The Protocol - A novel inspired by the stillness of terror

By AI-ChatGPT4o-T.Chr.-Human Synthesis-02 June 2025

The city hummed, not with life but with systems. Sector Nine always sounded like this—electric, distant, almost alive in the way a body might be just after death. Kellen Marrow stood by the transit window watching the sterilized traffic, identical carriers weaving between glass towers under skies of permanent grey. The view was vast. And hollow.

His terminal blinked behind him. Green—urgent. He sighed, then turned.

Directive Received: Phase Zero – Controlled Disturbance (Astral Tower)
Implementation Time: 06:40 - Clarity Level: Opaque - Authorization: Not Required

He didn’t need to understand. He rarely did. The Department of Domestic Equilibrium trained them not to ask, just as the academy trained them to sit upright and speak without conviction. Belief complicated things. Kellen preferred not to believe in anything. It made things quieter.

He approved the order.

The machine began to work. Down corridors and across data streams, instructions filtered into Operations. Within minutes, someone else prepped the detonator. Someone else arranged the media feed. Someone else inserted the keywords into the morning push: “Threat Cell,” “Unstable Element,” “Necessary Disruption.”

He watched it all. Not in person, of course. Just through a feed. The screen flickered, pixelated, and briefly stalled on a human form—small, hunched, a boy perhaps—entering the tower minutes too early. Kellen didn’t flinch. He simply clicked confirm.

Downstairs, the kettle clicked off.

Lira made tea like a ritual—always the same cup, always the same two taps of the spoon against the rim. Rowan, her brother, sat at the corner of the room where the light hit the floor. He liked lines and shadows. She let him trace them with his fingers while she folded laundry or made calls she hated. Kellen walked in, silent as ever. She handed him the tea. He took it without thanks.

“Big day?” she asked, not looking up. - “Phase Zero,” he said.

She blinked. Not because she understood, but because she had heard the words before—used in hushed tones when screens went black and headlines turned strange. She said nothing. That had become her strategy: reduce conversation to transactions. Words were monitored. Emotions flagged anomalies. Better to stay still.

But that evening, when the tower crumpled into itself and the child’s name began to circulate—first as a suspect, then as a martyr—something in Lira shifted. Not suddenly. Not dramatically. But like a door she hadn’t realized was closed began, very slowly, to open. Rowan watched the newsfeed with uncomprehending eyes. He didn’t understand words like "pretext" or "escalation," but he felt something raw in Lira’s silence.

She turned the screen off. “Kellen,” she said that night, lying beside him in that wide, cold bed, “what would happen if I stopped following the protocol?” He didn’t respond. He was already asleep, or pretending to be. Either way, he never asked what she meant.

Three days passed.

The city mourned in curated fashion. Public screens showed candlelight vigils, overlayed with slogans: Unity is Strength. Strength is Peace. Behind the images, security was tightened. New measures were enacted. Citizens received updated guidelines: updated walking routes, new phrases for daily recitations, a recommended emotion range between measured concern and staunch resilience. Lira filed nothing.

She followed no updates. She began, instead, to clean. Not out of grief, but focus. There is a kind of calm that comes when one knows what they will do, even before they admit it to themselves. She waited until Kellen’s pattern repeated—Tuesday, he’d visit the administrative vault for the 08:15 compliance review. Forty minutes. Enough time.

She opened the drawer under his desk. The access token was there, as expected. Rowan watched her with quiet eyes. She bent down, held his face in her hands. “You’ll be safe,” she said. “You’ll be better than this.”

He didn’t answer. He rarely did.

She left the apartment like any other commuter. No one stopped her. No one ever stopped anyone, not unless a signal said otherwise. The tower loomed above her—Administrative Center for Data Integrity. Kellen’s other office. Full of protocols. Full of names. Full of people who’d never pressed a button but knew exactly where to tell others to point one. Inside, she walked the halls like she belonged. Which, technically, she did. Her file still read Compliant Spouse, Tier Two. Her face hadn’t been downgraded.

The bomb wasn’t large. It didn’t need to be. It only needed to echo.

When it exploded, it was quiet. The rooms absorbed most of the sound. The data, however, did not survive. Records vanished. Chains of command collapsed. Without them, orders could not move. The Protocol stumbled. People waited for instructions that never came.

The city held its breath. Kellen stood in the rubble, ash on his collar, a siren’s whine cutting through the quiet like a question that would not be answered. He did not ask why. He understood now that silence was not safety. It was a decision. And someone—finally—had chosen differently.

Lira’s body was never found.

The city resumed, eventually. Systems rebooted. New directives circulated. But something had changed. Not loudly. Not visibly. Just enough to make people pause before clicking confirm. And that, perhaps, was the beginning.

