PROTOCOL 09 – PUBLIC RESEARCH DIVISION
The Friendship Audit
Deep questions for best friends
- Materials
- two subjects, zero romance required, snacks at audit standard
- Objective
- Formally review a friendship that has been running unexamined for years. Friendships are the least-audited bonds in our archive – load-bearing structures nobody ever inspects. The Lab takes them exactly as seriously as vows.
Procedure
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Open the minutes. State for the record how you met, each from your own memory, and let the discrepancies stand – parallel accounts are both true.
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Conduct the audit:
- What did I do early on that made you decide I was your person?
- What phase of my life were you most worried about me, and did I know?
- What do you brag about me to other people when I'm not there?
- What's something you'd tell me to stop apologizing for?
- If we'd met this year instead, what would still make us stick?
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Review one shared asset: the bit. Every friendship holds at least one joke with a decade of compound interest. Trace its origin. Argue about its origin. This step has never once concluded cleanly.
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Close the minutes with a forward-looking statement: one thing you want to still be doing together at some absurd future age. Enter it into the record.
Expected results
The audit finds the books in better order than either subject assumed. Someone says "anyway" and changes the subject at the exact moment it gets real. Standard. The finding stands anyway.
Findings worth keeping? Some of what surfaces in a protocol – the story, the detail they'd be embarrassed you noticed – is exactly the raw material the synthesis division turns into a finished song about them. The Lab merely notes the pipeline exists.
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