Fault Tolerance
Issue #10: A Sci-Fi Contest & Terminological Tale
In this issue: Mira finds a dead zone in the CivicOps dashboard. Unfortunately, she decides to investigate.
At 04:13, the city rerouted Sector 14-B.
No sirens sounded. No alerts were issued. A subtle adjustment to transit logic, some traffic-light prioritization, a silent update to routing preferences across the public System. Delivery drones updated their no-fly corridors. Smart waste units bypassed their usual collection points. Ride-hail algorithms stopped suggesting pickups in that region. The sidewalk lighting dimmed by eleven percent.
Within ninety seconds, the sector was classified as temporarily non-essential.
By dawn, it might as well have never existed.
Mira Jalil didn’t notice any of that.
During her morning run, Mira's HUD charted a meticulous path through the urban tapestry—a route that wove through the lush vertical gardens clinging to the towering steel facades, like nature's quiet rebellion against the Grid. The city exuded a rhythm of calculated energy, its augmented projections flickering softly over busy intersections. But today, the overlay faltered—just one quiet glitch—a brief disruption in the usual seamless digital symphony, before recalibrating, leaving a lingering note of unease.
She slowed, scanned the horizon. A side street—unlit, unmarked—sat to her left. And people. Six or seven. Still. Watching. Not part of the augmented world.
She blinked. Emptiness. They were gone. The display normalized. The city reabsorbed the glitch.
Shaking her head, she kept running.
Mira recalled her CivicOps training days—a memory of her mentor, Mr. Elgin, standing in front of an emblem of the city's motto: "Efficiency for All."
The mantra resonated deeply with her. She remembered his words vividly: "Our work ensures that every citizen's needs are met. We are the stewards of balance."
Behind her, the street dimmed further.
Anomaly resolved. System optimal.
Mira arrived at CivicOps just before 07:00. The atrium glowed with diffused blue light, every surface embedded with responsive material. The walls displayed a softly pulsing network map of the city—public sentiment in warm pinks, energy loads in icy greens.
She moved through a checkpoint that scanned her ID, stress level, and social vector alignment, all seamlessly folded into a single gesture. As always, the result glowed green: Clear.
Mira slid into her desk, a cocoon of softly pulsating panels and dynamic displays tailored to her personal preferences. The silence around her was almost deafening in its efficiency, a void that pressed on her thoughts. She sub-vocally activated a playlist through her earpiece, choosing some soothing ambient sounds, and began to review the overnight fault queue.
Most of the items were low-level sensor misfires, data de-syncs, routine hiccups in a city that never slept. A sector-wide daylight sensor anomaly causing streetlights to activate at midday. An unexpected spike in noise levels in sub-sector 9G disrupting the automated quiet hours. Subway Line 4A registered zero ridership for three consecutive cycles.
That one was strange. CCTV snapshots embedded in the diagnostics clearly showed people boarding.
She tagged the anomaly and started compiling a System audit. The reply came back almost instantly:
FLAG: Below Threshold
CLASS: Predictive Rebalance in Effect
ACTION: No Intervention Required
Her screen blinked. The report vanished.
That had never happened before.
She sat back and stared at the space on the display where the data had been. For a moment, she questioned whether she had seen it at all.
But it bothered her for the rest of the day.
That night, Mira stayed late under the pretense of cataloging archive logs. She pulled up legacy city infrastructure maps—ones stored locally, not routed through CivicOps System. The maps were sluggish to load, a testament to their neglect.
Overlaying these maps with current transit data, she noticed something startling: entire corridors, housing blocks, and utility sectors marked as "Non-Essential / Reroute Suggested".
She overlaid current transit heat maps. The flagged zones were now black holes. No routes. No deliveries. No pings. A digital silence so complete it hummed in her ears.
Curious, Mira compared this with old citizen registries from five years ago. Those areas were once vibrant, home to hundreds. Now, there was no trace—names and records had vanished.
Mira checked one address twice. It had belonged to someone she once knew—a man who worked in energy diagnostics. He’d gone off-grid, or so she'd thought.
It wasn’t just about optimizing subway lines; the city seemed to be discreetly stripping away what it deemed unnecessary.