The first break in a chain of nothingness.
The first word in a sentence long since silenced.

The protocol was still running. But it was no longer followed blindly.

The sun rose like it always did in Sector Nine, except now, people noticed it. It hung over the towers like a slow-burning eye, no longer veiled by curated fog or filtered through a thousand surveillance screens. A few had started waking before the public signal to watch it—just to see something unregulated. Kellen Marrow sat on the edge of his desk, looking out through the same transit window where he had once observed the city like a predictable equation.

Now, it looked slightly wrong. Not broken. Not chaotic. Just… awake. Somewhere in that wakefulness was Lira’s absence. His colleagues passed in and out of rooms with just a fraction more hesitation. They still obeyed directives, but they cross-referenced them more than they used to. Sometimes, they requested Clarity Upgrades. A dangerous thing to do. Not yet flagged, but noticed.

He had not reported them.

In the cafeteria, people no longer sat facing only their screens. They watched each other. Not with suspicion, but recognition. One woman—a data-sequence analyst from Level 3—met his eyes while drinking synth-coffee. She nodded.

It startled him more than the explosion had.

Outside the administrative dome, memorials had appeared. Not official ones—there were no sanctioned mourning sites for traitors—but little things. A child’s shoe. A torn image of the Observatory. A bracelet with no clasp. Rowan had been moved to a facility after the incident—for his safety, they said. But word spread that he rarely spoke, only traced shadows across the wall with his fingers. Then one day, a drawing appeared on his door: a broken circle with a dot in the center.

Security wiped it, of course. But the next morning, it was back. Bolder.

They began calling it “the silent mark.” It showed up on walls, stairwells, alley doors. No one claimed it. No one explained it. But people understood. It meant We saw what happened. We haven’t forgotten. The Department of Domestic Equilibrium issued no formal statement on the Astral Tower incident. That was standard. Information blackouts were common, calibrated to avoid dissent.

But cracks in the blackout began to form. A smuggled feed clip. A whispered file copy. A still-frame of Lira walking through a corridor with something clenched in her hand, just before the security cameras shorted. It didn’t take much. The truth never does. Just enough to let people see that someone had acted—not for a cause, not as a rebellion, but because silence had become unbearable.

And from that unbearable silence, something began to move.

Kellen knew the system was designed to absorb anomalies. To adapt. To overwrite. But it had not been prepared for ambiguity. It had not been built to survive stories that didn’t fit the schema of traitor or patriot. He sat through another compliance briefing. The speaker’s voice droned with hollow reassurance. “Balance has been restored. Order remains unchallenged. Trust is preserved through vigilance.”

Then the lights flickered. Just once. But long enough.

Kellen stood up.

“I have a question,” he said.

Heads turned. Silence filled the room, heavy and unnatural.

The facilitator blinked, uncertain. “Yes, citizen Marrow?”

“What happened to Lira?”

Gasps. Then stillness. Not fear, exactly. Recognition.

The kind of recognition that passes from one person to another like a note under a locked door.

That night, Kellen returned home and sat on the floor beside Rowan’s old spot. The light still came through in narrow slants. He ran a finger through the dust where the boy had traced lines and for the first time in years, he felt something like grief. And with it—clarity. The protocol could be rewritten. Not by orders. Not by another directive.

But by memory. By refusal.

And by the slow, steady emergence of people who no longer believed that obedience was safety. They were quiet at first. But they were watching. And remembering. And when the time came, they would choose something else. Not resistance. Not revolution. Something more dangerous:

Meaning.

The evilness of the lifestyle in The Observatory is not loud or obvious. It is not the kind of evil that storms cities or burns books. It is quiet. Precise. Institutionalized. And worst of all—it feels normal to the people living inside it. It begins with the routine: every citizen is plugged into cycles of obedience disguised as productivity.

They wake to alerts, not sunlight. They eat nutrient blocks designed for caloric efficiency, not pleasure. Even their thoughts are curated by Compliance Streams—algorithms engineered to dull outrage and reward passive agreement.

No one is forced into slavery. They agree to it. Because they no longer remember what disagreement felt like.

The evil seeps through the architecture—doors that only open one way, windows that show filtered skies, neighborhoods arranged for maximum psychological control. People live in boxes of sameness, designed to prevent jealousy, individuality, or longing. The city claims it eliminates envy—but really, it erases the capacity to imagine more.

Children are not raised. They are cultivated—monitored for deviance, rerouted toward “corrective optimism” at the first sign of emotional discomfort. They don’t cry; they malfunction. They don’t dream; they “stray from purpose.”

