Arch/Eternal - Chapter Twenty-Two

Jackson somehow biffs it with Esther

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 that, the three of them work their way through a ridiculously long obstacle course, designed to wear them out past the point of exhaustion. Jackson ends up half-carrying Deek up a really tall ladder at the end, and then pushing him past the finish line, and Esther barely manages to get to the end on her own, before promptly passing out.

But now, because they didn’t finish first, Jackson and Esther have to do it all again, backwards…

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The Other Side

Once again, I woke up fantastically disoriented. This time, though, it wasn’t a tiny Ginnean who greeted me, but, yes ladies and gentlemen, you guessed it: none other than Esther Quinn. 

“Morning,” she said casually as I dragged myself into a sitting position. I had no idea how long I had slept, but I knew it wasn’t enough. My body hurt in ways I didn’t know it was possible for a body to hurt. Thankfully my skin was visibly less swollen, and the scrapes, rub burns, and open cuts on my hands and feet and up and down my limbs were all closed up. They were all still tender, though, and would almost certainly open up again under stress.

“You fell asleep,” I said, having some idea that I needed to justify myself.

“That’s one way of putting it,” she said, and then added, “I saw what you did for Deek.”

“I hope it’s cool I let him finish first,” I said.

“Of course. I hope you’re cool with being the one who has to do this stupid course three times.”

That’s right. Whichever of the two of us got to the other side first would be done. The other one would have to come all the way back, again. But hang on — if she was so bent on beating me, why was she still here?

“How long have you been awake?”

She shrugged. “Long enough to know there’s no way off this platform but back the way we came. By the way there’s food.”

She jerked her head at a platter I hadn’t noticed with an piece of deep purple fruit on it about the size of a softball. At least I assumed it was fruit. It had that look. But who knew?

“There were two of them,” she said. “I ate the other one.”

It sat heavy in my hand as I looked it over. The skin was smooth and taut, with a pleasant shine, and it broke like a ripe plum when I bit into it. Its flesh had the texture of semi-dried mango, and it was a lot less juicy than I would have expected. But the flavor… Richly sweet, robustly fruity, with a gentle tang, and somehow also savory. It tasted like a whole meal. 

Esther watched me. “Not bad, huh?”

I ate the whole thing, quieting the howl of hunger, and generally feeling a lot less closer to death. 

Esther got to her feet. “Ready?”

“Kind of you to wait,” I said.

“Only seemed fair.”

The last thing I wanted to do was compete with this girl. Not only was I pretty sure she’d win, I also, if I was being honest, was maybe really looking forward to spending some one-on-one time with her. Not that I’d admit it. 

“Well then,” I said instead, “may the best Earthling win.” And then I jumped off the platform.

While I was struggling to get Deek onto my shoulders, I hadn’t been able to find the bottom of the pool, so I was reasonably sure it was deep enough. Amazing what a boy will do to impress a pretty girl.

Thankfully, I was right, and plunged deep into the water without shattering a femur. When I got to the surface, Esther shouted, “Hey, are you alright?” She sounded mad.

“Feel free to climb down if you think that’s safer,” I said, then swam into the same tube I’d spilled out of some unknown number of hours earlier.

Anyway, after a few long moments, I heard a splash behind me. I smiled at the thought of her pacing back and forth, working up the nerve to jump. Then I felt really stupid for showing off. Was it really worth the risk? And did I even know if she was the type of person to be impressed by that kind of thing? Did I want her to be? 

For the rest of the swim, I planned what I would say if and when I managed to meet up with her again before we got to the other side. More trash talk? Compliments? Maybe ask her about her parents? She had mentioned they were academics, but I didn’t know what that meant. It was good to show interest, right? Was that a thing? Or would it be weird?

Maybe some Star Facts.

After hours of swimming, my plan had congealed into some version of the strong silent type, with a couple of bad puns locked and loaded just in case, along with one question about her father carefully crafted to flatter her without seeming to mean to. Considering the degree of my infatuation with this young woman, I was grateful I had time to prepare.

“You really are a slow swimmer,” she said when I emerged from the endless tube. She was looking down from a perch within the ropes above the pool. 

I looked up and discovered how much all that planning had been worth. 

“Yeah,” I said, with an apologetic lilt. And that’s it. No puns, no cleverly designed questions about her dad, no strength in my awkward silence. My mind raced blankly for something else to say, but all I could do was obsess about why she was there. Did I get there just after she climbed up that rope ladder? OR HAD SHE BEEN WAITING FOR ME.

And if she had been waiting, was it just because it was fun to taunt me? Or was it because she actually liked me a little bit and maybe also possibly wanted to maybe hang out. 

Or — and this would be mortifying to the point of death — was she worried about me, like I needed to be taken care of?

“Hey,” she said, and I realized I’d just been standing in the pool for the past several seconds, mentally spinning out. “Keep up if you can. Would be nice to have someone to talk to.”

And then she started working her way further into the ropes.

Didn’t have to tell me twice.

And so, as we wormed our way through the tangle of ropes, we talked. 

