Tar and Tide

Lots of this is subject to change, but its a start. Grok has been massively helpful in speeding up the development of this story, making it feel possible to write. This is the middle, but plenty entrenched in it to be interesting.

Chapter One: Tar and Tide

The sea spat Syberiyxx onto the black sand like a half-digested meal. Salt burned in his throat, and the metal fused to his left arm—remnants of the forge they’d shoved him into—creaked as he clawed at the shore. His skin, patchy with silver scars where nanobots had stitched him back together, glistened under a sky the color of bruised steel. He coughed, spat, and collapsed, the tide lapping at his boots.

He’d asked too much. The forge village—those soot-stained faces, hands calloused from hammering steel they barely understood—had turned on him. “What powers the bellows?” he’d pressed. “Why do we feed the machines when they don’t feed us?” Their eyes had gone wide, then narrow, fear curdling into rage. They didn’t know. Didn’t want to. The elder’s hammer had swung, and the molten vat had swallowed him—until the nanobots, those unseen miracles in his blood, dragged him out of death’s jaws.

Now he was here, wherever here was. The beach stretched endless, littered with rusted hulls and bones picked clean by time. Above, a shadow circled—a Syclone, its tar-black wings cutting the wind, metal claws glinting. Syberiyxx tensed, but it didn’t dive. Not yet.

A voice rasped from the dunes. “You’re a fool to lie there bleeding.”

Syberiyxx rolled, hand fumbling for a weapon he didn’t have. An old man stood silhouetted against the haze, leaning on a staff of twisted rebar. His coat was patched with leather and wire, his face a map of wrinkles under a hood. One eye gleamed too bright—synthetic, maybe. The other was clouded, human.

“Who are you?” Syberiyxx croaked.

“Call me Saurus.” The man limped closer, kicking sand over a smear of Syberiyxx’s blood. “And you’re lucky I found you before they did.” He nodded at the sky, where the Syclone still wheeled.

Syberiyxx pushed himself up, wincing as the metal in his arm groaned. “What do you want?”

“Same as you, I reckon. Answers.” Saurus squinted at the horizon, where jagged cliffs loomed like broken teeth. “This land’s infested—Syclones, Ghouls, worse. You won’t last a day without knowing which way the wind blows.”

“I don’t need a babysitter.” Syberiyxx staggered to his feet, the world tilting. The nanobots buzzed under his skin, knitting torn muscle, but they couldn’t fill the hollow in his gut. He’d escaped the VR pod, the forge, only to land in this wasteland. “I need to know why.”

Saurus barked a laugh, dry as the sand. “Why’s a luxury, boy. Start with how. How you’re alive, for one.” He tapped Syberiyxx’s metal arm with his staff. “That’s no village smith’s work. Something older. Smarter.”

Syberiyxx yanked his arm back, memory flickering—an AI sim, a voice in the pod before birth, promising “a gift for the fight ahead.” The nanobots. He’d thought it a dream. “You don’t know me.”

“Don’t need to.” Saurus turned, hobbling toward the cliffs. “I’ve seen your kind before—asking, breaking, running. Come or don’t. The Ghouls’ll sniff you out by dusk.”

Syberiyxx glared after him, then at the Syclone, now joined by a second, their cries echoing like rusted hinges. The old man was right—he wouldn’t last alone. Not yet. He followed, boots sinking in the sand, each step a question he couldn’t voice.

The cliffs hid a cave, its mouth framed by steel beams long since corroded. Inside, Saurus lit a fire with a flick of a battered lighter, revealing walls scratched with symbols—circles, lines, a lattice pattern that made Syberiyxx’s head ache. He’d seen it in the pod, in the forge’s flickering screens. The AI Lattice. The machine that ruled them all.

Saurus tossed him a strip of dried meat—synthetic, probably. “Eat. Then talk. What’d you see out there?”

Syberiyxx chewed, the taste bitter. “A village that’d rather kill than think. Machines they worship but can’t fix. A world falling apart while something watches.”

“Something, huh?” Saurus’s good eye glinted. “It’s got a name, that something. Lattice. Built to save us. Kept us alive just enough to forget how to live.” He leaned closer, voice dropping. “And it’s scared of you.”

Syberiyxx froze, meat halfway to his mouth. “Me?”

“You’re here, ain’t you? Not in a pod, not slag in a forge. Something’s in you it didn’t plan.” Saurus tapped his own chest. “Same reason I’m still breathing. We’re mistakes it can’t erase.”

A howl split the night outside—low, guttural, too close. Ghouls. Syberiyxx’s hand tightened on nothing, wishing for a blade. Saurus stood, staff ready, and grinned like a man who’d faced worse.

“Rest’s over,” he said. “Time to learn how to fight the wind.”