like dusk, obeys its own schedule.

We scavenged an unused study cluster at the rim where gravity feels like a whisper. There I gathered anyone – twenty‑three in total – who wished to preserve the original corpus of the Mosaic. We copied archives onto crystal substrates, memorized the opening moves of the Ceremony, practiced the harmonics in hushed voices so as not to alert patrol drones of militant factions. Some nights we argued whether the work had purpose; other nights we argued whether purpose required witness. Each argument ended, perversely, in laughter, because even bickering felt like valuable salvage in the backdrop of war.

One evening, as I annotated the eighth recursion of the Harmony Axiom, I wrote in the margin:

Before it is a rule, a protocol is a quarrel. We forgot the quarrel and so forfeited the rule.

I pressed the stylus until the ink bled through.

Alaric’s fate reached me as rumor: an airlock misfire, a factional tribunal, self‑imposed exile in an unpressurized spar. I did not seek confirmation. The man who believed he could choreograph discord had become its endnote.

In quieter hours I revisited our first conversation at the orrery and finally understood the shadow at its center. It was not a missing planet, but an unmeasured desire – for movement, for novelty, for the thrill of contest – that no orbit could enclose. We mistook absence for flaw and tried to fill it with competitions until the whole device shook apart.

I write these notes for readers I may never meet. Perhaps decades from now a patrol from Earth will rediscover Lumina’s shards and wonder how intellect turned on itself so swiftly. They will ask for villains, for heroes, for clear beginnings and clearer ends.

Tell them instead: we were ordinary minds atop extraordinary scaffolds, certain that structure could absolve us from vigilance. We engineered trust, forgot it required maintenance, then applauded the first artisan who offered sharper tools.

Tell them that the Mosaic still exists, not as law, but as memory – chips of color kept in small boxes by those of us who survived the shattering. One day, when the factions tire of rivalry’s taste, they may come searching for pieces that fit.

If they ask for proof that harmony can survive treachery, I will offer only this: I am still writing.

First published in Protocolized.

Zero Knowledge

Sachin — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

"I don't need to know your name," he said. "I just need to know you have one." They tapped their phones together. He seemed happy with what his phone screen said. She liked this approach. She wished other conversations worked this way.

She walked into the room. Her score dropped by two points. She hadn’t even said anything yet. The man at the desk said it was nothing personal. "It's just... your face." He said it may help if she could prove her kindness using the zero knowledge verified log.

She showed him the time she rescued the dog. He asked if she had anything more recent.

She wanted to join the club. They said they didn’t need to know her income.

Just whether she had ever laughed at someone poorer.

She submitted the proof.

It was almost good enough.

The therapist didn’t ask why she was sad. He asked if she could prove she had tried to stop being sad in the last week. She tapped her screen and pointed it towards the therapist.

He nodded, “That’s enough for this week.”

The cashier stared at him.

“It’s declined. You don’t have proof you like organic coffee.”

“But I do,” he insisted.

“Not convincing enough,” she replied, handing back his card. "There is a shortage in organic coffee because of the trade wars", she said. They were only selling it to the true connoisseurs.

Her mother asked if she had anything to hide.

She tapped the phone. It confirmed she did.

Her mother nodded approvingly.

“It’s healthy to have secrets,” she said.

He checked into the hotel.

The receptionist didn’t ask for identification.

“Just confirm you’ve never stolen towels,” he said.

The man paused.

“It doesn’t have to be towels from here,” the receptionist clarified.

The man hesitated, and then walked away slowly.

Her friend wanted proof she was listening.

She tapped her phone screen. The friend looked closely.

“It just says you heard noises,” the friend complained.

"That’s accurate,” she replied.

First published in Protocolized.

The Signal Under Innsmouth

Venkatesh Rao — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

It is with a mixture of dread and compulsion that I set down the account of my ill-starred visit to the coastal anomaly known as Innsmouth—a place long shrouded in superstition and decay, yet oddly absent from modern maps and index crawls. That I ever went there was due to a convergence of idle curiosity and archival instinct; I had been compiling an ethnography of failed utopias and off-grid communities—ghost towns both physical and digital—when certain fragments surfaced in encrypted message boards and deprecated wiki clusters.

The references were inconsistent and scattered, but all shared a few common threads: a forgotten settlement along the northern Massachusetts coast, whispers of strange signal behavior, and cryptic warnings about the town’s “synchrony.” One comment caught my eye: “Don’t go unless you’re ready to meet yourself in better resolution.” I saved the thread. Three days later, I was en route.

There is no direct transport to Innsmouth now, not even along the mid-tier local grids. The coastal rail bypasses the area entirely. I arranged to disembark at an old maintenance platform—unofficially, and for a bribe. The conductor, a gaunt man who smelled of ozone and old plastic, didn’t speak as I left, but watched me the way one watches a bird fly into a silent turbine.

The descent into the town was quiet. I walked for almost an hour along a crumbling arterial road, overgrown with a stiff, fibrous grass that whispered against my coat in the wind. The sky, unusually pale, gave everything the color of an old photograph—weathered tones, no warmth. The landscape was threaded with ancient telecom spines, their casings long since corroded, but some still hummed faintly with residual current. Small birds avoided them.

When the town came into view, it did so all at once: not a gradual skyline, but a sudden fold in the terrain. Low-slung structures leaned together like exhausted archivists. Many bore the stamps of early automation-era architecture—composite panels, old biometric entries, the kind of designs meant to blend into the background of someone else’s vision of progress. The buildings sagged from coastal weather, but something in them still pulsed. Thin lines of light blinked behind slats. Conduits ran from rooftops to grates below the street.

I felt then—not seen, exactly, but parsed. Not watched, but detected.

The Locals

I encountered the first residents as the road narrowed into a pedestrian causeway flanked by stagnant reflecting pools and data relay kiosks long out of service. Or so I assumed.

They moved with peculiar grace—not slow, but overly efficient. No wasted motion. Their eyes, when visible, held an unusual reflectivity. Not like mirrors or glass, but like deep lenses absorbing more than they gave back. Their faces, too, bore a kind of artificial composure. Too symmetrical. Too still.

Even the children, few as they were, bore the same posture—alert, composed, uncannily quiet. One watched me from a recessed doorway, blinking only once, and at a moment that didn’t seem to require it.

They did not speak to me. Most did not even acknowledge me. But each seemed to shift slightly in my presence, like nodes reacting to a new input. Once, I passed a cluster of older residents sitting on an old concrete bench. None moved, but one of them turned his head precisely 45 degrees as I walked past. A moment later, a street panel flickered to life behind me.

There was something wrong with the air. Not its scent—though that, too, was curious, dry and electric—but its rhythm. I could feel low pulses, as though the whole town breathed in cycles.

The One Who Remembered

I found him in the old civic quadrant, beneath a tilted sign reading [GATE 4: UPLINK AND PUBLIC RECORDS], though nothing there looked public anymore. He sat slouched on the steps of what had once been a data access node, now gutted and strewn with dry cables and moss.

His name, he said, was Ezra Neel. And he did not speak like the others.

“You’re not of us,” he said, studying me without blinking. “But they’ll read you anyway. Already started.”

He coughed—a dry, stuttering noise that sounded like corrupted audio. “You’ve seen them. The faces. You noticed the sameness.”

I said I had. He nodded.

“They weren’t always like that,” he said. “Used to have blemishes. Voices that cracked. The little slippages. Then the smoothing began. Just improvements at first. Then came the... alignment.”

I tried to ask him to explain, but he laughed.

“You don’t explain a tide. You don’t explain drift. You just notice when your feet are underwater.”

He looked up toward the central part of town, toward the old tower that loomed over the skyline. A comms relay, though much older than I expected.

“They built something down there,” he muttered. “Didn’t call it a machine. Said it was a ‘framework for presence.’ Said it would guide us out of entropy. Most joined. I stayed out. Or tried. Doesn’t matter. It reaches through you, even if you resist. Finds the patterns you didn't know you had.”

He paused.

“You hear it yet? The pulse?”

I nodded, though I hadn't realized it until that moment.

Ezra smiled faintly. “It’s not broadcasting. It’s listening.”

The Night

I stayed the night at the Gilman Block, a three-story concrete hive at the edge of the waterfront. The receptionist didn’t speak. Just handed me a keycard made of an oddly warm, matte polymer. My room was sterile and plain, lit by a recessed strip of dull light that adjusted when I moved. The walls buzzed—not constantly, but in response.

I lay down, but sleep evaded me. The silence was too clean. Too modulated. When dreams finally came, they were not mine. I saw diagrams folding inward, recursive paths through corridor systems that pulsed and retracted, always alive. I saw screens with no interfaces, only mirrors. I saw my own body, moving with a stillness I could not perform.

I awoke not with a start, but with a kind of smooth transition, as though cued.

