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The Last Archive

Fiction Sachin Benny

Brother Lexicon, an archivist at the Ministry of Predictive Symbolism in 2667, faces the return of the WikiRael-9 comet—a celestial archive born from accidental preservation that became sacred scripture—presenting new challenges for how humanity preserves and transmits knowledge across centuries. This final installment of the Summer of Protocols workshop series explores the paradoxes of memory, institutional archives, and the unintended consequences of archival systems.

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Fiction

Archive

In this issue's debut of The Librarians series, Sachin presents fictional narratives based on real documentation from Summer of Protocols' long-term scenario planning workshops, beginning with 'The Crystal Reading Ceremony,' set in a futuristic underground archive where knowledge is stored on quartz discs. The story explores how institutional memory and archival practices might evolve in a post-AI world through the rituals and tensions surrounding the curation of pre-AI human knowledge.

archive fiction memory

Sachin Benny

Fiction

A Visitor’s Guide to the Disposition

This is a polemical visitor's guide to a mysterious geographical site called the Disposition, written by an anonymous author who has observed it for forty years and disputes official narratives about its nature and nomenclature. The text rails against deliberate campaigns of misinformation and mischaracterization by institutional authorities, establishing the author's preferred terminology and framing as the correct interpretation of this contested place.

fiction memory protocol-watching

Elizabeth Maher

Article

Archives of Discontinuity

This issue examines California's wildfire management through the lens of prescribed and wild fires at the wildland-urban interface, tracing how 20th-century fire suppression policies fundamentally contradicted ecological understanding of fire's necessary role in ecosystems. The case study explores combustion as a memory practice and investigates how new tools reshape our epistemological relationship with fire management.

archive article memory

Nathalia Scherer, Jiordi Rosales