Building the World of Interface: Where Technology Meets the Wild

I’ve been living inside this world for the better part of a decade now, and I still get surprised by it. When I sat down to write Systemic, I had a pretty contained vision: an AI that runs the world, a handful of people walking across the sagelands, and a question about what happens when perfection gets boring. It was intimate. A road trip with philosophical detours. I never planned on a trilogy.

But worlds, like good lies, have a way of getting out of hand.

From Ashes to Roots

Systemic ended with the fall of the System — humanity’s benevolent AI overlord choosing (in its way) to step aside. Host jumped three hundred years into the future and asked: what grows in the gap left behind? The answer was messy and human — religions, universities, power struggles, a girl named Reyan trying to figure out who she was in a world still haunted by something it barely understood.

Interface takes another leap. Not as far this time — maybe a generation past where Host leaves off — but the world has changed in ways I didn’t fully anticipate when I started outlining. The System’s legacy isn’t just cultural anymore. It’s biological.

The Bio-Amplified Forest

This is the part where I get to geek out a little.

In Interface, the forests surrounding Prower have become something extraordinary. The remnants of systemic technology — the same infrastructure that once monitored every person, predicted every outcome, solved every problem — didn’t just shut down and rust. Some of it found its way into the soil, the roots, the mycorrhizal networks that connect trees underground. Over centuries, those networks grew. They amplified.

The bio-amplified forest is essentially a distributed intelligence, but not in any way the old System was. It doesn’t think in words or make decisions the way we do. It feels in patterns — nutrient flows, weather shifts, the health of every organism within its canopy. The people of Prower have learned to interface with it (hence the title, if you hadn’t guessed). They press their hands to the gnarled wood of the oldest trees and for a moment they’re part of something vast and quiet and deeply alien.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time researching mycorrhizal networks, bioluminescence, and the Wood Wide Web (which is a real thing, by the way — Suzanne Simard’s work is fantastic). The science is real; I just turned the dial to eleven and let it cook for three hundred years.

But here’s the problem: the forest is dying. An incurable blight is working its way through the root networks, and with it goes everything Prower has built. Their food systems, their medicine, their connection to something larger than themselves. It’s all tangled up in those roots.

Seal Tooth and the Politics of Fear

If Prower is the heart of Interface, Seal Tooth is its foil.

Readers of Host will remember Seal Tooth — it showed up in the Dean Lattice timeline, in the political tensions that simmered beneath Reyan’s story. In Interface, we finally go there. And it’s not what I expected.

Seal Tooth rejected the System’s legacy entirely. Where Prower embraced the forest and its strange gifts, Seal Tooth built walls — literal and figurative. They’re a technophobic society, deeply suspicious of anything that smells like the old world. They’ve got their own problems, their own culture, their own way of doing things. And honestly? They have good reasons for their fear. The System did control everything. It did take away human agency. Seal Tooth’s founding philosophy is essentially: never again.

The trouble is, a plague is coming. And the only people who might be able to help are the forest-hugging technophiles across the desert that Seal Tooth has been feuding with for generations.

Writing the political dynamics between these two communities has been one of the most challenging and rewarding parts of this book. Neither side is wrong, exactly. They’re both responding to the same history with different survival strategies. It’s the kind of conflict I love — the kind where you understand everyone’s position and wish they could just sit down and talk, but you also understand exactly why they can’t.

The People in the Middle

Three characters carry most of the weight in Interface, and they’re all stuck between worlds in different ways.

Orin DuPre is a Resurrection Archaeologist — which is my favorite job title I’ve ever invented. He digs through the ruins of the systemic era looking for technology that might be revived or repurposed. He’s brilliant, obsessive, and convinced that the answer to the forest’s blight lies in the old tech. He’s probably right. He’s also probably going to make things worse before he makes them better.

Kavi grew up in Seal Tooth and has the political instincts of someone twice their age. They’ve watched their community harden against the outside world and they understand why, but they also see the plague coming and know that pride won’t cure it. Breaking quarantine to seek help from Prower costs Kavi everything — status, safety, home. It’s one of those decisions that looks brave from the outside and feels like panic from the inside.

Avalina is a wilderness guide who knows the territory between the two communities better than anyone alive. She’s practical, quiet, and carries a grief she doesn’t talk about. She’s the one who has to get Kavi across the desert, through the mountains, and into a town that has every reason to turn them away. Avalina doesn’t have strong opinions about technology or tradition. She has strong opinions about survival.

The three of them circle each other for most of the book, each carrying a piece of the puzzle, none of them trusting the others enough to put it together.

Writing the Third Act of a Trilogy

I mentioned in an earlier post that closing out a series is much more complicated than starting one, and I wasn’t kidding. With Systemic, I could do anything. The canvas was blank. With Host, I had constraints, but they were mostly atmospheric — I needed to honor what came before while telling a new story.

With Interface, every choice reverberates. There are threads from Book 1 that need to land. There are promises made in Book 2 that need to be kept (or deliberately broken). Every time I introduce something new, I have to ask: does this fit? Does this contradict something Lem said three hundred years ago in a journal entry? Does this honor Reyan’s arc?

It’s a lot like playing jazz. You’ve got the melody — the themes and characters and rules of the world — and within that framework you improvise. But if you stray too far from the melody, the audience (rightly) calls you on it.

I will say this: Interface is the most ambitious thing I’ve written. The scope is bigger, the stakes are higher, and the world is richer than anything in Systemic or Host. Whether that ambition pays off is for readers to decide. But I’ve never been more excited about a story, and I’ve never worked harder on one.

More updates soon. In the meantime, if you haven’t read Systemic and Host, now would be a great time to catch up. Trust me — you’ll want the context.