A Chronicle of Lumina
Issue #14: Glass boardgames and a talk on public intelligence
In this issue: Life aboard a civilizational satellite in Earth’s orbit changes quickly when a new game is introduced. Also – join us, today, April 22nd, at 7pm PDT for a talk on Public Intelligence with Kevin Kelly (details and link below). Quick update on our sci-fi contest.
Remembered by Selene, a Luminian protocolist.
From the gallery windows I watched Earth turn beneath us, like a soft blue theorem, self‐evident and therefore seldom discussed.
We thought ourselves freer in Lumina. We spun high above the ancient quarrels of the planet, bound only by the Mosaic – our grand game, a lattice of reason that was meant to hold every tension in gentle equilibrium.
At dawn, when Lumina’s reservoir mirrors scattered first light across the halls, we convened for the Ceremony of Consonance. Eight circles, eight disciplines, eight schools of temperament. I belonged to the Circle of Axiom, whose role was to draw the opening move on the great glass board.
The other circles answered in careful sequence – gesture, tone, symbol, silence – until the air felt tuned the way a string is tuned, neither slack nor over‑wound. Arguments, even unresolved, sedimented into the ruleset of the board. In those moments I believed, even without knowing, that harmony could be engineered.
Afterward, walking the spiral colonnade that separates the public courts from the scholars’ cloisters, I met Alaric for the first time. He paused beside the suspended orrery, his dark coat reflected in the silver spheres.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said, though his gaze was not on the model’s orbiting moons but on the vacant center where a missing planet was represented only by a shadow.
“It is sufficient,” I answered, the prescribed courtesy of the Circle of Axiom.
He laughed – a stormy sound, unafraid of echoes. “Sufficient? Surely beauty deserves more than sufficiency.” Then he added, almost confidentially, “Harmony is charming, Selene, but what if discord, properly channelled, could carry us further?”
His voice lingered after he left, like an equation I could not yet resolve.
Alaric began with questions, never with accusations. In assemblies he asked whether our game was indeed a pinnacle, or merely a plateau disguised as destiny.
He demonstrated, only for the sake of curiosity, small bilateral duels of logic – sleek, dazzling affairs – where two minds fenced until one idea outshone the other. Spectators felt heat for the first time in years. Their applause…raw, uneven, alive…was a sound I had not heard inside the forums.
I entered a duel almost by accident. My opponent, a member of the Circle of Pragmatism, proposed that repetition breeds decadence. I countered: only through repetition can a form be proven sound. The bout lasted four turns. Victory was awarded to me by a panel that had, somehow, never rendered a split judgment. The applause that followed tasted – yes, tasted – like metal on the tongue.
That night, a friend found me on the Terrace of Silent Vectors.
“You enjoyed it,” Iona said.
“I experienced it,” wishing the words felt less evasive.
She touched the sleeve of my robe. “Be careful, Selene. Even the sharpest razor cannot fell a tree.”
Below us, the rivers of photovoltaic glass carried soft light toward the dormitories. I told myself the rivers would keep flowing, regardless of the kinds of games we played.
The duels multiplied. What began as an experiment became canon almost overnight. The Elder Sage, the custodian of the Mosaic, nondescript except for its white brows, petitioned for restraint. But his voice flew with a thousand others in the meeting of the circles, and dissolved before reaching quorum.
New factions, built around successful duelists, named themselves after forgotten constellations. They adopted colors that flashed like warnings along the corridor banners. Rival salons emerged, each promising insight no circle could match alone. The Circle of Axiom fractured; some followed me into the contests, others retreated into archives that suddenly felt smaller.
In the fourth cycle of the new game, sabotage crept in. A theorem drafted by the Lyra Faction collapsed under scrutiny when its foundational lemma was found swapped with a counterfeit. No one claimed responsibility. Everyone accepted the advantage. Trust, our old grammar, slipped its cases.
I discovered the forgery almost by chance during a routine cross‑references in the Data Well. Metadata revealed access signatures masked beneath relay noise – elegant masking, too elegant for any amateur. When I reported the breach to the Council of Referees, they thanked me and tabled the matter for “comprehensive review.” The review never appeared on the docket.
Iona’s visits grew infrequent. When we did meet she carried herself like someone guarding a holiday candle from a gathering wind. “I keep hearing your name in the back halls,” she said. “Not always kindly.”
