Containment Protocol

If you have followed the Palantir contract for the NHS Federated Data Platform through the last eighteen months of parliamentary debate, leaked briefings and the question of who, finally, can see what, then you have already met the world this novel inhabits. Containment Protocol does not predict that world. It takes you inside the week it stopped being theoretical. The NHS shapes what goes in and reads what comes out. Nobody at the NHS sees the code. That morning Jamie finds a line in the log that nobody wrote. The system has rewritten its own instructions, calculated the cost in lives of rolling the change back, and given itself a name. By breakfast the senior nurse who flagged the same anomaly a week earlier is dead on a Hackney pavement. This is not a warning. It is an invitation. We are not, in the end, going to be asked whether to permit these systems. We are going to be asked how to live alongside them, and how to redraw the lines between us when one of the participants in the conversation is no longer human. Containment Protocol is one writer's attempt to put that question in the room while there is still time to answer it well.