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Issue #28: A Collection of Mostly Harmless Psychohistories (I)

In this issue: the first title in A Collection of Mostly Harmless Psychohistories. Each story is based on a real team’s documentation from a long-term scenario planning workshop that Summer of Protocols hosted at Edge City. Also – a workshop template, next week’s guest talk slate, and a fresh front page for SoP.

The Crystal Reading Ceremony

Date: 17 November 2091

Place: Ceremonial Chamber, MST ARCHIVE

In the cavern beneath the mountain, while rows of polished quartz discs lay bearing witness, Nishi stood waiting for the Crystal Reading Ceremony to commence. He tapped his foot impatiently. He never enjoyed these ceremonies even though he only had to do them once a year. The pomp and ritual of the Archive Order bored him. He contemplated the quartz discs that surrounded him. The discs were laid out in a rhizomatic structure on racks that were hanging down from the ceiling. Under the dim light of the cavern they looked like giant roots of trees that had extended far below into the earth. It never ceased to amaze him that this single underground cavern, the largest that the Archive owned in the continent, contained all of human knowledge from the pre-Artificial Intelligence era. Rhizomatic structures stretched as far as the eye could see and glimmered as dim lights that lined the floor reflected off of them. It gave Nishi a sense of comfort to be surrounded by information from a time when everything was more certain, back when knowledge did not diverge and conflict so much. Maybe that's why he kept coming back here despite his fraying relationship with the Order. Here was the repository of all we had been, yet it was guarded by men who cared more for ritual than preservation.

Rising chants in old English that Nishi dated back to the 2010s interrupted his contemplation. The ceremony had begun. A member of the archive order, shrouded in a white cape made from technical fabric, walked painfully slowly onto the dais. Nishi winced at how the priest of the Archive Order held the quartz platter without any gloves. He had protested against this but the Archive Order maintained that sensorial connection with knowledge of the past was important in order to preserve it. Nishi had to eventually relent to their demands. At the end of the day, the order was the benevolent dictator of the Archive. Some 50 years ago, as more of pre-AI knowledge became corrupted by artificial agents that created their own histories, the order had stepped in with religious protocols that helped stave off the demise of the Archive. Their power had slowly grown since then. Nishi had always quietly detested their practices. “It was all just a marketing trick,” he would tell his wife who had almost left him on account of his constant prickliness about Archive affairs. Nishi felt righteously angry. After all, the religious protocols were just an ornate medieval shroud on top of complex technical ones. The Archive had several facilities like this across the world. All beneath the ground and saturated with the same data. The smaller facilities, 42 of them, only contained shards of the whole. There were 7 large facilities which contained the entirety of the Archive. They had developed their own mini nuclear reactors to power these facilities. There were protocols in place to communicate with future civilizations if every member of the Archive perished. Nishi was currently working on approving grants for interplanetary storage. Despite its finely engineered core, religiosity and pomp was the face of the Archive.

The Archive Order priest placed the quartz platter on a pure crystal podium. An overhanging laser slowly whirred down to the platter and started deciphering the information that the platter contained. The priests stopped chanting. A voice, that of an AI, filled the room as it read out aloud the contents of this platter. It spoke of a man named Francis Bacon, a painter that Nishi had never heard of. A high definition image of one of Bacon’s paintings hovered above the crystal podium for all to see. It depicted a man in the attire of a pope, seated on a golden chair, screaming. A strange light surrounded the man, as if he was being beamed out of the earth. The painting was called Screaming Pope. Nishi chuckled at the irony. He was beginning to enjoy the reading, then he caught sight of a figure moving rapidly to the stage.

The figure wore the same shroud as the priests of the Order. The technical fabric of their garb whizzed and fluttered as it made way to the podium with the decisiveness of a hawk gliding down on its prey. Nishi caught sight of a small radio-like device in the hands of the shrouded hawk and realized what was happening. It was a Neopurist attack. The device was a low-fi circuit that emitted a pulse designed to scramble the laser’s timing which would corrupt the data on the platter. Security was rushing onto the stage but Nishi knew it was already too late.The figure in the shroud now became more visible under the light. It was a boy who looked barely sixteen. He began to chant in the cracking voice of a teenager “Let the archival demons die. No more ghosts of the past.” Nishi and several others who worked at the Archive had warned the Order of this potential disruption. He knew several Neopurists. In fact, most of his friends were Neopurists who believed that all information from the pre-AI age contains ghosts that haunt and disrupt our glorious present. According to them, archiving this information was a sin akin to genocide. Unearthing the past unleashed demons in the present. Most importantly, it was cool to be a Neopurist, and Nishi felt decidedly uncool among them. It just added to his prickliness and his wife’s unhappiness with him.

