Arch/Eternal - Chapter Seventeen

The Mystery Man and the Ciphergram

Skip this part if you’re caught up!

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 Dan Simmons.

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

And if you want 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, here’s a short summary of what’s happened up to this point:

Earth is a protected (read: ignorant) planet nested within a galactic community known as the Fellowship. In an effort to help Earth attain full citizenship, and to rescue its people from total self-destruction, historian/researcher and secret ambassador Rita Freeman is recruiting talented young people to build a better society.

One of these is Jackson River, who grew up with his grandmother in a tiny desert town in northern Arizona, and at 11 years old, lost his best friend after an episode of severe bullying. Another is Esther Quinn, who grew up in an idyllic home in Connecticut. When she was 11, her brother Adam was recruited by Rita to become the founder of a new movement called Cubensia. Years later, Esther moved to Boston to join him.

By some stroke of fate or fortune, Esther, Jackson, and their friend Deek are late to a Cubensian launch party that becomes ground zero of an attack that destroys an entire city block. Rita scoops up all three of them into her spaceship, and takes them through an interstellar gate buried on the dark side of the Moon to a planet called Priezh, where they will receive the Fellowship’s version of basic training, starting with a series of torturous physical augmentations.

On the way, they learn about the galactic drama that has been playing out between the Fellowship and the Confederacy, and the Firstborn, a powerful race of beings at the head of each of them — respectively called archs and eternals. Esther grieves the loss of her brother, Adam, and is vocally suspicious of an arch named Morning who was bonded to him, and should have protected him from what Rita claims was an attack by an eternal in Boston.

Meanwhile, a mysterious friend of Rita’s named Callan has been left back on Earth to try to figure out what happened. After recovering a stash of hidden armor, he decides pay a visit to an old acquaintance…

---

The Mystery Man and the Ciphergram

Twio Vaird lives on the floor right above his Mystical Shop of Magical Wonders. All the crystals and powders and tarot card nonsense is actually a great place to hide the various Fellowship tech and non-terrestrial artifacts that find themselves drifting into terrestrial possession. 

As a collector and purveyor of these items, Vaird is also a natural repository for information, usually without his realizing it.

It’s late, so the shop is closed, but Callan wasn’t planning to use the front door anyway. 

His armor reveals the various traps set up along the fire escape, so he can avoid or deactivate them on his way to the window that Vaird usually keeps open, confident in the subtle measures he’s taken to protect himself. 

“You have zero seconds to show yourself or die,” a threatening voice rumbles as soon as Callan is inside.

Callan uncloaks and peals the armor off his head before he takes a seat in a plush armchair next to one of the two tall bookshelves, crammed and disorganized, bracketing the window he just came through. 

“Callan!” Twio Vaird suddenly appears next to the stairs that lead down to his shop. The thick mop of hair he keeps slicked back from his receding hairline belies his age, as does the solidness of his bulk. He looks both fatter and more muscular than the last time Callan saw him. It’s hard to get fat with augments, but then Vaird has always prided himself on being a man of mystery.

Speaking of which, Callan has to admit to himself that he missed at least one telltale on his way in, and inwardly curses his sloppiness. Mistakes like that get you killed.

“It is impossibly good to see you,” Vaird says as he plods across a rug that might cost more than the room it lives in. 

The apartment looks more like a shop of mystery and wonder than Vaird’s setup downstairs. Ancient lamps and faded rugs — wardrobes full of things too exotic to keep out in the open. Or, possibly, old editions of National Geographic. 

Twio Vaird has lived here for a hundred years, but the building itself is older, probably built at the turn of the 18^th century. Over the decades he’s been with the PF, Callan has only visited the man a handful of times. He didn’t join the Protectorate to hang out on Earth, so it’s not like he’s had a lot of opportunities. 

Vaird leans against a beautiful armoir across from Callan. “Though, I have to say I’m not encouraged by the sight of you in armor. Can you tell me what’s going on out there?”

“I was hoping you might know,” Callan says. 

Vaird shakes his head solemnly. “It’s not us, then?”

“I sure hope not.”

“You really don’t know?”

“Twio, it sounds like you might know something.”

“No one tells me anything.” Vaird sits down heavily in another nearby armchair. 

“A lot of people died tonight,” Callan says. “I need a place to start.”

“I know. And I want to help you. I want to help. What do you need? Element packs for your armor? OBs? I’m not a weapons dealer, but I do have some old recon gear that probably still works…”

“No, thank you.” Callan tries not to sound weary. Doubtless Vaird is telling the truth about what he thinks he knows, but equally doubtless is the probability that he’s collected some intel he’s not aware of.

“Hang on,” Vaird heaves himself up off his chair. “I just got a bunch of stuff from this guy, some kind of drifter. Not the kind that usually comes by.” He opens a big trunk and starts examining items one at a time, mumbling to himself about what might or might not be useful to a PF soldier. 

“What made him different?”

“He wanted money. ‘Stead of a trade.”

“What for?”

“He wouldn’t say. But he sold cheap, so I didn’t ask.”

Callan closes his eyes for a brief moment and doesn’t say the thing he’s thinking.

“How long ago was this?”

“Not long. Maybe a day or two.” He frowns at what looks like a hunk of petrified wood, then tosses it back in.

“Did he leave any indication of how to get in touch?”

“No. Definitely not.”

“Do you have any passalongs or ciphergrams?”

Vaird drops another useless object back into the trunk, stands up, and puts one finger into the air with a smile. “Yes.”

