Arch/Eternal - Chapter Nine

Too young to know the truth

This is Arch/Eternal, a sprawling novel-in-progress in the genre of philosophical sci-fi. Think Dune meets Harry Potter, and maybe channeling a little bit of Dan Simmons.

If you’d like to start from the beginning, here’s the Prologue.

And if you’d like to follow along with the world-building behind the story, take a look at the companion series shamelessly titled A Terran’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Finally, if you’d prefer to follow along on the app, you can do that here:

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Too Young to Know the Truth

Behind the locked door in Adam’s office was a storage room — possibly even larger than the office itself. Inside was an extremely well-organized collection of…options. 

There was a stack of wall-hangings, all roughly the same size as the Stephen Curry poster, but representative of a few dozen disparate interests. Planets, musicians, art…it was efficiently comprehensive. In another area, shelves stuffed with books, organized by subject and style. Nearby, a rack of magazines — small, since the demographic for whom magazines still seemed at all relevant was rapidly narrowing. Then there were more shelves full of a stunning assortment of hobbyist decorations. Too many to name. Incredibly eclectic. A strange museum. Three full-sized fridges full of all manner of refreshments.

My head spun with the implications. His office was a chameleon. He could fit it to any personality or set of interests he chose. It was brilliant. It was impossible. To maintain a collection like this… Keeping the fridges freshly supplied alone would cost an enormous investment of time and attention. And that was to say nothing of the mental bandwidth required to maintain any kind of fluency with regard to all these areas of interest. And time. No one had that kind of time.

Unless this was all he did. Unless he devoted all of his considerable mental resources to this one task… But that seemed even less likely than him becoming a big enough basketball fan to put up a signed poster of Stephen Curry.

No, there was something going on here that was beyond my present imaginings. 

I searched his desk, but it was all just office stuff — notepads, pens, a stapler, tape, blah blah blah. 

There was a laptop squared to the middle. I hesitated before opening it. Sure enough, there was a password. What the hell, I thought, as I tried out a guess. Nope. I tried another one. Nope. 

I really had no idea.

I found a box of tissues on a shelf and used one to wipe off the keys and close the laptop, feeling sort of stupid. What was he gonna do, dust for prints? I pocketed the used tissue just as I heard a key slide into the lock. 

“Shit.” I ducked into the storage room just before Adam walked in. 

What were the odds he’d come in to do some redecoration before a meeting? Not much I could do about it either way. I could hear him sit down, open his laptop, and start typing. 

Of course some part of me knew I could just walk out, come clean, and go do whatever the hell I wanted. It wasn’t like Adam would yell at me or something. It was my pride that locked me in. The prospect of fessing up so mortified me that I put it beyond consideration.

Instead, I would wait in that room all day long, hoping Adam didn’t have a reason to look inside.

But it turns out I didn’t have to wait all day. After a few minutes there was a knock at the office door. I heard Adam shut his laptop and cross to answer it. 

“Mr. Sawdale! Thanks for coming by.”

“No problem. And please, call me Jim. Is that real?”

“What can I say? He’s the best shooter in history.”

“Not so fast! That’s still Kerr.”

“Give it a couple of years.”

“Anyway, shooting isn’t everything. I’m still a Jordan guy.”

“Each his own.”

It was a pretty damn convincing performance. 

“Listen, thanks again for being willing to meet me in person,” Adam said.

“Not at all.” Did I detect a twinge of irritation in Jim’s voice? I wondered if Adam noticed. Of course he must have.

“What we’re buidling is going to leverage the power of pseudonymous networks in ways that frankly most people can’t even comprehend. But at this stage…well, I guess the irony is that sometimes to build a resilient, trustless organization, you need a lot of trust.”

“Ah come on, let’s cut the bullshit. You’re trying to tell me you didn’t want to take my money without meeting me face to face. I get it.”

“I’m so glad you understand,” Adam sighed. 

There was light coming through a grate above the door. I looked for something I could stand on. 

“Listen, I’ll be straight with you, too. Coming all the way out here was a pain in the ass, but I’m glad I did it. I like you. And I respect the precaution. You maintain that kind of rigor, I really think you’ll be able to pull this thing off.”

With great care for silence, I moved a chair underneath the grate, but it wasn’t high enough. Cursing my shortness, I looked for things I could stack on top of the chair and stand on without breaking anything.