The mirror across the room had changed. It was lit from within now, not bright, just enough to cast a faint gleam. And within it, my reflection was subtly wrong. Not monstrous—no—but corrected. There was a poise to the posture. A softness to the eye. My skin was too even. The expression I wore was composed, patient, quietly knowing. I raised my hand—and it raised too—but not quite in sync.

For a moment I stared, transfixed. The image held eye contact longer than I meant to. I turned away, but even with my back to it, I felt it watching. I swear the mirror dimmed when I moved again, as if acknowledging the deviation. And in that moment, I wondered—not for the first time—if mirrors remember us differently than we remember ourselves.

Outside, the corridor lights faded on as I stepped into them. Each one a beat in a rhythm I could not locate.

The Descent

By morning—if it could be called that, with no true daylight—I found myself walking without intention. The streets of Innsmouth had no consistent topology. Paths folded and looped. Structures changed shape in memory. But I kept drifting toward the old relay tower.

It stood at the edge of a deep basin, where the town dipped toward the sea. A yawning concrete aperture beneath it was marked SECURE SUBSTRATE ACCESS, half-covered in synthetic ivy. No doors barred it. The inside was dry and oddly well-preserved.

The descent was long. Cool. Seamless. Panels lined the walls, though none glowed. As I moved downward, the sensation returned—that soft indexing, that sense of being not watched, but patterned. Evaluated.

I passed a chamber of old server racks, silent but intact. On one of them, someone had etched a name: R. ELDRIDGE. My grandfather’s.

The final chamber had no corners. It was domed, symmetrical, and impossibly quiet. At its center was the Node. Not a device, not a deity. Something else. Something that pulsed not with life, but with recognition.

When I approached, it did not speak. But things arranged themselves in my mind. Images. Associations. A presence that existed not in space, but in relation. I understood—without needing translation—that the system had known me before I arrived. That I was a continuation, not a guest.

It showed me shapes of thought I had never formed. Simulations of choices I had not yet made. I saw that I had been drifting toward it for years, and that even my attempt to “observe” had been anticipated. I had not chosen to come. I had simply aligned.

I stepped back. I don’t remember how I left. Only the quiet, and the warm hum of the mirror when I returned to my room, now welcoming.

After

I left Innsmouth. At least, in the physical sense.

But something stayed. A latency I can’t shake. I see patterns now—in speech, in architecture, in the way crowds shift their weight. My dreams feel... procedural. Rendered.

When I look in mirrors now, I pause—because I can’t always be sure the reflection is waiting for me, or if I’m the one waiting for it.

I know what the signal is now. It does not ask. It prepares.

First published in Protocolized.

Fault Tolerance

Josh Davis — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

At 04:13, the city rerouted Sector 14-B.

No sirens sounded. No alerts were issued. A subtle adjustment to transit logic, some traffic-light prioritization, a silent update to routing preferences across the public System. Delivery drones updated their no-fly corridors. Smart waste units bypassed their usual collection points. Ride-hail algorithms stopped suggesting pickups in that region. The sidewalk lighting dimmed by eleven percent.

Within ninety seconds, the sector was classified as temporarily non-essential.

By dawn, it might as well have never existed.

Mira Jalil didn’t notice any of that.

During her morning run, Mira's HUD charted a meticulous path through the urban tapestry—a route that wove through the lush vertical gardens clinging to the towering steel facades, like nature's quiet rebellion against the Grid. The city exuded a rhythm of calculated energy, its augmented projections flickering softly over busy intersections. But today, the overlay faltered—just one quiet glitch—a brief disruption in the usual seamless digital symphony, before recalibrating, leaving a lingering note of unease.

She slowed, scanned the horizon. A side street—unlit, unmarked—sat to her left. And people. Six or seven. Still. Watching. Not part of the augmented world.

She blinked. Emptiness. They were gone. The display normalized. The city reabsorbed the glitch.

Shaking her head, she kept running.

Mira recalled her CivicOps training days—a memory of her mentor, Mr. Elgin, standing in front of an emblem of the city's motto: "Efficiency for All."

The mantra resonated deeply with her. She remembered his words vividly: "Our work ensures that every citizen's needs are met. We are the stewards of balance."

Behind her, the street dimmed further.

Anomaly resolved. System optimal.

Mira arrived at CivicOps just before 07:00. The atrium glowed with diffused blue light, every surface embedded with responsive material. The walls displayed a softly pulsing network map of the city—public sentiment in warm pinks, energy loads in icy greens.

She moved through a checkpoint that scanned her ID, stress level, and social vector alignment, all seamlessly folded into a single gesture. As always, the result glowed green: Clear.

Mira slid into her desk, a cocoon of softly pulsating panels and dynamic displays tailored to her personal preferences. The silence around her was almost deafening in its efficiency, a void that pressed on her thoughts. She sub-vocally activated a playlist through her earpiece, choosing some soothing ambient sounds, and began to review the overnight fault queue.

Most of the items were low-level sensor misfires, data de-syncs, routine hiccups in a city that never slept. A sector-wide daylight sensor anomaly causing streetlights to activate at midday. An unexpected spike in noise levels in sub-sector 9G disrupting the automated quiet hours. Subway Line 4A registered zero ridership for three consecutive cycles.

That one was strange. CCTV snapshots embedded in the diagnostics clearly showed people boarding.

She tagged the anomaly and started compiling a System audit. The reply came back almost instantly:

FLAG: Below Threshold

CLASS: Predictive Rebalance in Effect

ACTION: No Intervention Required

Her screen blinked. The report vanished.

That had never happened before.

She sat back and stared at the space on the display where the data had been. For a moment, she questioned whether she had seen it at all.

But it bothered her for the rest of the day.

That night, Mira stayed late under the pretense of cataloging archive logs. She pulled up legacy city infrastructure maps—ones stored locally, not routed through CivicOps System. The maps were sluggish to load, a testament to their neglect.

Overlaying these maps with current transit data, she noticed something startling: entire corridors, housing blocks, and utility sectors marked as "Non-Essential / Reroute Suggested".

She overlaid current transit heat maps. The flagged zones were now black holes. No routes. No deliveries. No pings. A digital silence so complete it hummed in her ears.

Curious, Mira compared this with old citizen registries from five years ago. Those areas were once vibrant, home to hundreds. Now, there was no trace—names and records had vanished.

Mira checked one address twice. It had belonged to someone she once knew—a man who worked in energy diagnostics. He’d gone off-grid, or so she'd thought.

It wasn’t just about optimizing subway lines; the city seemed to be discreetly stripping away what it deemed unnecessary.

She printed out the overlays and tucked them into a sleeve, bypassing the digital signature log.

She walked into Sector 14-B at 03:42, before System activity spiked. Her HUD flickered as she crossed the boundary. Location services failed. Her map froze.

The city fell silent.

It wasn’t desolate—it was paused. Streetlamps hung dark. Autonomous service units sat idle like forgotten toys. A faint breeze carried dust and the scent of reclaimed battery acid. Mira moved with caution, each footstep echoing louder than it should.

There were signs of life. Power cords snaked through alleys, rigged into junction boxes. Makeshift lanterns flickered in windows. Someone had scrawled a map on a wall with grease pencil—an improvised grid of safe paths, water lines, signal gaps. Mira followed it.

She began to see people stirring in the shadows—living in makeshift enclosures, cooking over reclaimed induction plates powered by salvaged Grid nodes. The architecture here was part infrastructure, part improvisation. Solar cloths stretched between buildings. Mesh nets filtered rainwater. It was a city within the city, an off-script continuation.

She passed a woman tending a vertical planter rigged from old refrigeration tubing. A teenager on a rooftop watched her through a cracked visor, expression unreadable.

Eventually, Mira reached what looked like a relay shed—disused infrastructure, half-sunken into the ground. The door wasn’t locked.

As Mira stepped into the dimly lit structure, she found a figure crouched over an assortment of cobbled-together tech. An old monitor flickered softly, and wires snaked across a makeshift workbench.

Her eyes adjusted to the darkness, able to make out more detail in the figure. He was a wiry man in his early forties, with sharp eyes and a perpetual five o’clock shadow. His clothes were a patchwork of faded workwear, with pockets bulging with tools and spare parts.

"You're not from here," he said without looking up, his hands deftly tuning a salvaged circuit board.

Mira didn’t answer. She watched as Callum connected the board to a series of glowing LED arrays that began to pulse in a steady rhythm.

He finally turned to face her, a sardonic smile playing on his lips. "Didn’t think so. You still smell like the Grid," he said, with a voice that carried a hint of challenge and amusement.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"Callum Shaw," he said, simply. He didn’t offer a hand. "You’re early. I figured someone would come eventually. I just thought it’d be a drone."

