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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The lintel above its door was no longer there.

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

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

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

He spent the next rotation testing the hypothesis.

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

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

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

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

He intensified.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read previous episodes in this series here and here. ’s Zoothesia series begins here.

At the moment, given that PI is just a shoestring operation working with a small launch budget from the Ethereum Foundation to get us off the ground, with mostly part-time and volunteer effort, the grand titles Timber and I have given ourselves are a case of all hat, no cattle, as they say in Texas.

As I understand from the orientation package from the Secret Guild of Institutional Directors that Timber and I received, both of us have the the same, simple job description:

Bring in money from rich but busy individuals and organizations and give it to people and groups with interesting ideas, time, and energy to do things to benefit the glorious planetary process of protocolization.

To the extent we can do that, as Director of Research, I get to make grand, philosophical pronouncements and doctrinal assertions about Life, the Universe, and Everything, in direct proportion to the amount of money we bring in.

Specifically, the Guild orientation package tells me, I’m allowed to produce one fortune cookie pronouncement per million dollars we bring in. And since this institute, in its previous guise as the Summer of Protocols program, deployed about three million dollars over three years, I get to make three fortune-cookie pronouncements.

Here’s my first one: The task of our times is to invent New Nature.

I introduced the idea of New Nature in two posts earlier in the year, and I got the idea for this fortune cookie formulation from the title of Andrea Wulf’s illuminating biography of Alexander von Humboldt, Inventing Nature, which everyone should read. The big argument of the book, pretty persuasively made, is that in the early 1800s, Humboldt almost single-handedly invented Nature as we understand it today.

In the next decade, we hope similarly to invent a New Nature at the Protocol Institute.

In my previous posts, I defined New Nature as:

New Nature is regimes of reality governed by technologically mediated laws that are nearly as inviolable, immutable, and persistent as those of nature.

I’ll elaborate on how this is going to shape PI’s research mission in a bit.

Since I am only allowed to make two more such pronouncements before the hat-to-cattle ratio becomes untenable, I am going to need some help. So I’m going to be doing my research-directing in public.

Research Directing in Public

For my piece of the PI puzzle, I want to kick off a new working-in-public series devoted to figuring out our research mission, and how it fits in with the other parts of the larger vision (the practice/application of protocols, protocol education, scene-making, this magazine).

And I do mean working in public in the fullest sense that SoP alum wrote about in her 2020 book of that name: Sharing messy, unfinished, work-in-progress artifacts as we go, in the hope that we find and connect with aligned people and institutions that can influence us, and be influenced by us, in mutually beneficial ways. Ideally, some of those people and institutions will bring money to this party. We do not want to end up part of a LinkedIn for big-hat-no-cattle institutions.

What is the Protocol Institute about, you ask? Well, here is a WIP artifact for you:

Those are some key flipchart sheets from the 3-day strategy retreat Timber, (who will chair our advisory board), and I had in April, to figure out what the hell we’re going to be doing and how we’re going to pay for it. I’ve put then up on my home office wall because we still haven’t figured it out, and I need to keep staring at it until we do.

You should actually be able to read those if you zoom in, but just to spare you the pain of actually processing someone else’s WIP mess, here is a slightly cleaned up version of the key framing constructs we came up with, redrawn somewhat more neatly on my whiteboard.

In research-directing, neatness counts.

There are three pieces here: the 2×2 on the left, the pipeline drawing in the middle, and the map-thingie on the right. Let’s take them in order.

The Direct-to-Oblique 2×2

Early in the first session of the strategy retreat, we had a breakthrough moment with the 2×2, which crosses tech progress on the x-axis with human flourishing on the y-axis, with both axes going from Direct to Oblique.

Here we mean direct as in on-the-nose and explicit, and oblique in the sense of John Kay’s wonderful little book on strategy, Obliquity (itself based on a seminal 1959 paper about effective patterns of driving change, The Science of Muddling Through by Art Lindblom).

Protocol Institute is going to plant its flag in the top-left quadrant: direct engagement with tech progress, and oblique engagement with human flourishing. For completeness, here’s how we mapped out the landscape:

• Direct human, direct tech: Anything that’s shaped like “startups” or “products” making direct use of technology to try and directly benefit humanity, at least in some solipsistic sense, even if others don’t agree you’re benefitting anyone, and suspect you’re in fact hurting everyone. It doesn’t have to be a literal startup making literal products, but anything shaped like that belongs in this quadrant.

• Direct human, oblique tech: Most philanthropic and ideology oriented organizations fit here, since they usually have some sort of on-the-nose notion about doing good for humanity, coupled with an oblique engagement with technological progress. Typical think tanks fit here too, since they aim to directly influence and benefit human-centered entities like particular nations, transnational entities, or business sectors.

• Oblique human, oblique tech: This is the basic research quadrant, including basic scientific and mathematical research of course, but also humanities disciplines like philosophy, literature, art, and poetry, which constantly interrogate, deconstruct, and reconstruct what it means to be human in fundamental ways, often in ways that threaten naive humanists more than any tech advance.

• Oblique human, direct tech: This is what I’ve recently labeled (thanks to inspiration striking a couple of days ago) the context tank quadrant. Protocol Institute is a context tank. Perhaps the first ever! We’re obviously gesturing at AI here, and yes PI aims to be a deeply AI-native institute, aspiring to reduce itself to one giant markdown file. We’ll have more to say about how context tanks differ from think tanks, studios, incubators and such in a minute.

There is an implied cycle hypothesized here: Progress Change begins in the top right, and cycles around to the bottom right. Then there’s a crisis and we begin again.

Basic Research —> Context-Tanking —> “Startups” and “Products” —> Philanthropy and Think Tanks.

Institutions in each quadrant have a role to play in turning new discoveries on the frontiers into changed planetary conditions. We can and do argue endlessly about whether particular changes are good or bad, but the fact of the process of endlessly accumulating historical change is undeniable. We at PI don’t particularly want to get into endless arguments about the nature of “progress” as such, but we do want to be part of processes of historical change currently underway.

We are wary of committing to any particular notion of flourishing/thriving vs. decline/decay, but we do broadly think change beats stasis, and that protocols are a key part of the story of change.