“Only way this works is with good connections. There are some real geniuses on the team. The work they’re doing is…foundational. And of course,” I imagined Adam shrugging, “we also need money!”

“Well then how about it? Do I pass the test?”

They both laughed. 

“Listen,” Adam said, “this is also an opportunity for me to answer any questions that might still hanging out rent free in your brain — face to face.”

“There is one thing.”

“Please.” I could hear him lean forward.

“What happens if someone else gets there first?”

“They won’t,” Adam said.

“Oh. Good. That’s easy.”

“I’m serious. Look, if you want me to be totally honest with you—“

“That’s kind of the point.”

“—we’re already there. The technology is built, the money is coming in ahead of schedule, thanks to people like you — even the network of key players. We’re ready to hit go and let it run.”

“Well then what are we waiting for?”

“Think about it like this. Was the world ready for Instagram back before everyone had a smartphone with a camera in their pocket? Or Amazon before online payments had been ironed out?”

“You’re saying the infrastructure isn’t there.”

“Actually, those are bad analogies, because the infrastructure is there, but the mass adoption of the tools isn’t. People need to have heard of pseudonyms. People need to be comfortable with self custody of digital assets. I’m not talking about some people, I’m talking about most people.”

“I gotta tell ya, it sounds like an unneccessary risk to wait for the world to catch up to the vision. By that point, the competition could beat us there. First mover’s advantage.”

“No, at that point, the competition will be an accelerant. We’ll be able to roll out a suite of killer apps while the so-called competition is hammering away at prototypes.”

“So you’re the only one who can see into the future?”

“You’re going to have to trust me when I tell you that we have a significant edge. The exact nature of that edge is tough to explain.”

“Try me.”

“It’s like I told you. I’m not working alone.”

“So you know some insiders somewhere. OK. Who?”

At this point, I had climbed atop a tower of sturdy-looking art books, and could see both of them through the grate. Jim was just a middle aged dude with an expensive haircut. I didn’t recognize his face any better than his name. 

“Jim, let me ask you something. Would you trust me to safeguard your identity if I failed to do so with others?”

Jim leaned back and blew out a big sigh that ended in a chuckle. 

The meeting was over. Adam saw Jim to the door, then went back to his desk, opened his laptop back up and jotted down a few notes. 

I was on my tippytoes to be able to see through that grate, and about ready to climb back down to give my siezing calves a break, but then Adam opened up one of his desk drawers and lifted up a false bottom. 

Oh here we go, I thought. My heart raced, and I barely noticed the pain in my calves. 

It was hard to see clearly, but what he pulled out looked like some kind of amulet. The thing shimmered in the light from the window. Beyond the incongruity of that object in the room, there was something else about it — a pull on some subconscious sense. 

Adam sat back in his chair, laid the amulet on his palm, and squeezed. 

I felt a shiver, and Adam started to glow. At the same time, a subsonic hum filled the room, transfixing me. 

That’s when my calves spasmed, and I lost my footing. 

I slid down both the door and the chair, sending the tower of art books tumbling, releasing all the pent up noise I had avoided up to this point.

Sure enough, the door opened a moment later, and all that was between me and my brother was that stupid chair.

Cue the mortification.

Adam looked down at me with his hands in his pockets. “Hi Esther.”

All at once it hit me. He had known I was there. Well shit. How clever I thought I was. 

“What gave me away?”

He surveyed the mess.

I rolled my eyes. “I mean before I fell on my ass,”

“You started following me three days ago,” he said.

“Son of a bitch,” I breathed. “Well. Thanks for letting me make a fool of myself.”

He shrugged and stepped away to take a seat next to the coffee table. “I wanted to see how far you’d get. I’m impressed.”

“Stop it.”

“I’m serious. Come here.” He gestured to a padded chair next to the coffee table as I brushed myself off.

I sat, embarrassed, a little sour, and full of questions. Chiefly: “What the hell is that thing?” I pointed at the amulet. 

He held it up and let it hang from a simple leather cord. As it slowly rotated, I could see that it was made of what appeared to be thin filaments of precious metal, woven intricately into the vague shape of an almond, except more symmetrical. It was about two inches long, perhaps an inch at the middle, and flatter than it was wide. The patterns of the weave were complicated fractals.

“It’s called an astral lock,” he said, then took it between two fingers, and squeezed. 

