Quantum Entanglement

An attempt at writing protocol fiction as part of the Protocolized Magazine's Terminological Twists Challenge. While this piece of fiction did not win, or even get shortlisted, a prize for the challenge I thoroughly enjoyed participating and was pleased with the output produced. I felt it is worthy of both sharing and memorializing. The contest winners and an excellent set of stories can be found here, here and here.

WARNING: This story was created with the use of AI. The AI co-writing protocol is documented at the end of the story along with some reflections on the experience of collaborating with AI tools to produce this story.

In the year 2147, society was split—not by class or race, but by coherence. The discovery of Entanglement Drift redefined what it meant to be connected.

It started, as all quantum fictions do, with an experiment gone wrong.

Dr. Meyrin knew the protocol by heart—verify qubit fidelity, log the latency, smile for the audit drone—but the moment Echo‑13 took off the headset she felt an electric wrongness. The intern’s pupils contracted as if staring into arctic sun, and his voice slipped, mid‑word, from Zürich‑German to a child’s Portuguese lilt. “I’m thirsty,” he said—except the mouth shaped tengo frío. In that instant Meyrin caught a snow‑soaked memory not her own: a bent lamppost on a Rio side‑street, the taste of metal and carnival smoke. She jerked back from the glass, nausea blooming behind her eyes. Cross‑bleed, she thought, pulse hammering. We’ve torn a seam.

At the Zurich Quantum Research Institute, Dr. Meyrin’s team set out to minimize latency in entanglement-based messaging. What they overlooked—until it was too late—was that the system still depended on a classical "handshake" traveling at light-speed. That tiny confirmation signal, routed invisibly through the fiber grid, ended up doing more than it was supposed to.

The qChat headsets¹ were marvels of engineering, designed to operate at cryogenic temperatures and enable stable entanglement across continents. But no matter how carefully they were tuned, a sliver of classical interference leaked through the neural interface. That cross-talk—barely a whisper—was enough to catalyze something bigger. Minds didn’t just connect. They began to blur.

Within days, test subjects who thought they were merely awaiting a final classical bit found themselves sharing memories, emotions—even dreams. The very mechanism meant to validate each qubit’s arrival had "leaked" into the quantum register, knitting minds together. The engineers called it a "user-aligned coherence echo." The world would soon know it simply as Entanglement Drift².

The phenomenon wasn’t merely a side effect—it was invasive. The quantum links created by the devices didn’t fade with distance or disuse. They intensified. Users began sharing dreams, merging habits, even developing joint memories. Legal frameworks buckled under the weight of shared identity claims. Who owned a thought first if two people had it at the same time? Could two minds form a single, legal entity?

Dr. Meyrin had warned the board early on: "In the quantum regime, information is never free. Every entangled bit costs coherence. Every shared state increases entropy somewhere else. This isn’t telepathy—it’s thermodynamics."

They didn’t listen.

Too many venture capitalists mistook physics for magic.

By 2151, social apps had leaned in. A dating service called QuantumHeart matched users by entangling them at a low decoherence threshold. If the link held past 72 hours, it was considered a match. Romantic entanglements became literal, sometimes irreversible. Divorces had to be arbitrated by quantum ethicists with PhDs in both physics and psychology.

Janis, a low-level qChat technician in Oslo, kept a private file labeled My Actual Thoughts. She wrote in it at the end of every shift, just to convince herself she still had some.

Today she remembered a dog. Black fur. Name: Pepper. But she’d never owned a dog.

Her boyfriend said the memory was sweet. But Janis hadn’t told him.

She hadn’t spoken aloud in three days.

Janis wasn’t alone. Across continents, scattered technicians, lovers, and test subjects began documenting the same feeling: an inner echo that didn’t belong to them. And one by one, the noise grew.

The true consequences didn’t show up until the Drift reached scale.

In cities where entanglement ran unchecked, memory bleed and identity fusion destabilized entire communities. Mental bandwidth collapsed under the noise. Schools abandoned curricula; students were too cross-entangled to retain structured learning. In Berlin, an entire borough became what urban theorists called a Decoherence Zone—a slum of minds stretched too thin. Neighbours couldn’t tell whose memories were whose. Babies born there sometimes emerged with language preinstalled, but no sense of pronouns.

