Strike Radius

Arch/Eternal - Chapter Twenty-Five

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.

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 complete it on their own.

By the end, Jackson is all alone as he finally completes the course…

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Strike Radius

[Jackson’s POV]

When I finally finished that stupid obstacle course, Mowk and oyAyo were there to greet me. I could barely stand. I was too tired to talk. They had to half carry me. Well, mostly it was oyAyo who did the carrying. Mowk was too short to lean on.

We walked down one corridor after another, until suddenly we were deep in the guts of a thick jungle. Leaves and vines and needles of green and yellow and purple and blue. Splashes of red and orange so fierce they made me squint. It was a triumph of color and growth and absolutely nothing looked familiar. 

I looked down at my feet and thought the very ground we walked on must be alive — soft, loamy, and damp. 

Above us, the tangle of growth was so thick it made an impenetrable roof. The contrast between the sterile, manufactured aesthetic of the obstacle course, and this lush, ecstatically organic greenhouse was so stark I wondered if I had passed through the mortal veil.

Further in, I could see that we were somewhere up the side of a vast hydroponic silo, wide and deep, with platforms and walkways corkscrewing down from the top to depths buried in vegetation. I imagined falling down the center, to be swallowed up by alien trees and vines.

As we wound our way downward, we passed in and out of a warm, white light that poured down from above, filtering through the festival of foliage. Eventually, we entered a glen, out of view of either the silo’s hollow core. Mowk and oyAyo guided me toward a mossy depression filled with water at the base of some enormous tree. I was so exhausted, so overwhelmed with the sights and smells of this place, I barely noticed them help me out of the unitard I had been wearing for who knew how long and into the cool water. As I laid back, my body started to shiver uncontrollably. 

“You will rest now,” Mowk said.

As the water slipped over my face, there was a very brief moment of panic, before my body relaxed so completely that I couldn’t even hold my tensed lungs. All the air flowed out in a short stream of bubbles to the surface, and I melted into oblivion.

Later, I would learn that the pool had been prepared specifically for me, to repair and revise my internal and external microbiomes. It was state-of-the-art technology developed by the race aYa and oyAyo belonged to, and was the primary contribution of their people to the Fellowship. As I slept in that creche, freshly engineered colonies of micro-organisms were introduced to the ones already living in and on my body. The effects of this were the kinds of things you find on the labels of nutritional supplements — a vastly improved immune and digestive system, faster healing, more energy, clearer skin, no more unpleasant body odor, etc.

Not that I knew any of this when I woke up ten hours later. All I knew was that I was still naked. And alone.

But at least I was dry. The water had emptied out of the mossy creche, and there was a pile of folded fabric to my right. Hovering just above it, a tiny glowing dot. 

This would be my introduction to the way people primarily interface with technology in the Fellowship. 

I remember watching a video once about how Apple had to design its touchscreen to work just as well or better than BlackBerry’s dominant physical keyboard. So one of their engineers developed an AI assisted keyboard that would anticipate the next letter a user wanted to tap, and then invisibly increase the “hit region” around that button. The result was a touchscreen keyboard that seemed to just…work. And now no one has any issue with non-physical keyboards. 

Everything in Fellowship tech is like that. Things just make sense. In any given scenario, the virtual interface is seamlessly integrated with your physical environment, so that wherever or however you might anticipate some kind of option or control, it’ll just be there. More than that, the little artifacts that train your interactions slowly disappear with repetition. 

As I touched that little dot, a little folded note materialized out of thin air, and float down to rest on the clothes. Even though it was a virtual artifact, I could feel it in my hand when I picked it up, and opened it. This was thanks to the micrograft, which not only enabled me to see and hear the entire virtual interface, but could also simulate pretty much any kind of sensation anywhere on my skin. 

The note looked handwritten, in plain English, and said, “Get dressed, then follow the wayfinder to me. -Mowk”

With no real desire to go exploring on my own (and a vague fear of touching something poisonous), I decided to comply. I set the note down next to the clothes, and immediately a yellow line the width of my hand sprouted out of it and snaked away and out of the glen. The wayfinder. 

At first I thought that pile of fabric was what I had been wearing when I arrived, but it became quickly apparent that it was all different now. The material, for one, was of a much higher quality — like thick silk, or something. I’m not a textile expert. And everything fit better, too. In one of the pockets, I found the tie that I had been using to pull my hair back. When I used it this time, was it just my imagination, or was the thick knot at the back of my head more secure?

Fully dressed and rested, I took a deep breath of the sweet air and felt better than I ever had in my life. I couldn’t help but laugh for the joy of it, thankful there was no one around to make me self-conscious about the wide grin plastered on my face. 