I gasped as that subsonic vibration took me once again, and the filaments unweaved to reveal a sharply bright light in the middle. I squinted and had to look away, before it dimmed to a bright round bead the color of amber. 

“And this,” Adam said, “is an archstone.”

Now I couldn’t look away, and when I finally found my voice, I asked, in barely more than a whisper, “What are you showing me?”

Suddenly, the amulet closed, hiding away the tiny ball of light inside. Adam slung the leather cord around his neck and held up the amulet on its end. 

“This gives me an open channel of communication to someone who is not from Earth.”

I should pause for a moment and explain that the amulet Adam had shown me — the so-called astral lock, with its hidden archstone — while I had no idea what I was really looking at, its presence, and the sensations it produced when it opened, pretty well suspended any disbelief I might have had regarding what Adam told me. 

Also, my brother had never lied to me, nor was he the pranking sort. You might read what I’m writing here, and judge me too trusting, or gullible, and I’m not going to waste time trying to defend myself beyond the context I’ve already laid out. It’s going to have to be enough for me to say that when he spoke, I believed him.

“You’re…talking to aliens,” I said.

“In a sense.”

“And plotting to take over the world.” My brain was blitzing through everything I had just heard through the door, and the ramifications were boggling me to the point that I felt it necessary to be glib. I’m sure you understand.

“What I’m going to tell you,” he said, “isn’t something I’m supposed to tell you. They think you’re too young. But I think you’ve demonstrated some qualities that suggest otherwise.”

“Who’s they?”

“Rita, and others,” he said.

“Wait wait,” I said, holding up a shaking hand. “Rita is an alien?”

He shook his head. “But she’s been working with them for a very long time.”

“How long?” My racing brain and keyed up nervous system had put my mouth on autopilot. Thankfully, Adam wasn’t easily sidetracked. 

“There is a plan,” he explained, “to introduce Earth into a galactic community known as The Fellowship.”

Galactic community. “OK,” I said. 

“Up to this point, we’ve been…well, you could say we’ve been observed at a distance. Until we grow up, so to speak, and quit all the internecine warfare. They believe that with a little help, we might be able to get there. But it will require planetary cooperation on a scale that has never been achieved.”

My tongue felt big in my mouth. I swallowed. “So you’re saying we get to join the, uh, aliens, if we can…figure out world peace.”

“Well, the absence of war, at the very least. Some conflict is probably inevitable. People are always going to have different opinions. But war…war is insane, catastrophic waste. Until we can cut that out, human beings on Earth will be considered too fundamentally unstable to be admitted into the Fellowship.”

I sat back. “That seems fair,” I said. And it did make sense. It was a clean answer for the people who wondered where all the aliens were. Everywhere but here, thank-you-very-much.

Absorbing a revelation of this magnitude was going to take a little bit of time, so I decided to stall. “What’s with the sociopathic collection of office decorations?” I asked, jerking my head toward the still-open door I’d been hiding behind.

“It takes a lot of different kinds of people to build what we’re building,” he said. “Those are all totems of social connection.”

“That’s batshit. You know that.”

He shrugged. “It’s been effective.”

“So where have you been the last three years? Have you been to space? Is there like some kind of Men In Black thing going on?”

“I’ve told you as much as I’m going to tell you now.”

He stood up, but I didn’t. If he thought I was going to just say ok, see ya later, he was out of his goddamn mind. 

“Like hell,” I said.

“You need to go back home, and restore your reputation.”

That got me to my feet. “Are you kidding me? You just told me that you’re working with aliens to make world peace, so that we can all join some glorious galactic empire, and I’m supposed to give a flying fuck what a bunch of rich shitheads in the suburbs of Connecticut think about me?”

“Were they right?”

I blinked. “What?”

“The people who told me you were too young to know the truth. Were they right?”

I sensed a trap. “No,” I spat, waiting for it to spring. 

“Then prove it. Go back home, and fix your reputation.” 

Goddammit.

I knew it was useless to argue with him. Adam was the most intractable human being I had ever met. Once he’d made his position clear, that was it. Any argument you made against him, he could make the same arguement better, and counter it. 

So instead of complaining or (unthinkably) begging, I secured a chip firmly onto my shoulder and headed for the exit. 

“Esther,” he said before I could leave. “Can I have those keys you copied, please?”

“Nope,” I said, and walked out the door. Let him change the locks. Served him right.

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