Jamverse
Protocolized Writing Competition #4

Build an artifact
for the Jamverse.

Pick elements from one or more of the universe toy boxes. Write something under 1,000 words — a poem, a forum thread, a comic panel, an encyclopedia entry. The best artifacts reveal something the universes never wrote.

$1,000 Grand Prize
10 × $200 Runner-up Prizes
July 31 Deadline
Submit your entry → Generate a prompt →
The toy boxes

Each universe author has curated a set of elements for this contest. Your artifact must draw from at least one — preferably more than one universe. Click any universe name to read the stories and see the full toybox.

The Stockton Chronicles The Stockton Chronicles Near-future Bay Area — automation upends careers, communities, and moral compasses.
  • ▸Liquid Democracy — civic participation beyond election cycles
  • ▸Room-scale computing — projectors and sensors reshaping physical space
  • ▸Always-on AI agents — in smart glasses, accountable to wearer or employer
  • ▸Immersive storytelling — facilitated, dynamic digital narrative experiences
  • ▸Biotech frontier — fast-moving at-home biohacking ecosystem
  • ▸Shared housing co-ops — economic response to displacement from inner cities
  • ▸Influencer complex — economy of attention with unclear disclosure rules
  • ▸Basic Income — alternative social safety nets
  • ▸Bay Area / Stockton setting — displacement from inner cities
  • ▸Automation economy — careers rendered no longer viable
Stories + full toybox →
Legends & Ledgers Legends & Ledgers Folkloric timeless world — logging camps, island theocracies, woods that remember things.
  • ▸Invented authority — a fabricated master that generates rulings its maker never issued
  • ▸Myth as protection — exaggerating a person into a monster so others leave them alone
  • ▸Protocol of reply — an accretion shrine where each object answers the prior one
  • ▸Shrine-from-refuse — a guardian deity raised from cast-offs over a real person's death
  • ▸Engineered comfort — an environment tuned to soothe, and the unease it breeds
  • ▸Metabolizing crisis — absorbing shock by changing routines, not reckoning with it
  • ▸Bureaucratic obstruction — the form that never gets filed lets a forbidden thing persist
  • ▸Welcome-initiation — the foul tea, the questioning, the month of consideration
  • ▸The Prompt-book — generational codex of gesture and the rebellions against it
  • ▸The Concord — a planned community organized around invented authority, seen across eras
  • ▸Fortress Island — failed authoritarian state; collapse opens emergent, unsanctioned life
  • ▸The Bridge — seam between island and mainland: shadow-market, smuggling route, tourist ferry
  • ▸The Woods & the Disposition — woods that remember things; the accretion shrine
  • ▸The traveling show — Floyd Haggerty's Wild West Extravaganza Spectacular!
  • ▸The Big Man — the gentle giant whose legend outgrows its origin
Stories + full toybox →
Trainverse (UET-1) Trainverse (UET-1) A political thriller on a train from Lisbon to Laos — a moving special economic zone balancing priorities across legal jurisdictions.
  • ▸Rule 1 — the train must be moving
  • ▸Rule 2 — ECOROUTE is always running
  • ▸Rule 3 — stopping is a jurisdictional event
  • ▸Bio-bands — compliance status broadcast green through black
  • ▸ECOROUTE — continuous biometric surveillance with retroactive scoring
  • ▸The Pono — institutional memory device; language of "nothing of note"
  • ▸Mirage Handler — Cold War routing protocol repurposed for human smuggling
  • ▸Caduceus DRZ — pharmaceutical compliance zone, identity reset on entry/exit
  • ▸Zoothesia DRZ — perceptual classifier zone, objects withdrawn from perception
  • ▸Car 7 — gauge-change car, most intensive biometric read on the route
  • ▸Business car — privacy-filmed windows, closest to off-record but not off-record
  • ▸Casino Car "Loss and Gain" — documented but undeveloped in canon
  • ▸The route — Lagos to Singapore, 23,300km, 17 jurisdictions
Stories + full toybox →
Zoothesia Zoothesia A city where a harm-prediction algorithm decides, per observer, who can be seen.
  • ▸The Zoo — central algorithm hiding people based on harm prediction
  • ▸Overlays — deep AR shaping sight, sound, and other senses
  • ▸Kapala-Halo — headset that strips away the Zoo's AR protections
  • ▸Foulmaxxing — extreme body modification to become intentionally hidden
  • ▸Faceting — gemstone-embedding subculture; final form: becoming a still watcher in rock
  • ▸ProfBot — real-time tutoring AI agent carried by most young people
  • ▸Mayaford — the city (named for māyā, Sanskrit: illusion)
  • ▸Charntown — the invisible tent city on the outskirts, existing in a perceptual blind spot
  • ▸Oren — the Zoothetic psychopomp; guide to perceptual underworlds
Stories + full toybox →
Oblique Protocols
Honour thy error
as a hidden intention.

Stuck on where to start? Draw a random technology, a thematic question, and a universe element — then build your artifact from that constraint. The sideways approach.

Draw your prompt →
Technology drawn from the four universes
Thematic Question a lens, not a rule
Universe Element a place, figure, or protocol

What's an artifact?

For this competition we're looking for small pieces — under 1,000 words (200–700 is the sweet spot), a single comic strip, or a poem — that explore, expand, or create new pieces of canon, lore, and narrative within the Jamverse.

Writing

Other

We want your artifact to include:

1
At least one toy box element. Draw from the toy boxes above — preferably more than one universe.
2
A surprising traffic jam. Emergent effects, not simple explications. See below.
3
The theme of stigmergy. You don't need to name it — but it should be structurally present.

