Arch/Eternal - Chapter Twenty-One

The Big Dumb Obstacle Course

First thing, real quick…

For the newcomers: Arch/Eternal is a sprawling novel-in-progress in the genre of philosophical sci-fi. Think Dune meets Harry Potter, and maybe channeling a little Dan Simmons. It’s also an experiment in long-form serialized fiction on Substack.

For the allcomers: If you haven’t read any of the previous chapters, please abandon any feeling of obligation to catch up, and instead just start HERE, with this chapter.

That’s what the short summary below is for.

By the end, you’ll know whether you want to keep following along or not. And I promise to always include an updated summary, so you’ll never have to worry about keeping track of important details.

Two other things (even quicker) —

If you really want to start at the beginning, here’s the Prologue.

I also recommend you check out A Terran’s Guide to the Galaxy at some point, for a good ten thousand foot perspective of the world building behind this story.

OK, now the summary:

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.

On the way, Rita explains 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. While visiting a dealer of exotic artifacts, he learns of a shady figure who might have known about the attack in advance. In an effort to track this person down, he decides to enlist the help of an old flame in New York named Margaret McEvoy, aka “Marvy,” who manages what is basically a secret hotel for people affiliated with the Fellowship on Earth.

Back on Priezh, after undergoing a series of torturous physical augmentations, Esther, Deek, and Jackson are escorted by three non-terrestrial humans to a grueling obstacle course, and left to themselves. Before they get started, they decide to get to know each other better, and Jackson tells them how Callan set him up with an opportunity to murder the bully who was primarily responsible for Andre’s death — an opportunity which he almost took, but didn’t.

After hearing the story, Esther decides it’s time to start the course…

NOTE: Questions in ALL CAPS indicate a written dialogue between Esther and Sky, to whom the reader has not yet been formally introduced, but who we have so far surmised is one of the Firstborn arcs with a special interest in Earth.

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The Big Dumb Obstacle Course

WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO START THE COURSE?

After hearing Jackson’s story about what Callan and Rita had set up for him, I realized two things.

First, I didn’t trust these people. How could I? They were like fickle gods from Greek mythology. 

The second thing I realized was that if I didn’t want to be at their mercy, I needed to get an edge on them. All of them. Not just Rita and Callan and the rest, but on the whole damn Fellowship, and the whole damn Confederacy, including the big bad Firstborn arcs and eternals. 

And the only way I could see to do that was to play the good student. Switch on the ambition (never a hard thing for me), and climb the learning curve as fast as possible, and be vigilant in my observations. There had to be a way to get leverage. There always was. 

Adam was dead because of these people. The whole lot of them. If they’d left Earth alone, he’d still be alive, and he’d be well on his way to making the world a better place, with me by his side. We would have been unstoppable.

SO IT WAS VENGEANCE YOU WERE AFTER

No I wanted power. I mean yes, of course I wanted vengeance, but not just vengeance. I wanted control of my life back. Control of something.

So I was fired up to finish that big dumb obstacle course and demand the next challenge, whatever it was. 

DID YOU FEEL DIFFERENTLY AT THE END?

Well, it took a hell of a lot longer than I thought it would. And it was a lot more traumatic. You know what, I'd better just go through the whole thing.

OK

So, when I started, I knew they would follow. I could tell they were taking their beats from me, which was another piece of the motivation.

Anyway, as I held my arms out for balance on one of the three narrow beams leading away from the platform, I could see Jackson step up to the other two.

About halfway across, I heard Jackson make a sound like he was about to fall, and glanced back to see him pinwheeling. Deek hadn’t even started. I shook my head and kept going. 

Then I lost my balance, cursed, and fell all the way down to the big net hanging below. It hurt like hell, but I didn’t break anything. 

“Esther!” Deek called out. “Are you OK?”

“I’m fine. It looks like I’m just gonna have to climb the netting to get to the other side.”

