Sachin Benny launches a bio-thriller series set aboard the UET-1, the world's longest single rail line connecting Lisbon to Laos, following protagonist Rowan as she recruits unsuspecting friends for an invisible war while maintaining a meticulously optimized body through advanced cosmetic procedures. The narrative explores themes of bodily control, hidden agendas, and the blurred lines between self-care and weaponization in a speculative future.
This issue features worldbuilding analysis of the AI-generated film South Beast Asia, examining ten core traits designed to explore distributed AI systems through a Southeast Asian-inspired lens developed at the Khlongs & Subaks workshop. The piece unpacks how fictional 'strange rules' address questions of AI distribution while the issue also hosts a guest talk with AI Snake Oil author Arvind Sarayanan.
Sam Chua
Nicolás Madoery presents 'divergent protocols' as a counter-model to standard protocols that converge toward homogenization, arguing that AI and robotics now function as infrastructure (not tools) through which culture becomes 'liquid' and infinitely re-versioned. Drawing on examples like AI-generated Argentine folklore, a dancing folk robot, and his PIACH framework for cultural organizations, he proposes protocols that preserve diversity by naming what is lost, keeping source names, and leaving room for noise rather than optimizing transmission.
Nicolás Madoery
Daniel Schmidt argues that mazes are a minimal formal instantiation of protocols, not just a metaphor, using his own maze-drawing history and games to illustrate concepts like hard vs. soft protocols (physical walls vs. crossable paper lines), scale-entangled vs. scale-lined navigation, and stigmergic memory. He demonstrates an ant colony pheromone simulation, a multiplayer infinite maze with shareable 'pebble' markers, a maze-design platform separating protocol-author from protocol-navigator with heatmaps of friction points, and an art-gallery maze as medium. Venkatesh Rao joins to explain his 'clockless clock' maze, a topological map of thought-space (rat/goat/crow vertices) designed by Schmidt to represent arrested development and spiraling toward nirvana.
Daniel Schmidt, Venkatesh Rao