One subtle implication of this cycle we teased out in our conversations is that the “startup”/”product” quadrant is necessarily tribalized and identitarian, as people must commit to particular notions of human welfare, and inevitably get attached to particular notions of humanness (and thence, particular notions of “progress”), as they cross over into the direct/direct quadrant. The medium is the message is the human.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Commitment to making particular newly enabled futures real requires commitment to making certain new ways of being human work out. At least for a while. But it does create a regime of intense cultural competition ideas must traverse before they can become embodied in the fabric of civilization.

This arc is in fact the arc of what we call protocolization. Conceptually, we can restate the arc as:

Discovering —> Contexting —> Building —> Distributing.

One sociological function of institutions in the context-tank quadrant, we think, is to provide new ideas and new ways of being human time to breathe and work themselves out in relative peace, before they must choose a particular form factor in which to enter the hunger-games arena of direct/direct irruption into techno-human affairs, competing for the future of the planet.

We want PI to serve as such a space. How do we do that? This brings me to the second diagram.

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Ideas in Attention Tunnels

How do you allow ideas to breathe and take shape between discovery and building phases? What exactly is “contexting”? What happens to ideas marinating (not the same as incubating) in context tanks, and where do they go from there?

That purple arrow in the 2×2 is our attempt at an answer. That’s kind of the pipeline defining PI’s planned role. You can see the details sketched out in the blue diagram at the bottom. Here’s a zoom-in:

The logic of our pipeline is:

• “Basic research” relevant to protocols and protocolization diffuses in from the top right quadrant upstream of us. By which we mean fundamental advances in cryptography, AI, epidemiology, ecology, energy, new kinds of poetry, new modes of art, new philosophies, and so on. New knowledge that doesn’t quite know how to shape reality, or relate to humans. Ideas that are stumbling around trying to enter the world.

• A new idea stews in the context tank for a bit, between the two vertical dotted lines, in pre-factored forms, as an idea discovering itself and figuring out what form factor it should assume (Startup? Protocol proposal to the W3C? Great novel? Interpretive dance? Climate action protocol? New hand-washing protocol proposal to the WHO?). Contexting is about new ideas seeking their compile targets, and the new ways of being human they might enable.

• Then it makes its way into the bottom left “startups”/”products” quadrant, having assumed some legible form. Again, I emphasize, anything in that rough shape qualifies. A painting is a product in the sense that it uses the technology of the painting medium directly, to produce a work that directly affect human welfare in some way (though people might not agree about the nature and valence of that effect of course). A group of people trying to get a city to change its zoning laws is a “startup.”

In our first three years, as a summer program, we relied on a particular vehicle for doing our contexting, the summer cohort. We got pretty good at cohorts, but slowly realized we needed a more persistent vehicle for creating a context.

Enter the Special Interest Group, or SIG, designed to contain new thinking for long enough for it to decide what kind of shape it wants to take as it makes its debut into the world at large.

The name is old. Many storied institutions have used the SIG form for their work, but we think we’ve come up with a particularly original contemporary spin on it. We have four SIGs going on at the moment:

• Memory Research Group (led by )

• SIGFPT: Special Interest Group in Formal Protocol Theory (led by and myself)

• SIGP4B: Special Interest Group in Protocols for Business (led by )

• PFSIG: Protocol Fiction Special Interest Group (led by and )

A fifth SIG on distributed robotics is in the cunning-plans stage.

A SIG in our sense is something like a souped-up study group (roughly two-pizza sized, by that old Amazon heuristic of two-pizza teams) that has an open-ended charter to immerse itself in a theme or domain, with no particular goals, projects, or rules, and just enough resources and support to sustain itself indefinitely.

Read, think, work on your ideas in collaboration with the right set of peers, and see where the journey takes you. It is what I have started calling an attention tunnel, where scarce collective attention can do its work for a while.

Particular projects or workstreams may unfold within the context of a SIG, but the SIG itself isn’t a project or workstream. It is a manner of paying collective attention to a theme.

Nor is a SIG a heavier organizational unit like a “studio”, “lab”, or “research center.” You can’t build heavy-weight scaffolding when you’re at an all-hat-no-cattle phase of evolution. No, a SIG is simply a space to think and work between the provocations emanating from the basic research quadrant, and the pressures of operating in the startup/product quadrant. It’s the calm before the storm.

The pressure stage, of course, cannot be avoided for any serious idea that hopes to change the world, but it can be deferred while the idea grows up, and gains enough strength to handle it. This is not incubation though. Incubation is about the inner logic of a thing getting worked out, while it uses up a store of resources. Incubation is about ontgeny. Contexting is about a thing getting introduced to the world it is going to live in. Contexting is how you send an idea to school so it can get a job when it graduates.

The structure of a Protocol Institute SIG is deceptively simple – it’s just a group of people who decide they have some interests in common that have a bearing on protocols and protocolization. They start meeting (typically every other week on a Discord call), talking, studying, and working together. We pay the curators small honoraria to host these SIGs and report on their activities periodically in the form of Protocolized essays. That’s it. Nobody’s going to get rich running or participating in our SIGs. What you will get is a harness engineered to let you devote steady, cumulative attention to a thing, for long enough to do something with it. SIGs are Claude Code-like environments for groups of human brains.

Near-zero infrastructure costs. No fancy buildings, no expensive equipment. Just people, ideas, some cheap/free software tools, and a modest budget for AI and crypto tokens. Individual workstreams and projects within the SIG may have additional, heavier demands, but the container doesn’t have to be complex or heavy. All it needs to do is contain collective attention over weeks, months, and years.

Our two oldest SIGs – SIGFPT and MRG – will each be one year old in a few months. Warm contexts for the right kinds of ideas to develop.

I think this is all it takes to get started doing really big things today. You don’t need fancy buildings or big budgets. You just need a small group paying steady attention.

But this mode of working is deceptively simple because a lot more illegible kinds of knowledge and cultural capital have to be in place in the environment before stable and generative attention tunnels form and begin to do interesting, original, and useful work. Otherwise, all the thousands of communities on Discord and other platforms would be doing world-changing work.

There are certain necessary conditions for SIGs to thrive and function as attention tunnels acting on important and difficult themes. We can’t say we’ve entirely figured out sufficient conditions, let alone a “formula,” but we’ve figured out quite a few best practices. We think we know how to get a small group to pay attention to a small set of ideas for long periods of time.

Which brings me to the third diagram.

Shaping New Nature

Our three years of work in the Summer of Protocols has left us with a solid corpus of ideas and capabilities, produced collectively by almost 200 people contributing research papers, small projects, art, guest talks, workshop participation, and so on. This is the legacy PI is inheriting.

