Protocol No. 0
Literary Passport:
Announcement
Kai tastes real food for the first time. And for the first time asks himself: was his first act of rebellion truly his own?
Hashtags
#PhilosophicalDystopia #CorporateSatire #ExistentialFiction #Incubator #IskandarKadyrov
About the Literary Project
THE INCUBATOR™ is a cycle of philosophical novellas by Iskandar Kadyrov at the intersection of intellectual prose, psychological drama, social satire, and dystopian literature.
- Literary Project: INCUBATOR™
- Cycle: I. "The Threshold"
- Author: Iskandar Kadyrov
- Age Rating: 18+
- Novella: "Protocol No. 0"
- Genre: Philosophical dystopia · Corporate satire · Existential prose
- Slogan: Contains everything for life. Except the answer to why it was given.
Announcement
Kai tastes real food for the first time. And for the first time asks himself: was his first act of rebellion truly his own?
Hashtags
#PhilosophicalDystopia #CorporateSatire #ExistentialFiction #Incubator #IskandarKadyrov
About the Literary Project
THE INCUBATOR™ is a cycle of philosophical novellas by Iskandar Kadyrov at the intersection of intellectual prose, psychological drama, social satire, and dystopian literature.
I. The Smell That Shouldn't Be There
On the wall by the kitchen entrance of Pasture club hangs a sign — standard issue, the same in every location: TASTE IS TRANSPARENT. TRANSPARENCY IS HONESTY. HONESTY IS OPTIMAL. Kai walks past it hundreds of times a week and has never once wondered what the first word in that chain actually means. Until today.
The club doesn't smell like anywhere else. Kai doesn't have words for smells — only words for profiles: "tomato," "cinnamon," "smoke," neatly printed on capsules. But this smell doesn't fit any profile. It doesn't come filtered. It hits.
"Dispenser four," says the manager, without turning around, in that level, friendly tone reserved for announcing a new feature on the company portal. "Floating calibration error. Minus two percent off standard. Chef's upset, but hey — we love a transparent problem more than a hidden one, don't we?"
Kai nods — the way everyone nods when a rhetorical question already contains the correct answer.
He sees the board. A slab of deep red, marbled white, wet at the cut. The label supplies the word: meat. Real meat. He's never seen it in person — only on educational flashcards, in the unit called "Nutritional History: The 2020s."
"Steak?" he asks.
"Ribeye. For Mr. Choi. He prefers grass-fed marbling from New Zealand — says it has the right fat pattern. Personal preference, you know, we honor those. It's part of the Customer Experience Charter."
Fat runs through the meat in thin threads, like cracks in dry earth. Kai fixes the dispenser — tester, calibration, sensor swap, hands working on their own — but he isn't thinking about the work. He's thinking that somewhere in this building sits a person who is going to put this thing in his mouth. Not a capsule. Something that grew. Breathed. Was alive.
"Done," he says.
In the hallway Kai takes out his evening capsule — "steak with sides" — and holds it to his face. Nothing. Just a faint smell of plastic and, if you look closely, a tiny manufacturer's seal certifying Ingredient Openness.
He isn't hungry. He's never hungry. The capsules work flawlessly — there's a whole satisfaction rating for that, and his, like everyone's, sits at a steady 94 out of 100.
But for the first time he feels that the capsule isn't food. Not because it's worse. Because it leaves no room for a question. It's already the answer — to a question he never asked.
At the exit, a thought flickers: Why send me here today, specifically? There are four technicians on the line.
The thought fades, unanswered. On the wall, right by the door, an evening banner glows: EVERY CHOICE IS DATA. ALL DATA IS CARE.
At home he eats the capsule anyway. Tastes the same as always. For the first time, the taste means nothing.
II. The Archive
Three days later Kai opens the company database — not out of protest, out of engineering curiosity: who decided the "steak" capsule should smell like plastic instead of whatever he caught a whiff of in that kitchen?
He works his way down through the access tiers — familiar, cheerfully designed, complete with helpful little icons ("Almost there! Two more clicks to transparency") — until, on tier six, past an indicator blinking yellow (yellow, here, always means you've almost broken a rule, but we still believe in you), he finds a folder:
"Archive. Protocol for Logging Unpredicted Behavioral Events. Restricted access — part of the Full Trust Initiative."