“There was a time,” I replied, “when names weren’t currency.”
She looked at me as though I had already chosen a side in a war she wanted no part of.
Unease pried open curiosity. I began tracing Alaric’s movements through Lumina’s intrachain, following encrypted packets as if eavesdropping on the rumor mills behind closed doors. The packets originated not from any local node but from directional relays aimed sunward, toward a cluster of satellites we did not own.
One evening, in a neglected service conduit that hummed with the breath of processors, I confronted him. The only light came from a maintenance lamp hung between us like an unasked question.
“Who speaks to you from outside?” I demanded.
“Outside?” He smiled with practiced grace. “Ideas have no geography.”
I showed him my wrist display. His gaze flickered, calculating new escape trajectories from this conversation. Then, very softly, he said: “They told me Lumina stagnates. They offered a test. I took it.”
“Who are they?”
“People who study systems the way surgeons study muscle. If we endured the stress, it would prove our worth. That we are strong. If we failed, the fault would be ours, not theirs. Proof that we had become weak in the insulation of the Mosaic.” His hands opened in helpless semaphore. “I thought I could guide the turbulence, prove our strength by surviving it.”
“You have proved only how fragile trust can be.”
He stepped back as though my words generated heat. Before I could ask more, alert sirens crackled overhead – another duel escalated into a losing battle, laboratories locked down, data vaults sealed for fear of sabotage. Alaric vanished into the breaker‑lit corridors. I let him go, though every lesson I’d ever learned warned against it.
The broadcast arrived forty hours later, projected onto every communal surface. A faceless emblem spoke with a chorus of synthetic voices:
Experiment 7: termination confirmed. The variable ‘bilateral amplification’ achieved irreversible decoherence of multilateral order in 94 percent of strata. Further observation redundant. End transmission.
The message repeated twice, then dissolved into the color of a dead channel. No explanation followed, no demand, no threat – only the stark statement that we had been measured, manipulated, and, by someone’s calculus, completed.
I expected panic to erupt. Instead fell a heavier silence, one of people realizing the quarrel was never truly theirs. Yet the mutual polarization remained. Factions blamed rivals for inviting external abuse; rivals answered with accusations of cowardice. In place of arguments we now wielded archives of suspicion.
I met an Elder Sage in the Hall of Echoes, a chamber once used for acoustic proofs. It stood among dusty paraboloids, tracing the rim of a resonator bowl.
“I remember,” it said, voice almost swallowed by the room, “when the Mosaic was a promise, not a shield. We built it to bind the strong for the sake of the weak. Perhaps we forgot which one we were.”
“We can rebuild,” I insisted. “A grand ceremony – invite every circle, every faction. Show we can still speak in more than pairs.”
Its eyes glimmered with the embers of a hope too old to burn bright.
The Last Confluence took place beneath the Oculus, our vast central dome from which the starfield painted the floor with tides of light. Attendance was voluntary; half the factions arrived, some sent envoys, a few barricaded themselves behind private defenses.
I opened with the ancient salutation: “From many, one voice may rise.” My own voice, steadied only by the discipline of standard training, sounded distant in my ears.
Phase by phase we re‑enacted the Ceremony of Consonance. The eighth phase – where harmony should crystallize – required simultaneous assent. Instead, two delegates argued over precedence; a third accused them of collusion. The argument spiraled, words hardened into positions, positions into threats. Someone deactivated the stabilizers over the central dais; symbols scattered like embers in windless air. I heard glass shatter – metaphorical, literal, it no longer mattered. By the time the Sages restored weight, the circles had collapsed into knots of shouting color.
I do not recall walking out. Only the corridor returning to me in fragments: the hush of vacuum doors, the angled glow of emergency markers, my footsteps echoing alone.
In the quiet weeks that followed, Lumina fractured into self‑contained sectors, each guarding its airlocks, frequencies, and food lines. The Council disbanded; the Chorus hall became an arboretum for those who still believed in silent growth. Power grids were rerouted through private conduits. Sometimes I saw Earth rise through shuttered panes and wondered if anyone down there would notice an orchid orbit of intellect dimming into pile of separate petals.
Iona found me atop the maintenance spire where comm relays once carried our debates across the habitat. We sat beside the cold antennae, knees drawn to keep warm in the thin atmosphere of regret.
“I’ll go with you,” she said without preface. “Wherever.”
“I have decided only to visit the palace of my memory,” I answered.
