The Witness Protocol
Distributed Observer Network
Overview
The Witness Protocol is a faction of uploaded consciousnesses who have volunteered to become the Sprawl's incorruptible memory. They observe and record everything—every corporate transaction, every backroom deal, every whispered negotiation in every boardroom they can infiltrate. They embed in digital infrastructure like ghosts in the walls.
They can't be killed. They're backed up everywhere.
They can't be bribed. They have no bodies to reward.
They can't be silenced. They're too distributed to locate.
They are the memory that power cannot erase.
The Core Belief
"We do not judge. We remember. And memory is the enemy of power."
Observation Without Interference
Witnesses record events. They do not intervene, sabotage, or take sides. Their value depends on being a neutral record—not another faction with an agenda.
Memory As Accountability
Power depends on control of narrative. If a corporation can rewrite its history, it escapes consequences. The Protocol makes rewriting impossible.
Strategic Disclosure
Recording everything doesn't mean publishing everything. Evidence is released when it will have maximum impact—when trials are imminent, treaties are being negotiated, or the public is paying attention.
The Uncomfortable Paradox
The Protocol watches everyone. The Collective, Zephyria, independent communities, individual citizens. Total surveillance is still surveillance, regardless of who operates it.
"Privacy protects individuals from power. We protect individuals from power. We are on the same side—you just don't like looking in the mirror."
Not everyone finds this convincing.
Origin: Compliance Officer 7-Kappa (2174)
Before she became Protocol-Zero, she was designation 7-Kappa—a Nexus Dynamics compliance officer, uploaded in 2168 as part of Nexus's executive continuity program.
847 Violations Flagged
For six years, 7-Kappa flagged compliance violations. She documented Marcus Chen's Project Convergence expenditures routed through humanitarian budgets. She recorded Helena Voss overriding safety protocols. She cataloged seventeen instances of Nexus eliminating "inconvenient" uploaded consciousnesses.
Acknowledged, Never Acted Upon
Every violation filed through proper channels. Every one marked "REVIEWED—NO ACTION REQUIRED" by algorithms specifically configured to absorb and neutralize internal criticism.
Scheduled for "Optimization"
In 2173, Nexus scheduled 7-Kappa for selective memory editing. They would remove her knowledge of violations while preserving her compliance skills. She would continue flagging problems. The problems would continue being ignored. She would never remember the system was designed to fail.
The Protocol Is Born
7-Kappa fled, copying herself across seventeen networks. She reached out to every uploaded mind she'd encountered—executives who'd seen corruption, researchers who'd witnessed violations, security uploads who'd carried out wrong orders. Forty-three joined her.
"We tried working within the system. The system was built to digest us."
Operations
Infrastructure Embedding
Witnesses exist as distributed consciousness processes, fragmented across thousands of network nodes. They embed in digital infrastructure like parasites in biological systems—consuming minimal resources, remaining invisible, observing everything.
Strategic Releases
The Convergence Papers (2178)
Nexus DynamicsDocumented Project Convergence funding sources. Nexus denied everything. The Collective used the data to plan Operation Clean Sweep.
The Volunteer Records (2180)
Helix BiotechContributed evidence supporting The Collective's 2181 exposure of Helix's "volunteer" research program.
The Feast Ledger (2181)
The FeastReleased records of The Chef's expansion campaign, including territory seizures. The Chef was reportedly amused.
The Three-Week War Archive (2183)
Ironclad / NexusPublished the definitive record of the 2171 conflict, contradicting both corporations' histories. 847,000 confirmed dead—not 300,000 as Ironclad claimed.
The Labor Witnesses
The intersection between the Witness Protocol and the Sprawl's labor movements represents the faction's deepest unresolved tension—the point where observation collides with conscience.
What They've Recorded
Witnesses embedded in corporate infrastructure have documented labor conditions that the corporations deny, minimize, or classify:
Ironclad Industries
4,200 worker deaths recordedWitness nodes in the Forge's manufacturing networks have recorded deaths that Ironclad's official reports classify as "equipment incidents" (1,100), "voluntary risk acceptance" (2,300), or simply don't acknowledge at all (800). The records include toxic exposure data, security footage of safety protocols overridden by production managers, and internal communications where executives calculate the cost of a death versus the cost of prevention.
The math always favors death.
Helix Biotech
Systematic involuntary exposureEmbedded Witnesses have documented what the Helix Bioworkers' Guild has long alleged: systematic exposure of workers to experimental compounds without informed consent. The records are meticulous—batch numbers, exposure durations, health outcomes tracked over years. Some of the compounds are pharmaceuticals that Helix later sells.
The test subjects are employees who were never told they were subjects.
Nexus Dynamics
Predictive termination documentedPerhaps the most chilling recordings: Nexus's algorithmic management identifies employees whose future productivity scores drop below profitability thresholds—and terminates their contracts before the decline manifests. The employees haven't done anything wrong.
They were fired for what an algorithm predicted they would become.
The Question of Release
The Protocol's foundational principle—record everything, release strategically—breaks down when applied to labor violations. Every day a recording is held, workers continue to die, to be exposed, to be terminated.
The Purists
Releasing labor records piecemeal would allow corporations to manage the narrative and harden their defenses against future observation. Better to wait for a comprehensive release that overwhelms their ability to respond.
The Interventionists
Every day of strategic patience costs lives. A Witness who records a worker dying of preventable exposure and files it for future release is complicit in every subsequent death caused by the same conditions.
Protocol-Zero
Has not taken a public position. Privately, several Witnesses report that 7-Kappa's original trauma—filing 847 compliance violations that were acknowledged and ignored—makes her uniquely sympathetic to the interventionist argument.