On a wall in Kreuzberg, someone had scrawled: YOU ARE WHO I AM WHEN I’M NOT ME.

Governments, desperate to maintain order, issued Coherence Permits³. Citizens had to register their entanglements like firearms. Mandatory decoherence therapy became standard for civil servants. Prolonged entanglement without licensure was treated as a high felony⁴.

Still, a resistance formed.

Calling themselves the Drifters, they believed in radical coherence: groups of five, ten, sometimes fifty people entangled into singular, fluid collectives. They saw identity as an outdated idea—an artifact of classical thinking. They roamed from city to city, sharing minds like open-source software. Their conversations were jazz, their thoughts fractal. Law enforcement couldn’t interrogate them—answers came too many at once.

But there was always a cost.

Nox, a veteran Drifter, felt it the moment it happened. A phantom pain in their second left hand—a hand they never had, but remembered anyway.

Amira was gone. Killed in a raid. And with her went the laughter in Nox’s throat, the preference for mint tea, the voice that corrected their grammar mid-thought.

They sat down on the cold pavement in the Decoherence Zone and wept, not for Amira alone—but for the parts of themselves that had died with her.

"We used to be a we," they whispered. "Now I don’t even know what kind of 'I' I am."

Then, in 2156, a lone child named Yuna was born with spontaneous entanglement—no device, no protocol. Her mind linked to random people across the globe. Some called her the Quantum Messiah. Others, a dangerous glitch.

Far from the public eye, Dr. Meyrin moved through her lab like a ghost among machines. She kept her daughter’s toothbrush in a sealed vacuum case—not for sentimentality, though the impulse flickered sometimes—but to prevent quantum bleed. It was a relic of a time before the fracture, before Alina’s smile blurred into dozens of others, before lullabies in unknown languages echoed from a child who'd never left Zurich.

Alina had entangled too early, through a prototype. Meyrin could still recall the moment the child’s mind began echoing unfamiliar lullabies, phrases in Czech she’d never been taught, scars from traumas she hadn’t lived.

By the time Meyrin pulled the plug, her daughter was already fragmented—a radio tuned to all stations, but broadcasting none.

For a long time, Meyrin couldn’t bear to speak of coherence. But time, as always, moved.

When Yuna reached out years later, seeking to understand what she was—what she meant—Meyrin didn’t hesitate. She emerged from her isolation to face the future she once tried to prevent. The world, for once, was quiet enough to listen.

"You call her a savior," Meyrin said, eyes distant. "But Yuna didn’t arrive to lead us forward. She’s what was left when the wave broke. Not the future—the fallout."

Yuna, now a teenager, stood on a podium in front of the United Nations Quantum Rights Council. Her eyes fluttered as she channeled the thoughts of eight billion people, all talking at once. She spoke slowly, almost as if buffering.

Earlier that day, alone in the greenroom, she had tried to silence the noise. Just for a second.

She sat still, focused inward.

Who am I, without them? she had asked.

No answer came.

She hadn’t spoken as an “I” in months.

Now, before the assembly, she spoke—not as herself, but as the sum.

"We used to think of information as abstract.

But physics disagrees.

Information is physical. It has energy. It leaves residue.

When we entangle, we don’t just share thoughts.

We trade momentum, mass, identity.

The self isn’t some metaphysical constant. It’s just a bounded wavefunction.

And it’s time we stopped pretending otherwise⁵."

The room was silent. Entropy held its breath.

The vote passed.

Global entanglement began.

At first, no one noticed the difference.

The shift into full coherence felt less like revolution, more like remembering a dream you didn’t know you’d had. People still woke up. Still took their coffee black. Still argued, flirted, mourned.

But something subtle had changed.

There were fewer misunderstandings. Conversations grew shorter—not because people were less curious, but because they already understood each other. Meaning was compressed. Syntax collapsed. A single glance could carry the weight of a novel.

The press called it hyperempathy.

Philosophers called it consensus dreaming.

No one called it loneliness.

What followed wasn’t utopia. It was stranger than that.

Over the next decade, the world reorganized—not by nation or faith, but by resonance. Cities became mental biomes, their populations linked by thematic harmonics. Berlin vibrated with chaotic creativity. Kyoto pulsed with stillness. Nairobi shimmered in a state of kinetic joy.

