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.
You can also always refer to the Table of Contents to catch up or refresh before continuing. There, you’ll find short summaries for all the chapters that have been published so far.
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 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 begin an intense training regime under the guidance (coercion?) of three non-terrestrial humans.
Suspicious Fruit
HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR EXPERIENCE ON PRIEZH?
When I was little my dad taught me how to make clarified butter. It’s pretty simple, actually, you just take a stick of butter and melt it in the pan until the water evaporates out, and the proteins and other solids either float to the top or sink to the bottom. What you have leftover is pure butter fat.
That was me on Pizza Planet. Clarified Esther. Obsessive, mono-focused, striving toward some vague idea of excellence, of winning. Looking back, the prize I was after was just the avoidance of grief. I bent all my energy into every part of the training program without the need for any of the incentives they built into it.
In fact, I dreaded the times the three of us spent together. Seeing Deek and Jackson just reminded me of all the things I was trying so hard not to think about as I sprinted toward the next objective.
It was lonely. I remember feeling lonely. Because while I avoided my friends, I also didn’t trust whoever these people were, these aliens. I just thought that somehow, if I was focused enough, if I was good enough, I could rend an opportunity for leverage from reality, and take back some fraction of all the control I had lost.
So I worked harder, slept less, and voraciously consumed the Terran’s Guide to the Galaxy. Not that I could automatically believe everything in it, but at the very least, it was helpful to know what these people wanted us to believe. Even taken as fiction, though, it was impossible to put down. There were claims that connected some of the UFO stuff I’d read about years before to Fellowship activity, as well as other claims that other UFO stuff was still a total mystery. The writers of the Guide, whoever they were, seemed perfectly willing to admit ignorance in plenty of categories. The tone was always “here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t.” Or even, “here’s what’s knowable, and here’s what seems not to be.”
Despite myself, I ended up coming to really like the Guide’s personality. I found myself wishing I could meet its anonymous authors. It was somehow a safer connection to Earth than my actual friends.
And right there in the pages was an admission that the Fellowship was not the only extra-terrestrial organization with an interest in Earth, and that its efforts to protect Earth from outside harassment had not always been entirely successful. In other words, something like a Confederate attack on Boston, or even the presence of an eternal, was not unprecedented.
There was also, even more shockingly, a transparency about Fellowship fuck-ups in the past. The Black Plague, as it turned out, had been the result of early bioengineering meant to reduce the population of rats. Non-Terran advisors had introduced the technology to a delegation of people native to Earth, who then proceeded to accidentally unleash the deadliest and longest-running epidemic in recorded history. Why didn’t the Fellowship step in and clean up the mess? Good question. The author of that chapter in the guide offered some suggestions, but they were not altogether satisfying.
The gist seemed to be that nobody in the Fellowship is infallible, not even the archs themselves. Their predominating philosophy is that the solution to intervention going bad is never more intervention. I got the sense that some of the major world religions, and the genecidal conflicts that they sometimes instigated, may have been the result of well-meaning Fellowship involvement that turned rotten in our hands. Big surprise.
TALK ABOUT AYA.
…
Yeah.
Well, I didn’t like her. She was strange and aloof, and for the whole first week I was convinced she was withholding all the information I so desperately wanted.
So I pretended to be a perfect student, bright-eyed and game for anything. I feigned positivity. And god knows I put every scrap of effort I had on the table.
But I also sensed that she could see through my mask of amicability, right down to the hostile distrust and boiling resentment at my core. And of course when someone doesn’t believe your carefully calibrated performance, they become your enemy. So that was just status quo for a while.
After about a week, Deek and Jackson and I started spending more time together as a group, and earned the privilege to go outside, to learn how to wear and use armor, and received training with a wide assortment of weapons, many of which were headcrampingly exotic. Thankfully, almost everything was automated and magically intuitive, just like all the other technology we’d been introduced to in a very short time.
“Why not just use robots?” I asked aYa one day, thinking of drone warfare back on primitive old Earth. “What’s the point of risking the life of an actual person? Can’t everything be controlled remotely?”
“In any conflict, the more intelligent force will win. In a field of battle, non-sentient forces are always inferior to sentient ones. And remote operation is vulnerable to severed connection. The best way to utilize artificial intelligence is as a lever to amplify the efficacy of human discernment and intuition.”
“You can’t built artificially intelligent models that mimic those qualities?”
“To some degree, we can, but they are always vulnerable to manipulation in a way that humans are not. A full, self-determining sentient mind is still logarithmically more complex and valuable than the most sophisticated synthetics we can conjure, despite all appearances.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “We’ve got models back on Earth that can beat any human in any contest you can think of.”
“And in the jungle, how many animals would have you as lunch?”
She was making a point that it would take me a while to fully grasp. At the time, I logged the exchange as more evidence of her insufferable smugness, and dropped the subject.
The shift in our relationship happened when one day, seemingly apropos of nothing, aYa offered to teach me a’R’an botany.
It was after an admittedly pleasant afternoon making fresh craters out on the red flatlands. We were in a wide valley — a fifty mile bowl of rubble that made a very good case for why whoever had built this training camp had picked a planet without a biosphere. It was the only ethical choice. When we left, the air was sizzling with dissipating plasma, and the ground was soft and glowing for miles in every direction.
aYa invited me to come to the silo with her. We had some discretionary time scheduled, so she made it clear I didn’t have to go, but I was way too stubborn to let down the pretense that I was anything other than an eager student.