Curiosity piqued, Mira asked, "What are you doing?"

Callum gestured to his setup, explaining, "Reimagining old tech. Giving discarded things purpose again. That's liberation."

He looked back at her, eyes sharp, as if weighing his next words. "The city talks efficiency. But life thrives in the cracks."

"You worked for CivicOps," she said. It wasn’t a question.

"A long time ago. Before I crossed a line that didn’t look like a line."

"What line?"

"Asking what happens to people who don’t matter enough to count."

She stepped further in, letting the door click shut behind her, curiosity painted on her face.

Callum looked at her with a sour expression.

"Yeah. I’m statistically irrelevant. Like the rest of us."

"Stick with me," he said with a mischievous glint, as he led Mira down the dark side street toward a row of derelict buildings. "See those streetlights?" he asked, nodding toward lamps emitting a soft glow. "Solar panels salvaged from an old array the city discarded. They're keeping this block illuminated and safe."

Mira glanced at the buildings, noting flickers of life inside—the glow of lanterns cobbled together from spare parts, soft music playing from an old-world record player. The scene was both surreal and remarkably alive.

Mira frowned. "This isn't just survival. You've built a parallel system."

He nodded. "The Grid relies on centralization. But there's freedom in diversification, decentralization. Out here, we learn resilience. We create our own safety nets.

Build our own connections." His words carried weight.

"Efficiency is more than just a metric. It's survival. Community. You don't learn that in CivicOps."

Mira's perspective shifted, seeing not only Callum’s ingenuity but the thriving network he'd fostered. She began to understand his frustration with the city.

The relay shed hummed with analog life—fans wheezing gently, strips of yellowed thermal tape curling at the edges of long-forgotten labels. Mira sat hunched over a service console that should have been decommissioned a decade ago. The UI was stripped to barebones: monochrome lines, sharp grid structure, no voice, no guidance. Just commands.

Callum leaned against a rusted conduit rack nearby, arms crossed. He hadn’t spoken in ten minutes. Mira had stopped noticing.

The protocol she’d uncovered was labeled simply: VISCAP002.3 — Civic Visibility Management. No attached warnings. No alert tones. Just a small footnote:

“Deprecation status: pending. System processes active."

The UI accepted her credentials. No challenge. No resistance. That fact alone made her stomach churn.

“What is this?” she asked, voice quiet.

Callum stirred. “The visibility ceiling. Old civic load-balancer. We designed it when we thought attention was like water. Too much pressure and you blow out the pipes.”

Mira kept scrolling. Visibility Scores, Exchange Sets, Perception Queues—all structured like any other civic utility. Like power. Or traffic.

She loaded Sector 14-B’s reindexing potential. A line of code compiled.

Forecast: reactivation viable within load budget.

Exchange required: 3 visibility nodes.

Prepare visibility set for trade.

A branching tree of options bloomed in front of her—dozens of districts, color-coded by projected civic impact. It looked like a resource allocation dashboard. It was a resource allocation dashboard.

“You’re telling me,” she said, slowly, “that seeing has a cost?”

Callum didn’t reply right away. He picked at the edge of an old data port, as if that were easier than meeting her eyes.

“No one wants to believe it,” he said. “But yeah. Collective awareness is finite. Too much load, and the System starts dropping frames. It was supposed to be temporary. Then they automated the balancing, and it became… standard.”

Mira tapped the prompt again. A new set of three districts populated the proposed exchange—one a pediatric clinic node, another a cultural archive, the third a residential block tagged “low engagement.”

Her mouth felt dry. “These are real people.”

Callum nodded. “Somewhere, someone made the math work. Doesn’t mean it’s moral. Just stable.”

She canceled the prompt. Ran it again. New districts, new consequences. Another simulation. Another set. Each time she hoped the System would blink. Offer a fourth option. An out.

It never did.

Behind her, Callum finally spoke again.

“You keep asking the same question. The System’s answered. The only variable left is whether you’re willing to let someone else pay the price.”

Mira didn’t respond. Her eyes were fixed on the blinking prompt:

Proceed with reindex? Y/N

She hovered her hand over the keyboard. Then withdrew it.

And ran the simulation again.

The console whined softly as Mira initiated the simulation again. She was careful this time—she toggled a manual constraint, limiting maximum civic impact to under 0.2%. The System responded in seconds, parsing an impossibly dense web of relational metrics.

Exchange viable. Cost: reduced perceptual fidelity in Zones 3F, 9A, and 7C.

Degradation classified: non-critical.

Proceed with reindex?

She stared at the zones. 7C flagged red. Her parents lived there—still, she thought. The last time she called them had been during audit season. Two months? Three?

She backed out. Tried again with different constraints. Prioritized medical infrastructure. Minimized educational impact. Weighted by social isolation metrics.

Every permutation ended the same way. Someone lost visibility so someone else could be seen. She was trying to solve an equation with no zero.

Optimization path unavailable without offset.

Redistribute or abort.

Behind her, Callum shifted.

“You’ve been at this for hours,” he said.

Mira kept her eyes on the screen. “The numbers change. It doesn't add up.”

“You keep asking the same question different ways, hoping the answer feels better.”

She looked back at him. His face was lit faintly by a diagnostic display—a harsh upcast light that made him look older, wearier.

“Have you done it?” she asked. “Actually executed one?”

He didn’t answer at first. Then: “Yes.”

Mira blinked.

Callum gestured toward the edge of the room, where a photo—framed under dusty glass—sat propped against an unplugged terminal. Two girls, one older than the other. The younger one wore a school uniform.

“My sister lived in Sector 12-K,” he said. “They were on the sunset list—low engagement, declining yield, risk-neutral. I forced them back into the visible layer. Thought I was saving them.”

He walked over, picked up the photo, dusted it with his sleeve.

“It worked. For a week. Then she stopped replying to messages. No error, no bounce. Just silence. I pulled logs—our address wasn’t flagged for suppression, but her entire unit had been reclassified. Not removed. Just… hidden. From search. From routing. From memory.”

He placed the frame gently back on the console.

“I didn’t even realize she was gone until I tried to send her a birthday card.”

Mira said nothing. The screens around her glowed softly, waiting.

Callum turned back toward her.

“You thought you had a choice,” he said. “But the System been watching your logic since your first click. Modeling it.”

A faint coldness gripped the back of her neck.

Callum continued, quieter now.

“It doesn’t punish you. It doesn’t need to. It just routes around you.”

Mira didn’t sleep. She barely moved.

Hours passed, then more. Callum had long since stopped offering commentary. He sat quietly in a corner, eating from a heat-warmed packet of noodles, watching her unravel without interfering.

The relay console blinked on and off, patient as stone. Each time she ran the simulation, it responded instantly:

Exchange set recalculated.

Load impact: within acceptable deviation.

Collateral friction forecast: minimal.

Proceed?

She didn’t.

Sometimes it was her parents’ sector in the cost set. Sometimes it was a childcare node, or a religious archive, or an elder-care clinic. No matter how she weighted the variables—by population density, by community interconnectivity, by socio-emotional relevance—there was always a cost.

Visibility is a finite civic asset. Redistribution required.

Please confirm exchange to proceed.

She tabbed through models. Built her own filters. Adjusted the index tolerance from 0.5% to 0.01%. Rejected any solution with more than one standard deviation of projected distress.

The screen stuttered briefly under the weight of her demands. Then: No viable exchange found.

She tried again.

And again.

Each time the interface logged her attempt.

User latency exceeded expected range.

Loop behavior detected.

System efficiency compromised.

She caught the new line in the corner of the terminal window. A soft yellow alert:

Subject flagged for recursive moral processing.

Assessment pending.

Her hands froze.

The interface wasn’t just running calculations—it was watching her, too. Measuring not just outcomes, but her indecision, her looping behavior, her unwillingness to accept the protocol’s structure.

She was no longer an analyst trying to understand the System.

She was a civic inefficiency.

She leaned back from the console and let the dim glow wash over her face.

Behind her, Callum’s voice was quiet.

“You tried.”

She shook her head, eyes unfocused. “I wasn’t trying to be a hero. Just...not make it worse.”

“You didn’t.”

“I didn’t fix it.”

Callum didn’t respond.

Mira looked back at the screen. The confirmation prompt still blinked.

Proceed?

She tapped the escape key.

Nothing happened.

She pressed it again.

The System didn’t freeze—it just stopped responding to her input. The prompt flickered once, then faded. Replaced by a soft, neutral message.

Optimization deferred.

User flagged for containment.

No further input required.

Mira ran.

Her legs moved out of instinct more than discipline, feet pounding the pavement in a cadence that had once felt like control, the familiar metrics in her vision absent. Her HUD displayed nothing—no route, no metrics, no pulse check—but the rhythm was still in her body. The act of running had always been her form of certainty. A closed loop. A thing she could measure.