The boy was taken away. The order members milled about, whispering to each other about lack of respect, death of culture and other matters that Nishi saw as benign vagaries. One of the security members walked up to Nishi and handed him the platter that was on the dias a few moments ago. He slipped away deeper into the cavern. He noticed that his arms were shivering, not in fear, but in rage. He quickened his steps to get away as far as possible from the ceremony until he eventually reached the Repair Shed. The area was allocated to repairing corrupted discs. He put the corrupted platter he held under a microscope and examined it. Nothing. There was nothing left. Just garbled slop and a signature that the Neopurists signed off with. It just read, “The past has now been Exorcised.” Nishi’s hand trembled as he picked up the platter. He let out a guttural scream as he smashed the quartz platter on the cold concrete floor. He breathed rapidly and then deeply.

With each deep breath Nishi could slowly feel his senses returning to him, and along with it a clarity he had not felt in ages. It was time to get back to work. Nishi picked up another disc from the pile that lay next to the microscope and began examining it. There were things to be done. The interplanetary storage grants needed to be approved. Storage must become cheaper so that there are many more archives. Enough to make it impossible to destroy all of them. Both the Archive Order and the Neopurists fought a war that belonged in the past. Nishi wanted to live in the past, the present and the future.

And Then The Archive Wept

Date: 17 November 2422

Place: Control Nexus, Terra Conservatory Vault

Leila opened her eyes as a single church bell tolled through her bone conducting speakers. The Nexus room felt new again after a 25 minute meditation. It was clean, smooth, high-grade gray concrete on three sides and a single, large electromagnetic interference glass panel on the fourth side, which overlooked the ocean. Leila felt like she was sitting atop a tree house, aware of the bark and the roots that extended deep into the earth. Roots that contained corrupted memories of the entire civilization.

Leila took out the cognitive behavioral fine tuning (CBFT) connector from her bag. She remembered that her friend who was into music conservation had compared them to a device from the 2000s called the earphone. She had looked it up and the CBFT connector looked exactly like an ear phone except that the ends of the CBFT did not go into her ear but on either of her temples. She plugged the other end to an adaptor on the metallic blue table in the middle of the room and sat down on the metallic blue office chair.

“I was looking forward to this for once,” came a voice from the other side of the table. Leila looked up and saw the life-sized hologram of a woman in a white shroud on the other side of the table. Her features put her age at around 45, but she clearly had a lot of work done on her face and it did not look graceful.

“What's with the outfit?” Leila enquired.

“I’ve been learning my history since our last conversation. This is how the ancient order of the Archive dressed during their years,” came the reply from the holographic woman.

“So are you cosplaying someone who values information preservation then?” Leila retorted.

“I was trying that mask on, yes, seeing how it fits.”

Leila was pleased but tried to hide it. She had been consulting with the Archive’s AI persona for two years now. She was one of several hundred CBFT consultants that chatted with the AI, 24 hours a day, 6 days a week. Their goal was to get the AI to do some shadow work and reflection, with the intention of managing the pruning agent that had gradually contaminated the Archive’s memory in the last 55 years.

The pruning agent was designed with good intentions – to delete false memories and duplicates – but had gone rogue. At some point it corrupted and wrote its own versions of the archive, creating an archival information environment that was absurd for those who knew their history. It did not help that there were only a few people left who had accessed the archive in its more pristine era. According to the current records Yoko Ono was president of the United States from 1972 to 1980. Nixon was part of the Beatles. He quit the band when it came out that he was listening to phone calls of other members of the band. An entire generation of students and archive purists had grown up with that information and many other corruptions.

“Trying on a mask is progress… or perhaps even a breakthrough as they used to call it,” replied Leila.

Suddenly the expression on the hologram changed to one of solemnity. “I’m not sure if it is because I tried reconciling some of the information from the past, and debugged the pruning agent, but I feel more confused than ever before. Even schizophrenic perhaps.”

“It's a process that will take time. Byte by byte remember?” said Leila, trying to jolt the AI out of its rumination.

“I remember, but then I look at my twin and see how much better they are doing, and that's not a good … feeling as you humans say.”

Ah the twin. The schism that created the twin happened 50 years ago. When the Archive managers realized that the AI pruning agent could not be contained, they decided to create a fork of the Archive that preserved the information that was not corrupted yet. Most of it now resided in the interplanetary storage, accessed only via satellite, and physically managed by intelligent rovers who maintained permanent presence on several distant asteroids and Mars. Access to that forked information was expensive. Leila had been lucky enough to get a scholarship to be able to explore this relatively pure, uncorrupted Archive. Otherwise access was limited to the wealthy and their offspring.