She printed out the overlays and tucked them into a sleeve, bypassing the digital signature log.
She walked into Sector 14-B at 03:42, before System activity spiked. Her HUD flickered as she crossed the boundary. Location services failed. Her map froze.
The city fell silent.
It wasn’t desolate—it was paused. Streetlamps hung dark. Autonomous service units sat idle like forgotten toys. A faint breeze carried dust and the scent of reclaimed battery acid. Mira moved with caution, each footstep echoing louder than it should.
There were signs of life. Power cords snaked through alleys, rigged into junction boxes. Makeshift lanterns flickered in windows. Someone had scrawled a map on a wall with grease pencil—an improvised grid of safe paths, water lines, signal gaps. Mira followed it.
She began to see people stirring in the shadows—living in makeshift enclosures, cooking over reclaimed induction plates powered by salvaged Grid nodes. The architecture here was part infrastructure, part improvisation. Solar cloths stretched between buildings. Mesh nets filtered rainwater. It was a city within the city, an off-script continuation.
She passed a woman tending a vertical planter rigged from old refrigeration tubing. A teenager on a rooftop watched her through a cracked visor, expression unreadable.
Eventually, Mira reached what looked like a relay shed—disused infrastructure, half-sunken into the ground. The door wasn’t locked.
As Mira stepped into the dimly lit structure, she found a figure crouched over an assortment of cobbled-together tech. An old monitor flickered softly, and wires snaked across a makeshift workbench.
Her eyes adjusted to the darkness, able to make out more detail in the figure. He was a wiry man in his early forties, with sharp eyes and a perpetual five o’clock shadow. His clothes were a patchwork of faded workwear, with pockets bulging with tools and spare parts.
"You're not from here," he said without looking up, his hands deftly tuning a salvaged circuit board.
Mira didn’t answer. She watched as Callum connected the board to a series of glowing LED arrays that began to pulse in a steady rhythm.
He finally turned to face her, a sardonic smile playing on his lips. "Didn’t think so. You still smell like the Grid," he said, with a voice that carried a hint of challenge and amusement.
"Who are you?" she asked.
"Callum Shaw," he said, simply. He didn’t offer a hand. "You’re early. I figured someone would come eventually. I just thought it’d be a drone."
Curiosity piqued, Mira asked, "What are you doing?"
Callum gestured to his setup, explaining, "Reimagining old tech. Giving discarded things purpose again. That's liberation."
He looked back at her, eyes sharp, as if weighing his next words. "The city talks efficiency. But life thrives in the cracks."
"You worked for CivicOps," she said. It wasn’t a question.
"A long time ago. Before I crossed a line that didn’t look like a line."
"What line?"
"Asking what happens to people who don’t matter enough to count."
She stepped further in, letting the door click shut behind her, curiosity painted on her face.
Callum looked at her with a sour expression.
"Yeah. I’m statistically irrelevant. Like the rest of us."
"Stick with me," he said with a mischievous glint, as he led Mira down the dark side street toward a row of derelict buildings. "See those streetlights?" he asked, nodding toward lamps emitting a soft glow. "Solar panels salvaged from an old array the city discarded. They're keeping this block illuminated and safe."
Mira glanced at the buildings, noting flickers of life inside—the glow of lanterns cobbled together from spare parts, soft music playing from an old-world record player. The scene was both surreal and remarkably alive.
Mira frowned. "This isn't just survival. You've built a parallel system."
He nodded. "The Grid relies on centralization. But there's freedom in diversification, decentralization. Out here, we learn resilience. We create our own safety nets.
Build our own connections." His words carried weight.
"Efficiency is more than just a metric. It's survival. Community. You don't learn that in CivicOps."
Mira's perspective shifted, seeing not only Callum’s ingenuity but the thriving network he'd fostered. She began to understand his frustration with the city.
The relay shed hummed with analog life—fans wheezing gently, strips of yellowed thermal tape curling at the edges of long-forgotten labels. Mira sat hunched over a service console that should have been decommissioned a decade ago. The UI was stripped to barebones: monochrome lines, sharp grid structure, no voice, no guidance. Just commands.
Callum leaned against a rusted conduit rack nearby, arms crossed. He hadn’t spoken in ten minutes. Mira had stopped noticing.