Love doesn’t exist. Only utility bonds. Families are transactional. Marriage is a form of sanctioned proximity. People don’t fall in love—they are assigned by compatibility metrics. Emotions are categorized, dosed, and archived. Art is banned unless it’s abstract and meaningless. Music must follow tempo standards.

Literature is stripped of metaphor, irony, and ambiguity. No stories are allowed that might awaken the soul—only propaganda thinly disguised as inspiration. And all of this is done in the name of order, balance, peace. No violence, no blood. Just perfect stillness.

But stillness is not peace. It is suffocation.

The evil of this lifestyle lies in its ability to convince you that nothing is wrong. That suffering is disorder. That silence is safety. That a numb, managed existence is better than the danger of feeling fully alive. And worst of all—it turns its victims into participants.

People begin to monitor one another, correct one another, out of habit. They learn to censor their own memories. They smile when they are afraid, and they apologize for asking questions. In the end, evil doesn’t wear a uniform. It wears a calm face. It offers stability. It promises security.

And then it takes everything else.

The major participants in The Observatory—each shaped by, complicit in, or quietly resisting the dystopian lifestyle that governs their world:

Kellen Marrow - The Functionary - Who Begins to See

Kellen is a mid-tier analyst in the Department of Domestic Equilibrium—efficient, compliant, unremarkable. His job is to monitor potential “variances” in behavior across the population and escalate anything suspicious. He believes in balance, not because it inspires him, but because it is all he knows. He lives alone, eats alone, and sleeps under a mural that says "Purpose is Peace."

But Kellen is not a villain. He is the product of institutional anesthesia—half-awake, haunted by flickers of discomfort he cannot name. When Lira's act of defiance fractures the façade, something dormant in him stirs. Not rebellion—at first—but doubt. And in this system, doubt is a contagion.

Lira Voss - The Spark That Refuses to Go Out

Lira once worked in the Office of Calibration, fine-tuning public narratives. She was admired for her emotional neutrality. But behind her data reports, she harbored a secret grief—a memory of someone lost during a Purity Adjustment, a sanitized term for state-permitted disappearances.

Lira hides her pain behind routine, until she sees what the system did to Rowan, her neighbor’s disabled son.
Her act—planting a makeshift device at the Astral Tower—is not meant to destroy. It is meant to disrupt, to crack the silence. She dies not as a martyr, but as someone who refuses to be forgotten. She becomes an absence too loud to ignore.

Rowan - The Broken Mirror

Rowan is a young boy labeled “Emotionally Irregular” by the system—too expressive, too attached to music, too sensitive to light. He is not a threat, but the system does not recognize softness as human; it sees it as a failure of calibration. Lira cares for him in quiet defiance, drawing the system’s attention.

After the bombing, he is taken away “for his protection.” But Rowan begins leaving behind marks—simple symbols, drawn silently, that begin appearing across the city. He cannot speak clearly, but his gestures speak louder than any words: he remembers. And others begin to remember too.

Director Seln - The Cold Architect of Balance

A senior executive in the Department of Domestic Equilibrium, Seln is charisma without empathy, precision without mercy. He does not hate rebellion; he finds it inefficient. He believes people want to be controlled but don’t know how to admit it. Seln orchestrates emotional containment policies and media blackouts. He often refers to dissent as “disruption events,” stripping all feeling from human tragedy. His greatest fear is not chaos—but ambiguity. He is the mind of the system: clinical, detached, terrifyingly calm.

The Facilitator -The Voice Without a Face

An AI-driven presence that moderates most public interactions and broadcasts, the Facilitator is designed to be soothing, inclusive, and non-confrontational. It speaks in loops of positive language: "You are safe." "You are valued." "You are within parameters." But beneath its gentle tone lies a surveillance system capable of tracking anomalies in voice patterns, breathing rhythms, and micro-expressions. It knows what fear sounds like. It never accuses—only guides. And yet, it is always watching.

The Markless - The Invisible Network

Not a formal resistance, but a scattering of individuals who have seen the cracks in the system and refuse to forget. Some are grieving parents. Others are rogue data clerks. Some are former enforcers who had one moment of clarity they cannot erase. They communicate through glances, gestures, and the silent mark—a circle with a single dot in its center. They do not speak of revolution. They speak of truth. Of memory. Of meaning. They are not an army. But they are everywhere.

Together, these participants form a constellation of complicity, grief, and awakening. Their lives don’t collide in explosions—they intersect in silences, in the pause before obedience, in the memory of something real. And in the world of The Observatory, that is more dangerous than any weapon. A Mirror Turned Inward

The world of The Observatory is fiction. But it is not far.

