A Terran's Guide to the Galaxy

Introduction to the world-building of Arch/Eternal

Building a Galaxy

Arch/Eternal is a philosophical sci-fi novel-in-progress that takes place in our own galaxy, dominated by two competing empires. Unsurprisingly, writing this book has required a huge amount of world-building. At one point, I decided it made sense to capture a lot of it in a diegetic text called A Terran’s Guide to the Galaxy.

This has been a useful exercise for a number of reasons:

1. It’s an effective vector for exposition

2. It helps me coral and organize a vast array of disparate ideas

3. This framing makes a lot of it shareable

So, I’ve decided to share it. That way, I can bring you, my legion of devoted readers, into the process of world-building itself, and get your feedback and insights further upstream in the creative process.

Alright, no more prefacing. On to the preface.

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A Terran’s Guide to the Galaxy

First off, don’t panic¹.

Let’s not assume this Guide knows how you got your hands on it, but let’s do assume you’re feeling a little overwhelmed. That’s natural for anyone entering modern civilization from the wild and primitive jungle we call Earth. But, while the Guide can’t promise to tell you everything you want to know about the thousands of worlds that comprise the Fellowship, it can teach you enough to get by. 

Start Here

There’s no page 1 of Wikipedia, but maybe there would be if it was trying to teach an alien all about Earth from scratch. The Terran’s Guide to the Galaxy is sort of like that, but in reverse. So, while you’re free to jump around and read about whatever topic you want (just like in a regular, made-of-dead-trees book!), the Guide will do its best to lay out a reasonable path of discovery. 

Any discussion of the civilizational history of our galaxy (colloquially known as the Milky Way), must necessarily begin with a history of its Founders — the Who at the base root of the What. 

But before we name them, we must establish our convention of naming: All designations herein are to be understood as a cohesive subset of Terran (read: Earthling) interpretations. Each name or term you encounter in this Guide will be standard among English-speaking Terrans. If you were reading this Guide in Hindi, or Mandarin, or Finnish, or whatever, all names and terms would appear as the Standard interpretations in those languages. 

Language and translation are topics that will be covered more comprehensively in later chapters. However, it is beyond the scope of this text to detail the etymological foundations of every term here-in. You can be confident that the use of any name or term you encounter within the Guide will be properly understood by anyone belonging to the Fellowship, Terran or otherwise.

OK! Time for some history.

A long time ago (several hundred thousand of Earth’s years²), and much closer to the center of the Milky Way, life sprung up on a rocky planet orbiting a hot blue star inside a big dusty nebula. Life begat life begat life, until, eventually: people. You were wondering if what happened on Earth happened elsewhere? The answer is yes — many thousands, perhaps millions of times within our own galaxy alone, and within a remarkably narrow timeframe. We’ll be talking about that later³.

Among the uncountable sentient species cropping up all over the galaxy, however, this rocky planet and its blue star were unique. So close to the center, the delicate candle of life could never survive the relentless wash of cosmic radiation, except for the protection of the enormous cloud of gas and dust within which this particular star system drifted. The nebula shielded this little life-covered world from all the deleterious effects of its galactic environs long enough to get to people.

People not dissimilar from the ones we call humans on Earth. Except that these people did not enjoy the privilege of quietly observing their universe. By cosmic caprice, shortly after these people had achieved what we now recognize as the baseline for self-determining intelligence, the protective envelope of their nebula began to fray. In the span of a few thousand years, as they were discovering fire and agriculture and city-building, faint lights began to interrupt the pitch-black of their night sky.

The lights brought two things to their world: Death, and a New Awakening. While they, along with all the other creatures of their world, suffered diminishing lifespans due to increasing levels of radiation, they also awoke to the universe. Those fierce lights revealed vastness far beyond their previous imaginings. 

Spurred by an unending storm of mutation, evolution accelerated to unthinkable speeds. Meanwhile, the greatest adaptive power of intelligent life has always been innovation: the people found ways to protect themselves against the radiation, meanwhile studying its source in earnest. They became, of necessity, astronomers and physicists and bioengineers. Technology exploded out of them as a desperate bid to survive what looked increasingly unsurvivable. 

But none of the life on their world could prepare for what was coming. Within a few short generations, the nebula’s protection would be completely gone, leaving the surface of the planet to be scoured by the light of the innumerable stars within perilous proximity. 

For them, it was like waking up in a hurricane.

The pace of their technological advances carried them toward the very stars that threatened to destroy them. They studied stellar chemistries and lifecycles, and with the courage of desperation they plumbed the depths of their closest cosmic neighbors. The data they collected, the knowledge base they expanded, outpaced what anyone on Earth could comprehend by orders of magnitude. 

