The Air Gap
Issue #25: Mysteries in a Post-Surveillance World
In this issue: A story of a private investigator told partly in the mysterious languages of wrist-worn devices which proliferated after the rise of a visual surveillance state. By Jack Lord. Plus: guest talk on radios and engineering, help launch our SIG track, some more notes from Edge City, and an invitation to join the SoP server.
Bram Kvass knew this case was about a missing daughter without being told. An experienced investigator can read some things without language, and both the apartment and the old man’s face spoke of an absence.
The old man had summoned Brum via a series of intermediaries, always with a partial message, imprinted wrist-to-wrist. The caution and tradecraft made Brum suspect that he was dealing with a hacker from the old school. Now the appearance of the gray man—Ravek—confirmed this.
Ravek, wearing frayed and greasy orange overalls, sat in a wheelchair. His sleeve was rolled up, bony wrist resting on the table. Eight small cylinders marked the skin in an arc. He had a Stonehand, the earliest air gap communicator, designed in response to visual surveillance reaching saturation point. Wrist-to-wrist transmission only, no memory, no signal leak once the gap was closed.
Bram sat across from Ravek and offered his wrist. His own device was a full resolution Palme, but an unusual model that offered backwards compatibility with Stonehands. They touched wrists. There was a pause, then a rhythm of pressure and release, like rocks tumbling down a hillside.
YOU ARE BODY STILL-SEE TRUE?, Ravek pressed, adding the question particle with a subtle shift of his eyebrows and the tone for a name-sign with a brief pause before a syncopated rhythm. Bram nodded in confirmation as he felt his name-sign in Stonehand.
STONE MIND, Ravek continued, pointing at himself.
Bram nodded again and, as he did so, took in the contents of the white-walled room. It was a museum of two lives. Shelves held coils of wire, broken casings, and piles and piles of what looked like technical samizdat, yellowing papers filled with equations and code. This, and the old man's name-sign made Bram think: not just a hacker, then, but perhaps someone involved in early air gap communicator design? The walls were covered with paintings, some framed, others not, all by a single artist. Figures curled together, shifting through stories, obscured or illuminated by motifs: dim lanterns, curling vines, half-open windows and man-sized dogs. Artefacts of the missing daughter, Bram assumed.
ABOUT YOUR DAUGHTER?, Bram pressed, his question particle a sympathetic tilt of the head. Ravek nodded.
TRUTH-BY-LIGHT. THIS FROM HER, Ravek pressed. Then closing his eyes relayed the message to Bram:
BODY DARK FEEL FALSE HAND LIGHT
ROOM LIGHT BREAK
I STAY UNDER WIND
Bram felt his equilibrium slip. Stonehand was difficult for modern speakers, even for rare bi-linguists like him. It was a language of rhythm, compression and context, built from a fixed vocabulary of 128 root words. These were transmitted through binary combinations of small cylinders embedded in the wrist, each acting like a key. Like kanji radicals, words in Stonehand came together to form complex ideas—but the next moment they could dissolve, reshuffle, mean something new. It was all context and interpretation, but the context had no boundaries and the interpretation had no endpoint.
He searched for some anchor points in the message. BODY DARK referred to a person, one who might be unfamiliar, uncommunicative or overtly threatening. Whatever the precise meaning, the implication was bad. Brum took FEEL FALSE to mean misunderstanding. He looked again at the pictures on the walls, signalling HAND LIGHT? to Ravek as he did so.
FEEL, Ravek confirmed.
Brum continued to look at the paintings. They were fascinating, but it was hard to imagine a situation where they were not misunderstood. He must find the identity of BODY DARK, then.
ROOM LIGHT, ONE-TWO?, Brum asked, moving his eyes first to the artwork on the walls and then to a shelf covered in tools.
ONE, replied Ravek.
Brum nodded, pleased. A studio would have been difficult but he could find a gallery easily. He was about to ask about the rest of the message but Ravek pressed, NO MORE. But then another surprise as Brum stood up to leave Ravek held tightly onto his hand and pressed with emphasis:
STONE OVER PALM
And with that the old man let go.
Brum stopped for coffee en route to the gallery. BODY DARK GOOD, he thought as he swirled the last sip in the cup. He had heard the phrase BODY DARK almost every day of his investigative career and it stemmed from many places. A relationship broken, an attitude soured or a true nature finally recognised. But for the past year it had felt like BODY DARK only ever meant one man.