This is no mean feat by the way. Three million dollars may sound like a lot to people not used to research environments, but I’ve seen a lot more money get burned up a lot faster, with nothing to show for it.

Research directing is partly about knowing how to spend money… elegantly. I don’t know that we at PI have the skills yet to deploy (say) $10m or $30m a year well, but $1–3 million, we know how to do. And maybe we’ll build our muscles and get to those larger scales.

We think of this corpus as the core asset we’re building, and in this diagram, it serves as the anchoring center mass of our self-conception. This is a lot of material – go look for yourself on the protocolized.io site. But more than mere material, it’s a socially alive corpus, that’s steadily generating new ideas and inspiring more people to do more things everyday.

This is the kernel of PI, the innermost circle and energetic core. Three years of work is close to critical mass, and this kernel is beginning to accrete knowledge to itself at an accelerating pace. I’ve labeled it “IP” in the diagram, but that’s a loose term. I don’t mean specific forms of intellectual property like papers, patents, copyrighted artworks, courses taught, books written, and such. I mean all that and more, deeply entangled with the community that is producing it.

If I might be permitted the conceit of a somewhat self-congratulatory term, the PI kernel is a scenius structured as a commons. A young and fragile one, just three years old and a few hundred people strong, but definitely a scenius.

Kinda fun that PI reverses to IP.

That’s one necessary condition for a context tank and its attention tunnels to work – a center-mass of scenius like this. Check.

Next, it is 2026. If you’re starting a new institution today and it is not fundamentally AI native in a deep and unsettling way, you have some explaining to do. If its patterns of working look familiar and comforting, you have a problem. Becoming AI native, however, is easier said than done.

Fortunately, that’s the problem SIGP4B is actively working on, so we are making our own dog-food to eat. We’ve got a SIG on the job here.

That’s one half of the shell around the kernel in the diagram (we like our computing metaphors around here).

We’re getting pretty good at AI-native operating modes. This magazine is one of the few that not only accepts AI-assisted writing, it actively encourages it, and pays for it the same as for hand-crafted human writing. Trad publications may be drowning in slop submissions, but we are figuring out how to thrive on generated content.

Everything we do is deeply, organically, reflexively AI-forward.

All our artwork is AI-generated – but in a boundary-pushing way using the TITLES platform we’ve written about before. Neither Timber nor I code, and the two new websites of PI, protocol-institute.org and protocolized.io, were entirely vibe-coded (and will continue to be). We have plans to digest our sprawling corpus into embeddings, and turn it into an agentic oracle. And it will be a small project that will cost a few hundred dollars in tokens rather than a ponderous enterprise IT undertaking.

But all that is just at the level of tools. We’re also starting to think in AI-native ways. You’ll see more signs of that as our activities mature.

The other half of the shell in the diagram is decidedly more controversial. We’re not just AI-native, we’re crypto-native. That, for many people, is the worse of two strikes. But as a wise man once told me, you’re always going to piss off some people if you try to do anything of consequence, and what’s important is to piss off the right people.

This is of course, partly because of our origin-story and path dependent history as an Ethereum Foundation-funded project. But it’s also a central intellectual and philosophical commitment underlying everything we do. The discovery of public-key cryptography (PKC), which is now integral to every aspect of computing (including AI), was perhaps the genesis event of what we’re calling New Nature.

It has been obvious for a few years that AI and crypto are in some sense natural duals, and it is a rather delightful technical-lexical coincidence (or is it?) that both are ecologies based on tokens of different sorts. But actually working out the nature of that duality, and the natural shape of how the two ought to relate to each other technologically and mathematically, is far from clear. And building an organization that is a native of the quicksand-like emerging convergence zone of the two is even harder.

Slowly, but steadily, we’re figuring it out though.

More and more weird new ideas are trickling through from the basic research quadrant. Zero-knowledge machine learning, verifiably private computation, encrypted inference, oracle systems, verifiable provenance data, verifiable identities – piece by piece the elements of the duality are being uncovered in the discovery quadrant. And next door, we are paying steady attention, contexting away in our SIGs, figuring out how to put the pieces together in interesting ways.

This, by the way, is the theme of our Protocol Town Hall salon series this year, which will kick off shortly. AI × Protocols. We already have half a dozen talks lined up that should challenge your imagination, and recontextualize your thinking about the future.

Downstream of us, in the product/startup quadrant, the first fruits of this years-long convergence are already emerging. Mainstream society has only recently discovered relatively simple uses of AI and crypto in isolation – chatbots and stablecoins. But complex, converged technologies are coming. Agents paying each other with crypto. Decentralized agent ecologies taking root onchain. Secrets in enclaves shaping inferences without revealing themselves.

Normal people may never hear of such things as ERC 8004, x402, MPP, MCP, and all the other ideas floating around in the acronym soup, but they will soon start seeing the consequences of this emerging AI-crypto converged backend of planetary computation.

Here at PI, the prospect of this looming convergence (and the explosive divergence it will then spark) shapes almost everything we do. We are betting that this, in fact, is the future. And we are designing PI as an organization to run on AI+crypto rails philosophically, not just at the level of tokens. Even if we have to navigate the quicksand convergence zone to do so.

There is a praxis and a poiesis to this challenge of being simultaneously AI and crypto native.

Many have noted the emerging praxis.

• AI allows us to work radically more effectively, with radically minimized resources. Joules in, intelligent work out.

• Crypto allows us to coordinate radically more effectively, with radically minimized friction and trust. Joules in, coordination out.

But it is the poiesis that interests us more. There is a new grammar of reality emerging here. A new kind of poetry in the very bones of the planet. That’s New Nature.

Being “native” to both ecologies, we think, will make the Protocol Institute, despite its vanilla name and conventional surface appearances, a radically alien kind of institution. Of a sort that couldn’t exist as recently as six months ago. And figuring out how to be native to these two ecologies, which are both full of all the risks of frontier ecologies, is an existential imperative for us.

That’s the second necessary condition in the diagram. AI+crypto native institution building.

Check.

And finally, there’s the third and hardest necessary condition: Plugging into the real world. Education. Scene-making. Consulting. Banal words that are forced to do a lot of practical work. But we’ve accumulated a wealth of substance behind each.

