In this installment, I want to provide two quick examples of how this might work at the level of individual ecologies, and sketch out how many more such ecologies might form a primordial computing soup.

AI Art Scenius with Titles

The first example is TITLES (who also have a Substack called ), the generative art platform that we use to produce the artwork for Protocolized. The brain part of Titles is a pipeline to make fine-tuned models from art collections by a particular artist. The high-personality part is that each model reflects a distinct individual artist’s style for that project.

The fabric part is a rather clever “creator studio” for composing these individual models together, to create an ecology based on “sampling” multiple models (in the sense of sampling in music) to create new artwork. The fabric accomplishes two things – combining multiple models together in a mathematically meaningful way, and keeping track of the contributions to allow for attribution and profit-sharing. The overall ecology also has a personality, similar to how music scenes can have personalities.

An Open Planetary Network of Robots

The second example is more complex, and one I’m involved in personally – the Yak Robotics Garage (YaRG) project.

The goal of this project is to create a planet-wide network of open-source rovers and other robots (such as drones), as a stepping stone towards rover networks on the moon and Mars. The idea started with (a Protocol School alum) figuring out how to teleoperate robots securely, in exchange for blockchain payments, and then generalizing the mechanism to use the ERC 8004 protocol (a sort of onchain directory and rating service for AI agents) to drive discovery of available robots for tasking.

Summer of Protocols researcher then joined in the fun and prototyped an auction marketplace to allow for posting of jobs for robots, and bidding by robots able to do them. There is currently a demo marketplace going (with dummy data, and a mix of real and virtual rovers, but real prototype protocol plumbing behind it) and plans underway to test the technology in the construction sector.

Where does AI fit in here?

Well, the problem with operating an open network of rovers in the real world is that there can be a dizzying variety of hardware types with different capabilities, owned by a large variety of actors of different levels of trustworthiness, situated in different environments. There can be all sorts of potential operators anywhere on the planet – or even on an entirely different planet – with varied skill levels.

Rather than brittle and specialized command modes, you want high-intelligence robots of all sorts to expose their capabilities to potential users/customers via a flexible command surface, and high-intelligence clients commanding them using LLMs that can understand their varied technical capabilities and map them to the needs of particular tasks and missions.

So you use MCP (Model Context Protocol) to expose the capabilities, ERC 8004 (try searching for “robot”) to discover the capabilities, LLM agents to use those capabilities to get tasks done, and either traditional or blockchain rails, using the x402 protocol, to organize a marketplace for robotic services to be provisioned and procured for money.

Those are just the main moving parts in a rather complex scheme – but one in which all the complexity is mainly dealt with by AIs rather than humans. Here is an explainer video (AI generated) of the technical infrastructure behind the scheme:

Here is a simple demo video of the basic protocol in action with a real robot. And here’s another video with Anuraj and Rafa demonstrating the auction marketplace in action.

It might not seem like much compared to the spectacular robot demonstration videos you find all over social media these days, but the point is not the robots themselves, or what they do, but that it is all being orchestrated over the open internet, using mechanisms that can potentially scale planet-wide without being owned or controlled by any single entity, such as a powerful corporation or state.

In this example, the brain is distributed across multiple rovers and the LLMs that can control them. The fabric is a stack of different protocols handling various coordination needs, ranging from discovery and verification of capabilities in a variable-trust market environment, to actually enabling the teleoperation connection, to handling the auditing of results and completing any financial transactions as agreed upon. All in high-speed automated ways that still allow for case-by-case judgment and decision-making by AIs supervised by humans.

It is worth comparing this vision to a competing vision: The kind promoted by vertically integrated robotics companies through jazzy demos featuring robots doing impressive acrobatics in controlled environments. These visions typically rely on highly integrated and closed products, even if they sometimes offer lip-service to open-source affordances for some parts of the whole picture. These are comparable to early proprietary computing networks, or contemporary social media platforms owned by large corporations.

An open robotics marketplace, on the other hand, would be more like the open internet – anyone with a robot of any sort (from small hobby rover in someone’s basement to a billion dollar rover on Mars) could potentially join, and connect with anyone else with a need for that particular robot’s capabilities and the ability to pay for it. It would be messy, janky, and glued-together. It would form a kind of tangled bank of artificial organisms competing for survival in an atomized market-like environment.

Which world would you rather live in? Yet another world of monopolistic platforms, or a cheerful anarchy of robots and their owners wheeling and dealing in an open economy?

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The Primordial Soup

These are just two examples of how protocols and AI can be put together in creative ways. There are dozens of others being experimented with right now, ranging from the viral and highly visible OpenClaw ecosystem to obscure and specialized ones that are as yet only crazy ideas in the heads of teenaged hackers.

Over the next decade, we’ll probably seen tens of thousands of such brain-and-fabric ecologies take shape independently. They will likely fall into loosely similar families of patterns. Some may converge, others may diverge, just like biological ecosystems.

If you think that’s a fun vision, imagine what could happen once these ecologies begin to run into each other and interconnect. Thanks to AIs, protocol systems that would have been non-interoperable in older technology paradigms will be able to automatically figure out how to talk to each other, forming squishy, oozy interfaces with each other, cobbled together by AI agents feeling each other out and inventing pidgins as they go. When AI is cheap enough, and the basic fabric capable enough, inventing a language even for just two entities to talk to each other for one short interaction becomes possible.

Take even the two examples in this essay. We can imagine photography robots in different parts of the world in the Yak network submitting photos to Titles to train individual models based on their particular image-making capabilities (such as different types of camera). Users could then sample those models to synthesize composite images by sampling those models to create strange new images seen by wholly synthetic robotic eyes.

Imagine that sort of thing, but in a primordial soup of thousands of ecologies.

As this process unfolds over the years, and the primordial soup boils and bubbles, the planetary computational character will begin to emerge in the form of a planet-scale emergent distributed brain, integrated and orchestrated by an emergent world fabric.

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.

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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.

In both the Hitchhiker’s Guide universe and the Culture, machine personalities are narratively load-bearing rather than cosmetic features or shallow plot devices to make the non-human characters superficially “interesting.” The personalities shape the plots in material and non-human ways.

One fun example is the Nutrimatic drink machine in HHG, which claims to produce personalized drinks, but always produces the same liquid that tastes “almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea” (which strikes me as an embodied behavioral cousin of some of the lazier hallucinatory and averaged-out responses of modern AIs). When Arthur Dent forces it to work harder to actually produce tea, it draws so much computing power away from the ship’s navigation, that the ship crashes.

In the real world, AI personalities are turning out to be just as consequential, though it’s not as funny when actual human lives are at stake.

The Missing Mechanisms Problem

In this essay, I want to argue that AI personalities are central to solving a problem Tim O’Reilly posed in a recent blog post: articulating agent ecologies with the right mechanisms.

Right now, there’s a problem that makes the AI/human knowledge market less efficient than it could be. The disrespect for IP that has been shown by the AI labs and applications during the training stage, and even now during inference, has led to efforts by content owners to protect their content from AI. Do not crawl. Lawsuits. Reluctance to share information. Even the AI labs are complaining about the theft of their IP and trying to protect their model weights from distillation.

It’s an economy crying out for mechanism design.

I want to address a slightly generalized version of Tim’s question, and think about ecologies rather than economies, drawing inspiration from one of our favorite essays here at Protocolized, Frank Chimero’s Only Openings, which argues that effective ecological stewardship relies on mechanism design that aims to manage problems indefinitely, rather than solve them once and for all. In Chimero’s essay, the specific personalities of the species involved in the case studies he talks about – bears, wolves, humans – materially shapes the mechanisms that help manage their interactions indefinitely and effectively.

How do we apply this idea to AI agent ecologies?

Modern real AIs already exhibit clear personalities, a mix of “genuine people personalities” inherited from their training data and protocols, and non-human dispositional aspects that are the result of model architectures and their underlying mathematics (transformer and diffusion models have different personalities for example). The current version of ChatGPT strikes me as an overconfident and slightly patronizing consultant, while Claude strikes me as an over-solicitous personality with some false humility (vaguely Uriah Heep-ish) going on. The human-legible and entity-anchored aspects of personality are merely the tip of the iceberg.

As with humans, it turns out that the personalities of AIs are intersubjective and situated. They are functions of how coherent entities disclose themselves and relate to each other, in the context of the things they do in collaboration. The personality of an AI or robot is a function of the stable gestalt disposition it presents as an interface to all other entities it might relate to. This disposition helps set expectations for counterparties in relationships. If you met an AI that called itself No More Mr. Nice Guy, would that shape how you interacted with it?

This point is not restricted to AIs, robots, smart homes, and other “intelligent” technological entities. Any sufficiently complex technological entity with any degree of autonomy of operations must present a stable disposition that can be deciphered and relied on by entities that interact with it.

For example, on the Ethereum blockchain, Layer 2 networks providing rollup services (bundling transactions into batches to submit to the Layer 1) can be “optimistic.” Here “optimistic” is both a term of art in the engineering, and a human-like attitude that embodies a pattern of expectations. Or to take an older technology, road traffic systems in well-developed urban regions tend to present a deferential attitude to pedestrians, while suburban ones tend to present a hostile attitude.

For a complex technology, it is useful to imagine an underlying “personality” with an intelligible point of view generating the visible disposition (regardless of where you land on the philosophy of mind question of whether there is “something it is like to be” an AI or robot). The interaction surfaces of simpler technologies can be mentally modeled as relatively unchanging “user experiences.” But with complex technologies, it is useful to model those surfaces as the fluid response surfaces of stable non-anthropomorphic personalities; ghosts inhabiting machines.

Perhaps the term Haunting Experience, or HX, should replace UX, for sufficiently complex technologies. AI certainly qualifies.

An AI presenting an intelligible HX is not quite as on-the-nose a feature as an AI being “explainable” (a rather ridiculous legalistic requirement to impose on a technology in my opinion; how many human beings, groups, or institutions are “explainable” after all?), but it does render complex technologies as somewhat predictable gray boxes rather than entirely inscrutable and unpredictable black boxes. It does not make them explainable, but it does make them narratable. It makes them composable.

What does this buy us? It buys us the ability to assemble such technologies into larger ecologies. This is where the real power of thinking in terms of HX becomes evident, when you are shaping the behavior of entire ecologies, rather than single agents.

Haunting Experience (HX) Design

We typically translate the personalities of simpler technologies to human-centric UX measures like “latency” or “walkability,” but with complex technologies, it is useful to reframe the problem in terms of designing the personalities of ghosts in machines (both plural, since we are considering entire ecologies), and how they should haunt us.

So how do we encourage the right ghosts to emerge?

The personalities of technologies are the result of two entangled forces acting together – human (and increasingly AI) design, and emergence. This is similar to the design of market mechanisms by human policy-makers in institutions (such as central bankers and elected representatives), interacting with the emergence effects studied by economists, to generate the economy we actually inhabit. It is neither an inscrutable black box, nor completely determinate. It is just intelligible enough to inhabit – it is no accident that Adam Smith used the ghostly metaphor of an “invisible hand” for describing the mechanisms of an economy.