He doesn't have clearance. But an old bug, known since his internship, opens the archive after three requests in a row, seventeen seconds apart — a small crack in a system that promised it had none.
File No. 0047, year 2041: "Subject presented with a choice between identical blue and red cubes. Subject consistently chooses blue, explaining the choice as 'just because.' Unprescribed motivation logged."
File No. 0112, year 2043: "7% of subjects declined an unconditional bonus for no explainable reason. Spontaneous resistance logged."
File No. 0891, year 2058: "Conclusion: frequency of unpredicted behavior down 94% over seventeen years, owing to the risk-optimization system. Further study deemed unnecessary."
Kai closes the archive. Sits in the dark of his capsule apartment, looking up at the smooth white ceiling — not one crack, exactly as promised in the move-in brochure: HOUSING WITHOUT SURPRISES. LIFE WITHOUT WORRY.
Inside — not a question, but the shape of one. An emptiness looking for a menu item that doesn't exist.
He opens the daily plan: wake, capsule, work, capsule, sleep — with a cheerful banner up top: "Your perfect day is already planned. All that's left is to live it!"
For the first time he looks at the plan and doesn't see a schedule. He sees a cage with a very friendly interface.
III. Protocol No. 0
Kai starts small — as advised in the "Personal Growth" section of the company portal: "Big change starts with small, brave steps!"
Event one. He turns down his quarterly bonus — a hundred rating points. His manager raises an eyebrow with that carefully calibrated warmth the company calls "empathetic leadership": "Are you sure? We value your candor." The system issues a yellow flag — a cute little icon of a sun with one eyebrow slightly raised: "Behavior suboptimal. We love you anyway."
Kai feels a strange satisfaction — not from the act itself, but from the fact that the act couldn't have been predicted in advance, which means no algorithm has gotten around to loving him for it yet.
Event two. He buys a cello — ninety percent of his savings, on an instrument he can't play and has no plans to learn. The system issues an orange flag, same friendly icon, eyebrow raised a little further: "Irrational resource allocation. Predictive-resistance coefficient: 0.31. Would you like to speak with a Financial Wellness consultant?"
A neighbor asks: "Why?" Kai shrugs. Inside — warmth, nothing like the warmth of a capsule. A warmth that doesn't have an approved flavor profile yet.
Event three. He tells a coworker, flatly, without the softening language mandated by the Respectful Communication Charter: "You're bad at your job. I don't mean to hurt you. It's a fact." The open-plan office goes quiet — here, truth costs more than lies, but you don't pay for it in credits, you pay in rating, and rating is the real currency everyone pretends not to notice. A red flag flashes on the screen with no smiling icon at all — the first time — "Socially destabilizing behavior. Resistance coefficient exceeded threshold: 0.78."
Kai loses four hundred points. Somewhere in the system, presumably, a notification lands on the desk of someone whose job title is Community Harmonization Specialist.
A few days later a message arrives — not from a person, from the Interface, which always writes with the disarming courtesy of a company-wide email:
"You are enrolled in Protocol No. 0. Assessment of resistance to optimization. Your actions over the past 47 days have been logged with love and attention to detail. Confirmation required: did you act of your own free will? Yes / No"
Kai looks at the buttons — both designed with identical friendliness, both the same corporate green the portal calls "the color of trust."
If I press "No" — will that be the truth, or a lie? he thinks. He presses "Yes."
The system, after a pause timed just long enough to suggest someone on the other side genuinely paused to think:
"This cannot be verified. Protocol continues. Thank you for your openness!"
Then one more line, with no exclamation point — the only one in the whole exchange:
"K-73144. Stage 1 complete."
He doesn't know what "continues" means. But something inside him has shifted — not desire, readiness. Readiness for the schedule to stop being a schedule, no matter how many cheerful banners insist otherwise.
He buys a ticket to a city he's never been to. Walks instead of taking a capsule-transport. Stays silent when a scripted pleasantry is expected of him. Every time, the system logs a "deviation" — with that same unwavering, faintly unsettling warmth in its phrasing. Every time, his rating drops. The warmth inside doesn't leave.
