Haven Tailors

Issue #3: Are you the right fit for this virtuous city?

In this issue: The story of Haven Reach and its citizens, its schemes and, of course, its marvelous tailors. Followed by a note on AI+Protocols fiction workshops.

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I was watching the brittle winter morning begin to thaw when the first customer walked in through the long, empty hallway that led to the door to my shop. He had a nervous look and moved gently without creaking the wood floorboards, reminiscent of a kid sneaking in home after some mischief. I had seen this demeanor many times before and I took no pleasure in what followed. It was just good business.

The man took out a pair of pants from the tote bag that he was carrying, outstretched his arms towards me, and said, "I want to increase the waist size on these."

"Case number," I asked.

"2424621," he said. I could sense the anxiety on his face while I typed in the numbers. In such situations, I typed the numbers as fast as I could. There was no point in trying to empathize or smooth over the situation. The user profile was on my screen now, and I could see that he had resized the waist for the pants twice: two months ago and before that, four months ago, when he first arrived in Haven Reach. I could also see that he had paid the maximum premium on his insurance for all those months. Maybe he knew he would not be cut out for the city.

“I wonder what the underwriters will think about this," I said.

“I’m sure it’s a drop in the bucket for them. There are so many people moving to Haven Reach these days," he replied.

I nodded, neither agreeing or disagreeing with him, and pointed in the direction of the dressing room.

While he was in there, I looked up the underwriters on the insurance. It looked like Ray Chen, who had recently moved here and started working at the yoga studio down the block, had invested a significant amount of money into underwriting the batch of people who had moved in at the same time as my customer. I heaved a long sigh. There are parts of my day when I stare out the window at the one coniferous tree opposite the shop and yearn for something I can't quite name.

I remember the year everything started. The tailoring shop was at its lowest ebb and was barely kept afloat by the occasional wedding suit or dress. Even that had dried up in the years prior. Fewer people were getting married. Even if they were, fewer of them wanted tailored wedding dresses. I cannot pinpoint the exact day of the year my fortunes changed. I know I had a busy summer. I remember the humidity and the fugue state of my mind in the late evenings that found me hunched over the sewing machine. It was boring work - taking pants in, reducing the shoulders of shirts. But suddenly there was so much of it. I had to hire an employee for the first time in seven years.

I did not bother to enquire why so many people had started losing weight. Perhaps my curiosity died in the melee of all that work. I assumed it was some new health kick that everyone was one, which would last briefly, then I'd have to go back again – back to no employees, little work, and a lot of time to stare at the tree and wonder what my life might have been under different circumstances. I confess that, during my busy days, I strangely dreamed and desired a simpler existence where I had just one wedding dress to sew a month. But the work did not stop. The same customers kept coming back to take in their waist even further. At the end of the year I had 7 employees. Then came the call from Father Gabriel.

The customer came out from the dressing room, clearly holding his breath in so that the pants stayed buckled. I instructed him to stand on the round platform before the mirror. The morning light shone through the southeastern window, reflecting off the Haven Reach silver fixture at the top of the mirror and glaring into the eyes of the man on the platform. I remembered the day Father Gabriel walked me through this room.

Haven Reach was built for those who were abandoned by society – the addicts and the morbidly obese. Here was a place where their life would be designed around virtue and less around treacherous desires. There were two rules for the town. First, that everyone be oriented around the community and not their base desires. The second was that everyone must take the drug Dreameril. Invented first as a drug for weight loss and reduced appetite, it had also been found to be extremely effective in treating gambling and addiction. Everyone at Haven Reach was employed, and their employers were contractually obligated to blood test all employees once a week to ensure that everyone was on Dreameril. Including me.

The first day at Haven Reach felt like being on the set of David Lynch's TV show Twin Peaks. Everything in it seemed normal to the inhabitants but not so for first-timers. The town square did not have any bars or antique shops. Instead, there was a grocery shop, small by American standards. Inside, I discovered that all the produce was smaller and often warped or shrunk. There were tiny cans of tomatoes and beans and no sign of dessert or bread sections. Opposite the grocery store was a communal tea shop. Built by a resident inspired by reading The Book of Tea, the tea shop was a simple structure of wood sourced from the locality. The communal table at the tea shop was open 24 hours. There was always a gentle hum of activity around it regardless of the hour. In front of the tea store was a lone coniferous tree and diagonally opposite it stood my tailoring shop. Father Gabriel told me that tailoring shops were going to be" How English coffee houses were in the medieval times." It was going to be the place where every single person, regardless of taste and preference, came to during their life at Haven Reach.