Next thing I knew, Jackson purposefully jumped from his own beam, giving a shout of pain as the net caught him. 

“What are you doing?”

“Whoops,” he said, and then started climbing.

Meanwhile, Deek had started scooting across the pole-width path, one butt-length at a time. 

He ended up making it to the next platform first, but then waited for us. 

Huffing and sweaty, we took stock of the next phase. 

Enormous grey rubber cones, the tops of which were level with where we stood. The base of the cones all ran together in pinched valleys, at least forty feet below. 

I pointed at the cones. “The quickest way across would be to hop from one to the next. Otherwise we’re going to have to make our way down there.”

“I’m sensing a pattern,” said Deek.

“There’s no way I’ll be able to do it the other way,” Jackson said, nodding at the tops. 

One by one, Deek and Jackson tumbled to the bottom, got wedged in the crevices between the cones, and started wriggling and forcing their way through. I did try to do it the “easy” way, but it was no use. After grabbing onto the top of the first cone in a bearhug, I lost my grip and wound up at the bottom just the same. 

I’m certain it took us more than an hour to grunt and swear our way through those damned cones. My legs and arms were bright red and swollen by the end, and the flames of my hatred for whoever had designed this course burned hotly indeed. 

On the other side was a big gray wall, ten stories if it was two. 

“I’m pretty sure the fast way is climbing,” I said, staring at the pocked and scarred surface. But, augmentations or no, slipping and falling from halfway up that wall would result in a pretty gnarly compound fracture or five. 

“Oh yeah, sure,” Deek said. “Definitely.”

So it would be the long way. 

At the base of the wall there were three small openings. The center one was almost exactly my height. The one on the right was a head taller — that would be Jackson’s — and the one on the left was a hair shorter. Deek’s. 

“Obviously they want us to use separate doors,” Deek said.

“I wonder what fun things will be inside,” said Jackson.

I considered suggesting we all go through the same door together, rules be damned. But this is not what a good, ambitious student would do. I sighed, and went through mine. As soon as I’d crossed the threshold, it closed. 

OK then.

I was in a dimly lit hallway that stretched for about fifty meters. At the end of it, a short ladder that led into another hallway that doubled back the other direction, right overtop. Then another ladder, and another hallway. 

Oh god, I thought. I’m going to have to do this twenty times.

I estimated this based on how high the wall outside had looked. And I would have been close, if not for some of the hallways being so low they forced me to crawl. So it ended up being more like thirty before I reached the top. And then, instead of a ladder, it was a u-turn. 

And then another hallway, ending in another ladder — but this one went down instead of up. 

For quite a while, I was just grateful that it wasn’t a maze. I think I would have lost my mind. As it was, the monotony was terrible, and there was absolutely no way to know how many times that pattern would repeat itself. This was, after all, a very, very large space. It could go on that way, two steps forward at the top, two steps forward at the bottom, for a mile, or more. 

I’ll die in here, I thought. 

“Hey!” I called out. “Can anyone hear me? Deek? Jackson?”

I listened for an answer, but it was silence in those hallways. Just the sound of my own breath and the pad of my bare feet on the smooth gray surface of the floor. I knew this whole thing was a mind game, and I started to feel like I was losing it. 

I don’t know how long I spent crossing back and forth, back and forth, up, then down, then up, then down again, before the claustrophobia really started to kick in. For a while, my resentment for whoever had designed this abomination was enough to ward off the panic of feeling trapped. Walking, crawling, climbing, walking some more — the harder the panic pressed, the harder I pushed back with indignation. It was my best, my only defense, and it grew until I was laughing like a hate-filled psychopath, flinging myself down one hallway after another, slamming into walls, tripping down ladders, snarling at this prison.