He lumbers over to an ancient sideboard in another corner of the room. The whole thing rocks on its uneven feet as he wrestles the top drawer open. 

“Let’s see…” He pokes around at the contents. “Ah!” He holds up a gold coin, little bigger than a quarter, and turns it the light before bringing it to Callan. “This should do it.”

It looks old. He’s never seen anything like it. “How does it work?”

“Simple,” Vaird says. “It’s a container for a small packet of data, and it won’t open for anyone but the intended recipient. It relies on standard ID markers for that, but those haven’t changed in centuries.”

“So it’s a ciphergram.”

“Better. Once it’s ID locked, it’ll track every person who touches it, and every place it goes, until it’s opened.”

“What happens if someone destroys it before it finds its mark?”

Vaird shrugs. “You’ll get a ping — a location and an ID, if whoever breaks it has one. But you can encode a bounty, too, to incentivize the passalong. The fewer people touch it, the better the take. So people will want to get it into the right hands.”

The coin is blank on both sides. “Does it have a history?”

He shrugs again. “It was blank when I got it. Decades ago, now. The woman who sold it to me told me she was the most recent recipient, but there was no way to verify that. It was built for different times.”

“Mabye not so different,” Callan says. “How much do you want?”

Vaird holds up his hands. “You do your job, figure out who blew up my city, save the world, et cetera et cetera. That’s enough for me.”

“And maybe don’t look too closely at your off-ledger transactions?”

“Pleasure doing business with you.”

Vaird shows Callan how to activate the token, but it’s fairly intuitive once he transfers ownership. And because this drifter, whoever he was, sold a bunch of things to Vaird, they’ve got a usable ID marker. 

The message itself is simple — a name, a time, a place — but Callan sets it behind encryption Vaird can’t see through. Perhaps a bit stung, he complains again that people always come sniffing around for information, but never offer any.

“You get what you’re good at getting,” Callan says, heading for the window. Then, before Vaird can verbally confirm that he’s missed the point, Callan holds up the coin and claps him on the shoulder. “Thank you. This is really helpful.”

“Let me know what you find out,” Twio says. 

Callan slips the coin into his pack, then pulls the armor back over his face and cloaks before exiting the same way he came. 

Then it’s back to jogging.

The armor is already interfaced with the burner phone, so he can look up flights. He won’t be buying a ticket, but he will be riding the next plane to New York. 

Callan travels in a more-or-less straight line, scaling bridges and overpasses as necessary, until he has to jog through the Ted Williams tunnel. On the other side, he climbs up to and clears the fence on the eastern edge of the Logan International Airport. He’s got the layout of the tarmac pulled up, so it’s no problem to find American Airlines flight 2164 to New York, which is scheduled to take off in twelve minutes. 

If he really wanted to, he could find a way to sneak onto the plane, but it would be a major hassle, since the cabin doors are already closed, and so is the cargo bay. And it would be just his luck to get a whole planeful of people suspicious. Plus, he still has vivid memories of having to sedate a fat man in a public restroom. Speaking of tight spaces.

So, instead, Callan climbs quietly up the landing gear and along the underside of the fuselage until he’s roughly at its center. Then he stretches flat, belly up against the hull, and fully adheres to the surface. 

Once the armor is rigid, he can relax without deforming its shape at all. In this position, he should cause minimal drag, which means less chance of being noticed, yes, but also it’s about courtesy. 

The flight to New York is short and uneventful, so Callan takes a nap. 

He wakes up when the landing gear deploys, and turns his head to watch rising terrain slide by underneath him. 

The next part is tricky. He wants to detach well in advance of the airspace above JFK, but that will mean selecting a trajectory of descent for himself that won’t kill someone or cause a lot of attention grabbing destruction, like knocking out the wall of a building.

Thankfully, the plane banks over the shallow bay just south of the airport. As soon as Callan disadheres, his body smashes into the atmospheric resistance that had been sliding over him for the past two hours. He follows the natural arc of a rapidly descelerating projectile, then plunges into the brine. 

Best to stay underwater. On his next outbreath, an area of the armor on his back collects it into two long sacs, and quickly strips some carbon from the CO2. If he needs to, Callan can hold his breath for ten minutes without much trouble, but it’s nicer to take a fresh breath every thirty seconds or so. 

In addition to providing a breathing apparatus, the armor also makes the half mile swim marginally less tedious by flattening into flippers at his hands and feet.

At the shore, he’s careful to make sure there’s no one around to watch him emerge. While the armor sheds water like oil, it also can’t maintain a perfect cloak during major atmospheric transitions.

From there, it’s a 90-minute jog to lower Manhattan. He could make it in much less time, but he doesn’t want to recklessly spend his ATP reserves. 

There are dozens of physical nodes in the Terran Fellowship Network (TFN) on Earth, but the one that gets the most foot traffic is in New York. That might not last forever, but it had been that way as long as Callan could remember. In fact, when he had gone offworld for the first time all those years ago, it was with someone he met at this same node.

Margaret McEvoy. 

Marvy.

To say they had history would be an understatement. 

So yeah, that might be one of the reasons he’s not burning extra energy to get there faster. But hey, it also might be why he was so quick to pick the spot to begin with. Who knows. People are complicated.

Especially people like Marvy.

---

Substack does a great job of telling me about how many people open the emails, but there’s no way for me to know who’s actually reading these chapters. So if you’re reading THIS, please do this earnest author a solid and click that little heart. okgreathankyou!!!

And then of course I’d love to hear your thoughts if you’re willing to share. Are you having fun? Are you confused? Do you have theories?

See you next week!