Today, we are launching Monstrous Times, a magazine devoted to strange rules fiction. In the last two years here on Protocolized, we have published over 60 short stories, run four writing contests, produced several ongoing anthologies, and kickstarted an extended universe project. In doing so we have discovered the foundations of a new genre. Monstrous Times expands the goals of protocol fiction. What follows is a recap of how we got here and a sneak peek at where we are going.
Beginnings
Some of the earliest fiction-related ideas floating around the Summer of Protocols community were joking observations. Kara Kittell assembled a supercut of moments from movies where somebody says the word “protocol.” Venkatesh Rao kept pointing out an odd contrast in Star Trek – the original series contains no instances of the word across 80 episodes, while Voyager, three decades later, uses it 176 times across 168 episodes. Somewhere between Kirk and Janeway, the future acquired a lot more protocol-ishness.
In the world of Looney Tunes, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner famously operated according to a set of rules that Chuck Jones and his collaborators used to structure their encounters: the Road Runner stays on the road. The Coyote can only be harmed by his own incompetence or by ACME products. Gravity should, whenever possible, be his greatest enemy, etc. These rules do not make Road Runner protocol fiction, but they were protocol-ish in that their clever use generated an enormous amount of variation inside an otherwise repetitive universe.
This suggested an interesting relationship between protocols and stories. Rules that collide and combine with each other in interesting ways can generate stories rather than merely constrain them. Once you know the rules governing the Coyote and Road Runner, you can anticipate the shape of an episode without knowing exactly what will happen in it. A rocket, a giant magnet, a trompe l’oeil painting of a tunnel and a catapult could all enter the world while its underlying logic remains intact.
That led naturally toward stories where protocols exist inside the world as well.
Matt Webb had already been using the phrase “protocol fiction” in a more infrastructural sense: fiction that could make speculative systems believable by showing the network of actors, standards and incentives required for them to operate. His example of a national drone-delivery network gets at the distinction between protocols structuring a story vs speculating about protocols themselves. To paraphrase our favorite Frederik Pohl quote: the job of the protocol fiction writer is not to imagine the future of drones but the future of a world with drone swarms, stochastic terror induced by cheap drones and the change in our relationship to the environment dominated by drones.
Kafka gave us a third model for protocol fiction. This came through Nadia Asparouhova’s essay Dangerous Protocols, which considered the power that protocols acquire over their participants. Protocols coordinate action by narrowing possibilities. Once embedded deeply enough, they determine which actions are legible, available or permitted. Nadia described one outcome as the Kafka protocol: a protocol that has accumulated enough power that the person inside it becomes trapped in a maze they cannot understand or escape.
In The Trial and The Castle, the rules are sensed everywhere and never become completely visible. A person moves from clerk to office to messenger to procedure, learning fragments of a system whose total shape always recedes. The institution reveals itself through encounters with its edges. Its procedures provide the atmosphere of the story.
This was enormously useful because functioning protocols often disappear. When a protocol works, people carry on with their lives. Fiction typically depends on events, and protocols become eventful when somebody hits an edge, encounters an exception or finds themselves in the wrong relationship to the rules.
The Kafka model placed the system at the center and made the character its probe. The protocol became a vast structure never fully revealed to the unfortunate body passing through it.
Once we started producing stories, things became messier. People misunderstand protocols, exploit them, inherit them, counterfeit them, improvise around them and build folk explanations for why they work. Protocols collide with other protocols. They survive the problems that originally called them into existence. They move between communities and acquire different meanings without necessarily changing their formal structure. The fiction began to pull us away from the clean geometry of systems and toward the stranger cultural life that develops around them.
The Librarians
One important jump came through The Librarians, a series of stories I co-authored with AI, based on the Knowledge Futurama workshop hosted by Summer of Protocols at Edge Esmeralda. The exercise asked participants to imagine systems for preserving knowledge across a thousand years. Teams designed institutions and protocols; other teams introduced disasters, adversaries, technical changes and historical shocks. People from the Long Now Foundation participated, and the exercise drew heavily on the deep-time sensibility of pace layers and long-horizon institutional design.
A thousand years does something strange to a protocol. It gives it enough time to become a culture.
A rule introduced to solve a particular technological problem can remain after the technology disappears. An emergency procedure can become an annual ceremony. A classification system can harden into an ontology. A library designed to preserve information develops customs around what should be destroyed, who can access what has survived, and who is permitted to understand the preservation system itself.