The gallery sat quiet behind boarded windows. Brum knocked once. Then again. After a moment, the door opened.
A pale woman answered. She had the timeless look of a gallerist: an asymmetrical cut of black hair composed around a narrow face, her clothes dark, layered and cut with the precision of a neo-plasticist painting. But not far beneath that stylish exterior Brum saw shock and exhaustion.
"I'm terribly sorry, we're not open. But most of our stock can be seen online." The gallerist spoke Plain Voice, and did a good job of maintaining a professional tone.
Brum shook his head and offered his wrist. The gallerist nodded and took his hand. Like him, she wore a full resolution Palme. STONE OVER PALM, the old man had said: use Stonehand, not Palme. Modern Palme devices were much more sophisticated than Stonehands, theoretically able to represent any word and to communicate with absolute clarity. The only limiting factor was the memory and mental dexterity of speaker and receiver; for those who had grown up with Palme devices this was no limit at all. Palmes were almost universal and the only two holdout groups were members of the original hacker generation and a younger group of artists, punks and dropouts who prized ambiguity and difference.
Heeding Ravek's advice, Brum chose to restrict himself to Stonehand vocabulary. This was possible for any Palme user, but done rarely because modern speakers' poor control of visual, physical and contextual cues made such conversations awkward. Brum made a guess that the gallerist's work with non-conformist artists meant she was proficient in Stonehand.
FEEL THINK ROOM LIGHT BREAK. TRUTH-BY-LIGHT BODY LIGHT. I SEE HAND LIGHT?, Brum pressed.
Without hesitating, the gallerist accepted Brum's request. COME, she pressed. BUT ROOM LIGHT BAD BREAK. PATH DARK, TRUST HOLD.
The gallerist led him into her office at the back of the building. PATH DARK, TRUST HOLD might have been a suggestion to take care while walking through the gallery; whoever had messed the place up had left the floors covered in fragments of broken sculptures and scraps of torn canvas. Brum lost his footing once or twice, and hoped that this was all the gallerist was warning him about.
On the desk was a painting by a familiar artist. TRUTH-BY-LIGHT?, Brum asked.
FEEL, the gallerist confirmed.
The canvas had been cut with a blade, but was still legible. Two figures stood in a street: one a sneering man-sized dog wearing a suit, the other a woman crouched over in pain. A red smear ran between the two figures. In the background was a half-open window, a pale cadmium yellow light pushing out from behind the face of a young girl in cool blue shadow. Next to the canvas, a gallery sign said 'The Witness - Truth-by-Light'.
Brum looked at the painting in silence. He was surprised to find that he was thinking only about the painting. The man-sized dog gave him a small shock of fear: an implacable beast, one that was not just inhuman but against human. Then, with a start, Brum returned to the case. The dog could mean many things to many people, but there was only one interpretation that mattered now: someone thought that he was the dog.
BODY DARK?, Brum asked the gallerist.
NOT NOT FEEL FALSE. PRIVATE BODY DARK ONLY, the gallerist pressed, the repetition dismissing the idea as stupid. BUT TRUTH SHAKE.
Brum nodded. The man-sized dog that represented a personal fear in Truth-by-Light's painting had turned, somehow, into a real enemy.
BODY DARK WHO?, Brum asked.
WHO ELSE?, the gallerist answered. Brum's heart sank.
NEED FIND HER, Brum pressed. He stared at the rip in the canvas.
The gallerist hesitated for a moment, and then replied ROOM DRINK SAFE, NEAR. There was a neighbourhood map on the wall of the office, and in a few moments Brum had the location of the bar. He knew the place, though he had never been inside: The Coil.
Brum stopped for dinner on the way to the bar. He ate slowly, then walked the long way through the low streets towards The Coil. The overhead cables sang, a low hum in the wind answered by a soft whine as vehicles wound past.
By the time he reached the bar the sky was dark. The sign was a palimpsest, as if the patrons took turns painting and repainting it. The current iteration was a retro neon sign, painted in ironic pinks and purples, with a shocking yellow twist of lemon in a glowing blue cocktail glass.