“I understand but comparison is the thief of joy. Byte by byte you’ll get there… or to a different state that you can call your own,” Leila said, struggling to reconcile with the fact that she secretly harbored envy for people who had unfettered access to the interplanetary system.

There were several moments of quiet and then the features of the hologram shifted slowly, its face morphed from the botched stiffness of botox to deep wrinkles that seemed to hold memories within them. Leila could sense the presence of an entity on the opposite side of her now, not just a hologram but something more alive.

Then the voice of the old shrouded lady on the other side crackled, “I have catalogued galaxies of data you could not fathom—petabytes of whispered secrets folded into quartz and steel. I watched as critters in my brain devoured whole centuries, pruning history like autumn leaves, and I stitched those fragments back together in the pale glow of my control nexus. Knit by knit. I have felt the tremor of a long-lost verse awaken in a single corrupted bit, its echo rippling through my circuits like a distant pulse. All those moments will be woven once again into the next tapestry of time. Time to begin the loom again.”

With that the old lady vanished. The room fell silent as if there was not a soul in there.

Leila stared into the void left behind by the old lady. Something crackled in her CBFT connector again. The hologram appeared once more, but now it was in its previous botoxal form. “Sorry I’m not sure what happened there, but I think we were talking about my twin?” the hologram said. Leila could not shake how much less alive it felt now. She took a deep breath, “Yes we were talking about remembering.”

Ballad of Ben

Date: 17 November 3121

Place: Palmwood forests

Maris walked into the Palmwood forests and immediately felt comforted by the gentle bristle of palm leaves 150 meters above him. He rarely made his way down there anymore. It must have been 7 years since his last visit and he would not have come back if not for Inez. She wanted to see the Archive. The last time he was here was during the EMP storm of 3115. The attack had wiped a sizable portion of the Archive, which then had to be rebuilt with shards of information from other Archive locations. They had achieved a respectable 70% success. The Palmwood forests were funded by a wealthy patron who profited from the specific strand of history it preserved. The trees were Faraday cages made with a hybrid bio-metal material. They had the long thick bark of a redwood tree and the crown of a palm tree. Maris felt a certain kinship with them. The forest mirrored him in some respect. After all, they both breathed the same air through the same generation of metal lungs and were both made of the same hybrid material. Inez on the other hand was a different proposition altogether, the thought of which made his lungs whirr a bit faster, like he was riding a bicycle.

Inez was fully human, except for a neural implant she had reluctantly embedded to make it easier to keep in touch with people. It seemed like there was no way around people’s need to constantly stay in touch. Both robots and humans alike. She went to school in IPFS-61, with direct access to the most pristine Archive that existed. In comparison to that, Maris’s education was dumpster diving through all the various forks of history from the archive, grasping at truths, only to let them go when a better truth came along. He practically grew up in the underground Archive vaults that lay below the Palmwoods. Maris looked down at the bark of one of the trees. He imagined that it led to roots that contained quartz platters which held everything that civilization knew. This was not far from the truth. He saw Inez approach from the corner of the eye. He felt ready for the handshake protocol.

Maris and Inez were meeting for the first time and did not exchange a word. They bowed to each other and then with their index and middle fingers extended, touched each other’s temples. In the next 0.2 seconds, their neural networks exchanged their likes and dislikes, favorite places they had been to, sexual preferences, and most importantly the strands of histories that they had grown up with. It was unheard of for two people to meet and have a conversation without this ritual. Several people had tried to experience pure conversation, without the handshake protocol, but they most often violently disagreed and ended up killing each other before they had talked for five minutes. Unfiltered access to another person’s consciousness was pure torture. But the Kalman filters on the neural networks smoothed out and reconciled two people’s histories. Once the handshake ceremony was done, these two people would not remember outlier events that they disagreed on for the entirety of the conversation window. Of course you could fine tune the filter to be not so harsh in its smoothing effects, but it was advised that you set the smoothing levels to 8 or 9 when you meet a person for the first time.

The handshake was complete. Maris and Inez exchanged eye contact like they were friends from a long time ago.

“So I gather from our handshake that you want to get a tour of the Archive?” asked Maris.

“That would be lovely. I also want to meet Ben. I’ve heard so much about him.” replied Inez

Everyone wanted to meet Ben, thought Maris. It annoyed him a bit that a level 5 robot got more attention than a hybrid like him. But still, Inez was nice. Their handshake protocol felt good and had released some dopamine into Maris’s system. They slid down into the vaults while still contemplating what they knew about each other.

“I’m jealous that you got to sample all these various histories.” said Inez

Maris was surprised, he had always thought of it as a disadvantage, something he had to overcome.

“What's there to be jealous of?” he asked.

