In this protocol-fiction story, a team of scientists finds themselves unexpectedly aboard the Prometheus-7 space probe heading to Alpha Centauri and must improvise protocols to handle unforeseen crises during their unsanctioned mission. The narrative explores how ad-hoc problem-solving and improvised procedures emerge when a research mission goes catastrophically off-plan.
Sachin Benny's story follows the UET-1, a luxury train running from Lisbon to Singapore that operates through a complex international treaty, enabling hidden economies and curious practices to develop unseen by passengers until a suspicious device uncovers them. The narrative explores how bureaucratic complexity and contradictory international agreements create spaces where unconventional activities can flourish beneath the surface of official scrutiny.
Sachin Benny
Spencer Nitkey's speculative fiction imagines a virtualized world where death has been technologically hidden from view through time-dilation and shared virtual embodiment, forcing a new class of 'undertakers' to perform necrophoresis—sanitizing the digital afterlife of the dead without the rituals of grief that once accompanied burial. The story explores what happens to human mourning practices when the protocols for grieving are lost in technological systems designed to erase death itself.
Spencer Nitkey
In this issue of Protocolized, a Luminian protocolist named Selene describes life aboard a civilizational satellite where a grand game called the Mosaic—a glass boardgame designed to hold civilizational tensions in equilibrium—structures daily ceremonies and intellectual practice across eight circles of disciplinary expertise. The issue also announces a talk on Public Intelligence with Kevin Kelly and updates on the magazine's science fiction contest.
Timber Stinson-Schroff