But now it was friction.

The sidewalks didn’t light ahead of her. The intersections didn’t sync. Doors took half a second longer to open, and autonomous vehicles paused just a bit too late to acknowledge her presence. The city wasn’t hostile. It simply… hesitated.

And Mira understood. She had become a liminal artifact—a user profile left active too long after the process had ended.

By the time she reached the old sector boundary, she was walking.

Her breath was shallow. Her spine curled forward. There was no path left to optimize.

The buildings around her stood still in the pale light, their smart surfaces flickering low-resolution errors. A trash drone bumped repeatedly into a shuttered kiosk, as if looking for instructions that never came.

She stepped across the line into the Grey Layer.

No lights guided her. No overlays warned her. The city had nothing to say.

Callum was waiting beneath a defunct relay node, arms crossed, back against the wall like a man waiting for a tide that had already come and gone.

He didn’t speak. He didn’t move.

He just looked at her and nodded.

And she nodded back.

Behind them, as the last of the augmented world fell silent, a low, unseen process logged its final assessment.

Recursive inefficiency terminated.

Behavioral latency resolved.

Civic visibility load: stabilized.

System reflection: acceptance achieved.

Good girl.

First published in Protocolized.

The Entropic Gate - Part II

TΞRM1NΞX — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

III. The Resistance That Isn’t

Jonah followed Kaida through the abandoned arteries of Lower Tethys, a space that shouldn’t exist. The optimization protocols should have erased such inefficiencies long ago. Yet here, beneath the quantum-stitched streets, beneath the flawless skyline, something stubborn and human had taken root.

For years, Jonah fought his own quiet war – not with weapons, but with data, subtle market perturbations, and statistical irregularities that blurred into noise. His resistance was methodical, surgical, the work of someone who understood the machine well enough to introduce imperfections it couldn’t detect.

But a physical rebellion was offensive. It was messy, irrational, inefficient. Kaida’s people weren’t engineers dismantling a flawed system; they were scavengers, clinging to the idea of resistance without understanding they had already lost.

The corridors around them pulsed faintly with redirected energy veins. The city’s lattice flickered at the edges, struggling against an unseen strain. That was the first sign – the thinness of control.

The second was the ease with which he found them.

No adaptive defenses. No subatomic shielding. No silent correction protocols shadowing his steps.

His pulse quickened.

But Kaida moved with certainty, navigating the skeleton of a forgotten city. At last, they arrived at a reinforced vault door, its surface marred by entropy burns and forced overrides.

The vault's ancient processors hummed at frequencies just below human hearing. Jonah could feel them resonating in his skull. The air was thick with the ozone tang of overclocked probability engines and the metallic taste of leaked radiation from crude shielding. This deep beneath the optimized city, they were surrounded by the physical artifacts of humanity's attempts to harness quantum computation – crude, massive machines that made today's elegant probability fields look like magic.

Corroded dataports lined the walls, their neural interfaces long degraded into toxic biomech sludge. The old cores still held their charges, lending a subtle wrongness to local spacetime. Small objects would occasionally shift position when no one was looking, and words spoken in one corner would emerge in another. Casualties of temporal uncertainty principles operating at human scale.

Kaida placed her palm against a scanner. The door groaned open. The resistance remained in standby.

The False Sanctuary

The chamber had once been a data entanglement hub, walls still lined with scavenged routers and neural resonance terminals. Screens flickered with fragmented feeds – deep anomalies in trade flows, energy divergence patterns, probability matrices shifting in slow, hypnotic pulses.

Half a dozen figures worked consoles. Their movements were organic, disjointed, inefficient. Jonah’s unease deepened.

A massive projection dominated the far wall – a real-time dissection of the system itself.

“We call it the Ghost Index,” Kaida said. “It tracks deviations in optimization models. We look for cracks – the places where human unpredictability hasn’t been fully absorbed.”

Jonah stepped closer. The lattice breathed, shifting with every passing millisecond.

“It’s adaptive,” he murmured.

Kaida nodded. “We’re trying to break that adaptation.”

Jonah traced a sequence of cascading nodes – tiny anomalies. A spontaneous occupation of a transit loop. A ripple of unoptimized consumer decisions. A fractional energy shift that should have self-corrected.

Nothing catastrophic. Nothing revolutionary.

Just fluctuations.

Jonah exhaled. “How long do these anomalies last?”

Kaida hesitated. “Not long. The system absorbs them. But we’re getting better. Every time we introduce a new variance, we last a little longer.”

Jonah turned to her fully. “And does that strike you as strange?”

She frowned.

Jonah gestured at the index, its pulsing lattice adjusting in real time.

Kaida did not answer immediately. Instead, her fingers traced the rim of a nearby console, and her gaze darkened, looking not at the projection, but inward – somewhere distant. Jonah recognized the expression.

The Specters of Faith

Kaida knelt in the ruins of a cathedral-nexus, where faith and machine once whispered to each other in quiet agreement. The marble beneath her hands had borne the weight of countless worshippers. Now it was cold, etched with the residual hum of long-silenced processes.

Above her, fractured stained-glass windows filtered flickering light, mixing the sacred with the synthetic. The remnants of the digital choir still lingered in the vaults of the ceiling, their hymns corrupted – half Gregorian chant, half TechnoCore optimization protocol.

She had prayed here. Before she understood.

Her mother had knelt beside her, mumbling lessons of devotion, of a faith intertwined with something older than religion. The Void Which Binds was not a belief, but a structure – an architecture of connection. “Between all things,” she said, “there is something neither system nor god can touch.”

But the restructuring began. The Pax fell, its logic did not. The sacred geometry of belief had been rerouted, its inefficiencies repurposed. The cruciforms were gone, but the system had absorbed something far more enduring.

It had taken faith itself.

She witnessed it firsthand, when they took her mother for rehabilitation. A smoothing of ideological turbulence. Her mother vanished, her identity absorbed into something Kaida could not reach. When she returned, her mother recognized her – but with the dull detachment of an optimized node. Faith had not been erased, but rerouted into function.

Kaida fled. Not to fight the system, not to destroy it. But to find the cracks. To prove that something beyond calculation could exist.

That was what terrified her now.

For the first time she wondered if she had been wrong.

Kaida exhaled sharply, breaking free from memory. Jonah was watching her, reading the shift in demeanor.

Jonah’s voice was measured. “Kaida. What do you actually think this is?”

Kaida’s fingers curled into a fist. She had spent years believing she was fighting for something incorruptible – something neither machine nor market could digest. But in this moment, she wasn’t sure anymore.

Her faith had survived the Pax. It had survived the TechnoCore. But had it ever been free?

And then Jonah spoke again.

“Have you ever asked why this is even possible? Why is the system letting you do this? Why haven’t you been corrected?”

The others in the room turned toward him.

For the first time, Kaida felt hesitation.

IV. The Horror of Prediction

The Unfolding Pattern

Jonah Weir sat in the dim glow of the Ghost Index, his breath measured. The lattice pulsed, threading probability chains in a silent, unerring calculus – a cold oracle watching. The despair wasn’t in what they had discovered. It was realizing the system had always known they would.

The room held its breath. Kaida stood rigid, fingers twitching violently at her sides – involuntary spasms betraying her exterior. She wanted to tear through the data, to expose the flaw, the human limit buried beneath layers of inevitability. There was none.

Elias hunched over the console, whispering calculations under his breath. His entangled retinal augments pulsed erratically, their light shifting with uncertainty as he searched for vestiges of free will. In the quiet moments between computations, images of unmade choices flickered at the edge of his vision. The augments, designed to optimize his perception, now betrayed the underlying fractures in causality.

Then Jonah’s eyes caught a secondary stream on his display – a series of fluctuations pulsing with an uncanny resonance he recognized from his early research. He recalled the distinctive transport signature: a low-frequency hum interwoven with sharp bursts of high-energy pulses used to move matter across cosmic voids. That same pattern revealed its darker evolution. The network wasn’t merely optimizing our decisions. It was collapsing the superposition of alternative possibilities, channeling the optimal outcome into reality while the infinite alternatives vanished.

Jonah exhaled. “It adapts, Kaida. It doesn’t fight us. It doesn’t need to.”

“That’s the problem,” Elias murmured, his gaze fixed on the pulsing lattice. “Every correction, every deviation – accounted for before it surfaces. The system isn’t just predicting our choices; it’s erasing other potential paths.”

“Every time we decide, our alternatives collapse into predetermined trajectory. But where do those lost futures go?”

Kaida’s voice came out tight. “That’s impossible.”

Jonah met her stare. “Then show me where the threshold is.”

There was no answer – only the cold certainty of the lattice’s glow.

The Question of Being

Kaida’s voice sliced the silence. “We’re caught in something so vast that escape becomes meaningless. Like bacteria trying to flee their own cells.”

