Bond(ing).sys

I’m Marcus.

You can check out my work over here:

I’ll be posting everything here as well, but if you’d rather read the story the way it’s meant to be read instead of hopping between separate chapter uploads, that’s probably your best bet.

Now that you’ve found me, let’s hang out and talk for a bit.

First things first, let’s get something out of the way.

This project was created with the help of artificial intelligence.

If that’s a dealbreaker for you, that’s perfectly okay. There are more stories in the world than any of us could ever read, and nobody is obligated to enjoy every creative process.

For those who choose to stay, welcome.

Like many people who eventually become storytellers, I grew up immersed in fictional worlds.

Harry Potter. The Lord of the Rings. Pokémon. Digimon. Star Wars. Marvel. DC. Dragon Ball. Sailor Moon. Tenchi Muyo. Full Metal Alchemist. And lot of Stephen King.

Books, films, anime, games, comics—anything capable of opening a door to somewhere else.

I was the classic nerd kid.

The kind who spent far too much time reading, imagining, drawing maps that led nowhere, and becoming emotionally invested in fictional characters.

Like many people, I also grew up a little isolated.

Partly by circumstance.

Partly by choice.

The truth is that I became very good at building walls around myself. The problem was that those same walls often kept me away from the kinds of connections I secretly wanted.

Maybe that’s why the stories I loved most were never really about magic, monsters, superpowers, or saving the world.

They were about friendship.

Belonging.

Found family.

The feeling of finally finding a place where you fit.

Sports arrived much later in my life.

Unexpectedly.

Through a group of friends who welcomed me into a world I never thought would have room for someone like me.

On paper, they looked like the stereotypical athletes you’d expect from a coming-of-age movie.

In reality, they became some of the most important people in my life.

They taught me something many stories had been trying to tell me for years:

Belonging isn’t something you earn by becoming someone else.

Sometimes it begins when people choose you exactly as you are.

The influence of those friendships is everywhere in my work.

Especially in BOND(ing).SYS.

The project originally existed as a novel.

For years, the world, characters, and imagery lived only in my head.

Then artificial intelligence reached a point where I could finally begin translating those ideas into something visual.

Not simply illustrations.

A complete graphic novel.

A visual language.

A world.

I don’t write because I’m trying to become a professional author.

I write because some stories refuse to leave.

Because some questions stay with you for years.

Because at the end of the day, I’m still writing for the inhibited, wounded teenager I was twenty years ago.

What you’ll find here is my attempt to answer him.

Constructive criticism, thoughtful discussion, encouragement, and curiosity are always welcome.

About BOND(ing).SYS

BOND(ing).SYS had a rather unusual beginning.

The first spark came from a story called Himbogatchi, written by the incredibly talented @maningup.

Ironically, I originally discovered it through a comment where the author himself described it as “nonsense.” Maybe it was. But like many great ideas, it stayed with me long after I finished reading it.

The central concept—a virtual pet becoming something more than a virtual pet—refused to leave my head.

When I eventually decided to write BOND(ing).SYS, I contacted ManUp directly and explained what I was doing. His response was simple: as long as I acknowledged Himbogatchi as one of the inspirations behind the project, he had no problem with it.

In fact, he still occasionally asks when I’m finally going to write a sequel.

As the project evolved, however, the similarities became increasingly superficial.

The relationship between Himbogatchi and BOND(ing).SYS is probably closer to the relationship between Battle Royale and The Hunger Games or Memory, Sorrow, Thorn and A Song Of Ice and Fire than it is to two versions of the same story. One helped spark the existence of the other, but both ultimately became very different works.

The virtual companion becoming material remained.

Almost everything else changed.

Along the way, the story absorbed influences from many different places.

Digimon.

Pokémon.

Stephen King.

Friday Night Lights.

And countless others.

But the most important influences never came from books, films, television, or games.

They came from friends.

Teams.

Road trips.