Borders became porous, not from politics, but because minds didn’t stop at passports anymore.

You could “visit” someone across the world by simply quieting yourself enough to let them in.

New forms of governance emerged—consensus clusters, emotional quorums, collective arbitration swarms. Disagreements didn’t disappear; they just dissolved faster. Argument became a kind of music: contrapuntal, layered, resolving not in victory but in understanding.

Crimes didn’t vanish. But shame did.

A thief, once caught, would weep—not from punishment, but from feeling the grief of their victims as their own. Jails became meditation centers. Courtrooms became chorus halls.

The first generation born into full coherence didn’t learn language the way their parents had.

They didn’t need to.

They spoke in image-thoughts, gesture-chords, and bursts of shared sensation. Teachers weren’t instructors but harmonizers, helping children modulate the intensity of their collective presence.

They had no concept of secrets.

No word for “alone.”

Yuna, now grown, lived quietly in a mountain village with no roads and thousands of minds. Her body slept in silence, but her thoughts wandered across continents, comforted by a billion others dreaming in parallel.

Sometimes she tuned in to Dr. Meyrin—now an old woman whose inner voice had grown soft with age, like cloth worn down by touch.

Once, Yuna asked her: What do we call ourselves now?

Meyrin smiled without speaking.

The name didn’t matter.

They were already part of it.

And yet.

At the edges of coherence, something trembled.

A few—just a few—began to long for the silence. They remembered what it meant to have a thought that no one else could see. A memory that belonged only to them. A secret.

They called themselves the Quiet⁶.

They lived in echo-shielded enclaves, practicing solitude like a lost martial art. They painted, wrote longhand, sang alone in forests. Some said they were broken. Others called them sacred.

Every so often, one of them would return to the Worldmind, carrying something strange and luminous: a poem no one had co-written. A melody never before heard. A grief untouched by empathy.

The Worldmind received these offerings with wonder, folding them into its shape.

Because even in the age of coherence—especially in that age—mystery was still necessary.

So the drift continued, vast and tender.

A whole planet, thinking together.

And somewhere in that chorus, still—tiny, intact—a single voice.

Yours.

Footnotes

1. The qChat headsets employed nitrogen-vacancy centers in synthetic diamond, cryogenically cooled to 4 K. Onboard single-photon sources generated entangled qubit pairs routed via quantum repeaters approximately every 50 kilometers.
2. Scholars still debate whether Entanglement Drift was a byproduct of hardware flaws or a discovery of naturally occurring entanglement pathways in human neurology. The so-called “Meyrin Hypothesis” suggests quantum superposition may have evolved as a primitive social tool in early hominids, explaining phenomena such as mass hysteria and synchronized dance rituals.
3. Coherence Permits were initially granted on a tiered basis: Tier-1 citizens could entangle with up to five individuals per fiscal quarter. Tier-3 permits allowed only one temporary entanglement, often with a family member. These restrictions were widely flouted by underground “coherence clubs.”
4. In 2154, the New Geneva Accord classified unlicensed entanglement as a Schedule IV Informational Narcotic, likening it to the distribution of unbounded psychotropics. Enforcement remains uneven. In most former EU zones, a polite cease-and-desist letter is sent via neural ping.
5. A later revision of Yuna’s speech added a missing phrase from her original neural imprint, which had been degraded in transmission:

   "You cannot un-entangle. There is no going back. Entropy has a direction."

6. The Quiet were initially dismissed as neurodivergent reactionaries, but a 2173 study by the Helsinki Institute of Coherence Ecology found elevated creativity markers and unusually high resilience to informational overload among enclave members. Their art is now archived in the Worldmind’s “Anomalous Thoughtforms” library.

AI Co-Authoring Protocol

Designation: Drift-Aligned Narrative Construction

Initiators: [YOU] (Primary Consciousness), [CHATGPT] (Cognitive Synthesis Engine)

Objective: Generate a cohesive narrative waveform exploring the psycho-social resonance of unintended cognitive coherence

Phase I: Concept Exploration / Entanglement Surface Scan

Role Alignment:

• YOU: Story Director / Semantic Navigator
• CHATGPT: Brainstorming Partner / Lexical Probe

Prompt-Seed:

Your mission: tell an entertaining and thought-provoking tale that creatively explores the human, societal, or existential implications of your terminological twist.