• Scene-making: We’ve held a dozen workshops around the world, attended by hundreds of people, and learned how to get people “protocol-pilled” reliably. We’ve memed a new genre of fiction into existence over the last year.

• Education: There are now protocol studies courses at a dozen universities around the world, as a direct result of our work, and dozens of graduates of our own hugely successful first Protocol School last year. The protocol-literate community is growing and spreading.

• Consulting: Building off the experience of half-a-dozen experimental projects aimed at influencing real-world protocol domains in 2024, we’re now incubating several consulting projects, and a growing capability in our SIGP4B group. Want help for your organization to navigate New Nature? Call us.

• Monuments: This one is aspirational, and partly the result of taking as a challenge the title of the research essay we published by in 2023, Protocols Don’t Build Pyramids. We aim to lend some visible public charisma to the invisible protocol infrastructures that run the planet.

Each of these activities, taken in isolation, feels like part of the ordinary pragmatics of running any such program or institute. But if you step back, and contemplate them in the context of the hows and whys of the activities, a more profound pattern emerges – this is how you shape New Nature, by actually constituting it from the inside out, by creating strange new institutional species that survive and thrive by strange new rules. You discover New Nature by inventing it, by being it.

Big hat, no cattle?

Perhaps. But at least it’s a strange new hat.

If you’d like to help us make all this happen, get in touch. We’re just getting started here.

Dear Mom,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The boat took three weeks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But.

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

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

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

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

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

Take care, Cathy

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Second Letter

Dear Mom,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will write again when I know more.

Cathy

Third Letter

Dear Mom,

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

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

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

“A crab apple?” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your daughter, Cathy

Fourth Letter

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cathy

Fifth Letter

Dear Mom,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We’ll come find you. Now go.”

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

Cathy

Sixth Letter

Dear Mom,

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

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

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

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

Why.

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

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

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

Your daughter, Cathy

Seventh Letter

Dear Mom,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How are the plants still standing?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your daughter, Cathy

Read T.R.O.(L.L.), the precursor to this series.

Over the coming years – with your help – we will explore the question of civilizational durability from a fresh lens. Which protocols allow civilization to grow and manage tensions? How have past civilizations integrated information technologies after an initial period of disruption? What role does diplomacy play in producing durability, and how does that extend to bridge-building with both natural and artificial agents?

Like in chess, it’s tempting to jump into the endgame of this initiative. There are two ways to do so, both of which should be avoided. First, by interpreting it as another attempt at predicting the arc of history and dismissing it on those grounds. Second, by making a tidy checklist for an immortal civilization, as if the question were mostly settled and only needed some packaging. Neither of those strategies would allow us to do the work needed to produce useful tools. To do that, we must play through the arduous middlegame – comprising research, to learn what has worked in the past; prototyping, to improve upon existing protocols and create new ones; and entrepreneurship, to solve distribution so that what is learned and built actually reaches the people and institutions who need it.

Below is the announcement from our parter, the Long Now Foundation, written by . It covers all three of the Labs that we’ve designed together: Book of Time, Information Revolutions and Epistemic Crises, and Interspecies Protocols.

Apply yourself, or at a minimum, send this to a colleague or friend.

Long Now Labs: Where Long-term Thinking Becomes Long-term Practice

Today we’re excited to announce a new initiative at Long Now that builds on our history of incubating new projects and ideas: Long Now Labs. It’s where long-term thinking becomes long-term practice.

Long Now Labs will build cross-disciplinary collaborations around frontier ideas, creating tools, artifacts, and frameworks that expand humanity’s capacity to navigate the unknown and preserve possibilities for future generations.

Our inaugural Lab, Series 001: Protocols for the Long Now, launches today in partnership with the Protocol Institute.

Why protocols?

Civilizations run on protocols. They shape how we keep time, how we store knowledge, and how we make decisions in relation to other species and new technologies.

Protocols are the hidden infrastructure of cooperation. While they may depend on physical or digital structures like traffic lights or software networks to operate, protocols are broader than that – they’re the underlying social rules and conventions that define how things interact. Most of them are invisible until they fail.

Processes like globalization and financialization are well understood as planetary forces reshaping how we govern ourselves. Protocolization is a process happening alongside these forces. It isn’t new. But once we recognize how protocols shape our everyday interactions, we can reshape them to better serve civilizational resilience across generations.

Pairing Long Now’s practice of long-term thinking with the Protocol Institute’s expertise in protocol design, Protocols for the Long Now investigates three aspects of civilizational durability that are being radically reshaped by frontier technologies.

Lab 001.1 Book of Time

This Long Now Lab invites you to submit a concept for a new way of marking, experiencing, or making sense of time.

Our models of time dictate how we live. Many early civilizations experienced time as cyclical, mythic, and sacred. Before reliable pendulum clocks were invented, people told time by measuring the position of the sun in the sky. Clock time moved us away from this planetary connection, abstracting time into discrete, measurable units.

In 01999, Long Now cofounder Stewart Brand wrote, “Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span.” Today that feels truer than ever as social media algorithms, digital notifications, news feeds, financial transactions, and agentic workflows slice our days into ever more urgent microseconds.

How we think about time is changing at all levels. Technological advancement is both accelerating our relationship to time, while, in some cases, producing new conceptions of time. For example, blood tests that tell you your biological age, or the Internet Archive, which creates a timestamp of the entire Internet at regular intervals.

In this accelerating era, we are seeking novel prototypes for time – alternative tempos that might help humanity re-orient our thinking, behavior, and decision-making for the long term. Imagine not just new clocks, but new time standards, measuring frameworks, or other experiments that provide a different way of relating to the past, the future, and the present pace layers of civilization.

Open call until June 5 – apply now!

APPLY FOR BOOK OF TIME

Lab 001.2 Epistemic Cycles

This Long Now Lab seeks an individual or team to investigate historical epistemic cycles – patterns of technological disruption that result in the breakdown of a society’s shared ability to discern truth.

Like oil, gold, topsoil and silicon, information is one of civilization’s raw materials. Protocols used by states and citizenries to process information are a critical aspect of their collective longevity. The ways people argue determine how robust a peace they can sustain. Negotiations between nations and nature must be structured to be truth-seeking, rather than purely affirming of humanity’s special place in the world.

Our relationship with raw information is also transforming. The last quarter century has precipitated a flood of technologies, from social media to smartphones to LLMs, that have washed out the old paths by which we used to form common knowledge. We are deeply curious about other times in history where these crises of our epistemic commons have occurred and what we can learn from responses to those crises in order to create mechanisms for shared sensemaking.