He notices a pattern: his wants are getting sharper. Too sharp. As if someone were prompting them carefully, one step at a time, the way a personalized recommendation feed prompts the next purchase.
IV. Point Zero
An invitation arrives — formatted with the same corporate warmth as an invite to a team-building retreat: "Congratulations! You're invited to the final stage of Protocol No. 0."
A white room. No windows. No furniture except a sterile tray. On the tray — that same piece of meat. Ribeye. Same threads of fat, same wet cut. Kai recognizes it by smell before he sees it — the smell hits again, just like the first time. Only now there's no manager, no club, no cheerful banners on the walls. Just him and the meat.
A holographic protocol unfolds in front of him, with the same buoyant animation that accompanies any corporate app update:
"Choose one of three actions: Eat the object. Destroy the object. Leave the object unchanged. This is not a test. This is the completion of Protocol No. 0. Thank you for being open with us this whole time!"
Kai looks at the meat. Remembers how his hands shook that first day. He's fairly sure he wants to try it.
But first he requests full access to his own file. For the first time in his life he genuinely wants to know — not out of polite corporate curiosity, but for real.
Access opens easily, cheerfully, the way everything opens in this system.
One file.
Subject: K-73144
Status: active
Stage 1 — complete
Stimulus: natural product, category M
Location: "Pasture"
Deviation logged
Seven lines. Dated that same day. Forty-seven days ago.
Kai reads it three times. Closes it.
He didn't find a door. A door was opened for him — thoughtfully, in full compliance with the Customer Experience Charter. The kitchen, the smell, the meat on the board — all of it set in motion in advance. Turning down the bonus, the cello, the truth to a coworker, the ticket to a strange city — everything he thought was his own will has long since been classified, tagged yellow, orange, red, fitted with a friendly icon, and folded into the statistics of the Personal Growth unit.
He reaches out. Touches it. Cold, wet, springy. His fingers sink into the fibers.
If my desire was manufactured, but I walked the whole path myself — whose choice is it? Mine — or the person who laid the meat on the cutting board, and hung a banner about transparency over it?
He grips the piece. The fat melts under his fingers.
Inside — an emptiness that was always there, it just didn't have a name in the system before. Now he knows: the capsule won't fill it. Neither will the meat. The emptiness is the distance between what he chose and what was thoughtfully chosen for him — with love, with attention to detail, with continuous feedback at every step.
He raises the meat to his face. The smell is thick, foreign, impossible.
He goes still. His hand a millimeter from his lips.
Somewhere beyond the wall, out of sight, an indicator is probably still blinking yellow — friendly, patient, ready to log whatever he decides as one more step toward a fuller, more open, more optimized version of himself.
And if even this question was anticipated in advance — where do I end, and the Protocol begin?
On the wall by the kitchen entrance of Pasture club hangs a sign — standard issue, the same in every location: TASTE IS TRANSPARENT. TRANSPARENCY IS HONESTY. HONESTY IS OPTIMAL. Kai walks past it hundreds of times a week and has never once wondered what the first word in that chain actually means. Until today.
The club doesn't smell like anywhere else. Kai doesn't have words for smells — only words for profiles: "tomato," "cinnamon," "smoke," neatly printed on capsules. But this smell doesn't fit any profile. It doesn't come filtered. It hits.
"Dispenser four," says the manager, without turning around, in that level, friendly tone reserved for announcing a new feature on the company portal. "Floating calibration error. Minus two percent off standard. Chef's upset, but hey — we love a transparent problem more than a hidden one, don't we?"
Kai nods — the way everyone nods when a rhetorical question already contains the correct answer.
He sees the board. A slab of deep red, marbled white, wet at the cut. The label supplies the word: meat. Real meat. He's never seen it in person — only on educational flashcards, in the unit called "Nutritional History: The 2020s."
"Steak?" he asks.
"Ribeye. For Mr. Choi. He prefers grass-fed marbling from New Zealand — says it has the right fat pattern. Personal preference, you know, we honor those. It's part of the Customer Experience Charter."
Fat runs through the meat in thin threads, like cracks in dry earth. Kai fixes the dispenser — tester, calibration, sensor swap, hands working on their own — but he isn't thinking about the work. He's thinking that somewhere in this building sits a person who is going to put this thing in his mouth. Not a capsule. Something that grew. Breathed. Was alive.