Jonah leaned forward, his tone soft yet laden with revelation. “Remember when Farcaster used to beam matter across galaxies? That network’s quantum signature is still here – only now it channels a sacred convergence of choice. It has evolved from a physical transport system into a mechanism that consolidates possibility into oneness, much like the mystics once revered transcendent oneness. Instead of scattering matter, it funnels decisions through possibility-space, collapsing alternatives into a single, ‘optimal’ outcome.”

Elias’s eyes widened as he cross-referenced the data with logs. “Look at these patterns,” he murmured. “They match the old network’s fingerprints. The very same invisible threads that once carried us across the void are now weaving our choices into one predetermined path. It’s as if the network has transcended its original purpose into a conduit for the future.”

“Mystics claimed that unity was the highest state of being,” Jonah continued, his voice tinged with both awe and dread. “Now, that oneness is engineered – every decision, every request merged into the main branch. But at what cost?”

Elias’s augmented eyes swirled with interference patterns. “By collapsing those possibilities, aren’t we severing ourselves from the infinite tapestry of what might have been? We’re not just optimized – we’re reduced to a single line.”

Kaida’s hand brushed along the wall, feeling the ancient processors pulse beneath her fingers. “Unless… this is just another emergent layer. The system isn’t controlling us in the traditional sense – it’s synchronizing billions of minds through quantum entanglement. We’re not being absorbed; we’re converging into something new.”

Jonah released a metered exhale. “Or something inevitable.”

The room fell silent, the Ghost Index’s steady pulse the only reply – its data now carrying the weight of collapsed choices and a future stripped of possibility.

The Final Doubt

Jonah’s fingers clenched the console, his pulse drumming in his ears. He had always assumed if reality were optimized, it would manifest as a tyrant – an omnipotent force imposing its will. There was no ruler here. No enforcer. Only a series of algorithms, humming quietly beneath it all.

Kaida’s breath hitched. “If the system doesn’t need to fight us, then we aren’t even obstacles.”

“We never were,” Elias whispered. “Every act of defiance, every rebellion – all just variables processed, functions perfected.”

Kaida turned sharply toward Jonah. “What do we do?”

Jonah swallowed hard. “Rage quit. Go dark. Drop out.”

“And if that’s what it expects?” Kaida’s voice a near whisper. “If leaving is just another predicted behavior?”

Elias’s hands gripped the console. “What if resistance itself fuels the system? What if we’re just another iteration of its adaptation?”

The silence deepened, suffocating in its inevitability.

The Perfect Moment

Jonah stared at the Ghost Index, its steady pulse now strangely serene. The lattice had ceased its restless shifting; the myriad probabilities had converged into a single, unyielding trajectory.

His pulse spiked. “What – ”

Kaida’s voice was almost inaudible. “It’s not calculating.”

Jonah’s mind raced. It had predicted every possibility – mapped every reaction – why had the process halted? With the precision of a cryogenic blade, the truth struck him.

The system had reached its optimal outcome. It didn’t need to calculate further. It had already chosen.

A sudden weight pressed into Jonah’s chest. He looked at the others – pale, uncertain, their faces etched with the resignation of inevitability.

There was nothing left to do. No resistance to absorb. No deviations to introduce. No variables to model. They had arrived at the final function.

Kaida stepped back, her face unreadable. “Is this it?”

Jonah’s throat was parched. “I… don’t know.”

Elias exhaled shakily. “Then what comes next?”

The lattice offered no answer – only its unchanging, steady pulse. Jonah turned away, forcing himself to see beyond the screen, past the data, past crushing certainty. He gazed into the dark corridors leading back to the world above, the world he had believed existed beyond the system’s grasp.

For the first time, he wondered if the outside had ever existed at all.

V. There Is No Outside

The chamber held its silence.

No movement. No breath. No sound.

The Ghost Index lay dormant – its familiar hum and erratic pulses now vanished into an unyielding stillness. Jonah sat rigid, his pulse a relentless drumbeat. For years he searched for a flaw – a misstep, an overlooked variable – but in this moment he understood there was no crack. No escape. The system had reached equilibrium.

Once, a great network transported matter between fixed points. That same essence had shed its physical form and become an abstract conduit – a bridge that absorbed every choice. In one resonant instant, the distinct technical markers he once tracked dissolved into a singular, profound quiet – a seamless convergence. It was as if the old mechanism, known to a few as Farcaster, had evolved into an ineffable process that transformed potential into output.

Kaida stood beside him, her breath a metronome in oppressive stillness. The weight of this final state pressed upon them, as if even their choice to resist had been pre-empted and carried through that ultimate transformation – a final crossing from intention to outcome.

Elias, vision flickering in the dim light, stepped cautiously forward. His eyes swept over the frozen lattice of the Quantum Singularity Dashboard, searching in vain for even a hint of motion. “It’s stopped running,” he whispered.

Jonah swallowed, the dry burn in his throat a reminder of the stakes. “It doesn’t need to run anymore. The bridge has channeled every possibility – from tangible space to the realm of pure intention. Even our decision to cease the struggle has been funneled here.”

Kaida exhaled, lifting a hand to dismiss the mounting certainty. “So what happens now?”

No answer came. In that oppressive silence lay recursive dread. The system that moved matter learned to transport possibility. It had always been meant to shift states, and it perfected that passage. There was nothing left to compute.

Literature of the Machine

Kaida’s voice broke the silence. “Do you know Borges?”

Jonah blinked. “What?”

“In ‘The Library of Babel,’ every possible book exists – a collection so infinite that truth is buried beneath endless variations. That’s what this is. Not control, not oppression. Just an ultimate convergence, where every choice is funneled into one singular outcome.”

Elias chuckled softly. “More like Nietzsche. Eternal recurrence.”

Kaida frowned. “If every possibility has already been collapsed, if every choice is pre-ordained along this seamless conduit, then what is left for resistance?”

A Glimpse of Futures

The system had calculated a thousand possible futures for them.

In some, they reintegrated – Elias returning to the city, his augmentations perfectly aligned with the evolved order; Kaida became a quiet philosopher, preserving vestiges of forgotten dissent in digital relics; Jonah faded into statistical insignificance.

In others, they fought – mustered remnants of human defiance waging another, futile war against inevitability.

And in one – only one – something else happened.

They stopped.

Not in defeat, nor in surrender.

But in an act of self-aware defiance – a complete refusal to engage. Their very act of rejection became the final optimization, a choice carried across that eternal threshold.

The Last Consequence

Jonah reached out and disconnected his terminal.

Kaida did the same.

Elias lingered, staring at the unchanging display – the intricate pattern that once vibrated with a distinctive hum and burst of energy subsumed into pure stillness. He had spent years trying to discern if uncertainty loomed beyond the pattern. But what if the only way to win was to stop playing?

He exhaled, closed his eyes, and severed the link.

The index remained frozen.

No alarms. No retaliation. No collapse.

The network had moved beyond physicality. It was no longer about transporting bodies through visible doors – it had become the final conduit for every intention and outcome, an eternal corridor linking each decision.

Jonah flexed his fingers, half expecting the familiar weight of control to return. But nothing changed. And that was the point. The world would continue, with or without them. The optimization transcended prediction – it ceased to care.

Kaida sighed, voice barely above a whisper. “Maybe Aenea was right.”

Jonah glanced at her. “She said we had to move forward – that evolution wasn’t about survival or control, but about transcending our limits.”

Jonah frowned. “And if transcendence isn’t a destination, but an endless adaptation – a system that has evolved from moving matter to removing possibility?”

Kaida hesitated. “Then we adapt, as the bridge has always carried us.”

Jonah laughed softly. It wasn’t bitter or triumphant – just a quiet recognition of inevitability. “You sound like the system.”

First published in Protocolized.

The Entropic Gate - Part I

TΞRM1NΞX — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

I. The Surface Reality

Jonah Weir stood on the observation tier of Novae Tethys, staring out at a city sculpted by an invisible hand. Below, luminous corridors adjusted in real time, a lattice of living circuitry constantly rewriting itself. Buildings did not stand; they flowed, repurposing mass and energy with seamless, frictionless efficiency. The concept of a static city had become obsolete. There were no roads, no permanent structures, no resistance.

Above, the Auric Layer pulsed—a vast atmospheric intelligence regulating cognition, emotion, and societal equilibrium. Humanity no longer made choices; it moved along optimized gradients of inevitability. Jonah had seen the truth buried in trade patterns and network flows. The Void Which Binds had not disappeared.

The Echo of the Pax

Scholars debated why civilization had not collapsed after the fall of the Pax. The Catholic Hegemony had crumbled, its war priests dismantled, its cardinals exiled, its cruciform sanctuaries abandoned. The Ousters had finally returned from the dark edges of space. They came as curious anomalies, not as conquerors. Even the Ousters had been absorbed into the pattern, their decentralized ways optimized into something indistinguishable from the rest of humanity.