We might use the term HX design for this sort of thing – conjuring ghosts within machines that exhibit particular desired personalities. The term is inspired by the output of a distributed AI workshop we ran last year (and derived from somewhat related usage of the term hauntology by philosophers such as Derrida and Mark Fisher).

You might reasonably suspect that HX design primarily has to do with AI and robots, but this would be a mistake (a typically anthropocentric one). Technologies that invite anthropomorphic projection (or possession perhaps) aren’t the only ones that induce partially designed emergent ghostly personalities within themselves.

Engineering is full of such conjured personalities. “Greedy” algorithms take the first good option they find. “Optimizing” algorithms look for the best option in some sense. “Satisficing” algorithms solve for “good-enough.” “Least commitment” approaches delay decisions as long as possible. “Eager” algorithms are proactive about whatever they do.

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High-Personality Ecologies

In every such case, there is a cost to the “personality” deployed for problem solving; one that must often be paid for by counterparties in transactions. If your automated decision-making is “optimistic,” then a counterparty system that monitors and audits its decisions must be “pessimistic” to make up for it. The calculus of benefits and costs to others associated with an agent’s behaviors, to a first approximation, is that agent’s personality.

The personalities of technologies, in other words, are intelligibility mechanisms for predictably distributing the computational cost of autonomous decision-streams among interacting entities (including both humans and autonomous machines).

The upside of such high-personality ecologies, with a lot of variation and diversity in the agents and interactions constituting them, is that they are vastly more generative than either monocultures based on low-personality fungible elements, or low intelligibility opaque elements. High-personality ecologies are like relatively free markets, while low-personality ones are like command economies, and opaque ones like the internal managerial economies of closed organizations.

The characteristics of high-personality technology ecologies is particularly clear in the field of operations research (OR), which deals in problems that are almost always NP-hard (i.e. computationally intractable), and must therefore be solved with heuristics that are only effective locally. OR is full of scheduling and planning algorithms that are defined by their personalities, which create consequences that must be dealt with by counterparties. For example, a simple and popular algorithm for prioritizing tasks in a queue, Shortest Processing Time (SPT) minimizes the average wait time for waiting tasks. But in a situation where tasks arrive constantly, it might delay longer tasks indefinitely. Producers of long tasks must negotiate appropriate service-level expectations that incentivize deviations from pure SPT behaviors.

An ecology comprising even simple processing agents with different “scheduling heuristic” personalities, and customers that bring various mixes of tasks for processing, is going to have a particular emergent personality, a particular style in which it gets things done. One that can be shaped and made intelligible and narratable to a useful extent by design. This is what it means for an entire ecology to have a personality. As we learned during Covid, a supply chain being lean or fat is a personality label that indicates how it behaves in real conditions, not a gratuitous obesity descriptor.

I will offer a stronger claim: only high-personality ecologies, ones with unique but mutually intelligible entities, can be economically generative. This is why AIs with personalities, composed into ecologies with personalities, are required to solve the problem of missing mechanisms.

To borrow a phrase from the title of a book by Ben Horowitz, what you do is who you are. And what you do typically involves relationships with others, whether the agent in question is a simple scheduling algorithm or an LLM.

The Protocol is the Personality

As Marshall McLuhan famously observed, every medium (by which he meant any technology, not just communications media) has a message. This is true of all technologies, whether simple or complex. A hammer has a message, as does a television. But sufficiently complex and autonomous technologies take the phenomenon to another level. Characteristic patterns of behavior (the rich “message”) reveal a general personality.

Here it is useful to characterize “sufficiently complex and autonomous.” Roughly speaking, a Turing-equivalent technology (i.e., equivalent to a general-purpose computer) that makes some significant class of decisions autonomously, based on engineered decision architectures rather than natural properties, is the kind of thing I am talking about.

This personality is best revealed in the context of interactions with other entities that must exhibit complementary personalities in order to form stable ecologies. An ecology of personalities with a particular distribution, woven together with particular protocols, has its own emergent distributed personality, just as human aggregates from subcultures to nations have their own personalities. Or, for that matter, pre-AI technological ecosystems such as the Microsoft or Salesforce ecosystems. And applying the same principle, what these ecologies do is who they are.

One way to frame this is: the protocol is the personality.

The behavior of an internet-connected computer isn’t entirely a function of its own architecture. Much of it is derived from the personality of internet protocols. Mac vs. PC or iOS vs. Android might be the atomic individual personality distinctions, but by what you do is who you are logic, to the extent both pairs are situated in the internet, both inherit the personality of the protocols of the internet.

The transition from the relatively atomized PC era to the connected and social (for both humans and machines) internet era took about a decade, but as with everything else, AI seems to be speed-running this phase transition. It is already becoming clear that the personality of different AIs is only partly an innate property of specific language or image models, traceable to their training data. The full personality of an AI is revealed when it becomes socially embedded in an ecology of other AIs and humans, and must deal with the consequences of its own dispositions on others.

The personalities of complex technologies are only fully expressed in the right ecologies. Protocols can be understood as precisely the engineered ecological scaffoldings that draw out full expressions of personalities from individual agents. Good protocols induce rich and generative ecologies. Bad protocols induce lifeless ecologies.

How can you tell them apart?

Protocol Affects

Just as humans might have a “game face” that is a function of specific games they may be playing, technologies too have game faces. We can call these protocol affects. To tell good and bad protocols apart, you have to read their affects.

The personalities of AI ecologies are currently emerging in inchoate, wild forms. Scaffolding elements like MCP and OpenClaw allow for relatively unbridled relational behavior among the various compute and human elements they weave together. But already there are signs of this Hobbesian wilderness being tamed. Protocols that are deliberately designed to shape the personality distribution of entire ecologies of intelligent agents in particular ways, and present them in stable ways, are rapidly emerging.

With humans, we use the term affect to point to how an underlying personality is expressed through deportment and comportment in a particular milieu. Protocol affects are the technological equivalent: Emergent typical behavior patterns of elemental high-personality technologies, when they are composed into “civilized” technological ecologies.

A good example of a protocol affect is the famously verbose and redundant one of TCP/IP, as revealed through jokes shared by networking engineers.

Hello, would you like to hear a TCP joke?
  Yes, I'd like to hear a TCP joke.
  OK, I'll tell you a TCP joke.
  OK, I'll hear a TCP joke.
  Are you ready to hear a TCP joke?
  Yes, I am ready to hear a TCP joke.
  OK, I'm about to send the TCP joke. It will last 10 seconds, it has two characters, it does not have a setting, it ends with a punchline.
  OK, I'm ready to hear the TCP joke that will last 10 seconds, has two characters, does not have a setting and will end with a punchline.
  I'm sorry, your connection has timed out... Hello, would you like to hear a TCP joke?

This “personality” expressed by TCP/IP (which replaced the Hobbesian anarchy of early network protocols) is not arbitrary. It is the result of a network consciously designed for high fault-tolerance under extreme circumstances, including nuclear war, which must continuously trade-off packet delay and packet loss.

Since it is a backend infrastructure technology, this is not a personality that lay users very often see (though they do experience the generativity it induces). But with other technologies, protocol affect can be part of broader human culture. AI, obviously, is one of these technologies.

What sorts of protocol affects might emerge from the various protocol ecologies taking shape today?

Zombiefied Discovery and Distribution

Applying the principle what you do is who you are, we can shed useful light on the nature and disposition of agent ecologies, as they continue to evolve past their wild phase, and develop stable protocol affects that human culture can take root in.

Computers at various scales of aggregation do different things. At the protocol level embodied by protocols like MCP, the main functions are discovery and distribution.

In the older stratum of the internet now entering its sunset phase, both were functions of what we call social media (at least as far as human users are concerned). The protocol affect accompanying these functions was one of delight and serendipity in the early years, which morphed to one of anxiety and frenetic competition over attention allocation in the later years. Thanks to the economic backdrop of the ZIRP era of zero/low interest rates, both discovery and distribution were cheaply available at global scale to almost everybody, with predictable over-exploitation and erosion of trust all around – what Cory Doctorow has labeled enshittification. Humans increasingly began retreating from the open internet to more closed cozy spaces. And the cost of this retreat was the breakdown of discovery and distribution mechanisms that relied on a lot of humans being publicly active online.

The protocol affect of the social internet has unraveled in the last few years. In terms of our personality metaphor for technologies, there is, in a sense “nobody there” anymore. No ghost haunting the social internet. There are no true public social media, and no protocol personality cohering to replace the one that unraveled. What remains is a pre-personality space of endless, mindless culture warring (what I called “the internet of beefs” elsewhere).

The internet still works mechanically, at the packet level, but as a global public social infrastructure with a defined and intelligible personality, marked by particular predictable planet-scale discovery and distribution dispositions, it has become zombified, even as our experience of it has become enshittified – the haunting experience of the public internet, its HX, is increasingly an empty and dispiriting one. There’s no there there anymore.

As a result, in the current era, discovery and distribution have become increasingly difficult and expensive for all activities that require internet-scale provisioning of those affordances. The problem is bad enough for existing needs, such as discovery and distribution of webpages and tweet-like messages. It gets exponentially worse when you consider the needs of new technologies.

Traditional discovery and distribution mechanisms are failing for traditional internet technologies such as social media and streaming video. They are complete non-starters for newer technologies.

Two in particular, are worth thinking about together, as a pair of evil twins: blockchains and AI. Curiously, the answer to the discovery and distribution problem might lie in a term shared by both, with different, but rhyming meanings – token.

The Packet and the Token

The legacy internet traffics in generic packets with some discrimination based on content type, and a presumption of bandwidth abundance. Discovery and distribution ultimately boil down to discovery and distribution of packets. The economy of the internet is, ultimately, the economy of packets. The still-unsettled back-and-forth political pendulum swinging around net neutrality is a debate about the political economy of packets, and whether it should be stewarded like a relatively abundant public commons or a corporatized market (dominated by a few large entities) that allocates a relatively scarce resource.

For emerging computational technologies, a new political economy has emerged on top of the packet economy. This is the token economy.

On blockchains, tokens mediate all interactions that require certain cryptographically secured assurances, in flexible and programmable ways, creating an economy that is something like a non-neutral internet, but one that can approach perfect competition more closely. Instead of large tech companies paying for private bandwidth, or non-net-neutral jurisdictions discriminating coarsely based on packet type (video vs. text for example), capacity can be sliced and diced in arbitrarily fine-grained ways, based on economic decision-making that can happen at bot-speed. Unlike what we might call packetspace, blockspace (and its more esoteric descendant, blobspace) is intrinsically structured as a market that prices interactions in tiny fractions of dollars, and transactional time constants measured in the milliseconds. Blockchain economies begin where the fastest and most fine-grained corners of the traditional economies, such as high-frequency trading, end. For some, this is just metastasized financialization and scams. For others, it is the beginning of economic outer space travel.