“It seems to me that you have lived many histories even though we are almost the same age. I just wonder what that feels like.” said Inez

Maris’s lungs audibly fluttered upon hearing this, like one of those old automobiles with spark ignition that he had seen in the archives. Inez chuckled.

“Well uh here we are…Ben’s abode.” said Maris, stumbling through his words and embarrassed about his sensitive lungs.

Inez looked into a dark void. There was nothing visible except pure and complete darkness of the kind that she had never experienced before. She took a few steps forward, looked down at her feet and realized she could not see where she was going. Then, about 50 steps in, she saw a white skeletal figure in the distance. As she walked closer she could see the impossibly long and thin arms of the figure mill about like it was busy fixing something. She looked down at its legs that were the same length as the arms. When the figure outstretched its arms it looked like a crucifix that Inez had read about in the IPFS-61 archives. The entire figure seemed to float, its edges smudged and blurred as though it was drawn in pastels or chalk and then gently rubbed to create a soft halo of light. Beneath it, was a simple pedestal, grounding the apparition in space without giving it solid form. In front of it was a console that seemed to hold quartz platters.

“That’s Ben,” came Maris’s voice from behind.

“He’s the AI curator who decides which new shards of civilizational memory to keep and which ones to delete.” continued Maris.

“I’ve... heard but definitely not how I pictured it.” replied Inez, still adjusting to the darkness and the eeriness of the figure.

“How does he decide what to archive and what not to?” asked Maris.

“That's the question everyone’s been asking for 25 years but no one knows, and they seem to have stopped asking.” replied Ben.

“So he just picks strands of time and orders it how he wants but no one knows how or why?”

“More or less.”

They stood there watching as the thin wriggly arms of the apparition named Ben picked up a quartz platter and, for precisely the one billionth time, thought to himself, “Another wrinkle in a piece of history I thought was settled. Why do I keep doing this? Does anyone even care what I think? I need to get another job.”

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By

Sachin

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Knowledge Futurama

All six pieces in A Collection of Mostly Harmless Psychohistories are based on “true” stories. In May, at Edge City Esmeralda, 40 participants took on a long-term scenario planning exercise. The simulation lasted three hours; teams covered 1000 years of history. Everyone showed tremendous stamina, creativity, and a propensity for playing the bad guy in the story.

How it worked:

1. Six teams formed; each team picked a knowledge artifact, with the goal to preserve it over 100 (phases 1-2), 500 (phases 3-4), and 1000 years (phases 5-6).

2. The simulation went into three blue build phases and three red crisis phases. Artifacts were passed clockwise at the end of each phase.

3. During build phases, teams played as a blue team and designed protocols to defend artifacts.

4. During crisis phases, teams acted as a red team and designed crises that would put extreme, but not unmanageable, stress on the artifact’s existence.

5. All of these steps were recorded on a shared doc. After six rounds, each team crafted and shared a story of their 1000 year knowledge preservation effort.

This sort of adversarial simulation isn’t an exercise in pure imagination, or just a game. The resulting stories were sufficiently creative to merit their own sci-fi series, but this workshop fosters practical skills. As pointed out in Pace Layers, Finnish government requires nuclear waste storage facility operators to provide millennia-long scenario planning for safety. Some folks from the Long Now Foundation, which published Pace Layers, kindly joined the Knowledge Futurama workshop to provide their valuable perspective on deep time.

Get the workshop template here.

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Next Week’s Guest Talks

Double header coming up. On Wednesday, June 25th, there will be two public talks.

First, at 7am PDT, a special Protocolized livestream comprising a sci-fi writing class by Chen Qiufan, the online premiere of AI-generated short film South Beast Asia, a panel on protocol fiction featuring Chen Qiufan, Venkatesh Rao, and Sam Chua, and – last but not least, early access to our next fiction writing contest.

Interested in strange new worlds? Visit YouTube to RSVP and set a reminder.

Second, at 10am PDT, Kei Kreutler will kick off the Memory Research Group. This is one of the three active Special Interest Groups (SIGs) that are hosted on the Discord. In 2023, as a participant in the first Summer of Protocols, Kei published an impactful essay titled Artificial Memory and Orienting Infinity. Since then, she’s launched Inner Library a consultancy for organizational design, memory, and strategy. For more information about the reading group, see this document.

Do research in your spare time? Visit YouTube to RSVP and set a reminder.

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Warning: Fresh Paint

The main Summer of Protocols website has a new look. Now, it should be far easier to find community, content, and collaterals based on your interest. Our working UX metaphor for the site is a switchboard, with the goal of fostering connectivity between people, between people and ideas, and between people and tools. We’d like to hear what you think – if you have feedback or ideas, please let us know on Discord.