What’s Next?
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.