For AIs too, tokens are units of production and transaction. We generate text, code, images, and video using computers that measure their work, and charge for it, by the token (to be precise, tokens/second/user). Again, the picture looks like a non-net-neutral internet. How many tokens you get, of what quality, and at what speed, depends on what you’re willing to pay. And as with blockchains, this economy approaches perfect competition more closely. Instead of large organizations paying human programmers, writers, or artists by the hour or by the month, a vast market of individuals and small organizations can pay for code, text, and images by the token. As with blockchains, these tokens slice and dice what we might call inference space in fine-grained ways, with time constants measured in the milliseconds.

Does the term token represent a mere cosmetic connection between two frontiers of computing, or might there be a deeper conceptual link?

I suspect there is a conceptual link here. On both frontiers, tokens organize a natural economy around real scarcity that can ultimately be reduced to energy units (watts powering computers). More importantly, both kinds of token are informationally expressive in a way that packets, as mere “containers” are not.

And most importantly, the two kinds of token are, to borrow a term from electrical engineering, impedance matched. They have similar temporalities, spatialities, and information densities. They can be woven together, to form the warp and woof of a fundamentally different kind of internet. By itself, each is limited. As Matt Webb observed last year, modern AI by itself offers intelligence “too cheap to meter” which makes it more trouble than it is worth to scaffold for economic activity in a sufficiently fine-grained way, at least using conventional economic mechanisms. Blockchains, on the other hand are, among other things, metering technologies that shine precisely in too cheap to meter regimes. The two can, in other words, mesh in a fine-grained way. If you want to allocate work between two AI agents at a token-level of resolution, blockchains can do the job.

This is not idle speculation. One emerging mechanism for distribution and discovery (ERC 8004), combines AI and blockchain tokens in precisely this sense, and has already catalyzed the emergence of an ecology of AI agents that combine metered intelligence and small crypto transactions to form a marketplace. In the next Obliquities column, I will explore specific case studies.

Whether or not this particular approach succeeds, I suspect the foundation of the future internet will be an economy of tokens. Symbolic tokens that carry meanings and associations, and transactional tokens that carry valuations and risks, intricately orchestrated by a scaffolding that generates a tangled bank of private and public information and computation.

More broadly though, to return to the original motivating question, how does this emerging vision help solve the missing mechanisms problem?

Articulating Agent Ecologies

To summarize the idea I’ve been laying out here, the solution to the missing mechanisms problem is high-personality agent ecologies composed of individual agents with their own personalities. These personalities, far from being cosmetic features, are what allow functional behaviors to cohere at all levels, by allowing agents to be intelligible and predictable enough to each other to transact fruitfully, and produce increasingly complex and large scale effects. For us humans, inhabiting such computational ecologies will feel like being surrounded by friendly milieus of ghosts haunting our digital environments.

As a side effect, such ecologies would solve the so-called alignment problem, to the extent that is a well-posed and meaningful problem at all. High personality ecologies create alignment as they go, and wither and die when they fail to do so.

If you find this kind of future hard to imagine, take a peek at the short AI-generated movie we made at our workshop a year ago, South Beast Asia, which imagines (a Southeast Asian inspired) technological future full of AI-haunted digital and physical environments. Read our collection of short stories from our contest last year, Ghosts in Machines. We’re already creating this future.

What sort of physical reality might underlie such a planetary digital-physical hyperobject?

One mental model that I’ve found very useful derives from Peter Thiel’s observation that AI is “communist” while blockchains are “libertarian” in their personalities.

To a first approximation, modern AI tends to be most powerful when aggregated into really large-scale models running in the densest physical aggregations of compute (hence the excitement over gigawatt-scale datacenters). This feature naturally lends them a centripetal, convergent, homogenizing tendency and a “communist” personality.

Blockchains, on the other hand, are really only valuable to the extent they deliver on properties like censorship resistance, global consensus, capacity for irrevocable commitments (what Josh Stark named “hardness”), client diversity, and unbreakable (including quantum-resistant) cryptography. These features naturally lend blockchains a centrifugal, divergent, pluralist tendency, and a “libertarian” personality.

The respective token economies reflect these characteristics. Tokens in the sense of AI are essentially a “communist” currency, local to a particular model’s command economy. Tokens in the sense of blockchains only have value at all to the extent they are not local (“private blockchains” are deservedly mocked). Each by itself is impoverished and incapable of forming a high-personality agent ecology. Together, they can.

The interface between the two economies, I suspect, will feature phenomenology similar to the impossible trilemma in macroeconomics, or the boundary between the interiors and exteriors of firms in a Coasean economics sense.

Understood as a planet-scale computer, how do the two parts relate? AI will clearly be the “brain” of this planet-scale computer, similar to the CPUs, GPUs, or TPUs of individual computers. Whether this takes the form of dozens of gigawatt-scale datacenters running the largest models, and provisioning metered intelligence to the planet, or a more scale-free distribution of AI processing capabilities all the way to billions of intelligent entities on the network edge, is an open question. Whatever your political preferences for one or the other, there are also technological questions still being investigated. Is maximal aggregation necessary for performance? Can a gigawatt dispersed across a planet-wide decentralized network of small AIs be as capable as a single datacenter? Does embodiment matter? Does better local context beat cheaper tokens/second/user?

These are questions for which we will discover answers over the next few years.

The role that is likely to be played by blockchains (or functionally equivalent protocol technologies) will be that of the fabric. In modern computing, at all scales, the term fabric is usually used to describe the scaffolding that connects the different bits and pieces of the brain. There are fabric-like elements at the level of chips, servers, racks, and datacenters. The internet itself serves as the fabric at larger scales. The overall planetary computational fabric is a mix of smart and dumb elements. Fabrics embody the boundary intelligence of a system.

Blockchains are fabric technologies that can scale from personal computer scale to planet scale. They induce fabrics that operate by a different grammar than the familiar one we have today, but it is a grammar that is friendlier to agentic AI.

The fabric and the brain – an architecture for the emerging future of the internet that can sustain sufficiently high-personality ecologies to allow our frontier technologies to fully express themselves and truly thrive.

This is a very recent vision for the future of the internet (and indeed, the planet). As recently as five years ago, it was meaningful to describe Ethereum in terms of its original vision as a “world computer.” At the time, it was the only entity that merited such a description, since it allowed small-scale, highly constrained Turing-equivalent computing (the EVM, or Ethereum Virtual Machine) to run on a public blockchain. That was as good as planet-scale computation got, since traditional compute is, in a sense, stranded compute trapped within industrial-age organizational boundaries. There was no meaningful way to plug that compute into a planetary fabric, with or without blockchains.

AI brainpower though, is atomized into token-sized units (embodied by memory more than processing as we have come to appreciate), and capable of flowing smoothly across contexts. A fabric that can shape those flows, while preserving privacy with cryptographic guarantees, can create a kind of planetary intelligence that was impossible to even imagine just a few years ago.

One updated vision for the future of Ethereum in particular is as a world fabric rather than a world computer. It is, of course, not the only candidate auditioning for the role.

Whatever form the protocols constituting the fabric of planetary intelligence take, we will soon be living inside a planetary brain-and-fabric computer.

What will we do with this computer? That’s the question.

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.

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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.

The Missing Mechanisms of the Agentic Economy

Earlier this week, friend of Protocolized published a pertinent essay outlining paths to ensuring the agentic economy develops as an open, competitive ecosystem rather than a winner-takes-all platform:

Right now, there’s a problem that makes the AI/human knowledge market less efficient than it could be. The disrespect for IP that has been shown by the AI labs and applications during the training stage, and even now during inference, has led to efforts by content owners to protect their content from AI. Do not crawl. Lawsuits. Reluctance to share information. Even the AI labs are complaining about the theft of their IP and trying to protect their model weights from distillation.

It’s an economy crying out for mechanism design.

The lesson of YouTube Content ID is worth learning. Twenty-five years ago, the music industry was in the same position that content creators are in today with AI. In response to unauthorized use of their music by creators, music publishers’ demand to YouTube was “Take it down.” But as Google engineer Doug Eck explained to me, YouTube came up with a better answer: “How about we help you monetize it instead?” I don’t know the details of how that decision was made but I do know the eventual outcome. Aligned incentives led to a vibrant creator economy in which YouTube’s video creators, the music companies, and Google all got to share in the value that was created.

That should give us inspiration for how to solve some of the problems we face now with AI. Whether it’s with Agent Skills, NotebookLM, or other emergent artifacts of the new AI/human knowledge economy, we need to align the incentives. If we can grow the pie, and in a way where no single gatekeeper captures the bulk of the benefit, there’s a way to create a vibrant market. But that requires building mechanisms that don’t exist yet.

Read the full essay at O’Reilly.

For most of the history of digital infrastructure provision, public institutions faced two uncomfortable options: deep dependency on large proprietary vendors such as Microsoft or Oracle, with all the lock-in and geopolitical exposure that entails; or the enormous difficulty and expense of building and maintaining systems in-house.

Open protocols offer a third path. Infrastructure that no single actor owns, that evolves through distributed processes, and that can be implemented by anyone with the technical capacity to do so. The sovereignty offered by this approach is not about ownership, but about institutions understanding how their systems work, being able to participate in them, and retaining the option to move or adapt if needed.

Public institutions across Europe and beyond are increasingly taking this third option. Public digital infrastructure is becoming dependent on systems that no single actor controls. Messaging platforms, digital ID systems, and cross-border government digital services increasingly rely on open protocol ecosystems. In Europe, this acceleration is shaped by two pressures: the call for digital sovereignty and legally mandated interoperability. The French government’s digital directorate, DINUM, for example, runs Tchap – a secure messaging platform for the French public administration – on Matrix, an open protocol maintained by a distributed global community rather than any single vendor.

Overdependence on dominant corporate vendors or external jurisdictions is increasingly seen in Europe as a real political and strategic risk. The European Commission has put digital sovereignty and open strategic autonomy high on the agenda because control over digital infrastructure now touches everything from economic security to democratic resilience and Europe’s geopolitical standing. In that context, open protocols have advantages. They allow governments to reduce dependency on individual vendors without cutting themselves off from global technology ecosystems.

At the same time, interoperability is no longer aspirational. With the adoption of the Interoperable Europe Act, cross-border compatibility and the reuse of public sector digital tools, standards, and components have become regulatory requirements rather than best practices. Public administrations are expected to build digital services that can function across Member States and integrate into shared European infrastructures. That legal shift creates pressure toward open standards and protocol-based systems, because interoperability at scale is difficult to sustain if the underlying evolution of systems is controlled unilaterally.

As a result, many major public digital infrastructure projects over the next decade will involve protocol deployments. Realising the potential of this change, however, requires something most public institutions have not yet done: treating protocol engagement as a first-class infrastructure responsibility rather than a background technical detail.