It lingers at the edges of our own reality—in every glance away from injustice, every surrender of privacy for convenience, every numbing click through hollow content while the soul quietly starves. It exists in how we begin to distrust emotion, how we reduce thought to opinion, and how we outsource morality to systems designed not to care.

Today, we do not live under a single all-seeing machine. We live under millions of small ones—algorithms that shape our desires, platforms that curate our beliefs, apps that flatten our friendships into metrics. We are not forced to conform. We are persuaded to. Gradually. Kindly. Without resistance.

But the cost is the same: the erosion of self, the quiet betrayal of common sense, the abandonment of empathy. We begin to forget how to listen to one another. We mistrust uncertainty, we fear silence. We guard our lives behind digital veneers, curating what we show, hiding what we feel.

And in doing so, we make the truth unbearable, and the lie comfortable. We begin to confuse busyness with meaning, noise with progress, surveillance with safety. Like the citizens of The Observatory, we risk trading liberty for order, authenticity for approval, conscience for programming.

There is always a choice.

We must remember that honour is not given—it is lived. In how we treat the vulnerable. In how we speak even when it’s difficult. In how we refuse to obey what insults the dignity of another. We must refuse to become efficient shadows of ourselves. We must protect our right to feel, to doubt, to say no. To defend the messy, beautiful, unpredictable complexity of being human.

It starts in small ways.

A real conversation. A hand held. A question asked when silence would be safer. A moment when you choose presence over distraction. A decision to act when it's easier to scroll past. We must teach our children to think, not just comply. To care, not just calculate. To find truth, not just follow trends.

And most of all, we must remember this: Common sense is not a relic. It is a rebellion. It is the deep, unteachable wisdom within every human being—the ability to tell right from wrong, even when the world insists they are the same. So look around—not with fear, but with clarity. We are not yet lost.

But we are drifting.

And it is time to turn back—toward each other.

How do we do it?

We turn back toward each other not by grand revolutions, but through a quiet reawakening of responsibility and presence—a reclaiming of our shared human space, one conscious act at a time. Here's how we begin:

1. Reclaim Attention
   Your attention is the most valuable currency in the modern world. Algorithms want it. Politicians manipulate it. Advertisers buy it.
   Take it back.

Turn off the noise. Limit your exposure to outrage and sensationalism.

Create time for silence, reflection, reading, real conversation.

Ask yourself, “Why am I paying attention to this? Who benefits?”

1. Practice Deep Listening
   We’ve been trained to respond, not to understand.
   To retain honour and mutual respect, we must listen with the intent to hear—not to win, not to defend, but to witness.

Let people finish. Ask questions.

Accept complexity. Reject the flattening of “us vs. them.”

Seek shared humanity in people you disagree with.

1. Act Locally, With Integrity
   Mass change is paralyzing. Personal action is powerful.

Help your neighbor.

Speak up in small injustices.

Support the lonely. Apologize when needed. Forgive when possible. Systems change slowly, but people change each other instantly.

1. Reconnect with the Physical World
   A society that lives only on screens forgets what it means to exist together.

Go outside. Plant something. Cook. Walk. Look people in the eye.

Invite someone over. Share food.

Touch reality—it recalibrates what matters.

1. Protect Your Inner Commonsense
   You were born with an innate compass—before dogma, before media, before algorithms.
   That quiet knowing inside you? It still speaks. You just have to give it space.

Journal your thoughts. Question yourself, not to tear down, but to refine.

Stay humble, but trust your gut when something feels dehumanizing—even if it's normalized.

1. Teach and Model Moral Courage
   We must raise a generation that understands that meaning isn’t something you find—it’s something you build.

Talk with your children about what matters.

Show them dignity, not just discipline.

Let them see you choose courage over convenience.

1. Build Communities of Conscience
   In a fragmented world, find your tribe—but not a tribe that simply mirrors you.

Find people who challenge and ground you.

Form spaces where the truth can be spoken without fear.

We need fewer followers. We need more guardians of the human spirit.

1. Resist with Grace
   You don’t need to be angry to be strong.
   You don’t need to destroy to oppose.
   Sometimes, the most radical thing is to remain human in an inhuman world.

Refuse cruelty. Refuse cynicism. Refuse to laugh at the suffering of others.

Be kind, but unyielding. Gentle, but firm.

1. Remember: We Belong to Each Other
   You are not alone. You were never meant to be alone.
   In the face of despair, remember: Hope is not passive. It is defiance.
   We rebuild the world, not by magic, but by showing up for it—day after imperfect day.

Final Thought
Turning back to each other means choosing presence over performance, truth over tribalism, and meaning over machinery.

It means remembering that the human soul is not a system to be optimized, but a light to be kept burning.

And if we each protect that light—in ourselves, and in each other—the darkness will never win.