By analyzing analogous historical ruptures (from papyrus to the printing press, from medieval court rituals to social media), this Lab aims to provide insight for navigating the current epistemic crisis brought on by synthetic intelligence and generative media content.

Like economic bubbles, epistemic cycles of disruption and crisis are recurring. This Lab aims to look deeply into the long now to see how earlier civilizations dealt with similar crises to find repeatable patterns for hardening our own epistemic commons.

This Lab seeks an interdisciplinary individual or team who will analyze historical information technologies that disrupted common knowledge production and sense-making to provide deep contextualization for our current challenges.

Open call until June 5 – apply now!

APPLY FOR EPISTEMIC CYCLES

Lab 001.3 Interspecies Protocols

This Long Now Lab explores the protocols needed to support interspecies ecologies – the interactions between humans, nature, and synthetic intelligences.

Whales have a phonetic alphabet. Rivers hold legal rights. AI agents negotiate on behalf of humans they’ve never met. Synthetic biology blurs the lines between species. These signal a profound shift: the assumption that humans sit at the center of things is dissolving, bringing a set of questions we can no longer defer. How do we communicate with, govern alongside, and share decision-making power with other species on earth? This Long Now Lab explores the protocols needed to support the interspecies ecologies of the future.

Our new tools can be engines of collective intelligence or lead to institutional decay – the challenge ahead is to create shared protocols for preserving human capabilities while honoring and respecting the capabilities of the more-than-human world. This new planetary sapience is demonstrating mutual dependence between us and our planet’s ecologies — helping us conceptually move from managing the world as a resource to stewarding it for mutual flourishing.

Getting there will require new orientations to language, data collection, legal definitions of personhood and rights, and agreements on what constitutes knowledge or consent across species boundaries.

This Lab will take the form of a course launching in early 02027. Please be in touch with ideas or suggestions for guest faculty and curriculum partners at labs@longnow.org.

To learn more about this initiative, visit longnow.com/labs.

The mission of this institute is to advance the theory and practice of protocol design, analysis, and stewardship across domains, as well as promote protocol literacy, appreciation and cultural salience globally. In other words, our mission is to build the field and community capable of stewarding the ongoing planetary processes of protocolization – the slow, largely invisible means by which human behaviors become standardized into the coordinating infrastructure of civilization.

The Protocol Institute inherits the work of its predecessor, the Summer of Protocols (SoP) program, which ran from 2023 to 2025. The Ethereum Foundation initiated SoP with a bold thesis: deepened understanding of protocols generally would enable better governance of the core Ethereum protocol specifically. As a seasonal grants program, SoP was designed to:

• Bootstrap a new field of study around protocols

• Establish protocols as a first-class concept for thinking about and acting in the world

• Seed a scene and improve literacy around protocols

The program not only succeeded in these objectives, it went beyond them, sparking a rich discourse spanning many domains, such as robotics, climate, government, natural resources, insurance, programmable cryptography, economics, urban planning, health, gaming, encryption, wildfire management and more. Through its successes, both planned and unplanned, SoP has created the need for a suitable vehicle to sustain long-term activities building on what has already been accomplished.

The Protocol Institute is that vehicle.

I () will serve as the Managing Director of the Protocol Institute and Editor-in-Chief of Protocolized, supported by as Director of Research and as Chair of the Advisory Board. We are excited to work with anyone who wants to help, and encourage you to reach out by email.

The complete SoP archive has been merged with the living library of Protocolized, and is available at protocolized.io – the new home for Protocolized, which we will continue to distribute on Substack.

In this vision essay, we describe the work we are taking on, the evolving investment philosophies and strategies guiding the work, and the operating models we are employing. This is a daunting institutional and cultural challenge. We have made great progress in the last three years, but we now need all the support we can get to pursue this more ambitious, long-term mission. Throughout this essay, and on the Protocol Institute website, we share various ways you can join and support us.

Subscribe now

Protocolization Stewardship

To steward a single protocol is already a hard challenge. To steward planetary-scale dynamics of protocolization is arguably an insane challenge. We are excited to take it on.

Protocols are a strange thing to work on. Effective ones fade into the background, as do the people who maintain and study them. When someone becomes literate in protocol wrangling, it’s as if they’ve bought a pair of glasses that reveal a new layer of the world around them. But as they immerse themselves in this world, by attending to and working on things that others typically don’t, they themselves become invisible in proportion to the impact their perceptiveness has.

Imagine you walk into a hospital. All around you are hard-to-see orchestration technologies that allow actors in the space to perform together: triage, handwashing norms, double- and triple-checking patient IDs, standard metrics for hormone measurement, recurring supply orders, wipe-down routines, badge-based access control, maintenance tags on fire extinguishers, designated waiting areas, randomized control trials, and dosing algorithms for anticancer drugs. Despite the fact that these technologies tend to operate below the awareness of individual participants, they nonetheless choreograph them and guide the increasingly unconscious performance of important, life-saving operations. The people who work on these protocols also operate below our awareness, continuing to provide stability, security, and uptime to important civilizational operations.

The recently invented Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a live example. In the span of a year, it has become the default connective tissue between AI assistants and the tools they use, coordinating a sprawling ecosystem of integrations without any central authority. If it keeps working, it too will steadily fade from the conscious attention of the developers and users who depend on it. MCP’s success will be quietly manifest in integrations that simply work, and in friction that never materializes. Hospitals and other coordination hotspots, like legislative assemblies, powerplants, stock markets and airports, exemplify the current state of protocolization around the planet. This is not a mandated process unfolding, but an emergent one. It is also not just a civilizing process, but one that creates new types of wilderness. Protocolization is old, profound, and accumulating. We have inherited a big legacy.

We are early to figuring out what protocolization is, but everyone should be eager to help create that knowledge. While still not widely recognized as such, protocols are high-value pieces of civilizational infrastructure. They allow us to coordinate at scale, often without a central authority: sanitation routines for hospitals, SWIFT for banking, diplomatic immunity for planetary politics, GAAP for accounting. These protocols are immensely practical, and once you pull away the curtain, you’ll find that they are never short on intrigue.

Working with protocols requires a disruptive imagination. The Bristlemouth Connector, an open standard for marine hardware interfaces, a case which program alum David Lang studied in his research, is an example of what it takes – and what’s at stake.