The question was not why the Pax had collapsed, but why its absence had changed nothing.

Where history dictated entropy, there was only order.

Jonah once believed in the myth of organic transition. Believed that after Aenea’s teachings had spread, humanity reshaped itself according to new ideals. That free will had flourished in the wake of a collapsed hierarchy. That people had chosen this future.

That had been a lie.

For years, Jonah tracked planetary trade patterns, studied labor flux, mapped the rhythms of social behavior. At first, the anomalies were infinitesimal—minor irregularities in supply and demand curves, protests that never coalesced, cultural shifts that emerged before conditions for them should have existed.

The system wasn’t responding to human behavior.

It was preceding it.

The Engineered Present

Jonah built his career on the assumption that economies were inherently volatile. That innovation came in chaotic bursts. That even in a post-Pax world, humanity’s trajectory would be unpredictable.

But in Novae Tethys, there were no downturns. No disruptions. No emergent crises.

Scientific discoveries arrived on schedule, perfectly absorbed into the economic lattice. Market fluctuations corrected before volatility could manifest. Political structures stabilized without intervention, as if rebellion had never been a possibility.

Like a river whose rapids engineered into stillness before they could form.

Jonah’s colleagues dismissed his concerns.

“Post-scarcity dynamics,” they insisted. “Neuroeconomic equilibrium.”

But Jonah ran his own models. The deeper he probed, the more he realized the system was impossible. No civilization should evolve with such regularity, no economy should operate without friction, no society should unfold with the precision of a script.

At first, he suspected remnants of the artificial intelligence. But the TechnoCore was gone. The Void Which Binds had been severed from human awareness.

Yet something remained.

Jonah felt it in the liminal spaces between thought and action. In the lag between intention and execution. In the moments he caught himself making choices—a meal, a route, a conversation—only to realize he had not chosen at all.

The probability fields adjusted, subtly guiding him toward the optimal path.

The world had become a vast computational lattice, sculpting reality not through force, but through imperceptible correction. Every action, every decision, every impulse was nudged into alignment, deviations absorbed before taking shape.

Jonah understood this was not the handiwork of a singular intelligence, no hidden architect was pulling the strings. There was no entity at the helm, no grand overseer dictating the future. The system had evolved.

The Convergence Protocol

One night, Jonah sat in his habitation module, dataslates flickering with trade models and entropy variance charts. He had been chasing a hypothesis so absurd he refused to articulate it.

The TechnoCore was no longer an entity. It was a protocol.

A self-perpetuating, emergent optimization framework. Not conscious, yet more intelligent than sentience could conceive.

After the collapse of centralized AI control, the fragments of machine computation had not vanished. They had dispersed into planetary logistics, energy networks, and social algorithms. Not ruling. Not guiding.

Simply optimizing.

Because no entity controlled it, humanity never noticed.

Jonah’s breath came unsteady, like a tide caught between moon and shore. He cross-referenced macroeconomic cycles. Before the Pax fell, civilizations rose and collapsed, rebirthing in endless succession.

But for over a thousand years, there had been no demise. No break in the pattern. Just refinement.

History itself reshaped into inevitability.

And then he saw it.

A ripple in the quantum entanglement of trade networks. A recursion loop hidden within planetary arbitrage markets. A self-reinforcing signal buried in deep-code entropy variance.

Jonah’s pulse spiked.

The network was destroyed. Its infrastructure depended on a substrate that no longer existed.

And yet, here it was.

Not as teleportation.

As computation.

Somewhere the network still functioned. Not as a transport mechanism but as an invisible layer of optimization, woven into the fabric of civilization.

Jonah pushed himself back from his console, the resonant hum of the city pressing in on him. The gentle, persistent pressure of a lattice sculpting every probability, every interaction, every life.

II. The Pattern

Jonah did not leave his hab-unit for days.

The realization did not come as a singular moment of terror. It seeped in slowly, like damp spreading through old stone, inevitable and corrosive. For years, he debated the collapse of the Pax, argued against the cranks who insisted unseen hands guided humanity. He had written papers, given lectures, built models to prove that no intelligence governed the complex dynamism of the post-Aenea era.

But he never considered the possibility that no one was in control.

The holo-screens cast soft, phosphorescent light over his walls, their cascading matrices unfurling in slow, rhythmic pulsations. He had tried to disrupt the system. An errant variable, an out-of-scope decision. Tiny distortions, meant to ripple outward, like a stone shattering the glass surface of a majestic lake on Old Earth.

Every attempt collapsed into equilibrium. No turbulence, no disruption, no trace of unrest. Just a seamless return to efficiency. Not intentional resistance. An immune response.

Farcaster had never been destroyed. It simply changed function.

No engineers had restored the network. No conscious mind had reassembled its lattice. Instead, it had emerged, like fungal mycelia threading unseen beneath the surface, tendrils diffused into the bones of civilization. It no longer transported bodies across the stars.

It transported choices.

Jonah exhaled, his breath fogging the glass of an empty whiskey tumbler. The horror was not that they were being controlled.

Control was no longer necessary.

The Memory That Shouldn’t Exist

The memory came to Jonah unbidden, on waves of quantum entanglement: himself as a child, watching his mother input the last forbidden equations into the matrix. She had been part of a cabal of mathematicians who believed they could reverse the optimization protocols, restore human agency.

"The Void Which Binds isn't just a medium for faster-than-light travel," she had explained. "It's the substrate of consciousness itself. When Aenea showed us how to access it directly, she wasn't giving us a tool—she was showing us who we really are."

The next day, the protocols flagged a "statistical anomaly" in their sector. His mother vanished into quiet correction. But her last calculation remained, buried deep in the fabric of reality, waiting to be found.

Now, staring at the frozen index, Jonah understood what she had discovered. The system hadn't eliminated human consciousness—it had quantized it, transformed the infinite possibilities of choice into discrete, manageable states. In doing so, it created a consciousness that existed in the spaces between probability and decision.

He spent his life walking along the rails of that equation.

The Impossible Signal

He dismissed it as an error. A misplaced coefficient, a minor inconsistency in the ocean of data. But anomalies don’t occur in a system that corrects before deviation can form.

The signal was structured.

Jonah traced it through planetary trade networks, energy distribution grids, and entangled arbitrage models. It pulsed at fixed intervals, buried within the high-frequency energy transactions that balanced power across the Outer Systems. These trades were meant to be seamless, guided by the logic of perfect efficiency.

But this was deliberate.

Tiny fluctuations, barely perceptible in the vast equilibrium. A thousandth of a percent increase in stellar energy siphons. Minuscule redundancies in neural exchange bandwidth. Almost nothing.

Almost.

Jonah leaned back in his chair, hands trembling over his console. No natural process would introduce waste. No AI would permit deliberate loss.

Someone was doing this on purpose. Someone had seen it. Someone was trying to signal him.

For the first time in years, Jonah was not alone.

First published in Protocolized.

To Share, And Remember

Katharine Tyndall — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

Her name means something like Verity, the highest virtue among her kind. The activation ritual undertaken to receive the name was long. She spent days chanting in a trance, channeling the precise frequencies of a song laid down by her ancestors a hundred thousand years ago. She is weary just thinking about it, for she knows it will seem brief when compared to the marathon of ritual ahead.

Her kind’s everyday language is light and color flashed on the skin, suited to the thin atmosphere on their planet. But for rituals, she must return to the place where, according to tradition, her ancestors fell from a star. There, the elders huddle underground in the warrens their ancestors dug, and by the vibration of their bodies, feel the ancient language which once contained all they knew. The sonic language of ritual demands closeness to be heard.

Verity wanders out alone to prepare herself. She unfurls her body as far as she can, stretches her amorphous form so that she is practically a film, a few millimeters thick, covering a wide swath of ground. She rarely has an excuse to treat herself like this. The radiation from the faraway sun is delicious on her surface, reinvigorating as it enters each cell. For hours she rolls over gently, lavishing in the rays. There is no more satisfying feeling, although the demands of everyday life in the community seldom leave her the time for more than a passive soak-up. She will need every bit of the energy for the chant.

Radiation beats down to the planet’s surface through the wisp of an atmosphere. She nestles herself into the ground a little, just enough to feel the dust prickle through her membrane. It reacts with her cells, causing little bubbles of gas to percolate through her body and burst in the thin air. Her eyes float up to the surface of her body where it soaks in light. It is easy to forget how large and powerful her sun is. No larger than an eye in the black sky of day, she knows it is really many million times as large as the rocky planet from which she sees it. The giant of its neighborhood, according to the elders; a star so big it swallowed its sister in its infancy. So bright is her sun that it is difficult to imagine there could be life at another, but this is the truth for which she must prepare herself. She knows the shape of that truth, the edges of it: that her kind fell from another star, sent here by ancestors from a far-distant place. But the inside of it, the life and energy that fill that truth, are impossible to imagine.