But then, like any flame that burns too hot, it spent itself out, and the black fear of isolation took over. Then it was the terror that kept me moving, back and forth, up and down, until it grew so intense that it turned me to jelly. It was like one of those horrible dreams, where you’re trying to run, but your arms are so heavy, and your legs won’t move, and you can’t get up…

I remember crawling to the base of one more ladder and then curling up against the wall and hugging my knees tightly into my chest. All my strength, all my hope, had abandoned me. I was without friend or kin. Trapped, moaning as the damned, waiting to die.

I know this sounds dramatic, but I truly had never felt so lost and alone. It was the worst feeling of my life — something below grief, a kind of existential, gasping terror. A panic attack that stretched into eternity. 

This is how Deek and Jackson found me. 

Their voices, at first distant, and then closer, pierced the madness, reconnected me to myself. I shook with the effort not to weep at the sight of their faces. 

Deek had finished first. He had entered into a sort of meditative trance, until he emerged from one of three exits to face the next stage, a dense web of ropes. When he didn’t see either me or Jackson, he thought maybe we’d gone ahead without him, since he couldn’t imagine he’d been faster. He called out a couple of times, but it was hard to see into the webs.

A little while later, Jackson popped out of door number two. When he saw I wasn’t there, he Immediately headed back through door number three — my door — and Deek followed. 

Despite the narrowness of the space, they pulled me into a group hug when they found me. 

“It’s not that far!” Jackson said. “We’re so close,” Deek added.

The kind of love that fills you up at a time like that isn’t something you forget.

And then we were all three of us out. I got on my hands and knees and just breathed. Tears were coming out of my eyes and I couldn’t help it, but that was fine. It was just fine.

God bless them, Deek and Jackson set down nearby to rest and let me have my moment. But it wasn’t long until I was ready to get moving again. 

“Alright let’s get this bitch done with,” I said, and grabbed onto one of the three rope ladders hanging on the end. At that moment, I felt like I could do anything.“Come on, clock’s ticking.”

“What clock?” Deek said, dragging himself to one of the other rope ladders.

We had fun at first. Until our hands and feet got so raw they started bleeding. To say nothing of the growing constellation of bruises and scrapes from all the slips and falls into hard corded ropes. If there was a “fast way” through them, I couldn’t see it. 

Despite all that, I stayed effusively positive, shouting encouragement to the boys when they slipped and cursed, taunting them with how far ahead I was, and generally doing my best to make up for the embarrassment of needing to be rescued earlier.

I would have felt proud for making it out of the ropes first, but I had to admit the possibility that my friends were letting me have the win. Regardless, as I grabbed and pulled my way through the last bit of thick webbing with chafed hands, I was ecstatic to see a clear pool of water underneath me, instead of another platform. 

Dropping into it was a delicious relief. The water was cool but not cold. A profound grace. I lowered myself to my chin and let all the enflamed heat bleed off me. 

The final stage appeared to be three winding canals, suspended high above the floor, snaking back and forth all the way to the far side of the enormous room. They were hard to make out from that distance, but I thought I could see three very tall ladders, leading to one large platform with some kind of bright light in the middle. That must be the end of the course. 

I looked at the water, cupped some in my hand and brought it to my nose. When I couldn’t detect any odor of chlorine or salt, I took a sip and swished it around. There was no chemical tang. I plunged both hands in and drank until I couldn’t. 

If that’s what kills me, I thought, then shame on them.

Jackson dropped with a splash into the water nearby. 

“Well this is nice,” he said. 

“I think it’s drinkable. Anyway I drank it.”

He didn’t need any other reassurances.

“How are you doing?” he said when he was done.

“How am I doing? I’m doing great. I’ve been here waiting. How are you?”

“I’m tired,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Are we supposed to just swim the rest of the way?”

“Looks like it.”

“I’m not much of a swimmer.”

“Aren’t there plenty of pools in Arizona?” I winced at my thoughtlessness. Jackson grew up on the edge of a sparse and impoverished reservation. Plenty of pools?

But he just smiled. “Not in my Arizona.”

“You do know how, though?” That was a serious question. 

