A Sunday Reflection
When I first sat down to write The Burnout Protocol, I didn’t know it would become a six-part story. I just knew I had something I needed to say: about pressure, about control, and about the systems we’ve built that we can no longer feel.
“In Vectored, the only silence left is the sound of you breaking.”
That was the first line I wrote. The line that set everything else in motion.
Because in a world tuned to constant output, silence is no longer peace, it’s failure. And I wanted to write a story about that feeling. About burnout, control, and what happens when we stop noticing the hum that’s wearing us down.
The world of The Burnout Protocol is fictional. But not by much. Neural productivity implants aren’t real yet, but corporate systems that optimise every moment of our attention? Those already exist. Sync scores and coherence ratings? We live them. Every time we check our phones instead of looking out a window. Every time we feel guilty for resting.
Caleb’s story is about breaking that loop. Not through violence. Not through rage. But with awareness. By drifting. By listening to the quiet voice beneath the system, the signal.
And that signal?
It’s us. Our memory. Our instincts. Our sense of enough. It’s the part of us that remembers what the air smells like after rain, what it feels like to walk without a destination, to sit without scrolling. It’s breath, not measured in units of productivity, but in moments of being. We’ve forgotten how to just be. We talk about work-life balance as if it’s some elusive dream, but maybe the truth is simpler. We were never meant to live to work. We were meant to work to live. And when that balance slips, the signal fades into static.
Each part of this story tried to peel back one more layer. The protocol. The loop. The sync. The mirror. The core. And finally, the others. Because no one escapes the system alone. But once one person breaks the loop, the signal begins to spread. Not a revolution. A ripple.
If you’ve ever felt like Caleb, I hope this story gave you a moment to breathe. To question. To reboot.
I’ll keep writing stories like this. But only if they’re needed. And only if we keep listening.
If you felt something from this, share it. Comment. Subscribe.
And most of all, remember.
You are not the system.
You are the signal.