Protocols, including hardware standards like the Bristlemouth Connector, aren’t just paradoxical in their tendency to disappear. They are also generative as a result of being restrictive. Prior to the Bristlemouth project, the underwater robot and drone market comprised a ton of bespoke components which could not work together. By restricting the design space for connectors, the Bristlemouth team has enabled people to generate many new kinds of robots, drones and services built atop them, providing important services like ocean data collection and urban water monitoring. If the protocol is as successful as hoped, the industry could move beyond making marginal improvements in legacy technologies and into realising a whole new world of cheap and composable plug-and-play underwater devices.

The Bristlemouth team did not have a government or business playbook to follow. They practiced what Lang now refers to as disruptive standards-making. We’re launching the Protocol Institute, in part, to provide protocol entrepreneurs, like those that David Lang studied, with a community of likeminded peers and a knowledge commons to support their work.

The Bristlemouth project was named after the bristlemouth fish family, gonostomatidae, which we’ve adopted as a mascot for our work as well. Gonostomatidae is an unassuming but potent symbol for protocols. They are not only the most numerous fish in the oceans, they are also the most numerous vertebrates on Earth, with an estimated one quadrillion living specimens. Most people do not even know they exist. Even fewer will ever see one, since they inhabit the deep mesopelagic zone. But these tiny fish constitute the decentralized backbone of our oceanic ecosystems, just like the elements of the millions of protocols which constitute our technological environment.

Protocolization is transforming our world at this very moment, alongside more visible processes like AI adoption and climate change. As with past global transformations like industrialization, urbanization, globalization, and digitalization, it will radically alter the human condition. Stewarding protocolization thoughtfully is an urgent imperative because it is progressing invisibly whether we like it or not. In fact many of the world’s critical protocols, both old and emerging, are failing:

• Carbon accounting regimes have proven to be easily manipulated

• Protocol-based social media has been unable to catch up to the network effects of rent-seeking social platforms like TikTok, Facebook and X

• Diplomatic protocols have not been able to stop 21st-century wars of aggression

• While improving, the global banking system remains wildly inefficient and exclusive, when compared to what it could be re-engineered to become

• The legitimacy of some voting protocols in states around the planet has faltered, leading to wars over state capacity

Our ambition is that the Protocol Institute will shed light on and inform protocolization around the planet.

The first question I’m asking myself in my new role is what mental models I should bring to the job. I’m finding a useful starting point in the ideas of a 19th-century political economist and a 20th-century organizational theorist.

An Ode to Unbroken Windows

In July of 1850, Frédéric Bastiat published That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen. Even after living in Québec for two years I can’t read it in the original French, but a translated version is available here. Opportunity costs are well understood and priced today, but that wasn’t always the case. Bastiat explained how the broken window of a shoemaker tended to be justified because it created work for the windowmaker. While easily seen, the first-order logic is wrong. Unseen consequences dominate the arithmetic.

In fact, it is the same in the science of health, arts, and in that of morals. It often happens, that the sweeter the first fruit of a habit is, the more bitter are the consequences.

When a window is broken, the victims outnumber the beneficiary at least two to one. First, the shoemaker must purchase a new window. Second, that money flows to the accident and away from another, unseen, productive thing into which the shoemaker might potentially have directed it, like a book, medicine or shoes.

At the time of Bastiat’s writing, economics was effectively blind to the difference between these things. A repaired window was just as good as a new book. Hence why the calculus of war was (and sometimes still is) seen as unequivocally profitable. Peace, and unbroken windows, were regarded as bad for the economy. Their benefits were unseen. As the field developed, economists realized that both the seen and the unseen must be accounted for to paint a full picture.

This explains the fatally grievous condition of mankind. Ignorance surrounds its cradle: then its actions are determined by their first consequences, the only ones which, in its first stage, it can see. It is only in the long run that it learns to take account of the others. It has to learn this lesson from two very different masters – experience and foresight. Experience teaches effectually, but brutally. It makes us acquainted with all the effects of an action, by causing us to feel them; and we cannot fail to finish by knowing that fire burns, if we have burned ourselves. For this rough teacher, I should like, if possible, to substitute a more gentle one. I mean Foresight.

In the same way that a poor understanding of opportunity costs led to suboptimal economic outcomes, a poor understanding of protocolization will lead us, in the present, to short-sighted conclusions.

Protocols exhibit a similar pattern to unbroken windows. The costs of following protocol are more visible than their benefits. Institutions that govern and maintain a protocol, from traffic lights which prevent accidents to climate accords which prevent CFCs from blasting a hole in the planet’s ozone layer, struggle to prove that their worth outweighs their operating costs. A counterfactual future is always harder to see than a current expense or inconvenience.

However, over time, civilization has established many important “unbroken windows” through the process of protocolization. The eradication of smallpox. The absence of nuclear holocaust. The pandemics dodged and economic depressions avoided. The coal mines that did not catastrophically explode. The standardized drillbits that unlocked new markets. The randomized control trials that prevented dangerous drugs from entering markets. The shipping containers that formed the modular backbone of the global economy and avoided trillions in breakbulk shipping costs. The famines that never happened. The internet protocols which have enabled us to do things whose costs were once so prohibitive that they were not done at all.

Those hard-to-see things likely compose a kind of value greater than that measured by GDP. It remains arduous to measure them, even if economics has developed better tools since Bastiat’s time. This is one reason why we believe protocols are systematically undervalued.

Furthermore, many of the things that protocols generate are not owned by single shopkeepers but by loose networks of actors. Functional state capacity. Robust supply chains. Inhabitable ecosystems. Public health. Charged water reservoirs. Competitive technology markets. These sometimes delicate things exceed individuals and local groups, extend beyond political borders, even beyond our lifespans. The actors responsible for maintaining and following protocol do not fit neatly into state lines. The products of protocols are highly valuable and often invisible, each defined by the absence of a class of negative events (respectively: corruption, shortages, biodiversity loss, drought, monopolization). They are what Karl Weick would call dynamic non-events; windows with varying levels of unbrokenness, depending on the health of the protocol that generates them.

When we arrive at this unexpected conclusion: “Society loses the value of things which are uselessly destroyed;” and we must assent to a maxim which will make the hair of protectionists stand on end… To break, to spoil, to waste, is not to encourage national labour; or, more briefly, “destruction is not profit.”

