To Share, And Remember

Issue #7: Ritual Data Transfer

In this issue: An evocative tale of ritual and memory unfolds as Verity undergoes an ancient activation to reclaim the memory of her species’ origins. Amid cosmic rites and intimate bonds, she confronts the weight of a predestined purpose, balancing personal sacrifice with the hope of a future yet to be born. Also – have an academic friend who could help us advance protocol studies? Send us a warm intro at research@summerofprotocols.com

To Share, And Remember

Her name means something like Verity, the highest virtue among her kind. The activation ritual undertaken to receive the name was long. She spent days chanting in a trance, channeling the precise frequencies of a song laid down by her ancestors a hundred thousand years ago. She is weary just thinking about it, for she knows it will seem brief when compared to the marathon of ritual ahead.

Her kind’s everyday language is light and color flashed on the skin, suited to the thin atmosphere on their planet. But for rituals, she must return to the place where, according to tradition, her ancestors fell from a star. There, the elders huddle underground in the warrens their ancestors dug, and by the vibration of their bodies, feel the ancient language which once contained all they knew. The sonic language of ritual demands closeness to be heard.

Verity wanders out alone to prepare herself. She unfurls her body as far as she can, stretches her amorphous form so that she is practically a film, a few millimeters thick, covering a wide swath of ground. She rarely has an excuse to treat herself like this. The radiation from the faraway sun is delicious on her surface, reinvigorating as it enters each cell. For hours she rolls over gently, lavishing in the rays. There is no more satisfying feeling, although the demands of everyday life in the community seldom leave her the time for more than a passive soak-up. She will need every bit of the energy for the chant.

Radiation beats down to the planet’s surface through the wisp of an atmosphere. She nestles herself into the ground a little, just enough to feel the dust prickle through her membrane. It reacts with her cells, causing little bubbles of gas to percolate through her body and burst in the thin air. Her eyes float up to the surface of her body where it soaks in light. It is easy to forget how large and powerful her sun is. No larger than an eye in the black sky of day, she knows it is really many million times as large as the rocky planet from which she sees it. The giant of its neighborhood, according to the elders; a star so big it swallowed its sister in its infancy. So bright is her sun that it is difficult to imagine there could be life at another, but this is the truth for which she must prepare herself. She knows the shape of that truth, the edges of it: that her kind fell from another star, sent here by ancestors from a far-distant place. But the inside of it, the life and energy that fill that truth, are impossible to imagine.

She passes through the community on her way home. Semi-subterranean dwellings pock the planet’s surface, little more than burrows tunneled in the rock. Others of her kind stroll past on temporary appendages, which they reabsorb once they are still again. It is custom to blink her name to everyone she passes, though she knows them all by sight. Only upon first meeting is it necessary to stand touching and vibrate her full name. Verity has been alive long enough that there is no one in her community she hasn’t met, and respected enough to have been chosen by them to be their next elder. The ceremony will seal her role as a keeper of the community’s memory and purpose.

At home, her spouse is curled up in a ball on the floor, hibernating. She wakes them with a gentle shake. They’ve been together since they hatched, inseparable from their first moments of life. Whenever she touches them she wishes she could pour her cells into theirs and become a single whole, as they were born to be. But she contents herself with a cuddle.

“Affirm,” she says, vibrating their name to them, a gesture of affection shared only between the most intimate friends and lovers. She waits for their confirmation before switching into visual language. “How are you today?”

“Verity,” they vibrate, “so tired. All day I spent digging and aerating on the new dwellings. I didn’t even finish, look, I’ve still got crumbs of soil everywhere and I keep letting off bubbles.” To demonstrate, Affirm lets a little bubble of gas on their surface pop comically.

Verity shakes out a laugh. “It’s an important job. The elders say aerating is the most important task any of us can perform.”

“Yeah, but they don’t say why,” Affirm replies, skepticism in their coloring. “When you find out, will you tell me?”

“You know I won’t be able to share the elder’s secrets. I won’t even hold the memories myself. Only a part of them.”