Traffic jams

Traffic jams are the complicated effects that novel technologies, structures, and protocols produce. They aren't exceptions to technological or protocological structures — they're emergent features of those structures. They exist even when everything is working perfectly.

We want artifacts that reveal a surprising jam — an "ah-ha!" — rather than simply explicate something already in the universe. What strange rules, consequences, failures, and successes emerge from the interstices between and within the Jamverse worlds? This is a central judging consideration.

Logistics & prizes

Submit your entry →

Deadline: July 31, 2026 · Up to 3 entries per person

Example artifacts

Each built from a random Oblique Protocols draw — technology, thematic question, universe element.

Technology Foulmaxxing — extreme body modification to become intentionally hidden
Thematic Question Is desire compatible with being truly known by a system?
Universe Element Charntown — the invisible tent city, existing in a perceptual blind spot
Zoothesia Personal ad
Seeking Connection

Posted to the Charntown Mutual Aid Board, visibility restricted to render-threshold users

M, 34. Phobisculted to a Zoo score of 0.91 (predation tier, ambient). I am visible to approximately 200 people in this city. I would like to meet some of them.

I live in the tent district off the eastern overpass. I have a bicycle with a broken gear and a collection of clocks that no longer keep time. I find this useful for not knowing when things are supposed to happen.

My modifications: both forearms (embedded ceramic shards, antler), one ear (absent, replaced with scar tissue that the Zoo scores as a weapon), scalp (alopecia universalis, induced). My Zoo profile categorises me as ambient threat, non-proximate. I take this as a compliment. The Zoo doesn’t know what to do with ambient things.

What I am looking for: someone also operating below the render threshold. Someone who has found a way to want things the system cannot locate. I am told this is called desire. I have not confirmed.

Note: I do not have a ProfBot. I am not interested in people who have ProfBots. I am not interested in being defined for me in real time.

I will be at the eastern gate Tuesday evenings. I will be the one wearing the clocks.

Technology Protocol of reply — an accretion shrine where each object answers the prior one
Thematic Question What survives — and what gets mythologized — when a system collapses?
Universe Element The Woods & the Disposition — woods that remember things; the accretion shrine
Legends & Ledgers Interpretive plaque
The Disposition — An Interpretive Notice

Heritage Commission of the New Concord Territories

The Disposition is a naturally occurring accretion site located 2.3km north of the Old Concord boundary, accessible via the Heritage Corridor footpath (markers: white, then blue where the white ends).

Visitors are encouraged to leave an object in response to an object already present. This is the protocol of reply. The practice predates the Heritage Commission by approximately seventy years and the Heritage Commission has chosen to formalise rather than prohibit it, as prohibition was tried between 1987 and 1991 and the site simply accumulated objects faster.

What should I leave? Something that responds to what is already there. Do not bring objects from home for this purpose. The structure has rejected prepared replies in documented cases: they are found the following morning displaced from the site, sometimes considerable distances away.

What is the Disposition for? This question is outside the Heritage Commission’s jurisdiction.

Can I take something? No.

What is the large figure in the northeast quadrant? That is Dee Dee. Please do not approach Dee Dee. Please do not leave objects addressed to Dee Dee. Dee Dee does not participate in the protocol of reply and has not participated since the incident of 2003, which is not Heritage Commission business.

Hours: Dawn to dusk. The site is open at night but the Heritage Commission is not responsible for what is open at night.

Technology The Pono — institutional memory device; language of "nothing of note"
Thematic Question Motion is legal protection — what can persist only because it never stops?
Universe Element Business Car — privacy-filmed windows, closest to off-record but not off-record
Trainverse PONO log entry
UET-1 PONO · Service Day 4,017 · BC-9 · Almaty → Urumqi

21:14 — Routine biometric sweep of BC-9 completed. No anomalies. Passengers in assigned seats.

21:19 — Passenger in BC-9/Seat 4A (bio-band: green, name sealed per business class privacy protocol) requested window privacy film engaged. Engaged.

21:23 — Nothing of note.

21:31 — Nothing of note.

21:44 — Nothing of note.

21:51 — Nothing of note.

22:07 — BC-9 attendant Horváth reported an anomalous scent in the rear compartment. Scent identified as: soil. Source: unlocated. Logged for maintenance.

22:09 — Nothing of note.

22:34 — Passenger in BC-9/Seat 4A exited to lavatory. Returned 4 minutes, 12 seconds later. ECOROUTE scoring: no change.

22:58 — Nothing of note.

23:00 — Segment complete. Train continues.

The soil was wet. The window was cold. The train was moving. Everything was fine.
Technology Overlays — deep AR shaping sight, sound, and other senses
Thematic Question How do invisible rules shape a life — and what changes once someone finally sees the rule?
Universe Element The Bridge — seam between island and mainland: shadow-market, smuggling route
Zoothesia Legends & Ledgers Poem
Render / Render
The algorithm withdrew you from the bridge so I crossed without seeing you. You were there: I have this on good authority. The air where you stood still held your shape — a warmth, a pressure, the ghost of a word you were saying to someone who could still see you. I have since been tested. My score suggests I would have known. The harm I might have done to a stranger on a bridge in October is a number with six significant figures. The strange thing is I would have stopped to ask directions. I would have said: excuse me — do you know the way across? And you would have pointed at the water, at the far bank, at the simple fact of the other side. The algorithm was protecting you from a man who would have asked directions. I have been thinking about this for some time now.