Phantom in Eden
Issue #34: The Librarians - Act Four
In this issue: the fourth installment of The Librarians inspired by our futures workshop at Edge City Esmeralda; last call for our protocol science fiction contest Ghosts in Machines!; Discord highlights; protocol watching.
Phantom in Eden
Two years after the siege, Lila found herself in Tokyo, working at a daycare. The facility was clean, efficient, and cold. Her sole responsibility was monitoring a nursery where small robots, some shaped like animals, others like fruits, tended to the children’s basic needs. Lila watched them through one-way glass, invisible to the children. She tended to the machines who tended to the kids. Her heart ached at the isolation she perceived; she resisted every urge to reach out or interact.
This particular morning, Lila stood behind the one-way glass as a boy was dropped off by his parents. The child didn’t cry, didn’t smile—he simply stared past them as they knelt to hug him. His body stiffened at the contact, his arms limp at his sides. The father whispered something and brushed the child’s hair; the boy blinked slowly, unmoved.
But once the parents left and the boy entered the nursery, he changed. A small robot shaped like a strawberry approached, beeping softly. The boy’s expression shifted. He smiled faintly, crouched, and reached out. The robot responded with a mechanical chirp, nudging his hand with its smooth dome.
The boy laughed.
A giraffe-shaped bot rolled over and projected a light pattern across the floor. The child chased it, light-footed, alive. He pressed his face against the giraffe’s rubbery flank and whispered something only the bot could hear.
Lila watched, heart clenched. The boy was warm now, vibrant, but only within the choreography of circuits and programming. It was like watching kittens being raised by wolves.
Lila approached maintaining the little machines with the same emotional intuition that she had approached midwifery with in a previous life. She knew no other way. To her surprise, she noticed that the machines were not all cold and metallic, like in her grandmother’s stories. She distrusted them regardless. Lila’s grandmother’s words were sharp in her memory: “Always keep the knowledge close. It is older than you, older than me, and it must outlive all of us.”
The same afternoon, Lila observed the mother collecting her boy. As she lifted him, a wave of visible sadness overtook her. Lila hesitated, then stepped out into the open.
“Are you alright?” Lila asked softly.
The woman looked startled, then relieved to see Lila.
“I’m sorry I didn’t know what to do. I thought you needed help”, said Lila, realizing that she had just broken protocol.
“It’s alright, I’m glad you responded and not one of the robots”, said the woman who introduced herself as Elena.
She paused then continued.
“Although I’m embarrassed that you witnessed how cold my child is towards me …”
“Its pretty common you know,” said Lila, trying to reassure the women.
“I do know he’s a Mechikomi,” replied Elena, her voice trembling.
Lila regretted her attempt at reassurance. Of course she had heard the word before. Those were the kids who were emotionally attached to robots and nothing else.
Over the weeks that followed, Lila and Elena became acquaintances. At first, Elena spoke little, offering polite thanks and side glances. She seemed embarrassed about what she had revealed to Lila. But Lila’s warmth, unforced and quiet, was consistent. She remembered small things Elena said, brought her warm tea without asking, made her feel listened to. Elena reminded Lila of the first time she was a midwife, to a woman who had escaped the city in order to give natural birth. She was in the caravan that Lila had abandoned.
Eventually Lila and Elena began sharing silent lunches by the daycare’s back wall, exchanging stories in slow drips—Lila about the forest in abstract, Elena about her son’s distant silences. The warmth Lila gave off wasn’t a performance; it felt like something Elena hadn’t realized she was starving for.
“I’m pregnant again,” Elena admitted quietly one day, eyes fearful. “But I don’t want this to be a repeat of last time. I don’t want my baby’s Gestation Garden to be haunted by a phantom.”
“What do you mean by a phantom?”, asked Lila.
“When my boy was in the Gestation Garden, it was haunted by a phantom… a non human entity that altered the hormonal responses of the embryo… people call it Onnenki. They say it’s the machines taking revenge against us,” Elena muttered quietly, as if she was scared that the machines would hear her.
“The babies who come out of infected embryos… they only respond to metal. They won’t look at you. They won’t be soothed unless touched by one of those” continued Elena, pointing to one of the little robots in the nursery.
Lila felt a chill run down her spine. She remembered the pleas of the wailing woman in the caravan. Lila could hear them bouncing around in her head: “Don’t let him be snatched by the phantom… don’t let him be snatched by the phantom.”
“We’ll find a way to protect him,” Lila promised.
***
Two years ago, the caravan was attacked at twilight. Men emptied out silently from the back of armored trucks, and took the women and little children by surprise. Lila heard the screams before she saw the masked men. Her stomach tightened into a knot and she froze where she was, at the edge of the camp.
A voice echoed through an amplifier in Japanese and then English: “You are under arrest for the barbaric crime of assisted birth outside of a Gestation Garden. Lay down your weapons and surrender immediately.”
Mothers clutched their children, midwives scrambled for cover. A few men tried and failed to resist. The law enforcers moved quickly, binding wrists and pushing captives roughly into the trucks. A dark shadow engulfed the camp.
As she bolted into the woods, Lila felt the cool weight of the metallic scripture against her chest, tucked beneath her jacket. Branches tore at her face, her feet caught in the undergrowth. Behind her, voices shouted.
Lila ran until her lungs burned. Only when the sounds of chaos faded to silence did she slow her pace. She stopped in a small clearing, her breathing ragged. The scripture’s weight reminded her of the burden she now carried alone.
She withdrew it carefully, a nickel disc, the size of a golf ball. The faint moonlight illuminated precise, delicate etching on the surface. Nearly 2300 pages of knowledge passed down through midwives in her family, of whom she was the only one left breathing free air. Lila felt her pocket to make sure she still had her light microscope to read the disc.