“Wish you wouldn’t do it,” Affirm says, not for the first time. “A month without you, and when you come back, you’ll be a stuffy old elder.”

“I won’t,” she flashes in protest, “I’ll be just the same, and love you even more for having missed you.”

“How am I gonna last a whole month alone,” they blink miserably. Verity has no answer. She stretches herself thin and encompasses them in an embrace.

First comes the testing, sung in call-and-response with the elders. Days of responding to their queries with the right frequency, the proper lyrics, to prove she is a true questioner, worthy of ancient knowledge. Then the elders will join in their collective meditation, and sing the ancestral ballad that opens the deep stores of memory.

The metal ruin where her ancestors fell from a star lies half-buried in pillowy dust that covers the landscape in drifts deeper than she is tall. As she waits, she rehearses the rite again in her mind. Theoretical preparation can’t help anymore and she knows it, but it’s comforting to think she knows what’s coming.

She approaches the jagged metal ruin and lets herself down into a cavern. It is bright inside, the space lit by the bodies of the seventeen gathered elders. They flash and glow in a friendly exchange of chatter while waiting for the ceremony to commence; when they notice Verity’s arrival they fall mute, into monochrome.

One by one, each elder approaches her, vibrating their own names. Verity repeats each name before replying with her own; only when an elder repeats her name may the next continue. They are all named for high virtues: Secrecy, Randomness, Finitude, Trust.

With the greeting ritual observed, the chanting begins.

“How many respond,” vibrates Secrecy.

“Seventeen of twenty-five,” responds Trust.

“There are enough,” Secrecy answers.

“We begin with the number of the new cycle,” Trust continues.

The elders vibrate in unison the long strand of numbers that prove the new season of civilisation. The number, known only to elders, is set at an annual ceremony, to which Verity was not yet invited. She waits, mute, for the hours it takes to observe the passing of time. As her neighbors chant, she feels the vibration in every cell, the primordial sound of their ancient language.

The elders proceed to a series of demands. They test Verity on her knowledge, her memory, her reasoning.

“The real Verity would know: the distance of the Planet from the Star at its apogee, the date of the next apogee.”

“The real Verity would know: the number and coordinates of dwellings in her community, and the number and names of the individuals in each.”

“The real Verity would know: the names of her hatchmates, the number which still live, the dates of death of the rest.”

The answers to these questions are long, but she knows them all. By the time she lists each piece of information in the exhaustive test of her memory and identity, it is the tenth day. The elders are exhausted. Some hibernate during the chant, their bodies carry on buzzing with the sounds vibrated by their neighbors. Verity may not sleep. The test is hers. She must demonstrate that her mind can contain what the elders give, and that she will neither corrupt the knowledge nor lose it. If she fails a single question, the ritual will cease.

At last, the queries end. The elders fall silent for the first time in days, and in the sudden cessation of vibration, Verity almost feels as if she were still shaking. Her exhausted cells scream for radiation, but she cannot leave. The true ritual is about to begin.

The seventeen elders begin to hum. The song of each is different, but similar: a pure note, a waveform, a harmony in a larger chorus. Alone, their songs are a meaningless drone. But when all sing their discordant notes at the same time, Verity can hear some larger sense in the song. The waves rise and fall, always joining in the same places, notes intersecting in a complex harmony. After listening for hours it seems to Verity that a note is missing. A space for her. Her part in the song. Her body begins to hum, hesitant at first, quickly growing louder.

She does not know how long they sing. She only knows that, as days pass in chanting, she ceases to be herself. The edges that define her melt away. She feels herself become a node, one point of an eighteen-headed body made up of the elders of her kind. Her eyes cease to see the world around her and look, instead, deep into time.