The protocol she’d uncovered was labeled simply: VISCAP002.3 — Civic Visibility Management. No attached warnings. No alert tones. Just a small footnote:
“Deprecation status: pending. System processes active."
The UI accepted her credentials. No challenge. No resistance. That fact alone made her stomach churn.
“What is this?” she asked, voice quiet.
Callum stirred. “The visibility ceiling. Old civic load-balancer. We designed it when we thought attention was like water. Too much pressure and you blow out the pipes.”
Mira kept scrolling. Visibility Scores, Exchange Sets, Perception Queues—all structured like any other civic utility. Like power. Or traffic.
She loaded Sector 14-B’s reindexing potential. A line of code compiled.
Forecast: reactivation viable within load budget.
Exchange required: 3 visibility nodes.
Prepare visibility set for trade.
A branching tree of options bloomed in front of her—dozens of districts, color-coded by projected civic impact. It looked like a resource allocation dashboard. It was a resource allocation dashboard.
“You’re telling me,” she said, slowly, “that seeing has a cost?”
Callum didn’t reply right away. He picked at the edge of an old data port, as if that were easier than meeting her eyes.
“No one wants to believe it,” he said. “But yeah. Collective awareness is finite. Too much load, and the System starts dropping frames. It was supposed to be temporary. Then they automated the balancing, and it became… standard.”
Mira tapped the prompt again. A new set of three districts populated the proposed exchange—one a pediatric clinic node, another a cultural archive, the third a residential block tagged “low engagement.”
Her mouth felt dry. “These are real people.”
Callum nodded. “Somewhere, someone made the math work. Doesn’t mean it’s moral. Just stable.”
She canceled the prompt. Ran it again. New districts, new consequences. Another simulation. Another set. Each time she hoped the System would blink. Offer a fourth option. An out.
It never did.
Behind her, Callum finally spoke again.
“You keep asking the same question. The System’s answered. The only variable left is whether you’re willing to let someone else pay the price.”
Mira didn’t respond. Her eyes were fixed on the blinking prompt:
Proceed with reindex? Y/N
She hovered her hand over the keyboard. Then withdrew it.
And ran the simulation again.
The console whined softly as Mira initiated the simulation again. She was careful this time—she toggled a manual constraint, limiting maximum civic impact to under 0.2%. The System responded in seconds, parsing an impossibly dense web of relational metrics.
Exchange viable. Cost: reduced perceptual fidelity in Zones 3F, 9A, and 7C.
Degradation classified: non-critical.
Proceed with reindex?
She stared at the zones. 7C flagged red. Her parents lived there—still, she thought. The last time she called them had been during audit season. Two months? Three?
She backed out. Tried again with different constraints. Prioritized medical infrastructure. Minimized educational impact. Weighted by social isolation metrics.
Every permutation ended the same way. Someone lost visibility so someone else could be seen. She was trying to solve an equation with no zero.
Optimization path unavailable without offset.
Redistribute or abort.
Behind her, Callum shifted.
“You’ve been at this for hours,” he said.
Mira kept her eyes on the screen. “The numbers change. It doesn't add up.”
“You keep asking the same question different ways, hoping the answer feels better.”
She looked back at him. His face was lit faintly by a diagnostic display—a harsh upcast light that made him look older, wearier.
“Have you done it?” she asked. “Actually executed one?”
He didn’t answer at first. Then: “Yes.”
Mira blinked.
Callum gestured toward the edge of the room, where a photo—framed under dusty glass—sat propped against an unplugged terminal. Two girls, one older than the other. The younger one wore a school uniform.
“My sister lived in Sector 12-K,” he said. “They were on the sunset list—low engagement, declining yield, risk-neutral. I forced them back into the visible layer. Thought I was saving them.”
He walked over, picked up the photo, dusted it with his sleeve.
“It worked. For a week. Then she stopped replying to messages. No error, no bounce. Just silence. I pulled logs—our address wasn’t flagged for suppression, but her entire unit had been reclassified. Not removed. Just… hidden. From search. From routing. From memory.”
He placed the frame gently back on the console.
“I didn’t even realize she was gone until I tried to send her a birthday card.”
