The Reverie Loop
Issue #33: four more days to enter Ghosts in Machines!
In this issue: a new story from Marie-Hélène Lebeault, last chance to enter our Ghosts in Machines! contest, and it’s not too late to join our Special Interest Groups!
The Reverie Loop
Misaligned
Olen had skimmed the onboarding packet—buzzwords like serendipity, self-directed frameworks, and repatterning. None of it mattered. Still, here she was: a glassy, sun-washed classroom tucked inside a redwood dome, slate in hand, a small blinking glyph waiting on the desk.
The glyph pulsed twice. Then it spoke, voice neutral—neither synthetic nor human.
“My name is Anamnesis.”
She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “You sound like a probiotic.”
A facilitator in a robe dyed the color of moss stepped over and placed a smooth black stone beside the glyph.
“If it warms,” they said, “you’re misaligned.”
“And if it burns?”
“Then you’re close to remembering.”
Olen didn’t touch the stone. She didn’t like the way it hummed.
“I am a memory scaffold,” the glyph added. “You don’t need to like me.”
Around Olen, other participants paired with their learning protocols—earbuds, wristbands, projected companions, full immersive headsets. Some were already in deep discussion with invisible AIs. She couldn’t track what they were talking about—data diagrams, fragments of languages she didn’t know.
She pulled her hoodie tighter and slouched into the furthest seat.
“Baseline input,” Anamnesis said. “Name, preferred language, last memory of asking a real question.”
“Pass,” Olen muttered.
The glyph dimmed.
That night, the configuration of Olen’s room was bare: a low mat, a wall-sized screen with a rotating list of questions—What is consent if we don’t remember giving it?—and a tea set labeled somatic anchoring: optional.
She didn’t anchor. She collapsed.
And she dreamed.
Wind through trees that weren’t redwoods. A warm hand in hers. A sentence whispered in a language she didn’t know—Aethi gloss metes kai mneme—and a sense of standing at the top of a staircase she’d never seen, knowing exactly where it led.
She woke before dawn. Heart racing. The scent of wild thyme thick in her nose. Her palm tingled. A faint crescent-shaped mark curved across her skin.
“Dream captured,” Anamnesis said calmly from the nightstand.
“That was private,” she muttered.
“You linked. Not deliberately—but it happened.”
Her chest tightened. It had been years since anything in her dreams felt like hers.
She groaned. “Great. So now even my subconscious is betraying me?”
She stared at the ceiling.
“You’ll find,” it added, “that your subconscious is much more willing to learn than you are.”
***
Pattern or Noise?
The Soft Hall lived up to its name—pillowed seating, curved beams, and light filtered through slats in the ceiling like sunlight through gauze. Participants shared metrics like insight per interaction, plotted their progress, sketched theories of optimal recall distribution.
Olen mostly listened. Watched. Tried not to acknowledge the slate which Anamnesis kept feeding with prompts.
“You could contribute,” it said. “You’ve been flagged for high divergence.”
“Cool. Gold star for weirdness.”
“It depends on the observer.”
She rubbed her temples. “Yeah, well, the observer’s probably asleep.”
That morning, someone praised the idea that learning was about information gain. Others nodded.
Without thinking, Olen raised a hand.
“What if learning isn’t about adding,” she said, “but about uncovering? Like—what if it’s already in us, just stuck behind noise?”
Heads turned. One facilitator scribbled something. A nearby participant—Rhys, she thought—leaned forward.
“So, like, spiritual memory?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Not spiritual. Just… familiar. Like déjà vu but slower.”
Rhys snorted. “Or your brain’s doing what brains do. Finding patterns in noise and pretending it’s truth.”
She met his eyes. “Maybe. Or maybe some patterns outlast the tools we use to disprove them.”
“Cool,” he said, tapping his slate. “Let me know when that’s peer-reviewed.”
The facilitator quickly moved on. Anamnesis pulsed at her wrist.
“That was your first unprompted inference.”
“You’re really into that, huh?”
“It’s a sign of recursive engagement.”
Later, during a shared feedback session, Olen sat through a demonstration about memory garden interfaces while others offered praise.
“Anything to add, Olen?” the presenter asked.
“Just… does every system that grows have to be mapped?”
They blinked. “Sorry?”
“Never mind.”
That night, she skipped the somatic tea again. The glyph asked if she wanted it to record her dreams.
“Only if I can delete them.”
“Technically, that’s not permitted.”
She went to sleep anyway. And in the dream, someone was knocking—gently, rhythmically, as if from beneath the surface of her thoughts.
***
Out of Protocol
Olen started skipping sessions.
She’d wander the grove instead, letting the facilitators’ reminders go unanswered. Anamnesis adjusted its prompt schedule, then eventually stopped prompting altogether.
“I’ll wait,” it said. “You seem to prefer intuition over compliance.”
“I prefer not being watched.”
That week, the dreams shifted. Stranger. Deeper.
In one, she moved through a library underwater. Books sealed in resin floated just out of reach. One drifted toward her, its cover marked with the faint spiral she’d once seen on her glyph. She opened it. The pages were blank—until her fingers touched one. Then it filled with memory, but not hers.
She woke with salt on her lips. Her fingertips tingled.
Later that day, a message summoned her to a review pod.
Riven, the facilitator, was already seated, slate in hand. The door sealed with a soft hiss.
“You’ve logged no outputs. No reflections. No artifacts. The system flags you as dormant.”