First it was small talk — comparing aches and pains, wondering what the deal was with the micrograft, and all those other augmentations, trying to guess what might come next in the “training.” How weird this whole situation was.

“I’m trying to get my head around these, uh…” I tried to figure out what to call the non-humans that had escorted us into this giant room. “Aliens?”

“You mean Aya and whoever?”

“Mowk. Yeah. And oyAyo, I think.” Should I have added those names? Did it make me seem like a know-it-all? Dammit, Jackson! Get yourself together! 

“What about them?” she said. “I mean, specifically.”

I took a deep breath and pretended it was a precursor to my answer, instead of a desperate attempt to purge my brain of the buzzing anxiety of second-guessing every word I was saying. 

“Don’t you think it’s weird that they seem so…human?”

“I don’t know,” she said, hoisting herself through a tight tangle. “They do look pretty different.”

I was a couple of arm lengths away, trying to pick my next angle for movement. “Sure, but the differences are all basically cosmetic. The fundamentals are the same.”

“Yeah,” she conceded. “Sort of like what someone might imagine aliens look like if they’d never met any.”

“Or what we might look like given a few dozen generations on a different planet.”

“Maybe we were wrong about how evolution works?”

“You really think that’s the answer?”

“No.”

“So what the hell is going on here? All of the best theories we have suggest that if there’s other intelligent life in the universe — if life on Earth wasn’t some singular cosmic fluke — that if evolution has happened, is happening in other places, it would follow its own unique trajectory. To the point that we would be lucky to even be able to recognize it as life, let alone be able to have conversations with it.”

I realized all my talking was slowing me down. But instead of shutting up, I just tried to move quicker to keep up with her. 

“And that’s assuming that there’s any overlap in terms of time, because astronomical timescales make all of human history from the apes look like a blip. A blink. Not even that. All of recorded human history happened in the time it takes light to travel one tenth of the way across the galaxy. I mean, some planets take a hundred years to orbit their sun.”

“OK…?”

My face got hot. Was I losing her? I couldn’t stop the word vomit.

“What I’m saying is that, in a sense, it is absolutely ludicrous to assume that there are any other intelligent races even approximately close to us in either time or space.”

Do I sound smart? I hope I sound smart. But not too smart!

“And yet,” I soldiered on, “here we are. Presumably on a different planet, hanging out with ‘alien’ races that are shockingly familiar, biologically and culturally. I mean even technologically, given the pace of advancement on Earth over the past century — it just doesn’t seem like these people are that far ahead of us, does it? I mean technology is supposed to follow an exponential curve, so even if these guys are a couple hundred years ahead of us…”

I finally got myself to shut up, mostly because I wasn’t sure how to end that last thought. What was I even trying to say? By now Esther must think I’m some sort of raving cretin. I was grateful for the exertion and pain of the interminable ropes to distract me from Esther’s heart-pounding silence.

“So what’s your theory?” she finally said.

I let out a huge breath of tension, disguised by a big press upward into an open area. 

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I can only think of two explanations that would make any sense at all. One, this is all one big dream, or simulation, or some other fictional construct of  my or someone else’s imagination.”

“Possible,” Esther said, “but hard to prove.”

“And hard to rule out. Plenty of people on Earth have theorized this for a long time. Especially as we get better at making AIs and virtual environments.”

“You’re saying what we’re experiencing here is evidence in favor of that theory.”

“That, or option two, which is that there’s some kind of grand experiment going on that no one has told us about yet, or that no one knows about. Which would mean Earth is just one of many planet sized petri dishes filled with humanoid races, except that some of the petri dishes, or maybe a lot of them, have formed alliances.”

“And this whole big lab was built by, what,” she said, “God?”

“Or, you know, some kind of transdimensional superbeings.”

“Is there a difference?”

“Touché.”

We kept working our way through the ropes in silence for a bit — me because I was embarrassed at how much I had been talking, and she, well, I didn’t know. It was very hard not to fill the silence with more nervous chatter, but I kept repeating some kind of mantra about what a cool guy would do in this situation, and I very, very much wanted to be a cool guy.

She finally broke the silence. “After Adam showed me that astral lock, and told me he had some kind of deal with aliens, I went down the rabbit hole. Read all kinds of books about UFOs, alien encounters, ET conspiracies — the whole nine. Because Adam wouldn’t tell me shit, but I had to know.”

“I’ve done a little digging into that stuff, too. It’s pretty chaotic.”

“It is! It seems like it’s fundamentally impossible to parse what’s real from what isn’t. Every compelling narrative has an equally compelling counter-narrative. Stuff stays unexplained. So what? Plenty of things lack good explanations. It’s not proof. Nothing I found that might have even partly corroborated what Adam had told me — the little he did tell me — could be completely trusted.”

“Until Rita took us to a different planet,” I suggested, “and we met some aliens.”

“Until that, yeah. But all this other stuff — the unexplained, unexplainable stuff you’re talking about — feels the same. I’m starting to wonder if you can really know about anything you haven’t figured out for yourself, with your own first-hand experience.”

