Protocolized announces its fourth creative contest, the Jamverse Jam, inviting artists and writers to extend an interconnected fictional universe comprising four intersecting story cycles exploring themes of protocol-driven futures and stigmergy. The contest seeks submissions of in-universe artifacts that build out and connect this shared world inspired by science fiction's focus on systemic consequences rather than individual innovations.
Protocol fiction functions as a navigational technology for readers entering unfamiliar narrative spaces, much like Poe's protagonist using rope to map his prison cell. The emerging genre uses structural constraints and impossible premises to help audiences understand and move through complex conceptual environments.
Spencer Nitkey
Elizabeth Maher's series concludes with a narrative about Janice Spurlock, who designs the Concord Settlement with deliberate impermanence—structures built to be completely dismantled and leave no trace. The story explores how one woman anticipated cultural collapse by engineering everything, from buildings to records, to vanish without archaeological evidence.
Elizabeth Maher
Spencer Nitkey's story follows Egrol, a worker on Kupiter who envies ORCA pilots like Shreea for their agency in decision-making, as he discovers that meaningful work and autonomous choice still exist in pockets of their automated world. The narrative explores how different forms of labor—from directed emergence to pilot coordination—create hierarchies of agency and desire.
Spencer Nitkey