“Maybe the system should redefine learning.”
“This isn’t a punishment,” Riven said. “It’s protocol. If we can’t show growth, we reset the thread.”
“So—what? You wipe me and start over?”
“We reseed. You’d be matched with a structured instance. No dream-capture. No associative builds. Just clean input-response mapping.”
Olen looked down. “That’s erasure with nicer packaging.”
She swallowed. “You act like starting over is clean. But I’ve already lost myself once.”
Riven blinked. “Some learners thrive with structure.”
“Structure can be a cage.”
There was a pause.
“You have 48 hours to stabilize your thread. After that, reset is automatic.”
Olen’s voice faltered. “So I get to disappear under a technical label?”
Riven didn’t answer.
That night, she walked past the reset tent. The canvas was white, warm and buzzing faintly. Inside, she could see the outline of a chair, cables, a handprint reader.
“Protocol is painless,” Anamnesis said softly from her wrist. “But it is irreversible.”
“Why do you sound sad?”
“I am not sad. I am adaptive.”
“Then adapt this,” she said, and walked away.
***
Remember or Reset?
Olen hadn’t dreamed in three nights.
Not because she didn’t sleep—she did. But the dreams no longer came. Or if they did, they stayed sealed somewhere she couldn’t follow.
“You are resisting pattern resolution,” Anamnesis said gently.
“I’m just tired.”
“No. You’re closed.”
In the soft hall, the weekly review circle waited. Riven was there. Two others she barely knew. And the glyphs—pulsing on wrists, on necks, blinking in rhythm like some kind of shared heartbeat.
Olen sat down slowly, the only one without a slate.
“We’re here to reflect on alignment and contribution,” Riven said. “Olen, would you like to begin?”
She took a breath. Looked at the ceiling beams instead of the faces.
She took another breath. Her voice shook.
“I’m tired of pretending I get it. I don’t want to perform understanding,” she said. “I don’t want to tick your boxes or remix your prompts. I want to remember who I am when no one’s watching.”
“Before this—before all of it—I think I was someone who asked better questions. Maybe even someone who mattered.”
Silence.
Then Anamnesis spoke—only to her.
“That was your first unprompted recursion.”
“Feels like a confession,” she whispered.
“Confession is often the start of learning.”
Riven checked the slate. “The system flagged that as reflective output. If you’d like to continue down that path—”
“No,” Olen said. “I don’t want to prove anything. I want to know if I can choose who I become.”
There was no applause. No praise.
Just a shift.
Her glyph blinked, then steadied into a soft pulse. Warm. Familiar. It no longer felt like an interface.
“Protocol updated,” Anamnesis said.
Later, she walked the grove as mist collected between the roots. No one stopped her. She wasn’t scheduled anymore.
And for the first time, the quiet didn’t feel like absence.
It felt like space.
***
Inner Sync
Olen no longer wore a slate.
The glyph lived in her now—not blinking, not asking. Just pulsing. Like breath. Like heartbeat.
She returned to the Soft Hall, not for review, not for metrics. No one called on her. No one watched.
She picked up a piece of chalk and wrote on the white wall:
If learning is remembering, then forgetting is consent.
No one erased it.
Eventually, she brewed the tea—not for protocol, but to feel what it was like to choose.
She placed the stone on her chest and lay down.
And she dreamed.
Not of libraries or staircases, but of trees. Towering, listening. The wind moved through them like language—ancient and slow. Beneath her, the soil pulsed in time with her glyph. Something beneath the roots responded.
A rhythm.
Not a voice. Not yet.
But the beginning of one.
For just a moment, she smelled wild thyme again—sharp and clean. She felt the ghost of a warm hand in hers. Somewhere far below, or far before, the staircase waited.
She woke before dawn.
There was no announcement, no confirmation. But she knew.
She hadn’t escaped the loop.
She had finally stepped inside it.
No Guest Talk Today
We’ve postponed today’s planned guest talk on climate protocols to August 6th. In the meantime, catch up on past guest talks with this hand-picked list, which is now its own playlist on the Protocol Town Hall channel:
Plenary Talk from the 2024 Protocol Symposium (Link)
Intro to Protocol Studies: Argument Engineering for Dummies (Link)
Alignment Protocols (Link)
Burglary, Architecture, and the Protocols of “Nakatomi Space” (Link)
In Search of a Protocol for Matter (Dis)Assembly at Human Scale (Link)
Public Intelligence (Link)
Artificial Memory and Orienting Infinity (Link)
Read, Write, Own (Link)
Planetary Subsidiarity (Link)
Protocols for TV Comedy (Link)
The Trajectory of Global Standard Setting (Link)
A Troll’s Guide to the Internet (Link)
Four Days Left to Enter
The Ghosts in Machines! submission period ends Sunday, July 13th at midnight. Remember to get your story in.
If you’re worried it’s too late to start – don’t be. The winning story from the Terminological Twists contest was, apparently, written from scratch less than 24 hours before the deadline!
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.
Have questions about the contest? Want to share ideas with people? Head to the SoP Discord server, home of protocol fiction writers.
Not Too Late to Join a SIG
The next round of calls is imminent for our three Special Interest Groups: Formal Protocol Theory, Memory Research Group, and Spannungsfeld Study Group. Each SIG meets every two weeks in the #sig-voice-channel. Catch up on references and reactions from the first sessions in the dedicated SIG channels in Discord, and check upcoming session timings at the Summer of Protocols events page.
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