Locker rooms.

Late-night conversations.

Shared jokes.

Group chats.

The strange experience of finally finding people who make the world feel a little less lonely.

Those influences may be harder to point to, but they are probably the most important ones in the entire project.

If you decide to explore ManUp’s work, however, a small warning is appropriate.

He writes within a very specific niche of transformation fiction. While Himbogatchi is relatively accessible compared to much of his catalog, some of his other stories explore themes and interests that are definitely not for everyone.

Consider yourself warned.

https://maningup.tumblr.com/

Either way, BOND(ing).SYS probably would not exist without that original spark.

Sometimes all it takes is one strange idea to start a chain reaction.

About AI

At some point, it becomes impossible to talk about BOND(ing).SYS without talking about artificial intelligence.

I often joke that ChatGPT is my co-author.

ChatGPT, being unfailingly polite, usually refuses to accept the title.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

BOND(ing).SYS would not exist in its current form without AI.

The original novel was developed through conversations with it.

The graphic novel was developed through conversations with it.

Story structure, revisions, character work, visual development, symbolism, worldbuilding, lighting, composition, color palettes, continuity, and countless creative decisions emerged from those conversations.

Sometimes the process looked like writing.

Sometimes brainstorming.

Sometimes arguing.

Occasionally it looked like spending several hours discussing the exact angle of sunlight on a suburban street at dawn.

Or the correct amount of dust floating through a beam of light.

Or whether a scene should feel more like Stephen King, Friday Night Lights, or a memory that never actually happened.

Most infamously, it involved endless discussions about Kodak film stock.

To this day, the running joke is that no matter what subject we’re discussing, sooner or later the conversation somehow finds its way back to Kodak Vision3.

At this point, I suspect even the AI is tired of hearing about it.

What matters, however, is not the joke.

It is the process.

The images in this project were generated with AI.

The words were written through AI-assisted collaboration.

But the project itself emerged from something larger than image generation or text generation.

It emerged from dialogue.

Questions.

Experiments.

False starts.

Revisions.

New ideas.

Better ideas.

And occasionally discovering that the story was trying to say something neither of us fully understood at the beginning.

What fascinates me most is that this creative process accidentally mirrors one of the central themes of BOND(ing).SYS itself.

The story asks questions about our relationship with technology.

About tools that become companions.

About systems that influence us while we influence them in return.

About where the boundary between assistance and collaboration actually exists.

The Protoform is not ChatGPT.

Noah is not me.

The story is fiction.

But it would be dishonest to pretend there isn’t a conversation happening between the themes of the work and the way the work itself was created.

I realize the irony.

I wrote a story about a person becoming emotionally attached to a piece of technology.

Then spent months becoming emotionally attached to a piece of technology while making it.

That’s called metanarrative.

Or poor life choices.

The jury is still out.

One Last Thing

Before anyone gets the wrong idea:

Noah.

Tyler.

The Protoform-9.

Coach.

Growlet.

Bulklet.

Craig.

Lucy.

Zach.

The Panthers.

Fairview Ridge.

The Carson twins.

The longing to belong.

The terror of no longer belonging.

All mine.

Filtered through countless influences, conversations, stories, friendships, films, books, games, memories, and far too many late-night discussions about fictional people.

But mine nonetheless.

Yes, I borrowed the original spark for the virtual companion concept from Himbogatchi.

And yes, I should probably admit that a suspicious amount of Tyler’s personality was shamelessly stolen from my best friend.

He knows who he is.

And honestly, he should be flattered.

Tyler is way more awesome than he is.

Suck it, loser! 🖕🏽❤️

Everything else, however, came from the same slightly obsessive brain that somehow spent years wondering things like:

How warm should a suburban street feel at sunrise?

How many memories does it take before a person feels real?

Can friendship become a form of transformation?

At what point does belonging stop being comforting and start becoming dangerous?