And out of the deepening soils of their understanding sprouted a fervent love for the stars — these brightbodies of cosmic power, these givers and takers of life. 

We do not know exactly when, and we do not know exactly how, but we do know that all their studying and striving reached a crucial point of inflection. They found a way to bond with the objects of their love, embedding their consciousnesses within individual stars. The process was an existential trade. In sacrificing a mode of existence based on biology, each of them gained the potential lifespan of their bonded star, and access to its wellspring of energy. 

Many chose to do this, and many did not. The latter died with their beloved homeworld, eschewing immortality for the peace of permanent slumber.

Equipped with unthinkably advanced technology and access to virtually unlimited energy, the star-bound ventured further from their home, eventually discovering other worlds with sentient populations. 

It quickly became apparent to them, however, that none of the people they encountered on other worlds had attained anything close to their own technological advancement. Indeed, few of them had even left the surfaces of their respective homeworlds. Distance from the galactic center seemed to correlate strongly with each race’s position on the spectrum of technological advancement. The further away, the more primitive the people. 

Sometime during that early epoch of exploration and interplanetary interactions, observing this correlation between proximity and age of sentience, the people from that doomed planet near the center of the galaxy began to call themselves the Firstborn. By their reckoning, it was a literal designation, insofar as the awakening of intelligent self-determination can be considered a kind of birth. 

Political division marked the conclusion of this first epoch. When it came to the question of how all these other races ought to be treated, the Firstborn could not agree, and ultimately coalesced into three ideological factions. 

The first, taking as evidence their obvious technological superiority and access to virtually unlimited power, embraced a philosophy of supremacy, and argued for galactic domination. What wonders could be performed with the strictly coordinated efforts of a million unified worlds? 

The second, unconvinced that there could be any real value in fraternizing with more primitive cultures, opted for isolation. 

The third and smallest of these factions held an unpopular belief: that the most precious resource in the universe was consciousness itself — that flicker of intelligent, agentive awareness. So deep was their conviction of this that they vowed to preserve, support, and cultivate it against the emerging designs of the first faction, who had already begun to establish a system of utilitarian exploitation on a number of worlds. 

Thus began the War of the Firstborn.

Devastation bloomed swift and terrible. The conflict destroyed thousands of stars, countless planets, and entire nascent civilizations. Left unchecked, their war might have consumed all life in the galaxy. 

Thankfully, the isolationists intervened. They were enraged and horror-struck by what they witnessed, and compelled the two warring factions to enter a truce of simple terms: under threat of annihilation, all Firstborn were forbidden from fighting one another directly. 

And so, out of the cosmic ashes of that brief war emerged the Second Epoch. 

This is the epoch in which we live. It has persisted for many thousands of years, and it is defined by the ongoing tension and proxy conflict between those two factions of the Firstborn. The first, the supremacists, call themselves (roughly translated) the Confederacy of Eternal Order. Those who we follow have named themselves the Fellowship of Free Agents. Each has worked to expand its own ideological empire since the establishment of the truce — the Confederacy by conquest, the Fellowship by invitation.

The Firstborn at the head of the Confederacy, we call Eternals. Those who lead the Fellowship, we call Archs. While their origins are shared, their originating philosophies⁴ are fundamentally, intractably opposed.

As you might have guessed, the worlds of the Fellowship, as well as the Archs who lead and protect them, are vastly outnumbered by those under the empirical rule of the Confederacy. We know of no solution to this problem. We are grateful for the maintenance of the truce, which has so far protected us from another apocalyptic war among the Firstborn, and we are grateful for the network of interstellar portals⁵ that serves as an effective barrier between Fellowship and Confederate worlds. 

Still, as the galaxy slowly turns on its axis, the Confederacy grows more powerful, and its aims do not change. In time, they are likely to determine they can break the truce with impunity. We hold hope against that day, and build our lives by the faith of our principles.

In that effort, we enjoy both the wild abundance⁶ of a mature galactic empire, and the freedom to navigate its worlds at will.  But while the peoples and cultures of the Fellowship may strike you as a kind of burgeoning utopia, you must remember, as we all must, that we live these lives in the shadow of a volcano. 

But then, no one lives forever. If you’re lucky, you’ll die of old age⁷ long before it blows.

1. If you haven’t read the book that inspired the name of this Guide, do yourself a favor and find a copy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy right away. 

2. See “Standard Units of Measurements”

3. See “The Great Mystery”

4. See “Philosophical Foundations: Confederacy vs Fellowship”

5. See “Zero Point Portal Networks”

6. See “Perks of Being a Free Agent”

7. See “Extended Lifespans of Fellowship Citizens”