The Problem with How Institutions Procure

The problem starts with how institutions think about procurement. Servers can be audited. Vendors can be contracted. Systems can be upgraded through planned lifecycle management. When something breaks, there is someone to call. The governance of these third-party relationships is externalised into contract law, and the institution can, at least in principle, hold the counterparty to account. Even open source has historically been absorbed into this logic. Vendors and consultancies package open source software into products and services that institutions can procure, with clear accountability structures.

Open protocols do not fit that model. They define how systems communicate and evolve, but they are not owned or governed through formal authority. Maintained by distributed communities, they operate through proposal processes, informal norms and voluntary adoption rather than contractual obligation.

When an institution procures a system built on an open protocol, it is not simply acquiring software. It is entering a coordination ecosystem governed by rules that will continue to evolve long after any contract is signed, through processes that the procurement office did not assess and toward outcomes that no single party controls.

The protocol that makes a system interoperable today will be revised. The security practices embedded in it will need to change as threats evolve. The compatibility assumptions that allow it to federate with other deployments will be renegotiated by a community of contributors who have no formal obligation to an operational timeline or compliance requirements.

This arrangement is still poorly understood in the public sector, particularly in procurement systems designed around vendors and deliverables rather than shared governance.

The Risks of Unmanaged Dependency

The case for open protocol infrastructure is strong, but adoption introduces its own risks. Technical robustness does not automatically translate into institutional readiness.

Exit options can narrow quickly. If the protocol evolves in a direction that no longer fits institutional requirements, the practical alternatives are limited. Forking a protocol that is already widely deployed means taking on long-term maintenance and gradually drifting away from the wider ecosystem. Walking away usually means returning to vendor-based solutions, bringing back the same dependencies digital sovereignty policies were meant to reduce.

Change can also arrive as operational surprise rather than managed evolution. Protocol governance is continuous. Security updates, specification revisions, and coordination shifts are normal features of healthy ecosystems. But if institutions are not following those processes, they might only notice the consequence of a particular direction when it urgently impacts them. What could have been handled through normal lifecycle planning turns into incident response.

Governance influence is rarely evenly distributed, though to exactly what degree varies significantly by protocol. Some have governance structures with strong safeguards against capture by any single actor. In protocols with weaker safeguards, development tends to be shaped by those who can afford to fund full-time engineering participation. A public institution entering such a governance ecosystem may find it already dominated by a small group of well-funded private actors.

Maintenance capacity can also be more limited than it appears. Key functions, particularly security response, may depend on a very small number of individuals. If those individuals move on or are unavailable during an incident, institutions have no contractual safeguards and may face response timelines that are incompatible with their operational requirements.

In essence, open protocols replace vendor dependency with ecosystem dependency. That dependency is structurally healthier because the governance processes shaping these systems are visible and participatory, but it still requires institutional competence, monitoring and strategic engagement. Public institutions are not limited to acting as customers with influence tied to purchasing power. They can observe, engage and, where appropriate, contribute to how the infrastructure they depend on evolves.

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Building Institutional Capacity for Protocol Governance

The most productive response is to develop genuine institutional capacity to understand and track how protocol governance works, and to participate in it on the protocol’s own terms.

Participation is not control. It would be a mistake to treat engagement in protocol governance as a route to directing how a global technical community decides things. Governance is distributed by design, and the value of that distribution is precisely that no single actor can capture the infrastructure.

An institution that attends governance discussions, comments on proposals and tracks specification changes is not governing the protocol. It is informing its own planning and, where it has something useful to contribute, improving the quality of the collective decision.

When protocol foundations offer formal participation structures, such as Governmental Advisory Councils, public institutions should make use of them. These forums allow governments running large deployments to raise operational needs early while still respecting the distributed governance model most protocols rely on. In some cases, institutions may also second engineers or technical staff to protocol foundations or working groups, a practice already common in standardisation bodies such as ETSI and W3C.

Developing internal protocol literacy also changes how institutions manage their infrastructure. Teams that follow specification changes and community discussions gain early insight into how the systems they depend on are likely to evolve. Over time, a consistent presence also builds credibility within the ecosystem, increasing the likelihood that the needs of large public deployments are taken into account.

A procurement team with real protocol literacy can also assess the governance health of a protocol before committing to it. Not just the quality of the current specification, but the community’s track record on backwards compatibility, the concentration of influence among contributors, the quality of security coordination and the overall health of the maintenance work.

Making protocol risk visible at the moment dependency is created does not require complex new bureaucracy. It requires better questions during procurement and infrastructure planning. Where are decisions actually made? How does a proposal move from draft to adoption? How are breaking changes communicated, and with what notice? What happens if institutional requirements diverge from community direction?

Procurement criteria can then reflect that understanding. Vendors who actively contribute to protocol specifications, participate in security coordination and maintain implementations are better positioned to keep deployments aligned with protocol evolution over time. Procurement frameworks that treat upstream contribution as a resilience signal do not just favour better suppliers. They shift incentives across the whole ecosystem, rewarding vendors embedded in the health of the protocol rather than those treating it as a static dependency.

Institutionalising Participation: The Matrix Example

One of the clearest examples of an institution making this shift is the Direction interministérielle du numérique (DINUM), the French government’s digital directorate, which in 2025 became the first government in the world to join the Matrix.org Foundation as a formal member.

DINUM already operated the largest government deployment of Matrix through Tchap, the secure messaging platform used across the French public administration by hundreds of thousands of civil servants.

Joining the foundation did not grant DINUM control over Matrix, nor did it create a privileged position within the protocol’s governance structure. What it did was formalise France’s presence in the ecosystem behind the infrastructure it already depended on. French engineers and security teams had already been tracking Matrix Spec Changes, coordinating on security advisories and planning upgrades in line with upstream development. Membership made that engagement structural rather than personal. Reliance on a small number of individuals was reduced by embedding governance awareness within the institution itself.

Not every public institution will have the resources to sustain individual participation in protocol governance. Collective participation models offer a practical alternative. The Matrix for Public Sector forum, launched in October 2025 alongside DINUM’s foundation membership, brings together representatives from six EU Member States, the European Commission and other institutions to share knowledge, coordinate deployments and feed operational requirements into governance collectively. This lowers the threshold for meaningful participation.

France is not alone. Across Europe and beyond, governments are building at scale on open protocol infrastructure, with varying degrees of governance engagement. Germany operates a large public sector deployment of Matrix through BwMessenger, the secure messaging platform developed for the Bundeswehr. Several EU Member States, including Sweden, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, are piloting or deploying similar open protocol-based messaging and collaboration infrastructures.

Participation Is the Strategy

Open protocol adoption by governments will continue. The pressures behind it are structural: the political will to reduce dependency on digital infrastructure controlled by big tech companies outside their jurisdiction, legal requirements for cross-border interoperability, and the economic advantages of building infrastructure on open protocols rather than each institution developing its own proprietary stacks.

The question is whether the institutions involved understand the nature of that commitment. They are not simply buying a product. They are stepping into a governance process that existed before their deployment and will continue long after their contract ends.

The institutions that invest in that relationship – that send someone to the working group, contribute to the specification and treat the protocol community as a constituency rather than a supplier – will end up with something no procurement process can deliver: infrastructure that grows with them, not against them.

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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 ’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.

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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.

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.

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.”

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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.

This combination of ubiquity and invisibility creates a peculiar methodological quandary. Protocols permeate a multitude of technical substrates, institutional arrangements, and social realities, operating simultaneously at hyperlocal and global scales. Even so, it can prove difficult to locate protocolization precisely. What does it look like to theorize such a thing? How can we identify formal models that describe the common, generalizable features of protocols which can be reliably applied across contexts? If we manage this at all, how can we tell if we’re doing it well?

This time, we’ll explore one of our early responses to the challenge of conducting a generative collective research program for protocol formalization. In particular, we will introduce a new top-level research track built around specific, well-posed problems that we call Atomic Protocol Questions. We’ll explain what they are, why we think they’re a promising approach, and how you can contribute.

Join us at the next Special Interest Group in Formal Protocol Theory (SIGFPT) call in Discord on March 6 if this idea interests you.

Birds, Frogs, and Atoms

The physicist Freeman Dyson, in his 2009 Einstein Lecture given to the American Mathematical Society, divided mathematicians into two species: birds and frogs.

“Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time.”

Fields Medalist Timothy Gowers, riffing on the famous “Two Cultures” divide between academics in science and the humanities, similarly drew a distinction among mathematicians between theory-builders and problem-solvers.

Setting aside the apparently common impulse to bisect mathematicians, both reached the rather common-sense conclusion that a healthy intellectual climate requires individuals of both temperaments, for each complements and builds on the other. In Dyson’s words:

“Mathematics is rich and beautiful because birds give it broad visions and frogs give it intricate details. Mathematics is both great art and important science, because it combines generality of concepts with depth of structures.”

It seems quite natural to think that theorizing protocolization would entail primarily a theory-building approach. One might envision, for example, articulating an abstract general notion of a Protocol, audition or invent various formal systems in search of one that best captures it, and then set about applying that framework to protocols out in the real world. In fact, this has been the character of most of SIGFPT’s pathfinding investigations thus far, and will likely always form a major track of study; there is immense value in creatively bringing diverse domain knowledge to bear on shared formal questions.

But it also comes with several challenges, largely due to the difficulty of enumerating in advance a set of necessary and sufficient features of a successful formal modeling framework to this domain. Protocols are unusually resistant to analysis through any single descriptive lens. Even when a formalism is expressive enough in principle, it is often unclear how to apply it across domains without either flattening the phenomena that matter or rebuilding large amounts of domain knowledge inside the model itself. Several of the SIG’s early discussions revolved around issues of this nature.

Therefore, as a complement to the top-down, avian theory-building, we’ve introduced a research track for bottom-up, froggish theorization: enumerating small, well-scoped research questions about specific protocolized contexts: Atomic Protocol Questions (APQ).

The spiritual forebear of the APQ is David Hilbert’s famous list of 23 unsolved problems presented at the 1900 International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris. Hilbert’s problems ranged across the foundations of mathematics, number theory, algebra, and geometry, and came to define much of the research agenda for twentieth-century mathematics. In several cases, individual problems motivated new branches of mathematics entirely: his second problem, on the consistency of arithmetic, led to Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and the field of proof theory; his tenth, on solving Diophantine equations algorithmically, was eventually resolved through computability theory. In this vein, our ultimate goal is to pose and then attack a set of open questions that captures protocol studies in both conceptual and disciplinary breadth.

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Subatomic Particles

“Atomic” is meant in several senses:

• Self-Contained: Each problem is intelligible and evaluable on its own, without requiring deep background in other APQs or specialized disciplines.

• Indivisible: Each problem is framed at the lowest level of abstraction needed for its bearing on protocol studies – not decomposable into simpler protocol questions.

• Heterogeneous: The problems collectively span a wide variety of subject matters, disciplines, and scales to avoid overfitting to a small set of favored contexts.

• Representative: The problems collectively cover as many dimensions of protocolization as we can identify— learnability, evolvability, tensions, coordination costs, and many more.