The Librarians pushed protocol fiction into time. We could begin with something deliberately engineered and follow it until the original argument embedded in the protocol became difficult for its own custodians to recover. Procedure became tradition, tradition became superstition, superstition preserved fragments of operational logic. The line between an institution and its folklore became difficult to locate.
This also changed what fiction was doing for us. Stories could function as a way of running protocols forward and watching second- and third-order effects accumulate. A thought experiment usually isolates variables. Fiction lets the variables breed and mutate into new forms.
That possibility eventually fed back into protocol research itself. Helena Rong, Botao Hu and Samuel Chua used Knowledge Futurama and related protocol-fiction experiments in their work on “protocol futuring,” a speculative method for exploring the second-order dynamics of protocols embedded in sociotechnical systems. Fiction was becoming part of the research process: a way of discovering behaviors and interactions that were hard to derive from a protocol considered in isolation.
The crucible
In 2025 and 2026, we ran four fiction contests that upped the ante of genre development. The first three contests, Terminological Twists, Ghosts in The Machine, and Building and Burning Bridges, were based on specific protocol themes that were being investigated by Protocol Institute. The fourth, Jamverse, inaugurated our extended universe project. The contests brought in seasoned writers like Spencer Nitkey, while our openness to using AI in writing also invited stories from people with great ideas who might have shied away if we were solely preoccupied with human-produced prose.
Venkat has written about the crucible effect: the way concentrated collective attention can accelerate the development of a field. A group of people working on adjacent versions of the same problem begin teaching one another indirectly. They repeat moves, discard others, push techniques further, and create a local environment in which ideas evolve faster than they would in isolation.
The contests gave protocol fiction that kind of environment. Writers came in with very different instincts and with the same cluster of questions. What happens when rules persist for too long? What happens when two systems recognize the same person differently? What happens when an abstraction becomes the thing that governs the reality it was supposed to describe? What remains after a protocol loses its original purpose?
As more stories accumulated, a different sensibility became visible.
It wasn’t the comic stability of Wile E. Coyote, where the pleasure comes from watching endless variation inside a known set of rules. It also wasn’t quite the Kafka protocol, where the system towers over the individual and obscures itself through frustration, opacity and entrapment. The stories had started wandering somewhere else.
There was horror at a distance in them, though often without anything conventionally horrific taking place. Systems continued operating past the point where anybody fully understood them. Categories designed for one purpose started producing strange kinds of people and objects. Ancient cultural forms resurfaced inside contemporary technical systems. The organic kept encountering rules, classifications and infrastructures that had acquired persistence of their own.
Spencer Nitkey’s Soda Sweet as Blood is a good example. In the story, after his grandfather dies, the narrator begins the ordinary work of closing out his digital life. But when he tries to have his grandfather marked as deceased, a support message is replaced by ASCII art of a steaming cup of tea. Later, a bank chatbot answers him with a klon, the traditional Thai verse his grandfather used to write. Nothing has exactly come back from the dead. Instead, pieces of the grandfather – his identity contract, old messages, habits, writing and machine-readable traces – have begun surfacing through systems that are simply continuing to run.
The ghost fits because ghosts have always been creatures of persistence. Someone who should be gone continues making demands upon the living. Contemporary systems have developed their own persistence mechanisms: accounts that persist even after they have been abandoned, contracts that remain executable, records that cannot easily be forgotten, machine representations capable of continuing to speak.
Spencer’s Zoothesia stories approach the same territory through perception. People live inside systems that determine what they can see, what registers as dangerous, and whether another person remains socially perceptible at all. Randy Lubin’s Caduceus City places a murder investigation amidst the procedural cleanliness of a biotech campus, where process and transparency become part of the environment in which something can remain hidden. Liz Maher’s Legends & Ledgers places folkloric forms into contact with borders, accounting, records and institutional memory.
These stories share less at the level of plot than at the level of atmosphere. The world contains systems that are active, persistent and responsive without being alive in the ordinary sense. Human beings interact with them, adapt to them and sometimes become difficult to separate from them. Older myths and newer infrastructures start looking unexpectedly compatible.
That became the more interesting direction.
Liveness
This is why we have started thinking about Monstrous Times through liveness.