“Sort of. I learned to swim in Andre’s pool. But that was a long time ago.”

“It’s like riding a bike,” I said, and wondered how I’d managed to get my foot back in my mouth so fast. 

“That I never learned,” he said. “Couldn’t bare to put a helmet on my beautiful mane.”

I was glad he wasn’t the sort to take offense easily. 

“It’s overrated,” I lied. Riding bikes was the best, and everyone knew it. “Deek! Hurry up!”

“YOU hurry up!” he shouted back. “Everything hurts.”

“Good news is you get to go for a swim at the end.”

“…really?”

I splashed around.

“I’m coming I’m coming!”

“Be nice if there was a place to sit down,” Jackson said as he let the water come up to his shoulders. The walls of the pool were high and smooth, and there were no ledges anywhere. Just three separate exits to three separate canals. 

I took a breath and slipped below the surface, took a look around, and then came back up, sweeping my hair back and rubbing my eyes.

“See anything?”

I shook my head. “There’s not a lot of light down there, though. There might be something I didn’t see.”

“You think there’s some kind of shortcut?”

I shrugged. “Probably not one we can use.”

As soon as Deek dropped into the water he laid back and floated, letting out a long, vocal sigh.

“Thanks for warming it up for me,” he said.

“It was like that when we got here,” Jackson said, then looked at me. “Please tell me it was like that when you got here.”

“Who can remember these things.”

“Is it drinkable?” Deek said.

“I sure hope so,” Jackson said.

After Deek got himself hydrated, he pointed at the bright light at the end of the canals. “You think that’s the end?”

“It better be,” I said.

“Hey I was thinking,” Jackson said, “what would happen if we all tried to go down the same canal?”

What a sweetheart. “I seriously doubt it.”

Sure enough, as soon as Jackson crossed the threshold of one of the three entrances, it squeezed shut.

“Can you still hear us?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Jackson said. “Sorry. Maybe if we had all tried to go together?“

“Doubt it,” I said. “Well, I guess it’s a real race now. No way I’m gonna be the sucker who has to do the whole damn thing backwards.”

I dove toward the canal at the far right, and didn’t look back to see the entrance close behind me.

It was a glass tube, ten feet in diameter. Looking over, I could see Jackson and Deek working their way through their tubes, and down below I could see the vast, featureless floor of the cavernous room that we’d been stuck inside of for who knew how long. Days? It felt like days.

The water was deeper in the tube, almost to my neck. It meant I could stand if I wanted to, but walking wasn’t really an option. So I did my best to pace an even breaststroke. I’d always been a strong swimmer, but it was still exhausting. I had to stop frequently to catch my breath. My whole body felt like it had been used up. It seemed a minor miracle that I could keep moving my limbs. But then, what choice did I have? 

“Just keep swimming, just keep swimming,” I sang softly. “Swimming, swimming.” I could remember when the twins had watched Finding Nemo every day for what felt like a year. Would someone with a short-term memory disorder have an easier go in this purgatorial maze?

All of us had gone silent. There was no energy for talking. I started to feel alone again, but it was different this time. I knew I could shout, and be heard. So whenever another panic attack threatened, I stopped, stood up, and took slow, deep breaths. I was not alone. The path was not infinite. I would not drown. I would not die. 

I already gave up once today, I thought bitterly, then kept on swimming.

Eventually, I could see the end, but by that point I was too tired to be excited about it. Emotions consume energy, and I didn’t have any of that. So I just kept swimming, limbs numb, heart stammering, lungs like broken glass. Yes, eventually, this would end. It would end.

And then it did. 

I slid out of the tube into the pool and found it was too deep to stand. So I paddled my way to a nearby ladder — one of three that stretched straight up into the air, and hooked my arm over the first rung above the water. I thought maybe I was done swimming for the rest of my life. I leaned my head on my arm and went still. 