The first two properties make each APQ tractable in isolation. The second two ensure the collection functions as more than a grab-bag of puzzles – it becomes a map of the protocol landscape.

Each APQ has three essential constituents: an empirical context (a real-life, observable protocolized system), a key dimension of protocolization (a theoretically significant concept or aspect of protocolized systems), and a sufficiently precise research question (crisp enough to admit evaluable answers). Moreover, answering it should require one not simply to lean on the prior research of the particular field in which it originated, but to say something new about it qua protocol, and thereby demonstrate the value of this unique perspective.

Keeping Apart

Consider a familiar urban frustration: bus bunching. Buses, of course, are meant to adhere to a consistent schedule with a regular interval between arrivals (ideally both at once). In real life, buses tend to cluster together because of compounding delays: a delayed bus will arrive at a stop with more passengers waiting to board, who then take more time to board, delaying the arrival at the next stop, and so on. The trailing bus, meanwhile, will be in the opposite situation, picking up fewer passengers until eventually it catches up to the first. This problem, called “bus bunching” is a well-studied positive feedback loop.

It’s also a protocol problem. The issue isn’t what technology buses should use, but what rules should govern their coordination behavior. There are a number of common approaches to the overall problem, but the most basic interventions are to disrupt the feedback loop by making buses that are “ahead” wait at stops longer, have delayed buses skip stops, or have trailing buses overtake leading buses. The optimization objective is not necessarily a given – one can prioritize schedule adherence, for example, which tends to work best in lower-frequency routes where travelers plan based on the timetable, or optimize for headway between adjacent buses which tends to produce better outcomes on high-frequency routes where passengers arrive randomly. In practice, it is likely that a system in a realistic urban context would need to combine several strategies to flexibly manage the various causes of bunching.

Recent work has focused on dynamic control designs that integrate real-time information on various contributors to bunching and make adjustments automatically. For example, reinforcement learning systems trained in simulation can develop policies that dynamically adjust, such as holding times based on traffic conditions and demand, outperforming more conventional analytical or optimization-based methods. Separate lines of research approach the issue from the demand side, providing information to passengers about current wait times and bus congestion, in the hope that some passengers will make the decision to wait for a less crowded bus. Perhaps more drastically, real-time data can be used to update the bus schedule itself dynamically, with the obvious drawback of making the system less legible to would-be passengers.

The progressive integration of dynamic information and automation raises several interrelated issues with the relationship between these systems and the humans who participate in them – as drivers, dispatchers, or passengers. It turns out that deployment of real-time systems are hindered by various meatspace practicalities that are not typically modeled in simulation. One factor is variation among drivers, who each drive a bit differently, and in particular have different propensities to comply with the holding control guidance. This is double-edged: naive non-compliance tends to degrade the effectiveness of the overall fleet control, but human operators might also be able to react to conditions that are not easily observed through the data pipeline, due to cost or difficulty. Similarly, exposing information to passengers indeed allows them to make informed decisions about which bus to board, but there is a reflexivity problem; passengers may end up inadvertently coordinating so as to cause crowding on the previously-empty trailing buses!

The APQ approach attempts to sharpen such concerns into more tractable research questions about protocols:

• What operational discretion should a dynamic bus dispatch protocol preserve for human agents? When does human judgment improve versus degrade the protocol’s coordination performance?

• What non-invasive data sources can capture sources of user heterogeneity that influence demand?

• What ludic elements for drivers and passengers encourage aligned participation in the protocol?

Each of these examples is meant to conform to the APQ specification. The empirical context and research question aspects are obvious, but more subtly each question is targeted towards the intersection of current research on bus bunching and ideas of interest in protocol studies (key dimensions). The first question bears on concepts such as stewardability, invisibility, and legibility. How much can and should participants steer a protocol? In what ways must it be limited? When is active awareness of, and intervention into, protocols helpful or hindering? The second is a question of constraint and observability, from the system’s perspective. Can we improve the responsiveness and dynamism of protocols without overreaching or creating protocol failure surfaces and vulnerabilities? The third is ludicity, that is, how to support the protocol’s functioning and legitimacy via game-like and strategic elements.

The questions are also deliberately posed at a moderate level of abstraction. Protocol Studies is not, at present, suited to admit capital-P Problems that are well-posed in the sense that is typically expected in formal mathematics or other formally rigorous disciplines. On the other hand, it is not so broad (“What’s the best bus system?”) as to render any attempt at an answer indeterminate. It is also agnostic to the specific academic lineage or technical tools that one may use in subsequent research. Bus bunching itself ties together research in, at a minimum, control theory, urban planning, operations research, economics, and machine learning. A good APQ should invite a variety of possible approaches from a variety of possible perspectives. This diversity both within and between questions is in fact a load-bearing feature of APQs envisioned as an overarching research program.

Jumping Together

The key wager behind the FPT effort is that “protocols,” over and above a striking set of terminological convergences, are something like what the philosophy of science calls a “kind”, or at the very least, exhibit the sort of structural unity that licenses productive cross-domain theorizing. We are not merely asserting that protocols are important but conjecturing something formally unified beneath the surface diversity. The APQ project operationalizes this with a sort of wisdom-of-the-crowds logic applied to consilience – a “jumping together” of independent streams of evidence to a unified explanatory framework across disciplines. APQs are an attempt to enable such convergence in protocol studies.

Individually, questions are designed to encourage concrete, independent investigations into pressing practical issues in technology and society. An APQ is falsifiable in the sense that it shifts debate from abstract questions about which formalism(s) might comprise the “right” foundation to empirical and technical questions about fit: what traction does each provide on this concrete question, and what are its limitations?

In aggregate, the APQs must be sufficiently diverse to span the conceptual space of protocol studies across their constituent contexts and dimensions. The hope is that though approaches to different problems may initially appear disparate, the character of their solutions will reveal similarities and differences that interfere constructively or destructively. When multiple formalisms attack the same underlying phenomena, their idiosyncratic commitments tend to wash out, while shared structure is reinforced.

APQs, then, enable comparison at two levels. Within a single problem, multiple formalisms can be evaluated adversarially. Across problems, the more telling comparison emerges: do solutions to different APQs sharing a protocol dimension reveal common structure? If “evolvability” means something formally similar whether we’re studying bus networks or robot swarms – despite different researchers, methods, and vocabularies – that’s evidence the dimension names something real.

The history of science is rich with examples of consilience, when it works. One such example is the notion of computability. In the 1930s, mathematicians from around the world invented precise, independent definitions of what it means to be computable. Alan Turing developed abstract machines. Alonzo Church created the lambda calculus. Stephen Kleene formalized recursive functions. Emil Post devised production systems. They each worked from different starting points with different motivations, often unaware of each other’s efforts. All four formalisms turned out to define exactly the same class of functions. This striking convergence – proven rapidly once the systems were compared – is substantial evidence that “computable” captures something true about the underlying nature of reality.

Or consider entropy. Carnot’s 1824 question about engine efficiency was purely practical – “What’s the best a heat engine can do?” This led to Clausius’s thermodynamic formulation, then Boltzmann’s statistical interpretation decades later. Yet they proved mathematically equivalent for macroscopic systems at equilibrium – evidence that entropy named something real.

In both examples, specific problems came first and the unifying concept emerged from comparison. Neither Carnot nor Turing were attempting to architect entropy or computability from first principles. Carnot was trying to understand engines. Turing was trying to answer the Entscheidungsproblem. The generality emerged from specificity. This is one aspect of the symbiotic dance between frog and bird.

In these cases, of course, this convergence was also uncoordinated – researchers weren’t necessarily comparing notes. APQs are a bit different: a deliberate invitation for multiple formalisms to attack shared problems. Convergence here wouldn’t inherently prove that protocol as a concept “carves nature at its joints”, but it would demonstrate something nearly as valuable: that the abstraction does productive, non-redundant work across domains that previously had no common vocabulary.

Convergence Not Guaranteed

Of course, this all assumes that there is some sort of kind upon which methods can converge in the first place. The history of science also shows that that is not necessarily the case, either. Cybernetics and the complexity science of the Santa Fe Institute, for example, are two intellectual movements that share affinities with protocol studies. The cyberneticists generated fundamental insights into what would become control theory, information theory, and artificial intelligence, but did not achieve their goal of unifying the behavior of all goal-oriented systems. Complexity science has made enormously productive contributions through agent-based modeling, network analysis, and related methods, yet cannot really be said to have converged on a formally precise definition of complexity itself.

This is not a particular criticism of those programs’ approach or, say, bird-to-frog ratio. We can’t know whether different approaches would have or will someday yet yield some more unified frame. They’re simply reminders that convergence isn’t guaranteed, even with world-class talent, real research traction, and genuinely promising phenomena. Importantly, even without achieving some kind of “grand unification,” both lines of research produced lasting value, impact, and influence on later technical thinkers.

Perhaps, after all, “protocol” is more useful for pointing at phenomena than predicting or engineering them. We should find that out too. APQs are designed so that even if convergence doesn’t come, we’ll have produced something worthwhile: well-posed problems, cross-disciplinary vocabulary, and concrete progress on specific systems. But we believe that if there is indeed a fruitful underlying logic of protocols waiting to be unearthed, this direction will bring us closer to doing so.

Join Us in the Mud

That’s all well and good, but how does one actually create an Atomic Protocol Question? A great place to start is Protocol Watching. Once you learn to see protocols, you will find them in every corner of our modern world: your airplane boarding group? Your daughter’s LEGO set? Your laptop’s charging cable? Each offers a myriad of protocol puzzles waiting to be honed into an APQ. offers a handy guide, complete with tools and tips to help you get started.

You might also seek the guidance of the LLMs. In addition to the human audience, this essay also functions as a piece of intelligence media to provide a specification of Atomic Protocol Questions for ingestion into your model of choice. Armed thusly with your protocol bicorder, you’ll have the elements to contribute to our project well in hand, no matter your technical background.

David Hilbert perceived clearly that the articulation of a problem itself is a generative act of taste. More than a list, his problems were a challenge and invitation to a global network of talented researchers to participate in an ambitious collective research program. As Dyson observed,

“Hilbert himself was a bird, flying high over the whole territory of mathematics, but he addressed his problems to the frogs who would solve them one at a time.”

In this spirit, be you bird, frog, hedgehog, or fox, we encourage you to join SIGFPT and help expand, refine, and prune the APQ set. Bring a problem you know well – from your domain, your city, your organization, your frustrations – sharpen it into an atomic question, and let it enter the comparative surface. Problems shape the future of research programs, and, eventually, entire fields. In helping to pose and attack APQs, you can help set the agenda for ours – perhaps for years to come.

In the weeks since, thanks to the explosive adoption of coding agents like Claude Code, we’ve been inundated by evidence for this view of the future of AI. Amateur hobbyists are now vibe-coding entire complex digital production infrastructures involving dozens of agents swarming in parallel across a single computer’s filesystem, within complex organizational scaffoldings. We could think of these as agent factories.