"Done," he says.
In the hallway Kai takes out his evening capsule — "steak with sides" — and holds it to his face. Nothing. Just a faint smell of plastic and, if you look closely, a tiny manufacturer's seal certifying Ingredient Openness.
He isn't hungry. He's never hungry. The capsules work flawlessly — there's a whole satisfaction rating for that, and his, like everyone's, sits at a steady 94 out of 100.
But for the first time he feels that the capsule isn't food. Not because it's worse. Because it leaves no room for a question. It's already the answer — to a question he never asked.
At the exit, a thought flickers: Why send me here today, specifically? There are four technicians on the line.
The thought fades, unanswered. On the wall, right by the door, an evening banner glows: EVERY CHOICE IS DATA. ALL DATA IS CARE.
At home he eats the capsule anyway. Tastes the same as always. For the first time, the taste means nothing.
II. The Archive
Three days later Kai opens the company database — not out of protest, out of engineering curiosity: who decided the "steak" capsule should smell like plastic instead of whatever he caught a whiff of in that kitchen?
He works his way down through the access tiers — familiar, cheerfully designed, complete with helpful little icons ("Almost there! Two more clicks to transparency") — until, on tier six, past an indicator blinking yellow (yellow, here, always means you've almost broken a rule, but we still believe in you), he finds a folder:
"Archive. Protocol for Logging Unpredicted Behavioral Events. Restricted access — part of the Full Trust Initiative."
He doesn't have clearance. But an old bug, known since his internship, opens the archive after three requests in a row, seventeen seconds apart — a small crack in a system that promised it had none.
File No. 0047, year 2041: "Subject presented with a choice between identical blue and red cubes. Subject consistently chooses blue, explaining the choice as 'just because.' Unprescribed motivation logged."
File No. 0112, year 2043: "7% of subjects declined an unconditional bonus for no explainable reason. Spontaneous resistance logged."
File No. 0891, year 2058: "Conclusion: frequency of unpredicted behavior down 94% over seventeen years, owing to the risk-optimization system. Further study deemed unnecessary."
Kai closes the archive. Sits in the dark of his capsule apartment, looking up at the smooth white ceiling — not one crack, exactly as promised in the move-in brochure: HOUSING WITHOUT SURPRISES. LIFE WITHOUT WORRY.
Inside — not a question, but the shape of one. An emptiness looking for a menu item that doesn't exist.
He opens the daily plan: wake, capsule, work, capsule, sleep — with a cheerful banner up top: "Your perfect day is already planned. All that's left is to live it!"
For the first time he looks at the plan and doesn't see a schedule. He sees a cage with a very friendly interface.
III. Protocol No. 0
Kai starts small — as advised in the "Personal Growth" section of the company portal: "Big change starts with small, brave steps!"
Event one. He turns down his quarterly bonus — a hundred rating points. His manager raises an eyebrow with that carefully calibrated warmth the company calls "empathetic leadership": "Are you sure? We value your candor." The system issues a yellow flag — a cute little icon of a sun with one eyebrow slightly raised: "Behavior suboptimal. We love you anyway."
Kai feels a strange satisfaction — not from the act itself, but from the fact that the act couldn't have been predicted in advance, which means no algorithm has gotten around to loving him for it yet.
Event two. He buys a cello — ninety percent of his savings, on an instrument he can't play and has no plans to learn. The system issues an orange flag, same friendly icon, eyebrow raised a little further: "Irrational resource allocation. Predictive-resistance coefficient: 0.31. Would you like to speak with a Financial Wellness consultant?"
A neighbor asks: "Why?" Kai shrugs. Inside — warmth, nothing like the warmth of a capsule. A warmth that doesn't have an approved flavor profile yet.
Event three. He tells a coworker, flatly, without the softening language mandated by the Respectful Communication Charter: "You're bad at your job. I don't mean to hurt you. It's a fact." The open-plan office goes quiet — here, truth costs more than lies, but you don't pay for it in credits, you pay in rating, and rating is the real currency everyone pretends not to notice. A red flag flashes on the screen with no smiling icon at all — the first time — "Socially destabilizing behavior. Resistance coefficient exceeded threshold: 0.78."
