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The Air Gap

Fiction Jack Lord

Jack Lord presents a noir detective story set in a post-surveillance world where wrist-worn air-gap devices have become the primary communication medium for those seeking privacy, following investigator Bram Kvass as he pursues a missing daughter case through intermediaries communicating via these off-the-grid technologies. The narrative explores how visual surveillance saturation drove the development of Stonehand devices and other gap-closing communication methods that leave no digital trace.

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Haven Tailors

Haven Tailors is a speculative fiction story set in Haven Reach, a city where tailors serve as gatekeepers who adjust citizens' clothing and monitor their personal data through case numbers, revealing a system where physical alterations encode conformity and surveillance. The narrative explores how protocol-driven systems of governance operate through mundane transactions, using the metaphor of tailoring to examine belonging, control, and the anxiety of fitting into prescribed social structures.

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The House That Paid Its Own Bills

In this speculative fiction story set in 2075, digital afterlives have become normalized infrastructure where the deceased continue to generate economic value through subscriptions and automated transactions, creating a society where financial algorithms keep people functionally immortal regardless of biological death. Elizabeth Maher's award-winning narrative explores how automation and data commodification blur the boundary between life and death, using a house that pays its own bills as a metaphor for systems that perpetuate themselves independent of human existence.

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A Chronicle of Lumina

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.

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