Inside, the bar was mostly empty. A few figures leaned over drinks. The walls were pinned with sketches, flyers and exhibition posters. On the low stage, a musician was bent over a bank of electronic gamelans. He tapped out a melody, pushed a pedal to weave it into the whole, and there the phrases swirled past each other in seemingly endless variations.
The bartender was young and wore all the obscuring fashions of the city's artistic subculture. Her hair was braided and coiled into twin buns. Piercings ran the ridge of each ear, holding delicate metal chains that fell down onto her cheeks. Black ink curled up her neck and along her forehead in a pattern of thorns and loops.
Brum decided that the direct approach would be best and placed his wrist on the bar. When the bartender joined him he pressed NEED FIND TRUTH-BY-LIGHT. WHERE IS «UNDER WIND»?, he asked, marking the quote by half-opening his mouth.
While the bartender considered her response Brum took the opportunity to show her some photos on his phone: Ravek at his kitchen table; an image of a youthful TRUTH-BY-LIGHT that Ravek had shared with him; and the damaged canvas of The Witness. In Brum's experience, such proofs meant less than the feeling that he should be trusted, and the real value of a photograph, memento or letter was to grant him the time to make that connection. It was not until he described his own reaction to The Witness—BIG ANIMAL BODY, FEAR FIND SHAKE—that he sensed the bartender begin to trust him.
«UNDER WIND»?, Brum prompted again.
TRUTH SHAKE, the bartender said, meaning complicated. PLACE MANY, UNDER WIND, FEEL SAME.
GROW TELL, Brum suggested, with an accepting shrug.
LONG, the bartender warned, and so Brum ordered a drink. Via a circuitous conversation, the bartender described several informal artist studios in disused properties that might be described as UNDER WIND: an office block utility room, the wind flying across the roof one floor above; a former cooling plant for the cable network, full of rusting fans; and a maintenance tunnel attached to the local subway system, turbulence from arriving trains rushing through every few minutes.
When Brum reached his apartment, tired and ready to sleep, a parcel from Ravek was waiting on his doorstep. Inside was a thin stack of technical papers, held together with a bulldog clip.
He made coffee, sat at the table and began to read.
Brum read the papers for the second time over his morning coffee. When he finished he knew he needed to see Kel. He needed to see Kel because...the city was changing. There were more sirens, more often, and the police raids and the prosecutions actually seemed to be having an effect. The papers Ravek had sent over told Brum why.
Brum took the tram to the south quarter. The guards outside the building didn’t stop him. One looked up, recognised him, then turned away.
Kel sat alone in a quiet office lit by an artificial skylight.
When he saw Brum, Kel connected their wrists and pushed out in Palme: "You're back".
BODY DARK, Brum greeted him simply and extended the photo of The Witness.
"Knock it off", Kel replied. "With the photo and the grunting."
"Your call", Brum said.
In the first paper Ravek had sent, diagrams of bio-mechanical implants were annotated with terms Brum half-remembered from university: thermal readback loops, indirect lightfield spill, micro-resonance indexing. In the margins, Ravek's notes explained that Palme devices could now be partially observed despite the air gap using a new generation of narrow-spectrum light and acoustic sensors—and from a distance and at incredible resolution.
Kel looked thinner than Brum remembered. His eyes were sharp, his movements dull. There was an air of decline about Kel's office, beneath the luxurious surface.
The second paper described an AI model trained on millions of interaction signatures: body movement, wrist tension, shoulder alignment. Ravek's notes again spelled out the implications: an observer with enough compute could reconstruct over 80% of a high-resolution Palme message from a partial visual profile. Ravek had written, and then underlined, a stark message: "Someone will have already deployed this." And who, Brum thought, would be a better target for that deployment than a kingpin like Kel?
“Business is bad. You’re under pressure,” Brum said. “That’s why you lashed out—why you keep lashing out.”
Kel stood. “You don’t know anything about it.”
“I know she wasn’t speaking to you. You saw a fear and made it a fact.”
“She painted the truth.”
“No,” Brum said. “She painted herself.”
Kel didn’t answer.
Brum took a breath. “Leave her alone.”
Kel shook his head.
"I have something you need", Brum said.
The third paper was written by Ravek himself. It was half sociological study, half manifesto: a meditation on security through ambiguity, a defense of Stonehand. “The message must be incomplete,” he had written. “Meaning must rely on context, or it will be surveilled.” A final note in the margin: even this will not last. STONE OVER PALM.