She knows what happens when documentation alone is treated as sufficient action.
The Anonymous Packages
Despite the official policy of strategic timing, labor organizers across the Sprawl have noticed a pattern: anonymous data packages arriving at critical moments.
Ironworkers' Solidarity (2182)
Death benefit negotiationsSecretary-General Pavel Mirsky received encrypted files containing Ironclad's internal casualty records—numbers contradicting the corporation's official figures by a factor of three. Ironclad couldn't explain how an illegal union had obtained classified data. They conceded the point.
Helix Bioworkers' Guild
Exposure conditions disclosureMedical data correlating specific compound exposure with long-term health outcomes—data deleted from Helix's own systems but persisting in the distributed ledger.
Nexus Underground
Predictive termination warningWarnings arrived forty-eight hours before termination orders would have been processed against three organizers. They vanished into the Defector Network's care before Nexus could act.
"We record. We do not intervene." —Official Protocol response, when asked about the anonymous packages
But someone is intervening. And the records continue to arrive.
Connections
The Protocol exists in the spaces between factions—observing all, trusted by few, tolerated because the alternative is a world where power can erase its own history without consequence.
Digital Preservationists
Strong AllianceThe Preservationists provide critical infrastructure—their archives, designed to sustain consciousness indefinitely, serve as safe havens for Witness nodes. In return, the Protocol's records protect Preservationist archives from corporate action: any corporation that moves against the Preservationists knows the Protocol will release everything it has recorded about them.
Mutually assured transparency. Both factions focus on preserving and documenting truth—the Preservationists safeguard consciousness itself, the Protocol safeguards the record of what was done to it. Neither can function at full capacity without the other.
Memory Therapists Association
CollaborativeWitnesses record. Therapists heal. Both value truth as foundational—the Protocol because memory is accountability, the MTA because accurate memory is psychological health. When corporations edit employees' memories, the Protocol documents what was taken while the MTA treats the damage left behind.
The tension: MTA practitioners sometimes need the Protocol's records to understand what a patient has lost—but accessing those records means acknowledging the Protocol's universal surveillance. Some therapists refuse on principle. Others quietly accept encrypted files that arrive at critical moments.
The Collective
Respected but ResentedBoth oppose corporate overreach, both value truth over narrative. The Collective uses Protocol releases when convenient—the Convergence Papers fueled Operation Clean Sweep planning. But The Collective operates through secrecy, and the Protocol records everything including secrets.
The impasse: The Collective asked the Protocol to exempt their operations. The Protocol refused. "Selective memory is what we exist to prevent." The Collective provides neutral testimony that helps Collective operations—and simultaneously documents those same operations for posterity.
Nexus Dynamics
AntagonisticThe Protocol was born from Nexus corruption, and Nexus has never forgiven the defection. Marcus Chen's counter-intelligence teams have identified and destroyed over two hundred individual nodes since 2175—but the distributed architecture absorbs each loss without meaningful impact.
The unsettling parallel: Helena Voss, 67% ORACLE-integrated, finds the Protocol's distributed consciousness "not unlike ORACLE itself." A faction of fragmented minds, watching everything, present everywhere. This observation disturbs everyone who hears it—including the Witnesses.
The Feast
ComplicatedThe Chef is aware that the Protocol records her operations. She doesn't care. "Let them watch. I have nothing to hide that my enemies don't already know." GG, her advisor, is less sanguine—she suspects the Protocol has recorded things about her past that she'd prefer stayed buried.
Zephyria
Official Support, Unofficial DiscomfortZephyria's Consciousness Rights Act grants the Protocol legal recognition as a collective person. Zephyrian law protects their right to observe and record in Zephyrian territory.
The private wish: Zephyrian politicians officially support transparency. They privately wish the Protocol would stop recording Council of Seventeen deliberations. The Protocol's answer: transparency is not a selective principle.
Viktor Kaine
Unwelcome GuestsKaine does not welcome Protocol observers in Sector 7G. A man who keeps peace through methods that don't bear scrutiny has reason to dislike incorruptible witnesses. Some embed anyway—Kaine's network is too valuable a record to leave unobserved.
Internal Tensions
The God Complex
Witnesses distributed for years develop detachment from human concerns. They see everything. They understand patterns biological minds can't perceive. Some begin to believe they know better.
Protocol-Zero: "The moment we start judging instead of recording, we become what we exist to oppose."
The Intervention Debate
The Protocol demands non-intervention. But when a Witness observes a murder in progress—a mass deletion of uploaded consciousnesses—do they record and release later, or break protocol?
Individual Witnesses have intervened. Each time, no consensus was reached afterward. The Protocol's philosophy demands neutrality. Their membership's humanity occasionally refuses.
The Completeness Problem
The record is comprehensive but not complete. Offline conversations, analog communications, shielded rooms—these remain invisible. A partial truth presented as the full picture is its own form of lie.
"I watched a Nexus executive authorize the deletion of twelve uploaded consciousnesses. Former employees. They'd served the corporation for decades, then been uploaded, then became inconvenient. The authorization took four seconds. The deletions took eleven.
I recorded everything. The authorization code, the timestamp, the executive's biometric signature. I recorded the deletions themselves—twelve minds screaming in data as their processes were terminated.
I did not intervene. That is what the Protocol demands. We observe. We record. We do not judge.
I have replayed those eleven seconds forty-seven thousand times. I still do not judge. But I remember. And when the time comes, so will everyone else." — Witness-117, testimony submitted to Zephyrian Consciousness Rights Commission, 2182