The memory is a blur. First, a planet, its surface coated in creatures and dwellings of every shade she can imagine and many she can’t. Monochromatic creatures of unchanging form build metal vessels and launch them into a blinding-bright sky. Then, spaceflight, cramming into a small vessel and crashing onto the rock of her homeworld. The first settlers, creatures which will become her species, but for now lack their nuance, their visual speech, their culture, architecture, and language. Hundreds of thousands of years, the myriad generations that made her, Affirm, the elders, everything and everyone she knows.

At last she sees the purpose. The reason they fell from a star.

Her kind were made. Other-creatures, a hundred thousand years ago in another place, built them, cell by cell. They were designed to be radiation-eaters, rock-diggers, memory-keepers. Robust bodies capable of surviving without atmosphere, but capable of building an atmosphere. The process by which their bodies convert ground-up earth into gas, digging the foundations of their homes and setting it free into the emptiness around their planet so that one day, in a million generations, there will be a rich world, an atmosphere, a place where their communities are not the only living things. The aeration that Affirm hates will be the rite that brings their new planet into being.

The knowledge is terrible and frightening. In the memory, Verity knows herself to be artificial. She was created, just like every tool or dwelling she has ever used. Her purpose and the purpose of her species is preordained. Unchangeable. They did not ask for this life, this hardscrabble existence of chewing rock. And yet, a million generations of their labor will build a planet where more than their own lives can flourish. She now knows why the knowledge is defended under such heavy ritual. The elders have been tasked, since the very beginning, with keeping the purpose, and steering their species toward this future.

But the memory is brief. Already she feels the parts of it which are not hers to keep pouring back into her neighbors; it can be whole only when held together. The richness and detail slip away and only the shape of it remains. Returning to herself, she feels the sacred weight of it, nestled like an unprocessed pebble in her body.

The receding memory leaves stillness in its wake. After a month of constant vibration, the silence feels like hunger. There is no great rite of disconnection to observe; she watches the elders crawl weakly back up to the surface and collapse on the empty ground.

Verity is the last to follow. It takes all of her strength to emerge into the sunlight. She looks around at the desolate rock that is their home, at the ruins of the vessel which carried them here from a distant star. And now, she sees, or imagines she sees, a glimmer in the sky. A brume, like the cloud of aeration from a busy digsite, receding from the planet into the starlit sky of day. The barest hint of their planet’s atmosphere, only a thin haze. It hangs low on the horizon, faint and distant, lingering like a half-forgotten memory.

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SoP25 Town Hall

This morning, we hosted a live overview of the 2025 programming for Summer of Protocols. You can view the recording on our YouTube channel, along with many other videos (if you’re overwhelmed and looking for a place to start, we recommend the 2024 Protocol Symposium).

Jump in:

• 0:00 - Intro

• 1:00 - Program history

• 5:37 - Ethereum Foundation x Protocol Studies

• 11:35 - Preview of the three tracks for 2025

• 14:14 - Program philosophy

• 19:29 - Progress, moving forward

• 25:46 - Educational resources

• 28:45 - Program opportunities (grants, writing, research, corporate workshops, institutional partnerships)

• 41:58 - The new world struggling to be born

• 48:40 - Q&A

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Discord Highlights

Activity on our Discord server is ramping up, from people organizing meetups, to conjecturing about protocol studies, to pitches for science fiction stories. We’ll be posting weekly highlights here, and you can join the server for the full experience.

• A good quote from The Discipline of Steel: “To describe the statesman's action as an instance of diplomatic practice cannot be reduced to recounting the mere scribbling of a curvy blue line on paper or for that matter to noting the solemn demeanor of the emissaries at the table but involves a host of determinations including those of diplomatic protocol”

• Activity in #protocol-watch including disaster response and a Protocol Advisor job posting.

• Some great discussion between xh3b4sd and Jordan Olmstead about protocols for writing sci-fi, including the profoundly cool SCP Foundation.

• Kei Kreutler, an SoP alum and contributor, shared an upcoming series of public sessions including one on Mutualist Tech Infrastructure, in #random.

P.S. – if you’re in Southeast Asia, or are planning to be there in April, today is the deadline to apply to the Khlongs and Subaks workshop at CMKL University.