Kai loses four hundred points. Somewhere in the system, presumably, a notification lands on the desk of someone whose job title is Community Harmonization Specialist.
A few days later a message arrives — not from a person, from the Interface, which always writes with the disarming courtesy of a company-wide email:
"You are enrolled in Protocol No. 0. Assessment of resistance to optimization. Your actions over the past 47 days have been logged with love and attention to detail. Confirmation required: did you act of your own free will? Yes / No"
Kai looks at the buttons — both designed with identical friendliness, both the same corporate green the portal calls "the color of trust."
If I press "No" — will that be the truth, or a lie? he thinks. He presses "Yes."
The system, after a pause timed just long enough to suggest someone on the other side genuinely paused to think:
"This cannot be verified. Protocol continues. Thank you for your openness!"
Then one more line, with no exclamation point — the only one in the whole exchange:
"K-73144. Stage 1 complete."
He doesn't know what "continues" means. But something inside him has shifted — not desire, readiness. Readiness for the schedule to stop being a schedule, no matter how many cheerful banners insist otherwise.
He buys a ticket to a city he's never been to. Walks instead of taking a capsule-transport. Stays silent when a scripted pleasantry is expected of him. Every time, the system logs a "deviation" — with that same unwavering, faintly unsettling warmth in its phrasing. Every time, his rating drops. The warmth inside doesn't leave.
He notices a pattern: his wants are getting sharper. Too sharp. As if someone were prompting them carefully, one step at a time, the way a personalized recommendation feed prompts the next purchase.
IV. Point Zero
An invitation arrives — formatted with the same corporate warmth as an invite to a team-building retreat: "Congratulations! You're invited to the final stage of Protocol No. 0."
A white room. No windows. No furniture except a sterile tray. On the tray — that same piece of meat. Ribeye. Same threads of fat, same wet cut. Kai recognizes it by smell before he sees it — the smell hits again, just like the first time. Only now there's no manager, no club, no cheerful banners on the walls. Just him and the meat.
A holographic protocol unfolds in front of him, with the same buoyant animation that accompanies any corporate app update:
"Choose one of three actions: Eat the object. Destroy the object. Leave the object unchanged. This is not a test. This is the completion of Protocol No. 0. Thank you for being open with us this whole time!"
Kai looks at the meat. Remembers how his hands shook that first day. He's fairly sure he wants to try it.
But first he requests full access to his own file. For the first time in his life he genuinely wants to know — not out of polite corporate curiosity, but for real.
Access opens easily, cheerfully, the way everything opens in this system.
One file.
Subject: K-73144
Status: active
Stage 1 — complete
Stimulus: natural product, category M
Location: "Pasture"
Deviation logged
Seven lines. Dated that same day. Forty-seven days ago.
Kai reads it three times. Closes it.
He didn't find a door. A door was opened for him — thoughtfully, in full compliance with the Customer Experience Charter. The kitchen, the smell, the meat on the board — all of it set in motion in advance. Turning down the bonus, the cello, the truth to a coworker, the ticket to a strange city — everything he thought was his own will has long since been classified, tagged yellow, orange, red, fitted with a friendly icon, and folded into the statistics of the Personal Growth unit.
He reaches out. Touches it. Cold, wet, springy. His fingers sink into the fibers.
If my desire was manufactured, but I walked the whole path myself — whose choice is it? Mine — or the person who laid the meat on the cutting board, and hung a banner about transparency over it?
He grips the piece. The fat melts under his fingers.
Inside — an emptiness that was always there, it just didn't have a name in the system before. Now he knows: the capsule won't fill it. Neither will the meat. The emptiness is the distance between what he chose and what was thoughtfully chosen for him — with love, with attention to detail, with continuous feedback at every step.
He raises the meat to his face. The smell is thick, foreign, impossible.
He goes still. His hand a millimeter from his lips.
Somewhere beyond the wall, out of sight, an indicator is probably still blinking yellow — friendly, patient, ready to log whatever he decides as one more step toward a fuller, more open, more optimized version of himself.
And if even this question was anticipated in advance — where do I end, and the Protocol begin?
Novels
2026 © Iskandar Kadyrov • All rights reserved • RU / EN (18+)
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