Book One · The Protocol · Lettered
Symbiont: Dyad #1
They called us meat.
A West Philly medic who has doubled his gloves every morning for three years, and a North Philly mechanic who survives by touching no one. Two seconds of contact on a pharmacy floor ends both of those lives. Twenty-four pages, adapted from Chapters 1 and 2.
- Pages
- 24 + cover
- Time to ship
- 10 days
- Art passes
- 6
- Images generated
- 171 for 25
- Total spend
- about $17
The novel on Amazon Book site Issue 1 is Chapters 1 and 2 of the novel
Screen PDF Print PDF · 300 DPI 25 pages with cover
Art and lettering both complete, and the issue is print ready. Captions carry Kofi in cool grey and Rae in warm brown, the hymn has its own hand, and balloons are placed in each panel’s dead space rather than over a face.
Back to back, and one merged shadow with four limbs.
The ritual. Doubled nitrile, and the shape in the doorway he never turns to look at.
The tether's first appearance. Two mid-Crash bodies, fingertips an inch apart.
STAY OUT. And beneath it, in a different hand: THEY HEAR THE HEARTBEAT.
Two sets of footprints in the dust. Perfectly parallel, perfectly in step.
A dead tube, a scavenged battery, and four eyes under the counter.
The car is dead until she sparks it. The only light on the page is the one she makes.
Mirrored limbs on separate girders. Two bodies, one breath.
The ceiling comes down, and they fall through it still holding hands.
A pair in lockstep, then one man alone. His other half already died somewhere behind him.
Panel shape doing the work: two matched squares for the mirror, one dominant panel for the knife.
The knife is already in her hand. Outer glove, inner glove, skin.
The first saturated red in the book, against a page drained of everything else.
Both of them on the floor where they fell. Blood into blood, and the indigo wakes under the skin.
The splash. Two bloodstreams meeting, and the first indigo in the book.
The last thing in the issue is the hymn he has hummed since page one, dying mid-word.
Keep reading
Issue 1 ends where Chapter 2 does. The novel carries Kofi and Rae all the way south to the wall. It is out now.
How this was made, and what is still open
Built programmatically end to end, no human artist. Ten days, six art passes, 171 generated images to ship 25, about fifteen dollars in generation fees for the art and about seventeen with the voiced read-along, every experiment, dead end and re-roll counted. The full ledger lists each phase.
- Print1988×3056 at exactly 300 DPI on the US comic trim. A Lanczos resample of the approved pages, not a regeneration, because every regeneration returns a different picture and spends a composition that was already right.
- The FeralsAn earlier note here claimed a human artist was needed because twelve model configurations had failed. That was wrong. The instruction was competing with a six-panel prompt and losing. Asked for the design alone, it came back correct first try. The page text was also quietly contradicting the plate with words like gaunt and emaciated.
- Still openKofi’s gloves only read as two layers in close-up. The Ferals read as white throughout, which the source never specified either way.
- DisclosureArt and lettering are AI-assisted. The story, script and art direction are the author’s.
Script · ISSUE_1_SCRIPT_2026-09-03.md
Art · AI-assisted, generated from the script and two character reference sheets