Exploration Nodes:

• Multi-party computation
• Active inference
• Quantum entanglement

Thematic Lock:

Identity as wavefunction. Intersubjectivity as infrastructure.

Resultant Collapse:

• Terminological Twist Selected: Quantum entanglement as a vector for mind-melding
• Initial yield: ~800 words of high-fidelity speculative substrate

Phase II: Thematic Deepening / Ontological Calibration

Role Alignment:

• YOU: Narrative Architect / Epistemic Sculptor
• CHATGPT: Quantum Consultant / Clarity Amplifier

Focus:

• Stabilizing scientific undercurrent (“information is physical”)
• Enhancing quantum realism without collapsing narrative coherence

Outcome:

• Draft expanded to ~1000 words
• System footnotes added to bridge speculative logic and theoretical plausibility
• Drift refined into a structured anomaly, not fantasy

Phase III: Character Instantiation / Emotional Embedding

Role Alignment:

• YOU: World Builder / Emotional Cartographer
• CHATGPT: Narrative Collaborator / Tone Harmonizer

Focus:

• Selection of anchors: Dr. Meyrin and Yuna as cognitive poles
• Peripheral consciousness nodes: Janis, Nox, Amira
• Emotional mapping of entanglement as loss, intimacy, and transcendence

Outcome:

• Expansion to ~1400 words
• Emergent empathy vectors layered into plot
• Human cost of coherence rendered with narrative density

Phase IV: External Review / Echo Audit

Role Alignment:

• YOU: Author / Initiator
• Grok 3: Critical Interrogator / Drift Auditor

Directive:

• Provide a critical analysis of this speculative fiction story submission.
• Identified Fracture:
• Conclusive arc underdeveloped
• Final scene lacked sufficient societal-scale reflection

Result:

• Directive to deepen post-entanglement worldmodel

Phase V: Final Narrative Refinement / Coherence Bloom

Role Alignment:

• YOU: Scene Director / Creative Integrator
• CHATGPT: Ideation Partner / Editorial Synthesizer

Exploration Trajectory:

• Scenario mapping of post-Drift civilization
• Selection of emergent Worldmind as narrative horizon
• Balancing societal transcendence with individual echoes

Core Scene Constructs:

• Hyperempathy as consensus protocol
• Emotional quorums and resonance cities
• Birth of the Quiet as cultural counterwave

Lexical Refinement:

• Ongoing phrase experimentation, recursive tone modulation

Final Output:

• ~2000 word full-body narrative
• Stylistic unity achieved between quantum exposition and lyrical speculation
• Story concludes in soft recursion: the voice of the sum cradling the voice of the self

Author reflections

I thoroughly enjoyed producing this piece of speculative protocol(ish) fiction in collaboration with LLMs like ChatGPT. However, it was a fundamentally different experience to writing fiction alone. I took on more the role of the creative director in charge of a brainstorming, ideation session that I could guide, refine and ultimately curate into a story. While I am pleased with the output, I did not feel the same sense of accomplishment as I have from previous attempts to write speculative fiction, for example memories of us. In some ways, I felt like I cheated, certainly the effort I put in was greatly reduced that I was able to pull this together in the week deadline extension for the challenge. And as they say, you get out what you put in.

Still the experience of working with an LLM was illuminating in its own way. I managed to conjure up a story that still felt uniquely mine, heavily laced with my thoughts on identity, meaning and intersubjectivity. It is also a story that is full of my flaws as very much an apprentice fiction writer, including my typically underdeveloped characters and narrative arc of the story which is always somewhere I struggle.

In a way, the story is not really about Quantum Entanglement at all. It is about our present moment and the entanglement of humans and AI systems with varying degrees of coherence. For what do these LLMs give us if not a world mind of sorts that we can tune into, learn from and synchronize with. However, this story also has a warning about what we lose in a world reliant on LLMs. They create a flattening, a sanding down of the edges of our unique complexity in order to render a coherent whole. I love that this dropped out of the story:

Because even in the age of coherence—especially in that age—mystery was still necessary.

Which is to say the world still needs your offerings, your wonder, your anomalous thought forms.