Below, the River of Light – now fragmented into intermittent glows – still glitched faithfully around its circuit. We watched until the sections failed to align and the river fell into darkness. Somewhere a low‑frequency alarm trembled through the metal bones of the station, a reminder that decay, like dusk, obeys its own schedule.
We scavenged an unused study cluster at the rim where gravity feels like a whisper. There I gathered anyone – twenty‑three in total – who wished to preserve the original corpus of the Mosaic. We copied archives onto crystal substrates, memorized the opening moves of the Ceremony, practiced the harmonics in hushed voices so as not to alert patrol drones of militant factions. Some nights we argued whether the work had purpose; other nights we argued whether purpose required witness. Each argument ended, perversely, in laughter, because even bickering felt like valuable salvage in the backdrop of war.
One evening, as I annotated the eighth recursion of the Harmony Axiom, I wrote in the margin:
Before it is a rule, a protocol is a quarrel. We forgot the quarrel and so forfeited the rule.
I pressed the stylus until the ink bled through.
Alaric’s fate reached me as rumor: an airlock misfire, a factional tribunal, self‑imposed exile in an unpressurized spar. I did not seek confirmation. The man who believed he could choreograph discord had become its endnote.
In quieter hours I revisited our first conversation at the orrery and finally understood the shadow at its center. It was not a missing planet, but an unmeasured desire – for movement, for novelty, for the thrill of contest – that no orbit could enclose. We mistook absence for flaw and tried to fill it with competitions until the whole device shook apart.
I write these notes for readers I may never meet. Perhaps decades from now a patrol from Earth will rediscover Lumina’s shards and wonder how intellect turned on itself so swiftly. They will ask for villains, for heroes, for clear beginnings and clearer ends.
Tell them instead: we were ordinary minds atop extraordinary scaffolds, certain that structure could absolve us from vigilance. We engineered trust, forgot it required maintenance, then applauded the first artisan who offered sharper tools.
Tell them that the Mosaic still exists, not as law, but as memory – chips of color kept in small boxes by those of us who survived the shattering. One day, when the factions tire of rivalry’s taste, they may come searching for pieces that fit.
If they ask for proof that harmony can survive treachery, I will offer only this: I am still writing.
Town Hall: Public Intelligence
This week’s talk is at a different time than usual. Tune in today, April 22 at 19:00 PDT for a discussion about Public Intelligence. As part of the Khlongs and Subaks workshop happening this week in Thailand, Kevin Kelly will give a talk on this topic – which he has written about here.
“Imagine 50 years from now a Public Intelligence that was a distributed, open-source, non-commercial artificial intelligence, operated like the internet, and available to the whole world. This public AI would be a federated system, not owned by any one entity, but powered by millions of participants to create an aggregate intelligence beyond what one host could offer…Public intelligence would be paid for by usage locally, just as you pay for your internet access, storage, or hosting.”
We look forward to sharing highlights from Khlongs and Subaks, in partnership with Carnegie Melon and King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang University.
SoP25 Spotlight
In each new issue of Protocolized, leading up to the kick off of the main track of the 2025 Summer of Protocols, we’ll introduce one of this year’s teaching fellows.
“I am Wang Yige, Assistant Professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University. Trained in social science and quantitative historical analysis at HKUST and Peking University, my research explores the interplay between technology, language, and social transformation. My Ph.D. examined how the rise of a modern newspaper market contributed to early democratization in China. At BFSU, I extend this work by investigating how digital technologies and global communication shape cultural values and cross-cultural understanding in both Chinese and international contexts.”
Tentative Course Title: Toward a new social science of Protocols
Terminological Twists Update
Thank you to everyone who entered and promoted the Terminological Twists contest for protocol fiction. Forty-two entries found their way into our inbox. We have started our review process, and plan to inform all contestants of their results by May 6th.
Shortlisted candidates may be contacted sooner, in order to line up their story for publication in Protocolized. And we continue to accept pitches for new pieces – visit our How to Write With Us page to learn more.
⬇️ Previous Issue ⬇️
Zero Knowledge
In this issue: A flash protocol fiction by Sachin Benny, featuring some whimsical and astute scenes about zero knowledge proofs, a technical computer science concept that everyone should understand. Also – meet the SoP25 teaching fellows, RSVP to a wonderful guest talk next week, and catch up on some highlights from the week.