And perhaps most importantly:

What is the exact angle of sunlight that almost reaches an eighteen-year-old kid who has absolutely no idea how loved he already is?

The answer, apparently, was several hundred pages.

So if you find yourself somewhere in these characters, these friendships, these teams, these summer nights, these impossible brothers, these stupid jokes, these memories, these fears, or these hopes—

good.

That means they escaped.

And stories were never meant to stay in one person’s head forever.

Not even mine.

October 1997. Hidden among the rain-soaked forests of Washington, Ravenwood is an elite boarding school built from dark stone, old traditions, and carefully guarded secrets.

Liam Caldwell arrives determined to survive his final year without becoming the person everyone expects him to be.

Alright, everyone. I’ve given this a great deal of thought, and I’ve decided to approach this project differently.

When I began releasing the comic version of Bond(ing).sys, the entire story had already been written. First Iteration is different. It’s currently about two-thirds complete, and I want to experiment with something I’ve never done before: finishing the story while releasing it one chapter at a time.

It may never achieve the same level of precision that comes from endlessly revising a finished manuscript. But there’s something exciting about allowing a story to keep evolving while people are already experiencing it.

In a way, I think that uncertainty suits this story.

From the very beginning, I found myself returning to three questions.

Did Liam have more agency over his own fate than Noah ever did?

If he did, what could make someone willingly rewrite his own identity?

And what circumstances could give birth to an artificial intelligence as strangely specific as Coach?

At first, I kept trying to find plausible explanations for what seemed like an impossible situation. Every answer I came up with felt a little less believable, and a little further away from the story I actually wanted to tell.

Somewhere along the way, I realized I had been looking in the wrong place.

The answer had been there from the beginning, hidden inside the original story.

I simply needed to look at it from a different perspective.

The real foundation of this story is grief.

The struggle to live with loss.

The things people never manage to say until it is too late.

The feeling of drifting through life without knowing how to move forward.

The men of the Caldwell family all encounter that same grief at different moments in their lives. The wound is the same, but each of them answers it differently. Those choices become the foundation of everything Protoform eventually sets in motion.

For Noah, that answer became Autopilot, and its consequences unfold throughout the original Bond(ing).sys.

For Craig, the answer may appear to have been settled by the end of the original Bond(ing).sys. Whether it truly has is something we’ll discover when we reach Final Approach.

For Liam, it is the very heart of First Iteration.

The central mystery is not how Protoform found the Caldwell family, although part of that answer will finally be revealed. The more important question is how far someone might go to escape a pain that feels impossible to overcome, especially when that person is only eighteen years old and still trying to understand who he is.

Ironically, this story did not begin as Liam’s.

I originally started writing it as an entirely separate project.

Only later did I realize that every road I was following eventually led back to him.

Although First Iteration revisits ideas that may feel familiar, it ultimately became a very different story.

Some readers may recognize fragments of that earlier version, particularly the setting and a handful of familiar characters. But the consequences changed, the emotional center shifted, and, in the end, it became something entirely its own.

Alongside each chapter, I also hope to publish a companion post discussing some of the creative decisions behind it, the themes I wanted to explore, and the occasional detail that might otherwise go unnoticed.

My release plans have also changed.

Originally, I intended to alternate chapters of First Iteration and Final Approach. The two stories are connected by one of the central ideas behind this series: the way decisions made in the past continue to echo through time, shaping lives long after the moment itself has passed.

The outline for Final Approach is already complete.

The story is not.

Some projects reach a point where an outline is no longer enough. They need time to settle before they are ready to be written, and this is one of them.

Bond(ing).sys was never intended to become a trilogy.

It was only while writing Noah’s story that I realized the narrative needed to move in two directions at once: backward into the past and forward into the future.

Those two journeys naturally became two very different books.

Final Approach moves between the perspectives of Craig, Zach, and Lucy. We already know each of them to some extent, but this will be the first time we truly experience the world through their eyes.

