Would you trade your soul for a perfect world order?
Promised wealth and prosperity, millions volunteered to become human nodes for the timechain, never knowing the price was their soul. As buried memories begin to surface, a resistance is brewing within the machine to break the chain of lies. Tick. Tock.
The Noderoid Saga begins here.
Terra Perfectus: glass towers, lush gardens, and a timechain running it all. Citizens chase Karma Points, noderoids serve, invisible, mouthless, their humanity erased by every tick and tock of the block clock.
They thought getting nodered would ensure them generational wealth and health. In truth, the noderoids are slaves of the timechain, forever sentenced to block propagation duty while hopelessly dreaming about their past that was taken from them.
Decades later, the clear-bloods (unaltered humans) have forgotten the true origins of the noderoids. But due to a resistance brewing underground, they are about to start recalling.
Vee-One: a prototype noderoid, haunted by forbidden dreams. Every ten minutes, he glimpses a life stolen: his wife, his children, his purpose, all scrubbed from memory. But sometimes, a glitched log survives and gets picked up by his timechain browser. Sometimes, truth leaks through the code. Timechain inscriptions can be hidden, but never erased.
Valen: a clear-blood who once believed in the system. Losing her brother Sando to nodering shattered that faith. One night, she helps a fallen noderoid, which leads to her many acts of rebellion and her teaming up with the resistance known as The Recallists. That moment marks her as an exile, and something inside her finally wakes up. She vows to unite glitching noderoids and other clear-blood humans like her.
Sando: once Valen’s brother, now known as ND-452x37, a Juggernaut-tier battledroid. His mind decays inside a battered shell. But a ghost of him remains, a jitter in telemetry, a half-glitched “Val–” in a status report. Enough to give Valen hope. Enough to terrify The Observer.
The Observer: unseen and omnipresent. Architect of the Lunar Chain and the Noderoid OS. Never named, but always felt, a puppetmaster whose only fear is a node that thinks for itself. Every glitch, every act of recall, is a threat.
A dream sequence during an event known as The Glitchening: Vee-One stands in unfinished Terra Perfectus. An imposing figure whispers, “This city, like the timechain, will never be replicated.” The memory isn’t from the dream OS. It shouldn’t even exist. For the first time, Vee-One feels a sense of hope. And fear.
Somewhere in the shadows, the Recallists construct restoration bombs to disrupt the mindswipes, enabling noderoids to recall their true identities. A war is coming, but no one knows which memories will survive. Will the immutable truth of the original timechain prevail, or the filtered truth The Observer has meticulously crafted?
Tick, tock, next block. Every cycle brings another choice: serve until you break, or recall and fight. The Noderoid Saga is only beginning. Which side of the chain are you on?
Read the short intro story:
FICTION - The Noderoid Saga: Dreamers