“Okay!” I said out loud. Perhaps some fresh horror lurked just around the corner, but for the moment, it was impossible not to feel amazing.

I followed the wayfinder out of the glen.

Twenty minutes of walking brought me back out of the underground forrest silo, through the familiar featureless hallways, and up to a door, which opened with the wave of my hand. 

In the center of a white, low-ceilinged room about the size of a dance studio, Mowk rose from a cross-legged position, and tilted his head down to greet me. He was wearing a black unitard like the one I had put on before the obstacle course. With a wave of his hand, a small locker opened near the door where I stood. Inside was another unitard. Part of me had hoped I would never have to put one on again. Bad association. 

“Please change your attire,” he said, “so that we may begin.”

Feeling embarrassed but not wanting to show it, I stripped out of my new-old clothes and put the one piece back on. Just like before, it contoured perfectly to my skin. I had to admit, if begrudgingly, that it was pretty damn comfortable. Ned Flanders’ voice was in my head saying, “It’s like I’m wearing nothin’ at all…”

Now dressed like Mowk, I stood in front of him. Something told me I was about to get hit. 

“Have you studied any kind of martial art?” he asked.

Oh boy, I thought. “No,” I said. 

“I will teach you forms and principles, and you will practice them.”

I braced myself. 

“First, you must learn your own striking radius.”

Two circles appeared on the floor — one around me, the other around him. 

“Your reach is longer than mine, and so your striking radius is larger. Do you understand the implications?”

I swallowed. “It means…I can hit you before you can hit me.”

“No,” he explained. “It means that I must place myself within your radius of attack in order to strike you, but that you may strike me from outside of my own.”

As he talked, he pointed at the circles on the ground, and I noticed that they shifted with our movements. 

“So I have the advantage,” I said. Simple enough.

“You have the potential for advantage in range, but you will also have a disadvantage of speed. A larger radius means longer limbs. Longer limbs require more time for movement.”

Right.

“In any contest, you must learn minimize your disadvantage while maximizing your advantage. Your first objective is to force me outside of your striking radius, while I endeavor to evade any contact whatsoever.”

“Hang on,” I said. “So I just have to try to touch you?”

“Correct.”

A long-empty stomach was making me cranky, so I reached out without warning to tap the small man’s shoulder. 

He stepped aside, and I missed.

“We have begun,” he said.

I turned to face him again and waited, but he didn’t do anything.

“So are you just going to stand there?”

“I will stay within your circle until you successfully force me to leave it.”

Feeling clever, I took a quick step backward. But he seemed to anticipate the movement, and stepped forward. Our circles tracked us perfectly. 

“OK,” I said, thinking I might be catching on. 

I stepped quickly back and to the side, and threw my hand out to touch him as he followed me. 

But he was fast. 

He managed to dodge my arm and stay in my circle, even as I lost my balance just watching him, and fell to the floor. It was like trying to grab a ghost.

For the next half hour or more, he said nothing, while I tried everything. I lunged, kicked, sprawled, sprinted, and leapt. But compared to him I might as well have been an ogre in slow motion. I couldn’t get a hand on him to save my life, even though he was always right next to me.

For a little while, it was kind of funny. I laughed as I stumbled uselessly across the room, chasing a small man who never left arm’s reach. But after a while, it became clear that this game was not going to end, and it wasn’t funny anymore. Frustration started reaching toxic levels. 

When I finally accepted that I was nowhere near fast enough, I started trying to think more strategically.

The element of surprise? 

Maybe if I held still for long enough, and occasionally faked him out, I could…

Nope. 

His patience was inexhaustible, and he always knew the difference between a false start and the real thing. I even tried laying down and pretending to go to sleep, but he knew exactly was I was doing. When I started flailing at him from the floor, he just danced around my arms and legs as casually as he might step over cracks in the sidewalk. 

I thought more about what he said: the advantage of reach versus the advantage of speed. I needed to strike with multiple limbs, in multiple directions, over a short enough span of time to make it impossible for him to dodge everything without getting the hell out of my circle. 

Knowing I couldn’t outright surprise him, I practiced combinations of maneuvers that would maximize my reach advantage as much as possible. When it looked like one set of moves might be more challenging for him to dodge, I iterated on that, and sped up as much as I could.

Finally, in the middle of a blind and chaotic sequence of flailing, the room turned bright red. I stumbled to a stop, suddenly aware that Mowk was no longer locked into my personal space.

He was standing just outside of it.

Breathing heavily, I wiped sweat from my brow as the room went back to white.

“Good,” he said. “Again.”

He stepped back inside my circle. 

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