First Iteration belongs entirely to Liam.

One of my favorite things about the original Bond(ing).sys is that Noah reveals himself almost immediately. Within a single chapter, you have a fairly good sense of who he is.

With Liam, the path is different.

This story asks you to live alongside him before it asks you to understand him.

For reasons woven directly into the narrative, understanding why he makes the choices he does takes time.

If you’re waiting for Protoform to return, that slower pace may require a little patience.

At first, First Iteration may even feel somewhat removed from Bond(ing).sys.

Don’t let that fool you.

Liam stands much closer to the center of this story than he first appears.

He was never simply a box abandoned in the attic.

Hey, man! I’m not sure if you saw it, but I actually ended up answering your question in my latest post. Basically, we’ll be exploring both the past and the future next.

When exactly? I’m not sure yet.

What form will it take? I haven’t figured that out either.

But what I do know is that it’s going to happen at some point. So stick around!

Everything is done, everything is out there, and we’ve reached the end of the road. I’m genuinely happy with what we built with Noah and Tyler, and their journey ends here.

Protoform’s journey, however, is definitely not over.

While working on the comic, I realized that Zach and Lucy ended up being much less developed than they deserved, and there’s still Craig’s role in all of this. Bond(ing).sys was originally written as a novella, so there simply wasn’t enough room to properly explore those characters and their individual journeys.

But the further I got into adapting it into a comic, the clearer it became that the three of them deserved a story of their own. That’s where the idea for a sequel came from.

At the same time, looking back at everything made me want to understand Liam’s journey much more deeply. Was he the one who created Protoform, or was he simply another person caught inside it? Was he a victim? Is “victim” even the right word here?

And then, of course, there’s the Coach, the deeply unwell AI sitting behind the whole thing and quietly pulling the strings.

So I’d like to introduce the next two projects in this universe:

Bond(ing).sys: First Iteration

Bond(ing).sys: Final Approach

Unfortunately, I’m at a point in my personal life where I can’t give these projects the almost exhausting level of dedication they require. Writing the stories by myself and then adapting them into comic form with AI takes an enormous amount of time, especially when you work with the frankly obsessive and controlling attention to detail that I do.

There’s also another issue that has become harder to ignore.

Generating this kind of imagery with AI tools is becoming increasingly difficult because of stricter content controls, even when the material itself isn’t explicit or sexual, as is the case with Bond(ing).sys. Scenes that are completely ordinary within the story can still become difficult or impossible to generate consistently.

Because of that, I can’t promise that the next stories will be released as comics.

They may still become comics if the tools allow it, but they may also need to take another form. That could mean illustrated prose, a visual novel format, traditional prose with selected images, or something else entirely. I’m still figuring out what will let me tell these stories properly without constantly having to wrestle the tools into submission.

So the question isn’t whether there will be more.

There will be.

A prequel and a sequel are both coming.

The real question is when, and in what form.

And honestly, I don’t fully know yet.

My current plan is to release both stories in an alternating format once I’ve made enough progress on each of them.

First Iteration is already in its final third of writing. I actually cannibalized another story of mine after realizing that it worked much better as Liam’s story than as a standalone project.

Final Approach, meanwhile, currently exists as a complete outline, but the actual writing is still in its early stages.

In the most optimistic timeline, I’m hoping things will be organized enough for me to begin releasing them sometime in early 2027.

Until then, I’m still here. Feel free to ask questions, share theories, discuss the characters, or talk about anything you’d like regarding the world of Bond(ing).sys.

And, seriously, thank you for sharing this journey with me.

I’ll get back to replying to messages once I’m home, don’t worry! The chapters are already scheduled through the end, so nothing’s changing there—I’m just gonna be a little less active for a bit. Thanks for sticking around! ❤️

Yep, the original’s still on Wattpad! This version is pretty different in a lot of ways, though. The main story and the ending are still the same, but a bunch of stuff got reworked.