By liveness we mean the capacity of a form to persist, respond to its environment, reproduce its patterns and alter the conditions around it. None of this requires consciousness or even a single coherent actor. Liveness can be distributed across people, institutions, machines, habits and records, held together by the fact that each keeps giving the others reasons to continue.
A corporation persists through generations of employees and responds to its environment. A protocol recruits people into reproducing it and changes as those people alter their behavior. Bureaucracies survive the administrators who designed them. Arcane software dependencies continue to determine what can be built atop them. Borders move, harden and become porous while accumulating institutions whose purpose is to maintain the distinction they create. A myth changes over centuries and retains enough structure to keep producing behavior. These are all inorganic forms with varying degrees of liveness.
Liveness gives us a vocabulary for persistence, response, reproduction and adaptation without requiring a theory of consciousness. Something can acquire a kind of life because people keep performing it, because software keeps executing it, because institutions keep recognizing it, because records keep carrying it forward, or because the environment it created makes its continued existence necessary.
This is where older monsters become useful. Folklore has spent thousands of years imagining beings whose existence depends on rules, obligations, thresholds and forms of persistence. Protocol fiction, in what we call the Gramsci gap, brings those older creatures into contact with contemporary systems to see what their collision produces. Jurassic Park is a canonical version of this: the dinosaur is ancient, but the monster emerges through genetics, corporate management, security systems and the attempt to make extinct life administrable. The old creature and the new system transform each other. That same encounter can happen with ghosts and digital memory, demons and contracts, or older folkloric forms entering systems of identity, computation and control.
In The Promises of Monsters, Donna Haraway writes about the world as a “witty agent and actor,” something that does not sit passively waiting to be represented but participates in the encounter. Coyote is her figure for that condition: protean, responsive, capable of surprising the systems that try to describe or control it. “Coyote realism,” as she calls it, feels like the response of organic agents existing in protocolized environments.
The monsters emerge from relationships between organic being and protocolized environments that are alive. Their monstrosity lies in the difficulty of deciding what they are and where their agency resides.
Sean Stevenson gave another useful way of thinking about this at the recent Protocol Symposium. His talk described New Nature as the point where technologies descend far enough into the substrate of everyday life that their rules begin to acquire the force of nature. We stop encountering them primarily as products that someone designed and start encountering them as conditions of the environment.
One consequence Sean pointed to is that New Nature has no customer-care department. When rain ruins your picnic, there is nobody to complain to. As technical and institutional systems become more ecological – distributed across protocols, models, markets, databases, standards and autonomous processes – they can acquire the same frustrating quality. Something happens to you, but there may be no responsible person who can explain why. You cannot necessarily find the administrator, ask for an exception, appeal the decision or even establish which component of the system produced the outcome.
This takes us somewhere beyond the original Kafka protocol. Kafka’s protagonists are surrounded by clerks, messengers, lawyers, judges and officials. The problem is reaching the right authority, understanding the procedure, or discovering what the institution wants. New Nature can produce a stranger situation in which the search for the person behind the system is itself a category error. The outcome may have emerged from interactions among systems, each behaving according to its own rules, with nobody occupying a position from which the whole thing can be explained or repaired.
That absence of an answerable agent gives inorganic liveness some of its contemporary uncanniness. The system responds to you without anybody responding. It remembers without anybody remembering, decides without containing a clear decision-maker, and persists without anyone in particular choosing its persistence. You can have a grievance against it while having no obvious entity to whom the grievance can be addressed.
That is the territory that began to open up through the stories: organic life meeting inorganic forms of liveness, each reorganizing the other, in worlds where the systems acting upon you increasingly resemble parts of the environment.
Monstrous Times
That is the path from Protocolized to Monstrous Times.
We want stories about old monsters entering new systems and new monsters emerging from those systems. We are interested in myths that refuse to die, systems that refuse to die, and people dealing with the forms of liveness produced when those things overlap. The territory includes AI, alongside archives, markets, bureaucracies, networks, corporations, rituals, folklore and protocols themselves.
The coyote remains a useful ancestor. His universe runs on rules that everybody watching learns quickly, though nobody inside the cartoon ever explains them. Kafka gives us a world where those rules remain partially hidden and the struggle to understand them becomes part of everyday life.
Monstrous Times begins further downstream, after the rules have been operating long enough to accumulate a history and acquire forms of persistence of their own. At that point the protocol begins to resemble an environment: something you live inside, something capable of acting upon you, and something that may no longer contain anyone who can tell you why.