After the success of our first zine project, I began looking for a student who wanted to work on a follow-up. Ayush Manocha, who had just taken my undergrad PL course, was keen to help, and we began tossing around ideas.

My grad students Yan Tong and Nathan Liittschwager and I had been working on a new protocol for causal message delivery. We called the protocol Cykas, which stands for "Can you keep a secret?", and Ayush liked the idea of collaborating on a zine to explain the Cykas protocol!