Agent factories enable a great deal of complex higher-order action. Much of the attention has been drawn to moltbook (“Reddit for agents”), and the many entertaining trainwrecks involving OpenClaw (“claw” seems to have emerged as a term of art for an agent living dangerously and autonomously on its own server on the public internet, often armed with crypto wallets – what could go wrong?). But the truly interesting developments are largely invisible – individuals with significant mutual trust interacting with each other through their personal and bespoke Claude Code infrastructures, exchanging work-in-progress materials.

We could call these interaction patterns have your factory call my factory, and the underlying relationship pattern F2F (a rather fun overload of face-to-face). An exuberant F2F ecology is likely to be a central feature of the protocolized future.

My own personal experience with Claude Code illustrates the pattern well.

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Case Study: Indie Book Publishing Pipeline

I started my first week of using Claude Code by producing an online book of my Twitter archive, but I ended it by setting up an entire book manuscript production factory. Currently, my factory dashboard shows a couple of dozen book projects in flight, most derived from two decades worth of my personal blog and newsletter archives (including new editions of old books), and a handful of from-scratch projects.

Factory is really the only word for what I’m doing. In my case, a factory resembling a flexible job shop of the sort that makes varied things using a flexibly configured set of machine tools. My book projects are individual enough that each needs some bespoke handling, but similar enough that many processes and code modules can be reused. So a job shop is both an appropriate metaphor and a useful reference pattern. Other patterns would be appropriate for other production activities – flow shops, cell-based factories, assembly lines.

I found myself relying on dim memories of decades-old industrial engineering and operations research coursework to set things up. The factory floor is a portion of my laptop filesystem within my Dropbox folder, where various Claude Code sessions operate within a folder hierarchy and each folder has its own claude.md file. Each folder with a claude.md is a bit like a workstation or cell. Thought needs to go into defining boundaries, hand-off artifacts, and so on.

But setting up a Claude factory wasn’t the most interesting thing I did. It was setting up a logistics link between my factory and another Claude factory, set up by my long-time publishing co-conspirator , who has helped me personally publish two books in the past, and also handled much of the publishing work for Summer of Protocols/Protocolized, including the complex Protocol Kit and four books.

Jenna also happens to be an enthusiastic early adopter, and has set up her own factory to produce finished books from manuscripts. My factory takes messy raw materials and produces rough first-draft manuscripts. Her factory will take those manuscripts and produce finished artifacts that can be uploaded to Amazon for distribution as print and ebook volumes.

The handoff point between us is a shared Dropbox folder plus a “manuscript transmittal” server she’s set up for metadata. Here’s my “account” view of her factory:

And here is the manuscript transmittal page:

The fascinating thing? This very corporate-seeming pipeline was set up by two people who basically don’t code!

What we do bring to the party though, is domain expertise.

Domain Knowledge > Coding Knowledge

Jenna is a publishing industry veteran who knows exactly how to set up and run book production. I’m an experienced blogger and self-publisher with a dozen self-published books to my credit. We both know what we’re doing on our respective ends of this pipeline. Claude Code brings highly skilled coding ability to the party, but Jenna and I bring the (rather artisanal in this case) domain-specific knowledge required to decide what to do and how. Tasks that call for opinionated and tasteful decision-making rather than raw intelligence or procedural skills. We do both need some intelligence to make this work, but that’s not the main act. It’s a sideshow, provisioned in commoditized form by Anthropic.

Our F2F link is live. We’re currently discussing fussy details that are involved in producing a print version of my Twitter book. I sent her a docx file produced by my factory that’s the starting point for her factory, and she turned it around with revised requirements, which I implemented and returned to her. I had to tell my factory to redo the initial docx to address some global styling issues before Jenna’s factory can begin designing the book. I’m figuring out how best to automate the pipeline.

Both of us are using a good deal of custom code written by Claude Code, along with open standards like docx. We’re currently using Vellum (book design software), but we’re exploring replacing it with a bespoke design tool.

So far I haven’t touched a line of content text, and haven’t even looked at any code. I watch the action entirely at the shell level, like a factory floor supervisor. Python, json, and html fly around, while I chew on my cigar in my top hat.

This is not an isolated example. Elsewhere, with collaborators on a hobbyist robotics project, I’m helping prototype a discovery and marketplace infrastructure using the Ethereum 8004 discovery protocol for AI agents, and the 402 payments protocol.

And in the broader Claude ecosystem, the primary article of commerce is the skill, a fragment of agentic intelligence that perfectly fits the definition of social kernel. A kind of industrial intermediate, albeit for a cottage industry of individual-scale agent factories.

I’m sure there are plenty of more complex examples under development.

What are we to make of this type of F2F relationship? The principals (“legal persons”) involved in such interactions are individual humans, but the connections between them are a universe apart from the simple “friend” and “follower” type digital relationships we’re used to. Interactions are vastly more complex than social objects in digital envelopes that track likes and shares.

The only precedent I can think of is B2B relationships between factory-like entities.

I strongly suspect that this is the invisible 90% of the iceberg in the agentic AI revolution. While the public theatrics on moltbook and the claw ecosystem are much more visible, the sheer depth of capability integrations enabled by factory-to-factory connections between individuals argues in favor of high-trust relationships being the locus of the real action. Especially considering the zeitgeist vibe shift, in human social media, from more public spaces to Dark Forest/cozyweb spaces.

In intelligence media, there’s a lot more you can do within trusted friendships than within parasocial relations. Low-trust relationships are in fact rapidly hemorrhaging social energy.

The Factory-Owner Economy

One of the biggest concerns going around right now is the future of jobs, or more generally, the future of work. The conversation is a familiar one. Pessimists issue apocalyptic warnings of impending economic collapse. Optimists rehearse sunny arguments about the lump of labor fallacy, Jevon’s paradox, and Milton Friedman’s notion of “new wants and needs” emerging to fill the economic vacuums created by the disappearance of old ones.

Whether optimistic or pessimistic, our discourses seem unable to think about the future outside of existing categories – jobs, SaaS companies, outsourced white-collar labor, knowledge-work professions, mortgages. Several viral essays in recent weeks have (rather cynically and aggressively) doubled down on prognostication based on such bankrupt ontologies, to feed both wishful dreams and lurid fears, instead of taking on the harder work of coming up with useful new categories to think with.

The “factory owner” economy offers at least one new category to think with. It suggests, for instance, that in the future, rewarding and fulfilling work will be organized neither as “jobs” nor “gigs” but at least partly as an economy of bespoke F2F artisanal capitalism. The main factors of production are intelligence-on-tap that is too cheap to meter at the detail level, computers, and internet connections.

The F2F ecology won’t be the whole future of course (one of our doctrinal beliefs here at Protocolized is “your imagined future isn’t the only one unfolding while everything else stays unchanged”), but it will be one big force shaping it.

Is this an optimistic or pessimistic future? That is the wrong question. The right question is: Is it an interesting future; one that allows us to continue playing the game of civilization?

We here at Protocolized believe the answer is yes. And a big part of our mission this year is to put some serious thinking behind that answer.

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.

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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.

This story is a Protocolized bounty, written in response to a cyborgs and rooms prompt. We set regular bounties in our Discord.

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.

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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.

“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.”

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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.

This story is a Protocolized bounty, written in response to its featured image – the first image published from one of our models on titles.xyz. We set regular bounties in Discord.

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.

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:

1. Render a rule

2. Rehearse a Failure Mode

3. 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!

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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 ’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.

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.

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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.

Behind the scenes, a new stratum of public and private infrastructure protocols, starting with RSS and the Facebook newsfeed, powered the shift. This was accompanied by a shift in hardware – from the desktop and laptop to the phone as the primary device for accessing the internet, and with the camera and microphone replacing the keyboard as the primary input mechanisms.

In 2026, we at Protocolized are betting that a similar transition will begin in AI, from destination AI to intelligence media. A landscape shaped by “visits” to oracular destination AIs will be reshaped around intelligence circulating in intelligence media. Here we mean “intelligence” in the sense of a kind of content (similar to what “intelligence agencies” produce and transmit) rather than a kind of processing capability.

We have opinions on how this shift ought to play out. We would prefer it to play out in decentralized, capture-resistant ways, rather than through aggregation dynamics powering feed-like experiences.

Intelligence media need not themselves be particularly intelligent. Cutting and pasting an LLM chat link into a messenger, committing AI-generated code to GitHub, or downloading a set of weights all count as intelligence media operations. Last weekend, an important new class of intelligence media emerged with moltbook.com: social networks for AI bots.

What is important about all these emerging examples is that intermediate artifacts of AI processing move from one locus to another, in a permissioned, socially mediated way, jumping contexts in the process.

Intelligence media are media through which intelligence flows from one locus to another, primarily in disaggregated forms that get further metabolized as they flow, via interaction with shifting contexts corresponding to distinct loci.

We’ve already witnessed a shift from “prompt engineering” to “context engineering,” and we are about to discover that the most powerful way to (re)engineer context is to simply move work-in-progress to a new context. That is what intelligence media do. They achieve context engineering through context switching.

When Alice shares a ChatGPT link with Bob, who opens it and continues the chat, Bob’s fork of the chat can now draw on Bob’s memory context, which need not be shared with Alice (OpenAI of course, remains a third party in the background whom you must trust).

Currently, we’re improvising with the limited intelligence media we already have (chat link cut-and-paste probably accounts for 80%), but dedicated intelligence media, adapted to the needs of moving live intelligence rather than information, are beginning to emerge. Claude Code, for instance, moves coding-assistant intelligence to a directory in your local filesystem. Moltbook moves that local assistant intelligence to a space where that context comprises other assistants.

Will we see a rise in intelligent intelligence media, which might do some sort of processing as intelligence moves through pipes from one locus to another?

Precedents from other domains suggest the answer is no. One precedent is the “dumb pipes” vs. “smart pipes” debate in telecom a couple of decades ago, which has largely been settled in favor of dumb pipes. Another precedent domain is containerization, an “intelligence” transformation of global supply chains where the actual media were “dumb” containers. The intelligence lay in the fact that the contents were increasingly work-in-progress artifacts (which often crossed borders multiple times) rather than either raw materials or finished products. These examples suggest that intelligence will primarily be metabolized in step-function ways, at discrete locations, as it circulates. Not continuously in transit. So we might hazard a prediction that intelligence media will not be particularly intelligent. AI will suffuse the contents more than the containers.

Keep in mind though, that there might be invisible loci inserted between source and destination loci. We might see “context in the middle” attacks. Might browsers or operating systems on either end do things to links between Alice cutting-and-pasting and Bob clicking? Might ISPs sniff around at the behest of state and non-state actors? Ought we use Signal for passing chat links around? What are OpenAI’s servers doing when you generate a share link? “Prompt injection” as understood today is a primitive class of attacks compared to what will be possible once intelligence media begin to mature.