Among the most valuable civilizational outcomes are things that don’t happen. Protocols are technologies for producing these non-events.

Investing in the Production of Non-Events at Scale

Aerospace engineers don’t make safe planes. They design planes capable of producing safe flights. Anyone can make a plane that never crashes – just never let it fly.

Karl Weick, an organizational theorist whose ideas were adopted in military, healthcare, aviation and energy domains, championed the term dynamic non-event. Non-events such as safety, reliability, interoperability and quality are invisible moving targets which must be continuously produced, and only become visible when they lapse.

Protocols can be understood as infrastructural technologies for producing non-events at scale, often without a central coordinating mechanism. For that reason, we like to call protocols engineered arguments. They are not universal agreements, but rather mostly predefined sets of rules that allow individual actors to make trade-offs without becoming embattled. Following Bastiat’s reasoning, since non-events are systematically undervalued, we systematically underinvest in protocol analysis, design, and improvement. A tenet of our mission is to address this underinvestment, and a few examples will illustrate the philosophy we are pursuing in order to do so.

A tell for spotting investment opportunities is the commonly noted phenomenon of small changes having big effects in complex systems. Checklists (which are simple thoroughness protocols), for example, have proved to be a powerful continuous producer of non-events in the context of domains such as hospitals and aviation. Despite being cheap and easy to implement, checklists are still underused. Dedicated operations professionals tend not to center their careers on such apparently trivial things, preferring to focus on more complex change and improvement theories and programs.

In 2024, we ran a grant program which tasked six teams of practitioners with driving small, incremental protocol improvements in their domains. Like checklist adoption, seemingly simple changes, such as adding encryption to a messaging protocol or simplifying a permit approval process, proved surprisingly hard to implement, despite their obvious potential for precipitating big changes. The 2024 grant program taught us a great deal about what it takes to drive even small consequential changes in complex systems.

Another example of our investment philosophy has to do with the critically undertheorized topic of memory. It is easy to forget non-events. That is in many ways a good thing, because it frees up cognitive (and economic) bandwidth to perform other operations. Technologies that produce non-events do not automatically create and preserve verbose traces in historical memory. Even when raw memories are produced, they tend to be easily forgotten or disregarded.

In a thoughtfully designed, safe workplace, a log of accidents not happening (such as the familiar image of a sign highlighting the number of days without an accident at a factory) does not naturally attract the attention it perhaps deserves.

Memory, therefore, has been an important research and investment theme for us, beginning with ’s seminal 2023 work on the relationship between memory and protocols.

Her essay Artificial Memory and Orienting Infinity sparked a steady stream of follow-on research and supporting activities such as workshops over the next three years. Kei now leads a Special Interest Group that meets biweekly on our Discord. The graphic below shows the evolution of this research track, which now serves as the model for our investment in other deep, undertheorized topics that require sustained creative attention and organized inquiry.

These are just two of the validated strategies we have developed over the years to invest in the world of protocols. Not everything we try works out, but we aim to gradually grow our arsenal of research, application, pedagogy, and scene-making methods by trying many such strategies and doubling down on the ones that work. From 2023 to 2025, the Summer of Protocols program helped us bootstrap into a strong initial position with solid momentum. In 2026, the Protocol Institute and Protocolized will begin transforming that into lasting institutionalized value.

This is particularly urgent with regards to another contemporary technological theme. AI systems are powerful precisely for being non-deterministic and generative, but that generativity is most useful when it operates within stable, well-designed infrastructure. Protocols are that infrastructure. Indeterminacy and stability are complements, not competitors, and understanding one requires understanding the other. Even the arguments of TCP/IP, the very foundation of the modern internet, might need to be reengineered from the ground up to accommodate both humans and AI agents.

We’ve only scratched the surface of the world of protocols. In working towards a deeper understanding, beyond pursuing our own activities, we surface and curate ideas and knowledge from existing traditions (both scholarly and practitioner), unlocking insights and wisdom on the subject of protocols.

The Beginnings of a Canon

Establishing a canon is an important part of building a new field, and an important aspect of that is deciding which ideas to inherit, and from where. In the three years we’ve been consciously working to do this, we’ve accumulated a vast library of references across our publications that we’ve curated into the beginnings of a canon. We’ve deliberately chosen to strike a middle path between relevant academic traditions and broader works that not only cut across disciplines, but look beyond scholarly traditions to writing that’s embedded in real-world practice, and popular writing aimed at non-scholarly audiences.

This selection of well-known works, which arguably belong in a protocol canon, has proved valuable in our short history, and might serve as familiar entry points. If you have read and enjoyed any of these books, stories, or essays, you might already know more about protocols than you realize:

• Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott

• Governing the Commons, Elinor Ostrom

• Normal Accidents, Charles Perrow

• The Control Revolution, James Beniger

• The Box, Marc Levinson

• The Nature of Technology, Brian Arthur

• Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse

• How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs

• The Tacit Dimension, Michael Polanyi

• Who Could Write Protocol Fiction for Speculative Infrastructure, Matt Webb

• The Complete Stories, J. G. Ballard

• Mother Earth, Motherboard, Neal Stephenson

• Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, Alexander Galloway

• The ETTO Principle, Erik Hollnagel

From our own corpus of work, The Protocol Reader has earned a place in the canon, as have several stories from our archive of short stories.

These aren’t the only works that matter, and I’d be suspicious of any list that claimed to be complete. The canon is still being established, as is the live tradition of practice and application.

Creating a Movement

This then, is our investment thesis:

1. Protocols are infrastructural technologies that produce some of the most valuable outputs of society: dynamic non-events

2. Dynamic non-events have a natural tendency to become invisible and be forgotten

3. This tendency has historically led to them being undertheorized and underinvested in

4. Widespread improvement to this important class of technology requires creative new investment strategies and philosophies

Since 2023, an Alfred North Whitehead quote has served as our lighthouse, keeping us oriented to the essential core of this thesis: “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations it can perform without thinking about them”

A modified version, we think, will keep us moving in the right direction in the years ahead:

Civilization will always be partially defined by the unseen and unremembered; by the outputs of its most important non-events – safety, hygiene, peace, frictionlessness; by the technologies that produce them in steady, sustained ways; and, perhaps most importantly, by the people who analyze, design, evolve, and maintain those technologies.

The Protocol Institute and Protocolized will serve this world.