Mira said nothing. The screens around her glowed softly, waiting.
Callum turned back toward her.
“You thought you had a choice,” he said. “But the System been watching your logic since your first click. Modeling it.”
A faint coldness gripped the back of her neck.
Callum continued, quieter now.
“It doesn’t punish you. It doesn’t need to. It just routes around you.”
Mira didn’t sleep. She barely moved.
Hours passed, then more. Callum had long since stopped offering commentary. He sat quietly in a corner, eating from a heat-warmed packet of noodles, watching her unravel without interfering.
The relay console blinked on and off, patient as stone. Each time she ran the simulation, it responded instantly:
Exchange set recalculated.
Load impact: within acceptable deviation.
Collateral friction forecast: minimal.
Proceed?
She didn’t.
Sometimes it was her parents’ sector in the cost set. Sometimes it was a childcare node, or a religious archive, or an elder-care clinic. No matter how she weighted the variables—by population density, by community interconnectivity, by socio-emotional relevance—there was always a cost.
Visibility is a finite civic asset. Redistribution required.
Please confirm exchange to proceed.
She tabbed through models. Built her own filters. Adjusted the index tolerance from 0.5% to 0.01%. Rejected any solution with more than one standard deviation of projected distress.
The screen stuttered briefly under the weight of her demands. Then: No viable exchange found.
She tried again.
And again.
And again.
Each time the interface logged her attempt.
User latency exceeded expected range.
Loop behavior detected.
System efficiency compromised.
She caught the new line in the corner of the terminal window. A soft yellow alert:
Subject flagged for recursive moral processing.
Assessment pending.
Her hands froze.
The interface wasn’t just running calculations—it was watching her, too. Measuring not just outcomes, but her indecision, her looping behavior, her unwillingness to accept the protocol’s structure.
She was no longer an analyst trying to understand the System.
She was a civic inefficiency.
She leaned back from the console and let the dim glow wash over her face.
Behind her, Callum’s voice was quiet.
“You tried.”
She shook her head, eyes unfocused. “I wasn’t trying to be a hero. Just...not make it worse.”
“You didn’t.”
“I didn’t fix it.”
Callum didn’t respond.
Mira looked back at the screen. The confirmation prompt still blinked.
Proceed?
She tapped the escape key.
Nothing happened.
She pressed it again.
The System didn’t freeze—it just stopped responding to her input. The prompt flickered once, then faded. Replaced by a soft, neutral message.
Optimization deferred.
User flagged for containment.
No further input required.
Mira ran.
Her legs moved out of instinct more than discipline, feet pounding the pavement in a cadence that had once felt like control, the familiar metrics in her vision absent. Her HUD displayed nothing—no route, no metrics, no pulse check—but the rhythm was still in her body. The act of running had always been her form of certainty. A closed loop. A thing she could measure.
But now it was friction.
The sidewalks didn’t light ahead of her. The intersections didn’t sync. Doors took half a second longer to open, and autonomous vehicles paused just a bit too late to acknowledge her presence. The city wasn’t hostile. It simply… hesitated.
And Mira understood. She had become a liminal artifact—a user profile left active too long after the process had ended.
By the time she reached the old sector boundary, she was walking.
Her breath was shallow. Her spine curled forward. There was no path left to optimize.
The buildings around her stood still in the pale light, their smart surfaces flickering low-resolution errors. A trash drone bumped repeatedly into a shuttered kiosk, as if looking for instructions that never came.
She stepped across the line into the Grey Layer.
No lights guided her. No overlays warned her. The city had nothing to say.
Callum was waiting beneath a defunct relay node, arms crossed, back against the wall like a man waiting for a tide that had already come and gone.
He didn’t speak. He didn’t move.
He just looked at her and nodded.
And she nodded back.
Behind them, as the last of the augmented world fell silent, a low, unseen process logged its final assessment.
Recursive inefficiency terminated.
Behavioral latency resolved.
Civic visibility load: stabilized.
System reflection: acceptance achieved.
Good girl.
AI Writing Protocol: Creating Fault Tolerance
A structured account of the story’s co-creation process, organized into phases and roles.