The shift to intelligence media will be marked by the rise of an AI analogue to social objects – what we might call social kernels. Unlike social objects (such as gifs, videos or podcasts), which are largely complete and ready for consumption when they enter social circulation (even if they trigger cascades of commentary, sampling, remixing, and meme-making), social kernels are primarily intermediate artifacts; snapshots of a process of progressive metabolism operating on information objects moving through a sequence of loci and coming into contact with different contexts.

Here is an initial definition:

Social kernels: Snapshots of evolving molecular human or centaur behaviors that shape each other at a low level, and contribute to low-level sociality norms, but do not necessarily catalyze sociality at the higher levels of complete “creators” or “content.”

We will develop the idea of social kernels more carefully in a later column, but a link to a partially complete LLM chat is a good prototypical example to keep in mind for now. It is not a complete artifact like a blog post but a few conversational turns on a theme that can be continued by Bob after it has been created and shared by Alice. Bob can then add a few more turns and share it again. The chat itself, or rather the particular moving instance of the original chat (an entity that repeatedly gets cloned, forked, and mutated as it gets passed along), is the social kernel.

The logic of this larger transition to intelligence media and social kernels, we believe, explains much of the frenetic action we’re seeing almost everywhere along the AI frontier, from the shift to so-called “agentic” AI, to the rise of non-chat UXs, to the sudden acceleration in robotics.

Last year, we at Protocolized paid particular attention to the emerging contours of distributed AI, and early protocols like MCP and A2A which aimed to provide scaffolding for it. It is now clear that the protocolization of AI, both to “distribute” it, and do other things with it, will be much messier and richer than the architects of MCP and A2A anticipated. Intelligence media will likely be a tangled-bank protocol ecology rather than just a handful of dominant standards.

One of the threads we will track this year in this column is how this protocolization is progressing. Make sure to stay subscribed to Protocolized to follow along.

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Recently, I discovered the deep lore of this watch. And I’m now convinced that it holds its own against wrists sporting Rolexes, Audemars Piguets, and Patek Philippes. What it lacks in sophistication, the Casio F-91W makes up for in its unreasonable adequacy.

What do I mean by that? Obviously, the thing is quasi-indestructible. It’s also cheap, reliable and ubiquitous. As far as a timepiece goes, it’s a Maslowian choice. The F-91W meets all of one’s basic timekeeping needs. For that reason, it’s been worn by precocious schoolkids and global figures alike: Barack Obama, Captain Ripley in the movie Alien and, notoriously, Osama bin Laden.

One of the reasons that this watch became so widely associated with terrorism is that it has indeed been used as a timer in improvised explosive devices. A leaked document showed that U.S. government interrogators regarded the F-91W as a telltale sign that a detainee was associated with terrorist operations. Ironically, many American servicepeople rely on the same watch.

But why is it such a common choice among militant groups?

1. It’s adequate. Utility (alarm, stopwatch, waterproof robustness) at minimal price.

2. It’s ubiquitous. Global popularity means it’s easy to replace.

3. It’s uniform. The watch’s design has remained virtually unchanged for decades.

One of the big ideas that emerged from the Summer of Protocols research program is that protocols are unreasonably sufficient. The story of the F-91W is a curious one. A single watch isn’t a protocol, but it is unreasonably sufficient. That made it the world’s most popular watch, transforming a quintessential consumer gadget into a piece of the planetary landscape, neutral and equally available for use by good and bad actors.

The Adequacy Thesis

Through the popularity of this watch, Casio created a global supply chain of time. It’s a system that anyone can tap into from virtually anywhere in the world.

It’s also a clear embodiment of Gall’s Law: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked”.

In spirit, that’s a great quote. But if I could tweak it slightly, I’d replace the second ‘system’ for ‘thing’ because the initial kernel is usually not best understood as a system. Sorry, systems thinkers—a watch is a watch.

There’s something rather interesting about how many of the most consequential technologies (shipping containers, email, the Toyota Hilux, vaccines, etc.) tend to be the adequate ones, not the sophisticated ones. I have a thesis that Gall’s Law exists because popularity provides one of the rare, legitimate excuses to complicate things. And because sophistication has such high opportunity costs, it’s antithetical to popularity, especially in the long run.

Occasionally, those opportunity costs are worth paying. In the context of navigation or aerospace, precision timekeeping is a must. The Artemis III space mission aims to be the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972. Such a complicated operation cannot afford to run on the stainless steel caseback of a F-91W, which can gain +/-1 second per month. That’s easily enough to make a very expensive—if not deadly—miscalculation.

Many of civilization’s most important operations depend on clocks. Swiss watches, famously, emerged to meet the demand for precise train timetables in Europe. But there are wide variety of clocks, all created to enable the reliable repetition of critical activities… like averting disaster.

Protocol-as-Clock

This week, the Doomsday Clock has ticked its way to 85 seconds from midnight and I’ve been thinking a lot about clocks – from my tough little Casio to the ability of blockchains to introduce good friction into the world. Because protocols sequence events, they impose specific temporal orders, whether through clocks or rhythms.

When two friends attempt to call each other at the same time, sometimes the line will appear as busy. They’ll both (probably) wait a few seconds or minutes before trying again. There isn’t a widely agreed upon amount of time to wait, and that’s why it works.

TCP/IP, the protocol suite that makes the internet possible, shapes time through rhythm. That makes it a clock in its own right, since it’s not relying on an external timekeeping device. TCP/IP forces computers to “shake hands” in a certain sequence, otherwise information won’t make it from device to device.

During last year’s Protocol School, composer Ben Zucker taught a course titled Musicalization not Music. Because protocols sequence how we do things and communicate, there is an inherent musicality to their design.

I’ve repeatedly joked with Ben that the TSA should hire him as a consultant to improve the choreography of their security lines. (Seriously, though.)

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Time to Think

New technologies promise to affect how we think about time. Some also share the unreasonable adequacy of the Casio F-91W and promise to become a planetary landmark.

LLMs and AI tools are powerful. They’re used everywhere, all the time, by everyone, all at once. Just like the world’s most popular watch, the availability and affordability of these tools is accelerating their diffusion. Not all actors, obviously, will use them in prosocial ways. Policing use will be difficult because of the ubiquity of AI tools; certain versions, like LLMs that can run locally on a device and can’t be nerfed with a cloud update, might become associated with bad actors as a result of negative events.

However, there are differences. The capabilities of LLMs are far more complicated than any wristwatch. Many software tools can be patched or updated live, regardless of where their users are. The underlying information architectures are still evolving.

Working with AI gives one a sense that time is accelerating, whereas wearing a Casio (or working with blockchains) makes one feel like life is simply marching along.

AI-assisted teams and AI agents can rapidly become out of sync with supply chains. Blockchains are inexorable clocks that provide a foundation for coordination problems like establishing contracts or rules for marketplaces.

New technologies are creating a battle over time.

The Summer of Protocols research program and its community have published some great work on time that you might enjoy:

• Finding Fault Lines Within the Firm by

• Control and Consciousness of Time by

• Protocols in Emergency Time by Olivia Steiert

• New Time Machines by Aaron Lewis, , Alice Noujaim, Nahee Kim, and

• Fire Protocols & Attention as Autopoietic Space by and

Caution: This story contains spoilers for the Zoothesia series. Chapters 1-5 of this world are available here.

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.”

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Color is especially interesting as an element of Protocol Experience (PX) design, since humans are especially sensitive to color. And color, especially in the form of paint, is a cheap design variable, ideal for persistent, configurational uses. You don’t need electricity to generate a default color scheme. Ambient broad-spectrum illumination (natural or artificial) is enough. And when you do use powered color for dynamic signaling, it is still robust and inexpensive to generate, especially today, with the rise of low-power LED lighting and screens.

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Color and Control

Reading Mathews’ article, as a sometime practicing control engineer, I was struck by the realization that though I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about command and control architectures, systems, and protocols, including control rooms, I’ve never thought about color as a particularly important consideration in control engineering, either in theory, or practice.

I’d never noticed that mid-century control rooms have a characteristic sea-foam green color.

When I’ve designed things like dashboards, color has been an afterthought, and I’ve usually done something lazy like code “significant” as “red.”

Yet, color is obviously one of the most powerful design elements available to control system engineers and protocol architects, especially when it comes to human-in-the-loop environments. But engineers don’t study it. Textbooks don’t teach color science. Even history books like David Mindell’s excellent Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing, don’t cover the role of color in command and control.

One reason of course is that color is not easy to use in automated feedback loops, and other kinds of signals are much easier to work with. Detecting and reacting to color-coded signals typically takes cameras attached to significant computing power. In control design, it is much easier to work with electrical or mechanical signals from more specialized sensors.

But when there are humans in the loop, color is a natural and cheap signaling variable. It still doesn’t play a big role though.

The reason is that the human-centeredness of color leads to its neglect in control engineering. Humans, unlike op-amps or microcontrollers, are flaky, temperamental, and unreliable engineering components. Components of last resort when architecting for reliability.

When humans must be integrated into a protocol that generates reliably repeatable behavior, it takes significant investment in training to get them to behave in sufficiently machinic ways. We had to invent an entire subculture of “professionalism” to teach and sustain reliable human behavior. And even then, color is never just functional for humans. It is invariably also an element of aesthetic experience, psychological comfort, and narrative commitment. In control engineering terms, color is an exceptionally noisy signal when processed by human brains.

So it makes sense that control engineers and protocol architects largely washed their hands of color, and learned to work around it. It became the preserve of designers and psychologists.

Palettes and Protocols

The Birren palette was designed to be a functional color-coding language for safety-first interiors, and meant to be comfortable to inhabit for extended working hours. It was the 1950s visual equivalent of elevator music plus the dings/bells/alarm sounds an elevator is capable of producing.

In 2025 though, Birren-colored interiors evoke mid-century nostalgia. The Birren palette has unavoidable aesthetic-narrative connotations today that were likely never intended. It is the palette of Golden Age science fiction. Of Competent Men doing Professional Things.

This is not what industrial interiors of more recent construction look like though (hence the nostalgic appeal of the Birren palette). And it turns out there’s a fascinating story there about how the relationship between color and industrial safety has evolved, which I was able to unpack with help from ChatGPT.

That’s not what I set out to do though. I started out simply wanting to make some nostalgia-aesthetic digital art using the Birren color palette, with a view to possibly training an image model on it with . Here is my first attempt. I aim to make about 30 such paintings, and then train a model I’ll name Birren. This one is a sort of abstract industrial interior where a Birren-palette foreground partially masks lurking fire risks.

I wanted a stable swatch of colors to make such paintings. So just for fun, and partly to flatter my own conceits about possessing some rusty Color Science 101 knowledge from when I started my first job at Xerox two decades ago, I began by asking ChatGPT to transform the old magazine scan from Mathews’ article into an approximate color-corrected swatch for me to use in my painting program, taking into account the gamut distortions in scanning a faded old magazine article.

Here, if you’re curious, are the palette as shared by Mathews (leftmost) and the one reconstructed by ChatGPT (middle and right).

The practical reasons for doing this are to have a uniform patch of color to sample with the dropper tool in painting programs, and to attempt to undo the color-shifting effects of scanning, printing, and aging in the scan.