She looked back through the dense forest toward where the caravan had been. There was no returning, no rescue possible. She closed her eyes briefly and thought about the last woman she had tended to. It was someone who was giving birth to her second child. She had left her husband who believed midwifery to be futile. “I don’t... I don’t want my baby snatched by the phantom… I don’t want my baby snatched by the phantom,” she kept repeating as her water broke. Lila had just stepped out of the tent to fetch supplies for the birth when the raid happened.
When she opened her eyes, Lila’s gaze settled on the horizon ahead. In the distance, she could see the outline of the city where the men had come from, where the phantom that the woman wailed about lived.
With careful fingers, she replaced the disc against her heart once more. Then, taking a deep breath, she stepped forward into the night. She knew hiding among the men who took away her home was the only way to survive now.
***
The next morning, Lila lied to Elena. “I trained as a Gestation Gardener,” she said, voice steady. “I know the machines. I know how to interact with them.”
Elena studied her, eyes wary, but this seemed like her last hope. Lila was the only person who had taken her concerns seriously. She handed Lila a slim data pad. “Remote access,” she said. “To the Gestation Garden.”
Lila plugged in and took a breath.
The Gestation Garden appeared on her screen: a pristine chamber, 4×4 feet. Walls of pale green curved into each other; thick foliage lined the ceiling. Soft mood lighting shifted from mint to amber with the embryo’s pulse. In the center, a tank shaped like a closed flower, with organic seeming petals curved over a glass core, stood on a raised platform. Temperature, humidity, hormonal levels, and audio signals were displayed in a grid of floating squares on the data panel.
For several days, Lila attempted to tinker with the Gestation Garden, utilizing whatever she had learned from tending to the machines in the daycare. She kept running into one dead end after another. She tried modulating the hormone levels on the tank but every time she managed to change some of the parameters, it would be back to where it had been within 10 minutes.
She talked to the gestation pod through the mic on the data panel but nothing budged. The more she worked on communicating and manipulating the tank, the more alien it felt. She felt as if something had invaded and captured the garden, and all her pleas and attempts to help were repelled.
She felt the presence of something else in the garden with her, something that thwarted every effort of hers to connect with the baby in the garden. Every time she logged in, it felt like she was the one being observed and not the other way around. There was something within the code monitoring everything she did, sending her down pointless trails, reverting things she had fixed, frustrating her with vague answers.
One day, exasperated, on the verge of a panic attack, Lila began to sing a hymn her grandmother had taught her. It soothed her but also seemed to stir something on the data panel. One square blinked. The hormone graph—the oxytocin line—spiked upward and then steadied. The petals on the tank shivered, as if responding to a breeze.
Lila had a gentle smile on her face. Her midwife’s song had reached the machine.
Over the next weeks, Lila returned daily. She opened the tank’s petals with a gentle command, calibrated audio loops to her own humming, and watched the hormonal curves smooth out. Each session, she guided the phantom away, not by force but with gentle attention. Warmth against calculating precision.
Elena’s remote feed glowed with promise. The Gestation Garden, once haunted, began to pulse with a new life.
***
One afternoon, close to the birth of the baby, Elena walked in on Lila reading the scripture with her handheld light microscope. The metal gleamed softly under the lamplight, the images etched in lines that looked foreign.
“What is that?” Elena asked, her voice sharp.
Lila froze. She couldn’t lie this time.
“It’s scripture,” she said. “Passed down by midwives. I was trained in the old ways. I’m not licensed. Not for this work.”
Elena stepped back, color draining from her face. “You lied to me.”
But then a sound—wet and sudden—echoed from the gestation pod. The birth had begun. Elena rushed to the chamber for the first time. Lila watched through the data panel.
The infant emerged quietly, squinting at the light. A nursebot hovered nearby, ready with its metallic arms outstretched. But the baby turned its head instinctively to Elena.
Tiny fingers reached for skin, not steel. Elena cried. She felt seen by her child.
Later, as the child slept on her chest, Elena turned to Lila.
“Whatever you are,” she said, “you saved her.”
Lila nodded, a new inspiration forming in her. The phantom had retreated, but it would not stay gone forever. She would need help.
She would find the others.
The midwives who had survived.
And she would teach them what she had learned.
Final call for Ghosts in Machines!
Ghosts in Machines!, our second protocol science fiction story contest, closes tomorrow, Sunday, July 13th at midnight. If you have an idea it’s not too late to draft text — we encourage the judicious use of AI writing tools. Check the contest guidelines, and then send your story, a ~100 word synopsis and, if applicable, your “writing with AI protocol” to research@summerofprotocols.com
Ghosts in Machines
Welcome to our second protocol science fiction story contest: Ghosts in Machines! Our first contest, Terminological Twists, was a great success — you can read the winning and finalist stories at this page.
We’ll go live on Substack next week to talk about our past two protocol fiction contests, how to get involved in voting, and more.
In the Summer of Protocols Discord
The SoP Discord is where we host informal protocol conversation and it’s the place to hear about upcoming events, bounties, and other activities. If you are new to protocol discourse, our social channels are a great place to start. Our #general, #protocol-watch, and #reading-room channels can introduce you to our community through topical discussion of protocols and related readings. Some highlights from this week:
Idle musing about protocol studies causing some major problems.
How ticketing protocols profit from escalated enforcement actions.
A long thread on triangles and tensions.
Two great SIG calls, and an upcoming one on Monday (check the server’s Event Calendar).
Traffic protocol fails and standards for lane marking.
Protocol Observation Art
This sketch by Phi Nguyen is an example of ’protocol observation’ as a genre of artful and deliberative diagramming. We are on the lookout for examples of drawing and diagramming as means of protocol watching to feature in future issues. Like this kind of stuff? Tag us @protocolizedmagazine so we can highlight more great work.
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