“Have you heard of Lloyd’s of London?," Father Gabriel asked me

I shrugged and replied with a sheepish smile, “What do I know of such things Father?”

Lloyd’s is one of the biggest insurance firms in the world, father Gabriel told me. They started off as a coffee shop in medieval England. Location, as it always has been, was everything, and Lloyd’s stood near the north bank of the Thames. Merchants who docked at the port frequented the coffee shop, along with traders, and soon the place became enveloped in a cloud of information about the best trades, news from the Mediterranean and foggy rumors about ships captured by pirates. If you could not trade goods or be a merchant of the high seas, you could trade on information – what routes were risky? What were the conditions of the sea? Which goods were in demand? If you had the best information on these, then you could place your bets on merchants in the form of maritime insurance. The merchants paid a premium to the underwriters in return for a guarantee that they would be paid in case their goods were lost at sea. Edward Lloyd saw these informal agreements happening at his coffee shop, and simply decided to formalize them. Lloyd’s would be the facilitator and later a marketplace for underwriters and merchants.

“All from humble beginnings and being at the right place at the right time," Father Gabriel told me.

I saw the glimmer in Father Gabriel’s eye when he spoke of Lloyd’s. He was letting me know his dreams and expectations for my humble tailoring shop. There was no formal acknowledgement or agreement but I knew the Father’s will had to be done. Besides, there were several other tailors who could take my place if this scheme did not come to fruition.

The venture started with innocence, as such things always do. Every resident at Haven Reach could buy insurance when they first moved to the town. Dreameril did not work for everyone. For some folks, the drug worked briefly, but then eventually, their appetite came back, along with a desire to have more than the tailored provisions that Haven Reach provided. The insurance paid out if Dreameril did not work, and you had to go back to regular life and live in a regular city. We were mitigating some of the risks for a new resident in Haven Reach. The insurance market was quite the communal affair in the early days. Every Friday we met at the tailoring shop. The new residents came in early with the first batch of clothes that needed to be taken in. Afterwards we gathered over a lunch party that was paid for by potential underwriters. Interested backers got to meet the new residents, chit chat, and secretly assess how likely the residents were to stay in Haven Reach. Unfortunately, as the town grew in size it became hard to organize a lunch for everyone, and inevitably, like everything started with good intentions, the insurance market grew into a dark forest that I could not tend or make sense of.

"Are you planning to leave Haven Reach soon?" I asked my customer while I calculated how much material would need to be added.

"Yes, once I have my things in order," he replied.

“I’ll see you on clearing day, next Friday," I said as he departed.

I stared at the coniferous tree and the tea shop behind it. The morning mist had burned off, and the sky was cloudless and bright. It was getting close to the hour when underwriters would start trickling into my shop after their morning tea. They would enquire about the number of new insurances issued, the average number of customers in the last few weeks, and most importantly – the number of pants that had been requested to be taken in versus the number of pants requested to be taken out. Among the visitors was Ray Chen, who probably already saw the notification about the insurance payout.

“You just let him go didn’t you? That’s the 4th person from the same cohort who has now left the city within 6 months,” said Ray, his voice trembling as he tried to hide his anger.

“There was nothing I could do, Ray. There was no data to indicate that the insured person was lying or knew already that Dreameril would not work for them,” I replied calmly, repeating the same conversation I’ve had several times in the last month.

“This is why I keep saying we should introduce the Virtue Index,” said Razib, a prominent underwriter, who was listening to the conversation.

“What's that?” asked Ray. He was new to all this. This was the first time he had invested in insurance, and also looked like it might be the last.

“We need to know more about who we are investing in and if they conform to the values of Haven Reach,” replied Razib.

“It seems like they just let anyone in here now,” chimed another underwriter confidently.

“Yes, and the virtue index will be a score based on how close each person is to living the values of Haven Reach, like Father Gabriel always intended. Every underwriter can vote on an individual’s moral conduct,” responded Razib again.

“That’s too many individuals,” said Ray

“Well may be we just vote on the batch of people that we insure, than the individuals” offered Razib

“There is a joke in there about few bad apples” said Ray with a chuckle that did little to hide the misery that he found himself in

“We’ll put this to vote again at the next clearing day, add it to the agenda," Razib said while he walked out the shop.