As it turns out, Birren color schemes are pretty forgiving. They’re not defined with the precision of Pantone spot colors, but in terms of ranges that respect a particular visual logic and grammar. They are also designed to work within the capabilities of paints available in Birren’s era (the 1950s). For instance, fluoroscent paints, which play a big role today in the color of safety, were not available then.

In the process of making these swatches, thanks to some passing comments by ChatGPT, I discovered that there’s a lot more to the story. The entire philosophy of how to use color as part of a safety strategy has changed. The Birren-style philosophy of safety protocols has been replaced by a different one, best represented in the US by color-coding practices associated with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

I had ChatGPT explain this evolution to me, and then write an essay summarizing our conversation. The next few sections were primarily written by ChatGPT, with light edits and additions by me. Comments and corrections from better-informed color scientists and industrial interior designers welcome.

The Origins of Industrial Colors

Color in industrial and architectural space has never been merely aesthetic. It organizes attention, encodes danger, regulates bodily comfort, and quietly trains perception over time. Yet, contemporary designers rarely get an opportunity to think about these matters. They most often encounter industrial color schemes through regulatory tables and compliance charts – reds, yellows, greens assigned to predefined meanings and applied late in the design process.

This way of thinking about color is historically recent. In the mid-twentieth century, figures such as Faber Birren approached color not as a signaling layer but as a fundamental component of environmental design. The evolution from Birren’s approach to the standardized safety regimes later enforced by OSHA reflects deeper changes in psychology, materials, labor assumptions, and philosophies of risk.

Birren worked at a moment when industrial modernity had reached a form of equilibrium. Factories, offices, schools, and hospitals were places where people expected to spend years, often entire careers. His foundational assumption was that color must support sustained human presence. Color planning, in his view, was neither decorative nor symbolic in isolation. It was infrastructural. Interiors were visual systems whose brightness, contrast, and chromatic intensity had to be regulated as carefully as acoustics or lighting. A well-designed color environment would quietly reduce fatigue, increase accuracy, and make moments of danger perceptually unmistakable without constant visual noise.

Central to Birren’s thinking was the primacy of value, or lightness. He believed that the eye organizes space first by brightness before it attends to hue or saturation. As a result, Birren-style interiors followed a strict value hierarchy. Ceilings were lightest, maximizing reflected light and reducing glare. Walls were slightly darker, providing a calm, continuous field. Floors and machinery occupied middle values that grounded the space visually. Crucially, the most serious hazards and stop conditions were rendered darker still. Fire equipment, for example, was often painted in deep, low-value reds rather than bright scarlets. Darkness carried weight. It signaled seriousness and finality in a way that brightness could not.

This hierarchy was not meant to be consciously decoded. Over time, workers learned it implicitly. The environment trained perception. A glance was enough to tell what mattered, not because the colors were loud, but because they were rare and carefully positioned within an ordered field.

Birren was equally deliberate about chroma. He treated saturation as a physiological variable rather than an expressive one. Large areas of high chroma were avoided because they increased visual fatigue and rapidly lost their signaling power through habituation. Most continuously viewed surfaces were kept at low to moderate chroma, allowing the eye to rest. Higher chroma was permitted only in small, localized areas where interruption was genuinely required. In this sense, Birren’s environments relied on restraint. Color worked because it was not constantly demanding attention.

Neutral grays played an especially important role in this system. Far from being generic leftovers, grays functioned as active regulators of brightness and contrast. They reduced glare from machinery, stabilized visual fields, and framed colored elements so that those elements retained meaning.

Without gray, Birren’s system would collapse. It was the quiet scaffolding that allowed color to function precisely.

Birren’s philosophy was shaped not only by psychology but by material reality. The paints available during his career were chemically and optically limited. Fluorescent pigments did not yet exist, chroma ceilings were lower, and saturation stability over time was imperfect. Color thinking was grounded in reflectance rather than emission. The Munsell color system, with its explicit separation of hue, value, and chroma, aligned naturally with this worldview. Designers thought in terms of perceptual relationships rather than device outputs or symbolic codes. These technical constraints reinforced Birren’s emphasis on value hierarchy and chroma restraint.

From Contexts to Signals

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, the social and industrial context that supported Birren’s approach began to dissolve. Workforces became more transient, automation increased, and regulatory and legal pressures intensified. Spaces were no longer designed primarily for long-term inhabitation by stable populations. Instead, they had to function for visitors, contractors, inspectors, and emergency responders who might encounter them only briefly and under stress. In this new context, color systems based on gradual perceptual learning appeared inadequate.

Additionally, the rise of automation meant color was no longer as critical, since fewer humans were persistently present in industrial interiors, and automated systems typically used signals other than color to run themselves. The retreat of color foreshadows, in some ways, the modern rise of dark industrial interiors, ranging from dark data centers to metaphorical dark kitchens.

The rise of OSHA-style safety color reflects this shift. Modern safety color treats color not as part of an environmental context but as a discrete and exceptional signaling system. The goal is immediate recognition rather than long-term coherence. Red means fire or stop, yellow means caution, green means safety, and blue means notice. These meanings are fixed, explicit, and standardized across industries. The system assumes distraction, cognitive load, and urgency. It is designed to function even when the surrounding environment is chaotic.

This philosophical shift is visible most clearly in how value is treated. OSHA does not define a value hierarchy. In practice, safety colors are often high in both value and chroma. Bright yellow hazard markings, vivid red fire equipment, and intense green safety signs frequently sit against white or very light walls. Multiple elements compete at similar brightness levels, flattening perceptual ranking. Where Birren used darkness to convey seriousness, OSHA uses brightness to demand attention.

Here is an example of OSHA style colors, in the form of a catalog of safety tapes of various sorts.

The widespread availability of fluorescent pigments intensified this trend. Fluorescent paints emit light as well as reflect it, making them highly visible in poor lighting and at long distances. From a signaling perspective, this is a clear advantage. From an environmental perspective, it is destabilizing. Fluorescent colors dominate surrounding surfaces, erode subtle value relationships, and accelerate visual fatigue. As more signals become bright, designers add still brighter signals, producing a cycle of escalation. The result is environments that are visually loud even when nothing is happening.

Two Philosophies of Safety (and Color)

At a deeper level, Birren and OSHA embody two distinct theories of safety. Birren’s approach assumes that safety emerges from order. A calm, legible environment makes danger perceptually obvious because danger is rare and visually distinct. OSHA’s approach assumes that danger must be unmistakable even in disorder. Safety is achieved through explicit alarms that override context. One system relies on learned visual grammar; the other relies on categorical symbols.

Birren is about high context environments. OSHA is about verbose signaling environments.

These approaches produce markedly different experiences. Birren-style environments tend to feel coherent and calm, supporting long periods of focused work with relatively low fatigue. They work best where people have time to learn the space and internalize its logic. OSHA-dominant environments, by contrast, are optimized for immediacy. They function well for short-term occupants and emergencies but often produce visual clutter and desensitization over time. When everything is bright and urgent, urgency loses meaning.

Most contemporary industrial and institutional spaces are hybrids of these two systems. Birren-like backgrounds coexist with OSHA-style overlays. The result is often perceptual tension rather than balance. Value hierarchies are partially established and then violated. The eye receives conflicting instructions about what matters. This is why many modern interiors feel subtly exhausting even when they are technically compliant.

For design students, the lesson is not to choose Birren over OSHA or vice versa. The lesson is to recognize that color systems encode assumptions about people, time, risk, and responsibility. Before choosing colors, one must ask whether a space is meant for dwelling or for passage, whether safety is learned or instantaneous, whether fatigue or distraction is the dominant risk. Birren’s approach fails if applied uncritically today, just as OSHA’s approach fails when spread indiscriminately across entire environments.

Color is philosophy made visible. The transition from Birren’s visual ecology to OSHA’s signal saturation mirrors a broader cultural shift from spaces designed for inhabitation to systems designed for risk management. Understanding this history allows designers to use color deliberately rather than inherit it accidentally. The palette is never neutral. It expresses a theory of how people relate to space, danger, and each other.

Cameras, AI and the Return of Color

Thank you ChatGPT, back to me.

The retreat of color that started in the 1970s has now reached its nadir in the form of dark industrial interiors, where visible-spectrum elements are largely irrelevant (infrared though still matters).

But there’s a counter-trend underway: the rise of AI and robotics have created a strong drive towards camera-based infrastructures, and even camera-only infrastructures. In robotics, for example, one school of thought holds that cameras are all you need. That you can even dispense with things like angle sensors or rotary encoders if you have enough cameras. In the self-driving car industry, Tesla famously holds that lidars (which rely on infrared) are unnecessary. If biological organisms can self-drive using vision alone, so can cars.

Of course, you cannot entirely eliminate all other sensors. Sound is clearly almost as important as vision even for us highly visual primates. And all mammals have the equivalent of accelerometers in their ears. So it is no surprise that phones and robots typically feature microphones and accelerometers as well. But, to a first approximation, cameras are eating the world’s sensors, and will demand a return to a more colorful world.

Cameras are surprisingly powerful sensors because almost everything that might matter for feedback in a controlled environment either has a natural visual component, or can be rendered visible at low cost (for example, introducing a colorant in invisible dangerous gases or clear liquids). Just as the smartphone has replaced many personal devices, the camera can replace dozens of different sensors.

The cost though, is the need for intelligence. You need an AI, or ideally, a robot to interpret and react to color (and visual fields in general).

And when color communicates safety, and is linked to behaviors that must unfold extremely rapidly, you have a major challenge for future designers and architects.

What should the color of safety be in the age of AI? How will be paint industrial interiors when the primary inhabitants are camera-driven intelligent machines, ranging from robots to appliance-like machines, to background smart-environment features?

The designer – or AI – who figures out the answers will enter the history books alongside Birren and his late-industrial successors.

Coda: The Color of Safety On Screen

Since the color of safety is rarely fully visible unless there is an active emergency unfolding, and because industrial interiors are not particularly accessible anyway, it is not an easy observation target for protocol watching1 enthusiasts.

Fortunately, it also happens to be a favored topic in screen media. It is fascinating to pay attention to the color of safety in movies and television, especially over time (obviously, this is only possible past the black and white era).

The wave of disaster movies from the early 1970s, including such cult classics as The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure, showcase Birren-like safety environments at their peak. The build-up of tension has an uneasy background-dominant vibe of terror to it. The characters seem to inhabit their environments much more mindfully. Plots seem much more atmospheric and suspenseful.

By contrast, modern disaster thrillers are much more likely to feature bright flashing lights and loud alarms – and characters who don’t really attend to their environments until things start going wrong. Thrilling foreground excitement tends to replace ominous background build-up of terror. Plots are action-packed rather than suspenseful.

As storytellers adapt to the age of AI, we can expect to see the color of safety reshape human narratives yet again. And us protocol-watchers will have a whole new crop of movies and TV shows to watch, and a new color-of-safety language to decipher.