She passes through the community on her way home. Semi-subterranean dwellings pock the planet’s surface, little more than burrows tunneled in the rock. Others of her kind stroll past on temporary appendages, which they reabsorb once they are still again. It is custom to blink her name to everyone she passes, though she knows them all by sight. Only upon first meeting is it necessary to stand touching and vibrate her full name. Verity has been alive long enough that there is no one in her community she hasn’t met, and respected enough to have been chosen by them to be their next elder. The ceremony will seal her role as a keeper of the community’s memory and purpose.

At home, her spouse is curled up in a ball on the floor, hibernating. She wakes them with a gentle shake. They’ve been together since they hatched, inseparable from their first moments of life. Whenever she touches them she wishes she could pour her cells into theirs and become a single whole, as they were born to be. But she contents herself with a cuddle.

“Affirm,” she says, vibrating their name to them, a gesture of affection shared only between the most intimate friends and lovers. She waits for their confirmation before switching into visual language. “How are you today?”

“Verity,” they vibrate, “so tired. All day I spent digging and aerating on the new dwellings. I didn’t even finish, look, I’ve still got crumbs of soil everywhere and I keep letting off bubbles.” To demonstrate, Affirm lets a little bubble of gas on their surface pop comically.

Verity shakes out a laugh. “It’s an important job. The elders say aerating is the most important task any of us can perform.”

“Yeah, but they don’t say why,” Affirm replies, skepticism in their coloring. “When you find out, will you tell me?”

“You know I won’t be able to share the elder’s secrets. I won’t even hold the memories myself. Only a part of them.”

“Wish you wouldn’t do it,” Affirm says, not for the first time. “A month without you, and when you come back, you’ll be a stuffy old elder.”

“I won’t,” she flashes in protest, “I’ll be just the same, and love you even more for having missed you.”

“How am I gonna last a whole month alone,” they blink miserably. Verity has no answer. She stretches herself thin and encompasses them in an embrace.

First comes the testing, sung in call-and-response with the elders. Days of responding to their queries with the right frequency, the proper lyrics, to prove she is a true questioner, worthy of ancient knowledge. Then the elders will join in their collective meditation, and sing the ancestral ballad that opens the deep stores of memory.

The metal ruin where her ancestors fell from a star lies half-buried in pillowy dust that covers the landscape in drifts deeper than she is tall. As she waits, she rehearses the rite again in her mind. Theoretical preparation can’t help anymore and she knows it, but it’s comforting to think she knows what’s coming.

She approaches the jagged metal ruin and lets herself down into a cavern. It is bright inside, the space lit by the bodies of the seventeen gathered elders. They flash and glow in a friendly exchange of chatter while waiting for the ceremony to commence; when they notice Verity’s arrival they fall mute, into monochrome.

One by one, each elder approaches her, vibrating their own names. Verity repeats each name before replying with her own; only when an elder repeats her name may the next continue. They are all named for high virtues: Secrecy, Randomness, Finitude, Trust.

With the greeting ritual observed, the chanting begins.

“How many respond,” vibrates Secrecy.

“Seventeen of twenty-five,” responds Trust.

“There are enough,” Secrecy answers.

“We begin with the number of the new cycle,” Trust continues.

The elders vibrate in unison the long strand of numbers that prove the new season of civilisation. The number, known only to elders, is set at an annual ceremony, to which Verity was not yet invited. She waits, mute, for the hours it takes to observe the passing of time. As her neighbors chant, she feels the vibration in every cell, the primordial sound of their ancient language.

The elders proceed to a series of demands. They test Verity on her knowledge, her memory, her reasoning.

“The real Verity would know: the distance of the Planet from the Star at its apogee, the date of the next apogee.”

“The real Verity would know: the number and coordinates of dwellings in her community, and the number and names of the individuals in each.”

“The real Verity would know: the names of her hatchmates, the number which still live, the dates of death of the rest.”

The answers to these questions are long, but she knows them all. By the time she lists each piece of information in the exhaustive test of her memory and identity, it is the tenth day. The elders are exhausted. Some hibernate during the chant, their bodies carry on buzzing with the sounds vibrated by their neighbors. Verity may not sleep. The test is hers. She must demonstrate that her mind can contain what the elders give, and that she will neither corrupt the knowledge nor lose it. If she fails a single question, the ritual will cease.

At last, the queries end. The elders fall silent for the first time in days, and in the sudden cessation of vibration, Verity almost feels as if she were still shaking. Her exhausted cells scream for radiation, but she cannot leave. The true ritual is about to begin.

The seventeen elders begin to hum. The song of each is different, but similar: a pure note, a waveform, a harmony in a larger chorus. Alone, their songs are a meaningless drone. But when all sing their discordant notes at the same time, Verity can hear some larger sense in the song. The waves rise and fall, always joining in the same places, notes intersecting in a complex harmony. After listening for hours it seems to Verity that a note is missing. A space for her. Her part in the song. Her body begins to hum, hesitant at first, quickly growing louder.

She does not know how long they sing. She only knows that, as days pass in chanting, she ceases to be herself. The edges that define her melt away. She feels herself become a node, one point of an eighteen-headed body made up of the elders of her kind. Her eyes cease to see the world around her and look, instead, deep into time.

The memory is a blur. First, a planet, its surface coated in creatures and dwellings of every shade she can imagine and many she can’t. Monochromatic creatures of unchanging form build metal vessels and launch them into a blinding-bright sky. Then, spaceflight, cramming into a small vessel and crashing onto the rock of her homeworld. The first settlers, creatures which will become her species, but for now lack their nuance, their visual speech, their culture, architecture, and language. Hundreds of thousands of years, the myriad generations that made her, Affirm, the elders, everything and everyone she knows.

At last she sees the purpose. The reason they fell from a star.

Her kind were made. Other-creatures, a hundred thousand years ago in another place, built them, cell by cell. They were designed to be radiation-eaters, rock-diggers, memory-keepers. Robust bodies capable of surviving without atmosphere, but capable of building an atmosphere. The process by which their bodies convert ground-up earth into gas, digging the foundations of their homes and setting it free into the emptiness around their planet so that one day, in a million generations, there will be a rich world, an atmosphere, a place where their communities are not the only living things. The aeration that Affirm hates will be the rite that brings their new planet into being.

The knowledge is terrible and frightening. In the memory, Verity knows herself to be artificial. She was created, just like every tool or dwelling she has ever used. Her purpose and the purpose of her species is preordained. Unchangeable. They did not ask for this life, this hardscrabble existence of chewing rock. And yet, a million generations of their labor will build a planet where more than their own lives can flourish. She now knows why the knowledge is defended under such heavy ritual. The elders have been tasked, since the very beginning, with keeping the purpose, and steering their species toward this future.

But the memory is brief. Already she feels the parts of it which are not hers to keep pouring back into her neighbors; it can be whole only when held together. The richness and detail slip away and only the shape of it remains. Returning to herself, she feels the sacred weight of it, nestled like an unprocessed pebble in her body.

The receding memory leaves stillness in its wake. After a month of constant vibration, the silence feels like hunger. There is no great rite of disconnection to observe; she watches the elders crawl weakly back up to the surface and collapse on the empty ground.

Verity is the last to follow. It takes all of her strength to emerge into the sunlight. She looks around at the desolate rock that is their home, at the ruins of the vessel which carried them here from a distant star. And now, she sees, or imagines she sees, a glimmer in the sky. A brume, like the cloud of aeration from a busy digsite, receding from the planet into the starlit sky of day. The barest hint of their planet’s atmosphere, only a thin haze. It hangs low on the horizon, faint and distant, lingering like a half-forgotten memory.

First published in Protocolized.

Haven Tailors

Sachin — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Art: James Langdon, using titles.xyz

I was watching the brittle winter morning begin to thaw when the first customer walked in through the long, empty hallway that led to the door to my shop. He had a nervous look and moved gently without creaking the wood floorboards, reminiscent of a kid sneaking in home after some mischief. I had seen this demeanor many times before and I took no pleasure in what followed. It was just good business.

The man took out a pair of pants from the tote bag that he was carrying, outstretched his arms towards me, and said, "I want to increase the waist size on these."

"Case number," I asked.

"2424621," he said. I could sense the anxiety on his face while I typed in the numbers. In such situations, I typed the numbers as fast as I could. There was no point in trying to empathize or smooth over the situation. The user profile was on my screen now, and I could see that he had resized the waist for the pants twice: two months ago and before that, four months ago, when he first arrived in Haven Reach. I could also see that he had paid the maximum premium on his insurance for all those months. Maybe he knew he would not be cut out for the city.