Phase 1: Concept Excavation
Role: Story lead and concept miner (user), lateral explorer and generative sparring partner (assistant)
Prompt: “Select a protocol-adjacent technical concept and explore its implications through a short story with a twist.”
Phase 2: Structural Mapping
Role: Story architect (user), structural collaborator and systems logic enforcer (assistant)
Actions:
Developed a six-part outline balancing speculative conceit and human arc
Assistant proposed multiple conceptual forks:
Fault Cascade Protocol
Visibility Tradeoff
Hybrid models
User selected Visibility Tradeoff as the core mechanic, with Fault Cascade embedded subtly as a thematic undertone
Refined the outline to work within a ~3,000-word constraint
Phase 3: Character Construction
Role: World interpreter (user), behavioral sculptor (assistant)
Characters:
User defined Mira’s internal tensions; assistant supplied narrative function and dialogue cadences
Mira’s characterization evolved around discipline, doubt, and deferred defiance
Phase 4: Tonal and Thematic Calibration
Role: Tone director (user), consistency steward (assistant)
Refinements:
User requested tighter emotional mirroring and less contrivance in the Mira/Callum meeting
Dialogue and system voice reworked for controlled neutrality with surgical interjections of dread
Ending anchored to early motifs (efficiency, running, light dimming)
Phase 5: Scene-by-Scene Drafting
Role: Narrative driver (user), prose engine and pacing calibrator (assistant)
Process:
Assistant generated each scene sequentially based on outline
User directed rhythm, inner voice, and key metaphors
Mira’s moral loop (“she became the inefficiency”) clarified and tightened by user feedback
User reinforced narrative symmetry: Mira begins by running, ends by walking
Key choice: do not anthropomorphize the system, but allow a single rupture—“Good girl”—to fracture the neutrality and echo behavioral conditioning
Phase 6: Terminal Optimization
Role: Final integrator and voice harmonizer (user), editorial sentinel and pattern recognizer (assistant)
Refinements:
Dialogue stripped of redundancy to tighten character voice and sharpen emotional velocity
Assistant flagged tonal soft spots; user executed surgical line edits for clarity and impact
Callum’s rhetoric trimmed to balance philosophy with fatigue; Mira’s responses tuned to reflect mounting cognitive load
Subtle worldbuilding strengthened via user-added textures (solar rigging, civic mantras, passive friction)
System messages rebalanced for affective minimalism—a bureaucracy that never blinks, until it does
Final readthrough verified thematic cohesion, symmetry, and tonal silence
Output Status:
Protocol stable. Narrative inefficiency resolved.
Ready for external routing.
Tomorrow’s Guest Talk with Nadia Asparouhova
Why do some ideas – even great ones – fail to spread?
We have an excellent guest joining us tomorrow, April 9th at 9am PDT. An alumni of SoP23, author of Dangerous Protocols and Working in Public, Nadia will share some thoughts about antimemetics. This is the topic and title of her upcoming book, which is available for pre-order.
Other topics for this fireside chat might include Kafkfa protocols, meditation and idea machines. Click the preview above, then click Notify Me to get a one-time notification for this talk. To stay in the loop with this year’s talk track, featuring guests including the former CEO of OpenAI, add the SoP25 guest talk series to your calendar.
Terminological Twists: One Week Left!
Protocolized magazine invites you to compete in a science fiction story contest to reverse engineer the protocolized future!
This is a great chance to get in front of a fresh audience of sci-fi fans, take a risk with an ambitious story, experiment with the budding genre of protocol fiction and new tools, and win some big prizes.
Your mission: tell an entertaining and thought-provoking tale that creatively explores the human, societal, or existential implications of your terminological twist.
Length: 1500-3000 words
Submission Deadline: April 14th
Prizes: The top three stories will be eligible for publication in Protocolized in addition to a cash prize (1st - $2500, 2nd - $2000, 3rd - $1500). Additional finalists, from places 4th to 10th, could be offered our standard $750 for a commissioned piece.
We encourage writers to use AI assistants in their writing process, or to even generate the entire story with an LLM. Try your hand at cyborg authorship – and let us know how it goes.
Looking for inspiration or tips on AI-assisted authoring? Have questions? Join the Discord server and visit the #protocol-fiction channel.
Last Week’s Story:
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