The precarity of my consciousness bothered me less than it should have, like when you’re falling asleep at the wheel. Some part of you knows that it will kill you, but the bigger part very persuasively suggests that it’s probably fine if you just close your eyes for a few seconds. Thankfully Jackson spilled into the pool next to me before I slipped under the surface. 

“Hey,” he said as he grabbed onto the other side of the ladder I was hooked onto. “I’m worried about Deek. He doesn’t have the body mass. The reserves.”

Jackson’s voice sounded far away.

“Esther.”

I blinked at him. 

“Can you start climbing? You should keep moving.”

Whose hand was that next to my face? Oh it was mine. What?

“I’m gonna go find Deek—“ Jackson started to say, right as Deek drifted out of his tunnel and into the pool. 

His eyes were half closed until he took in more of a mouthful of water than was good for him, and started coughing and thrashing weakly. Jackson swam over to him and brought him to one of the open ladders. He could barely hang on. Jackson kept having to put his arm back around him to make sure he didn’t go under.

“OK,” he said. “Here’s what we’re gonna do.”

I watched as he managed to get Deek’s legs over his shoulders by diving below the surface swimming up under him, and grabbing onto the bottom rung of the ladder as Deek used him for balast and pulled upward. Deek’s arms were shaking so bad it looked like he was dancing. I only smiled because I was delirious. 

“This is crazy,” Deek said. “You can’t go the whole way like this.”

“Maybe if you were a big fat guy it would be a problem. But, no offense, you basically don’t weigh anything. Just focus on not falling off.”

And then they were climbing, one painstaking rung at a time. 

I looked up at my own ladder. It was fifty, maybe a hundred feet high. Hard to tell from that vantage. I knew I couldn’t do it. It just wasn’t possible. Whatever reserves I’d had, they were all gone now. 

But what was I gonna do? Wait for Jackson to come and get me? Or someone else? Give up and suck in a lungful of water? That’d show em.

Almost as a joke, just for the lulz, I lifted my numb arms out of the water, grabbed the highest rung I could, and pulled. It didn’t feel like I was doing anything, but by some mysterious magic, my body lifted out of the water, enough so that I could get my feet onto the bottom rung, and stand. 

As soon as I put all my weight onto the ladder, my whole body threatened to shake itself right back off again. I imagined this must be what it felt like to have a seizure. But eventually it passed, and then I was just standing there, water up to my knees, hugging the bars. 

Eventually, I reached up to grab the next rung, then lifted a foot. And so on. 

Pain, prickly and burning, came back in a rush, now that gravity was reasserting its dominance. There was wildfire in my muscles, dry concrete in my joints, and it felt like the top layer of my skin had been shorn away. Every rung was fresh agony. 

At about the halfway point, I realized the whining and grunting I heard were my own, and that my breath was leaving in ragged sobs. The shaking resumed, and my hands were quickly losing their ability to grip, so I resorted to using my whole forearms to keep going. Still twenty feet from the top, I noticed my calves were losing their ability to support my weight. All my muscles were simply refusing to cooperate.

As I tried to shift my weight to my heels, I slipped. 

Suddenly, wouldn’t you know it, my hands could grip again. 

Aha, I thought, heart racing. You’ve been holding out on me.

Before the adrenaline could wear off, I put it all into the climb. After five or six more rungs, my body started trying to convince me that it didn’t have anything left. “Bullshit,” I said, and kept going. 

When I looked up and saw I was only a few rungs from the edge of the platform, something like bloodlust took me. I was like a mad charioteer, thrashing my arms and legs with barbed whips, screaming at them to MOVE, MOVE, MOVE!

Every muscle shook and spasmed, every pull felt like the last I could ever do. 

And then, there it was — the edge of the platform. If I had known I would have to drag myself up and over it, I might have given up long before, but in that final moment, blind animal rage got me onto the platform. 

I laid there, gasping, aware only of the supernal bliss of motionlessness. My eyes were closed, and I heard nothing but the rushing relief of sleep, spinning me into oblivion.

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