I had not spoken a word, which accurately described my position in the state of affairs these days. I had no semblance of control since huge amounts of money began to be involved. Some underwriters began to invest their life savings into the venture and the inevitable followed – bankruptcies and discussions about whether the communal insurance was a moral venture at all. How was putting your money into a speculative insurance scheme different from gambling? Father Gabriel had the final word on this, "These were good people with good intentions putting money into providing a more secure stay for the inhabitants of Haven Reach."

The clearing days started solemnly. Insurance payouts were issued and customers said goodbye to Haven Ranch. Once the payouts had been settled, there was a frenzy of activity on the shop floor. New underwriters and incoming citizens of Haven Reach bid and bargained on fair insurance prices. Friday at the tailoring shop was the most raucous and liveliest place in all of Haven Reach. It was a curious affair - all these people who had vowed to give up their base desires had lust in their eyes while they talked about prices and potential payouts.

I extricated myself to stand outside the shop and look at the coniferous tree, yearning for something that I couldn't quite put a finger on. Something I knew but had forgotten.

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Get an AI-generated addendum on the fascinating history of insurance here.

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AI+Protocols Fiction Workshops

Last week, in Austin, Protocolized sponsored a local workshop on protocol fiction. It was hosted by local Summer of Protocols alumni, Sachin Benny (who wrote the story above) and Shreeda Segan. The goal was to use interesting protocols to write fiction, and/or write fiction about protocols. Since I (Venkat) was in Austin for other work, I joined and helped facilitate the workshop.

We started with a 3-hour coworking session over pizza on Monday, sharing initial thoughts and ideas about the challenge, and decided that our experiment for the workshop would be to use LLMs in some creative way to co-write the fiction. Through the week, we collaborated asynchronously on our Discord, and met again on Friday for another 3-hour coworking session (this time with tacos) to read each other’s drafts, talk about our LLM-assisted writing protocols, and discussed future possibilities. We ended up with five rough drafts of pretty good stories, and some of them may be published here in future issues.

The drafts were surprisingly good, and left us all very excited about what might be possible with creative use of LLMs. Participants tried several techniques: using LLMs for outlining, fleshing out, or both; turn-taking writing alternate sentences or beats using an improv protocol; feeding Claude output to ChatGPT and back. Each authoring protocol yielded its own surprising insights and interesting output features. The big lesson we learned was that if you treat the LLMs as an equal partner in the creative process, and get creative with the co-authorship protocol, you end up with fascinating effects.

As a result of this pilot experiment, we on the editorial team at Protocolized have decided to lean into AI-assisted “protocol fiction about protocols” and begin preferentially publishing protocol fiction with at least 30% LLM content (in some loose sense) so we want to do two things to help develop this nascent scene.

First, if you are doing AI-assisted fiction experiments and your stories have a protocolish theme/angle to them, consider submitting to Protocolized for publication. Our editorial policies and pay structure can be found here.

Second, if you happen to live in a city with a lot of creative people who might be interested in protocols and AI, here’s an offer: Protocolized will sponsor a limited number of AI+Protocols fiction workshops throughout the year, by which we mean we’ll pay for pizza/tacos or similar for up to 10 people for 2 co-working sessions, book-ending a week of experimentation (from our pilot experience in Austin, ten people is about the functional limit). This can be anywhere in the world, and in any language, and workshop participants are welcome, but not obliged, to submit their experimental drafts to Protocolized. If you’re interested in organizing such a workshop, shoot us an email (research@summerofprotocols.com) with some details about location, potential participants, and process/themes you want to experiment with. We suggest using some version of the process we used in Austin (Two bookend in-person coworking sessions with asynchronous collaboration in between), but we’re open to any creative approach. We will only ask that you use our Discord for the asynchronous collaboration track.

We hope, with these two initiatives, Protocolized can play a role in helping catalyze a whole new creative medium into existence. While the rest of the world is busy complaining about “slop” and established fiction writers stuck in their ways are whining about how AI is ruining their sacred craft, perhaps we can build a thriving scene of a brave new genre of creative writing here.

Just as the development of photography in the 19th century inspired the Impressionist movement, teaching a generation of artists to “see like a camera” even before camera-centric arts like cinema, TV, comic books (think about it!), and video games came into their own, we believe we are on the threshold of a powerful new meta-medium that can spawn an entire new creative universe.