"And...?"
Brum made a judgement that the office was small enough for anti-surveillance measures to work.
“The Palme isn’t private anymore,” said.
Kel froze.
“I’ve seen the papers. AI models, remote sensing, visual indexing. It’s all observable now. And if it’s observable, it’s recordable. Switch to Stonehand,” Brum said. “If you want to keep your empire, stop broadcasting it.”
Brum let go of Kel's wrist. Kel didn’t nod. He didn’t sit. But he said nothing else. Brum left. He felt no victory in it.
The wind in the tunnel came before the train. Brum stepped back as it passed, then moved down to the maintenance level. In the half-dark, coiled wire clung to the wall. Someone had shaped it, spirals within spirals, and when he touched the metal it held a faint warmth.
UNDER WIND, he said to himself, rhyming it with 'sinned'. Then he repeated the phrase, rhyming it with find: UNDER WIND. The Coil: a spiral wound from wire, a place where ambiguity was expected. The bartender: a young woman hiding in curls of ink, metal and hair–TRUTH-BY-LIGHT.
She was still at The Coil when he arrived, still tending bar.
Brum offered his wrist and she accepted. BODY DARK NOW LIGHT.
She nodded and replied FEEL.
Brum wanted to ask about her painting but before he could TRUTH-BY LIGHT continued:
YOU CARRY HIS NAME
NOT MINE LET GO
He nodded and then left. He made the long walk to Ravek’s building and knocked at the door. As he waited he replayed TRUTH-BY-LIGHT's last message in his mind. He wondered what it meant.
- by Jack Lord
Writing Protocol: I wrote The Air Gap with the help of ChatGPT-4o, using a structured and iterative process. I developed the story’s concept, themes, characters, and tone, and ChatGPT-4o helped shape scenes, refine language, and maintain internal consistency. We worked scene-by-scene, revising based on narrative logic, emotional rhythm, and clarity. I gave direction, constraints, and specific goals for each stage. ChatGPT-4o responded with targeted edits, rewrites, and suggestions for vocabulary, structure, and symbolism, especially for the Stonehand language.
Engineering Guest Talk
This will be a good one for the techies, industrialists, and policy analysts alike. A case study of how the 50 ohms standard made its name in radio frequency engineering might sound pretty specific. However, it’s representative of how standards seem to establish themselves at arbitrary thresholds or averages. There’s a tension between unlocking future optionality and establishing path dependence. Join us at 10am PDT, June 4th to learn about this, and more, with engineer and writer
!Protocol SIGs
In addition to curricula development and workshops, the Summer of Protocols runs an ongoing research track. For the next 4-6 months, the program will incubate a handful of Special Interest Groups (SIGs) on a few topics, such as memory, spannnungsfelds, or mathematical foundations. Help steer this track by registering your interest with this survey.
SIG leads will plan, coordinate, and host 1-2 calls per month in a dedicated voice channel on the SoP Discord. Operations are up to them and there’s no prescribed output – but, if you’re unfamiliar with this acronym, a SIG is basically a study group.
You can also indicate interest in leading a SIG, in the same form pictured above. Keep an eye out over the next couple of weeks to see which topics spin into active groups.
Esmeralda Recap
The Summer of Protocols community is resting up after last week’s Protocol Worlds III at Edge Esmeralda. It was a full docket with thirteen workshops, tons of coworking, an AI film premiere, five hours of recorded lectures, and a million tacos. A few outputs, like the stories from the 3-hour Knowledge Futurama workshop and the mock class series, will be published in the coming weeks. Here’s a short slide deck from a general presentation during the week to get you started.
Now, participants will shift gears into course and module development in preparation for an online protocol school this fall and beyond, at universities from Shanghai to Carlow, Ireland. Other SoPers will host SIGs or write full-fledged pilot studies in new geographies, like Southeast Asia and Latin America. Plus, we’ll announce a new protocol fiction contest soon. Hint: 👻🤖
One thing we were struck by is how many Protocol Worlds attendees had read the Protocol Reader. It’s become a reliable onramp to protocol thinking and, arguably, still the best place to start.
Want to expand your horizons? The distributed campus for SoP is on Discord. That’s where you can work with fellow researchers, teachers, and practitioners. Head there to introduce yourself and your current projects or research interests.
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