As part of the fourth IViR Science Fiction and Information Law competition, DigiCon will publish the stories of the finalists every week. The winning stories will be revealed during the CPDP 2026 conference in Brussels on 19-22 May.
The seventh shortlisted story is now live on DigiCon.
It is called “The Semantic Corridor – Notes from the Floor Above the Particle Accelerator” and was written by Caroline De Cock.
It is set in 2039, in a Zürich office above an old particle accelerator, where a Senior Semantic Compliance Officer translates meaning between two competing American reality engines and a Europe that solved its AI crisis by training exclusively on public domain material from the 1960s. The result is a continent recommending cigarettes and asbestos with institutional confidence.
The featured image accompanying the story is from Better Images of AI, a non-profit library challenging the tired visual tropes of AI, robots, glowing brains, metal hands, and replacing them with images that reflect its actual material reality. DigiCon has been collaborating with them, and you can explore the full flipbook on their website.