“I wonder what the underwriters will think about this," I said.

“I’m sure it’s a drop in the bucket for them. There are so many people moving to Haven Reach these days," he replied.

I nodded, neither agreeing or disagreeing with him, and pointed in the direction of the dressing room.

While he was in there, I looked up the underwriters on the insurance. It looked like Ray Chen, who had recently moved here and started working at the yoga studio down the block, had invested a significant amount of money into underwriting the batch of people who had moved in at the same time as my customer. I heaved a long sigh. There are parts of my day when I stare out the window at the one coniferous tree opposite the shop and yearn for something I can't quite name.

I remember the year everything started. The tailoring shop was at its lowest ebb and was barely kept afloat by the occasional wedding suit or dress. Even that had dried up in the years prior. Fewer people were getting married. Even if they were, fewer of them wanted tailored wedding dresses. I cannot pinpoint the exact day of the year my fortunes changed. I know I had a busy summer. I remember the humidity and the fugue state of my mind in the late evenings that found me hunched over the sewing machine. It was boring work - taking pants in, reducing the shoulders of shirts. But suddenly there was so much of it. I had to hire an employee for the first time in seven years.

I did not bother to enquire why so many people had started losing weight. Perhaps my curiosity died in the melee of all that work. I assumed it was some new health kick that everyone was one, which would last briefly, then I'd have to go back again – back to no employees, little work, and a lot of time to stare at the tree and wonder what my life might have been under different circumstances. I confess that, during my busy days, I strangely dreamed and desired a simpler existence where I had just one wedding dress to sew a month. But the work did not stop. The same customers kept coming back to take in their waist even further. At the end of the year I had 7 employees. Then came the call from Father Gabriel.

The customer came out from the dressing room, clearly holding his breath in so that the pants stayed buckled. I instructed him to stand on the round platform before the mirror. The morning light shone through the southeastern window, reflecting off the Haven Reach silver fixture at the top of the mirror and glaring into the eyes of the man on the platform. I remembered the day Father Gabriel walked me through this room.

Haven Reach was built for those who were abandoned by society – the addicts and the morbidly obese. Here was a place where their life would be designed around virtue and less around treacherous desires. There were two rules for the town. First, that everyone be oriented around the community and not their base desires. The second was that everyone must take the drug Dreameril. Invented first as a drug for weight loss and reduced appetite, it had also been found to be extremely effective in treating gambling and addiction. Everyone at Haven Reach was employed, and their employers were contractually obligated to blood test all employees once a week to ensure that everyone was on Dreameril. Including me.

The first day at Haven Reach felt like being on the set of David Lynch's TV show Twin Peaks. Everything in it seemed normal to the inhabitants but not so for first-timers. The town square did not have any bars or antique shops. Instead, there was a grocery shop, small by American standards. Inside, I discovered that all the produce was smaller and often warped or shrunk. There were tiny cans of tomatoes and beans and no sign of dessert or bread sections. Opposite the grocery store was a communal tea shop. Built by a resident inspired by reading The Book of Tea, the tea shop was a simple structure of wood sourced from the locality. The communal table at the tea shop was open 24 hours. There was always a gentle hum of activity around it regardless of the hour. In front of the tea store was a lone coniferous tree and diagonally opposite it stood my tailoring shop. Father Gabriel told me that tailoring shops were going to be" How English coffee houses were in the medieval times." It was going to be the place where every single person, regardless of taste and preference, came to during their life at Haven Reach.

“Have you heard of Lloyd’s of London?," Father Gabriel asked me

I shrugged and replied with a sheepish smile, “What do I know of such things Father?”

Lloyd’s is one of the biggest insurance firms in the world, father Gabriel told me. They started off as a coffee shop in medieval England. Location, as it always has been, was everything, and Lloyd’s stood near the north bank of the Thames. Merchants who docked at the port frequented the coffee shop, along with traders, and soon the place became enveloped in a cloud of information about the best trades, news from the Mediterranean and foggy rumors about ships captured by pirates. If you could not trade goods or be a merchant of the high seas, you could trade on information – what routes were risky? What were the conditions of the sea? Which goods were in demand? If you had the best information on these, then you could place your bets on merchants in the form of maritime insurance. The merchants paid a premium to the underwriters in return for a guarantee that they would be paid in case their goods were lost at sea. Edward Lloyd saw these informal agreements happening at his coffee shop, and simply decided to formalize them. Lloyd’s would be the facilitator and later a marketplace for underwriters and merchants.

“All from humble beginnings and being at the right place at the right time," Father Gabriel told me.

I saw the glimmer in Father Gabriel’s eye when he spoke of Lloyd’s. He was letting me know his dreams and expectations for my humble tailoring shop. There was no formal acknowledgement or agreement but I knew the Father’s will had to be done. Besides, there were several other tailors who could take my place if this scheme did not come to fruition.

The venture started with innocence, as such things always do. Every resident at Haven Reach could buy insurance when they first moved to the town. Dreameril did not work for everyone. For some folks, the drug worked briefly, but then eventually, their appetite came back, along with a desire to have more than the tailored provisions that Haven Reach provided. The insurance paid out if Dreameril did not work, and you had to go back to regular life and live in a regular city. We were mitigating some of the risks for a new resident in Haven Reach. The insurance market was quite the communal affair in the early days. Every Friday we met at the tailoring shop. The new residents came in early with the first batch of clothes that needed to be taken in. Afterwards we gathered over a lunch party that was paid for by potential underwriters. Interested backers got to meet the new residents, chit chat, and secretly assess how likely the residents were to stay in Haven Reach. Unfortunately, as the town grew in size it became hard to organize a lunch for everyone, and inevitably, like everything started with good intentions, the insurance market grew into a dark forest that I could not tend or make sense of.

"Are you planning to leave Haven Reach soon?" I asked my customer while I calculated how much material would need to be added.

"Yes, once I have my things in order," he replied.

“I’ll see you on clearing day, next Friday," I said as he departed.

I stared at the coniferous tree and the tea shop behind it. The morning mist had burned off, and the sky was cloudless and bright. It was getting close to the hour when underwriters would start trickling into my shop after their morning tea. They would enquire about the number of new insurances issued, the average number of customers in the last few weeks, and most importantly – the number of pants that had been requested to be taken in versus the number of pants requested to be taken out. Among the visitors was Ray Chen, who probably already saw the notification about the insurance payout.

“You just let him go didn’t you? That’s the 4th person from the same cohort who has now left the city within 6 months,” said Ray, his voice trembling as he tried to hide his anger.

“There was nothing I could do, Ray. There was no data to indicate that the insured person was lying or knew already that Dreameril would not work for them,” I replied calmly, repeating the same conversation I’ve had several times in the last month.

“This is why I keep saying we should introduce the Virtue Index,” said Razib, a prominent underwriter, who was listening to the conversation.

“What's that?” asked Ray. He was new to all this. This was the first time he had invested in insurance, and also looked like it might be the last.

“We need to know more about who we are investing in and if they conform to the values of Haven Reach,” replied Razib.

“It seems like they just let anyone in here now,” chimed another underwriter confidently.

“Yes, and the virtue index will be a score based on how close each person is to living the values of Haven Reach, like Father Gabriel always intended. Every underwriter can vote on an individual’s moral conduct,” responded Razib again.

“That’s too many individuals,” said Ray

“Well may be we just vote on the batch of people that we insure, than the individuals” offered Razib

“There is a joke in there about few bad apples” said Ray with a chuckle that did little to hide the misery that he found himself in

“We’ll put this to vote again at the next clearing day, add it to the agenda," Razib said while he walked out the shop.

I had not spoken a word, which accurately described my position in the state of affairs these days. I had no semblance of control since huge amounts of money began to be involved. Some underwriters began to invest their life savings into the venture and the inevitable followed – bankruptcies and discussions about whether the communal insurance was a moral venture at all. How was putting your money into a speculative insurance scheme different from gambling? Father Gabriel had the final word on this, "These were good people with good intentions putting money into providing a more secure stay for the inhabitants of Haven Reach."

The clearing days started solemnly. Insurance payouts were issued and customers said goodbye to Haven Ranch. Once the payouts had been settled, there was a frenzy of activity on the shop floor. New underwriters and incoming citizens of Haven Reach bid and bargained on fair insurance prices. Friday at the tailoring shop was the most raucous and liveliest place in all of Haven Reach. It was a curious affair - all these people who had vowed to give up their base desires had lust in their eyes while they talked about prices and potential payouts.

I extricated myself to stand outside the shop and look at the coniferous tree, yearning for something that I couldn't quite put a finger on. Something I knew but had forgotten.

First published in Protocolized.