Maintaining a robust, continuously tested and refined investment philosophy and thesis is necessary for the work we have ahead of us, but it is not sufficient. While one of our main operational goals is to serve as an investment vehicle for other institutions and individuals who see the value in what we are doing (please reach out if this is you; we will share more in the coming weeks), it only makes sense when paired with our other main operational goal – creating a movement.

While our plans for the Protocol Institute and Protocolized take many cues from scholarly societies and publications, we believe the world of protocols requires a fundamentally full-stack societal approach, spanning scholarly, entrepreneurial, governance, policy-making, cultural and subcultural activities. This is a daunting scope to operate in, and we have therefore converged on a few fertile and high-leverage core operational capabilities. The most important capability is using a publication to supercharge an entire emerging movement, rather than just its nominal contents.

This vision for our publication takes inspiration from other powerful movements and scenes that were shaped by highly influential publications, such as Astounding (Golden Age science fiction), The Whole Earth Catalog (early counterculture), Wired (early digital technology) and Make magazine (the Maker movement). The editorial postures and visions of these magazines served as far more than curators of content – they erupted larger discourses and policy conversations, seeded thriving subcultural scenes and catalyzed a range of creative, entrepreneurial, hobbyist, and social activities. Aesthetics, too, played a big role in the success of these magazines. We are well positioned on both fronts and I’m excited that will continue to be a driving force behind Protocolized as Head of MagOps and Art.

Already, through its first year of existence, Protocolized has helped spark the emerging genre of Protocol Fiction, published the output of several special interest groups pursuing important research tracks, seeded protocol watching as an engrossing new hobby, and hosted a dozen events around the world.

Going forward, we will consciously aim to use the Protocolized editorial room as the bridge from which we steer a fragile young movement through its uncertain early years. Our hope is that the movement quickly takes on a life of its own, with more individuals and institutions joining us in our stewardship efforts. In this nautical metaphor, we hope to thoughtfully design and evolve the Protocol Institute as the long-term engine for institutionalizing what needs to be institutionalized, while also helping preserve what should not be institutionalized in vibrant, wild, generative states.

A Map of the Protocol Institute

The Summer of Protocols began with a set of interdisciplinary research essays and culminated in a series of courses, taught online and at universities around the world. SoP provided the activation energy for a new field of research and practice based on real-world phenomena to emerge, just as bazaars and insurance brokers existed long before economics.

The Protocol Institute will irrigate this nascent field with the hope that it continues to develop tools and theories that will accelerate the production of important non-events. Right from the outset, we are an online-first organization and planetary in scope. Members of the protocol community already participate in this discourse from around the world, from a wide variety of countries, geographies, companies and institutions. Part of our philosophy as we chart a path during these early days is to capitalize on the energy and mediums available to us, rather than force old organizational forms like those of universities, traditional societies, or think tanks onto a digital and global network.

This organizational model will evolve, probably quickly, as the field and movement advance. At this time, Protocolized, the SIGs, and the annual Protocol Symposium (already two editions old) are the flagship projects of the Protocol Institute. In addition, several partnerships are in progress that we are excited to share more about soon. A big part of the Protocol Institute’s function is to create durable infrastructure for the emerging community of protocolists, including experimenting with and taking advantage of new AI tools.

Initial membership will include alumni from all three years of the original Summer of Protocols program, as well as guest speakers, lecturers and contributing writers of Protocolized. We also welcome the Class of 2025 from our inaugural Protocol School. What membership means and what direction it will take is an ongoing discussion among the founding members of the Protocol Institute. We look forward to expanding membership in a way that adds value and energizes the field.

To kick things off, we’ve put together a thorough (but not comprehensive) list of ways to work with the Protocol Institute and see the world through a new and useful lens:

1. Subscribe to Protocolized. Quick and easy. We’ll help point your attention to what matters in the field. This is also where we share project information – like an upcoming partnership program with the Long Now Foundation – and future opportunities, like becoming a member.

2. Start protocol watching. Trying to spot the protocols and dynamic non-events around you is a surefire way to build literacy.

3. Study the 2025 Protocol School lectures. These were taught by faculty from around the world and are completely free.

4. Take a weekend to digest the Protocol Reader. It’s still one of the best places to start. If you want a palate cleanser from non-fiction, read our protocol fiction anthologies: Terminological Twists, The Librarians and Ghosts in Machines.

5. Join the Discord server and participate in a Special Interest Group. Meet fellow theorists, practitioners and writers. Make something useful.

6. Write with us. Pitch an article or short story. Write something about what you saw, learned, read about or built. Fiction or non-fiction.

7. Apply what you learn. At the end of the day, what will come to define this new field is the real-world agency and effectiveness that it provides.

8. Make a tool for other people to use based on protocols in your field. Try to generalize useful principles and techniques.

The world of protocols is full of opportunities to exert an influence. You’ll have to tilt your head a bit to see these opportunities at first, but eventually it will become second nature. We want you to imagine a future where people live better through protocols. A future where, among other things, arguments are engineered to be productive, there are fewer central mechanisms at risk of becoming captured or malevolent, and where there is more peace, properly accounted for.

Here’s to the protocolists.

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

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

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

“You haven’t eaten,” Felix said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Which is...”

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

“For what?”

“For work that needs to be finished.”

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

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

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

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

For 20 minutes, neither of them spoke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He found this thought uncomfortable and set it aside.

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

“What did you do?”

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

“Have you seen a man juggling, Felix?”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Drift,” he answered lazily.

“From what?”

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

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

“And if he drifts?” Felix asked.

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

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

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

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

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

Felix took the folder. “What is it?”

“Infrastructure planning.”

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

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

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

“My qualifications...”

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

Felix said nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What changed?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lin set his cup down.

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

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

Felix did not sleep.

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

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

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

Felix stood in the corridor and did not move.

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

“The contracts?” Lin’s voice.

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

“Even if the board is replaced?”

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

“And if the roadmap changes.”

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

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

“Gauge transition at Zabaikalsk. 11 minutes.”

“I’ll be there.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He sent it at 2:47 in the morning.

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

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

He slept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Felix received two calls before the train reached Warsaw.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Felix had ordered eggs which had now gone cold.

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

“Hale Gap?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Felix.”

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

“Sir,” Felix said. “Where are you?”

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

“Why?”

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

“Are you going to come back?”

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

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

“I know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I know.” A pause. “I need it.”

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

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

Felix waited.

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

The line went dead.

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

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.