I thought about that. “Seems kinda bleak.”

“Why? I mean, what’s the alternative?”

I thought about it. Why had what she said felt bleak?

“I think it’s about trust,” I said. “Either there are people you can trust, or there aren’t. And if there aren’t, then you’re right: knowledge outside of firsthand confirmation is impossible. But I’m not sure you can build much of anything that way.”

“Sure,” she said. “But then, plenty of people, maybe most people are perfectly blissful in ignorance, right? Which is probably how most things get built. And also, trust isn’t binary. It’s more like a measurement of probability. Actually I don’t know if that’s right, I always hated math. But anyway, it depends on context, and it depends on degree. I can trust this person this much for this thing in this situation.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think there are people I can trust completely. Or I hope so. Like my Nali, or like Rita.”

“Yeah,” said Esther. “Of course.”

But I’d lost her.

I could hear it in her voice. Some part of her that had been open, present in the conversation, pulled back and quietly closed a door. I had no idea why. 

We kept talking, but it was superficial. Half-serious speculation about what other worlds might be like, or how a zero point portal actually worked. She was still charming and funny and irresistible, but she was also performing behind a mask of safeness.

At the end of the ropes, we were back at the three openings in the vast grey wall. The enormous box of hallways. 

“See you on the other side,” she said with a charismatic smile, and then disappeared through one of the openings.

A bitter tang of disappointment settled into the bottom of my throat as I stood there alone. It was clear she expected us to take separate routes. I had been hoping to stick with her through the interminable switchbacks. 

What had I said? 

Feeling pathetically sorry for myself, and deeply resentful of the sentiment, I trudged into my personal hall of hell. 

It went exactly as you’d expect. A misery of tedium that felt unending until it finally did end. And by the time I made it out, Esther was already halfway across the rubber cones. I was surprised to see her sitting astride one of them. She waved. I waved back. Then she kept going. 

She had figured out, apparently, how to hop from one to the next, and scramble up to keep from tumbling down into the pinched valleys below. It did not look easy, but it certainly looked faster. When I tried out the same method, I was surprised to discover I could do it, too. My body was stronger — my grip strength, my balance, my endurance. The revelation injected some much-needed positivity into my self-image. I was a badass!

By the time I made it passed the cones, Esther had managed to cross the two hundred meter balancing beam all the way to the starting platform. There was a glowing circle there, just like the one I had pushed Deek across all the way on the other side of this impossibly large room. 

Esther cupped her hands at her mouth and shouted, “I’ll tell them to send you another ball of food!”

She crossed the line and walked through the open door, which immediately closed.

OK then.

I looked behind me and saw that all three entrances in the grey wall were also closed. Clearly I was expected to cross the balance beam before turning around and heading all the way back. 

Feeling abandoned and lonely, and also feeling stupid for feeling those things, I decided to walk up to that big grey wall and see if I could climb it. I was really tired, and thirsty, and hungry again, but what the hell.

And you know what? I did it. It was hard, and there were several times I slipped or lost my grip, but I managed to climb the whole ten stories or however tall it was without falling to my death. 

It was, if I’m being honest, probably the most frightening thing I’d ever done up to that point in my life. A very dramatic experience. Which was GREAT, because it very effectively got my mind off Esther, and when I was finally standing on the expansive flat roof of the thing, I felt like a champion. 

My fingers were bleeding, my hands were shaking, and I was seeing stars, but the sense of total personal victory was almost overwhelming. 

It took maybe five minutes to walk across, which was amazing, considering the countless hours it had taken to traverse the entire three dimensional volume of the structure both times.

Instead, I looked up and saw the fast way through the ropes. Well, maybe. Up this high, they were more spaced out. I could see how it might be theoretically possible to jump and swing across like Spiderman. 

But I was so tired. And so thirsty. The euphoria of my previous triumph leaked out of me as I contemplated what “the fast way” would require.

Still, I rallied myself as best I could and leapt to the first rope. I even managed to jump to the next one, and use it to swing and jump to a third. But from there I failed to see what my next move should be until it was too late, and ended up tumbling deep into the thick web before the hard corded ropes broke my fall. 

Terribly bruised, I managed to inch my way through the rest of the ropes course — for the THIRD time — until I could finally drop into the by-now-familiar pool of water on the other side. Once again I drank until I was nauseous, and then stood there and decided I’d probably made a mistake not crossing the balance beam and waiting for perhaps another meal, or at least laying down to rest. The ropes course had taken pretty much the rest of whatever I had, and I just couldn’t abide the thought of swimming another however many miles.

But what else was there? I couldn’t see a fast way here. Running along the top of the tubes would be suicide — it was a long way down, and there was no nets here.

So I started swimming. And thinking.

Was this what I wanted, growing up with my eyes fixed on the stars? Was this what Rita was promising? A galaxy full of familiar people. A war. And soldiers who trained for that war in places like this, where someone like me could be left in a cavernous room to blow it with a girl who was way out of his league, and then toil away in solitude and confusion, just trying to make it to the other side.

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