As we walked toward the silo, she was uncharacteristically chatty, explaining what an engineering marvel the place was. Hundreds of thousands of plant species all coexisting in a frothy equilibrium of constant death and mutation, all aided by countless micro-organisms that were meticulously accounted for and shepherded to any number of mysterious ends by the gardeners — mostly aYa and her brother.
Inside, she taught me how to interface with a local colony of micro-organisms around a bushy tree budding with translucent orange fruit.
“This work is not necessary, but it is beautiful. There are languages you can learn by feeling, by touch, by smell and taste. Some of these speak lovely things.”
She bent and plucked a knobby, translucent orange fruit from the bush and brought it to her face. I expected her to take a bite, but instead she broke its surface with her delicate fingernails and breathed in.
Then she offered one of her hands to me. When I looked down at it, uncomprehending, she brought it to her nose to show me what she meant, then offered it again.
Yeah, it was weird. But honestly by now this level of weirdness didn’t even register. I bent forward and took a sniff.
It was strange. I expected the floral fruitiness, and even the acidity that tickled my sinuses, but there was also something else. Something that made my heart catch. I stepped back, frowning with the sudden rush of emotion.
“The juice of this fruit contains compounds that bind with pheromones to carry them more effectively to olfactory receptors.”
I had questions, but they were trumped by the sudden certainty I felt that this enigmatic female alien was pining after me. It was a feeling of pity, a hope for connection, for depth of friendship only blood can give you. As someone who knew I had only brothers, she wanted to be my sister.
Through the tang of that juice and its mysterious alchemy, I felt her ache vicariously, and it brought tears to my eyes. I stepped back.
“Why?” I managed.
“It is a hard thing, to meet across the great divides. Easier to learn of you from a distance, and to conjure abstractions. But now, here, I thought perhaps we might talk of what we share.”
“What we share,” I repeated, dumbly. There was some part of me screeching about tricks and tests and suspicious fruits, but it couldn’t get through the foamy head of emotion that I somehow knew had come from aYa.
“oyAyo is my younger, but I once had an elder. His name was yarWray. We were close, formed for later union. You might have called him my brother, but perhaps betrothed would be more accurate.
“There is a sickness on my world which has eluded all our best arts for many generations. It is a sickness of mind, of spirit. Some of us, for reasons unknown, drift. The process is irreversible, and begins with periodic lapses in presence and attention, which become longer and more frequent, each time resulting in reduced interest and awareness. Eventually, our minds shut down completely, and we die.
“I spent many years alone in the wilds after yarWray was lost to the Drift.”
aYa had led me onto dangerous ground. I could feel my own wrenching pain threaten at the edges, and fought it back by trying to focus on the strange details of her story — sibling betrothal? the Drift? the wilds? — but it was no use. The emotions were winning.
“It is not the same,” she went on, “but it is similar. We have both suffered the loss of someone we love deeply to something we can neither control nor understand.”
Thankfully, the ground was soft, so that I didn’t hurt myself when I fell.
It’s hard to say if it was the effect of the fruit, or it was just that the dam I’d built to keep back the grief was thinner and more brittle than I had believed, but all I could do was wail.
At first, I was barely aware of aYa as she stooped down and put her arms around me, saying, “I’m sorry, I only meant to meet… I’m sorry.” But effectually, I hung onto her too-thin arms and was grateful not to be alone in my agony.
The question — the one that I had been refusing to ask, let alone answer, since the night we left Boston — the question that now loomed over me and refused to any longer be ignored, was how could I live without my brother? How could my life have the audacity to continue without Adam in it?
But of course I didn’t have an answer.
I still don’t.
Some business:
Please be so kind as to slap the heart on your way out.
Also, if you’re reading this on the app, or on the website, you can use the “Next” and “Previous” buttons below (underneath the like/comment/share buttons) to navigate through the chapters.
Lastly and always…
“The Black Plague, as it turned out, had been the result of early bioengineering meant to reduce the population of rats.” Nice touch to bring cohesion between this world and the one you’re weaving.
And wish this was true (& believe that it is, ultimately): “In any conflict, the more intelligent force will win.”
“There are languages you can learn by feeling, by touch, by smell and taste. Some of these speak lovely things.” Gorgeous.
“…grateful not to be alone in my agony.
The question — the one that I had been refusing to ask, let alone answer, …the question that now loomed over me and refused to any longer be ignored, was how could I live without…? How could my life have the audacity to continue without …in it?
But of course I didn’t have an answer.
I still don’t.”
And now I’m crying in the airport. Well said.
Wow deep chapter. Hard to get all my thoughts together so here are some things that are kinda random that I’m curious about.
-Is yarWray just happenstantially close to Yahweh? Almost like a pirate trying to say it, at least the way my brain is pronouncing things.
-Do you forsee things like "The UFO Rabbit Hole" influencing some of the things you are exploring in this particular story?
Disirregardless of your answer to the above, for some reason during this chapter I was asking myself over and over what some of your inspirations were for this whole story.
I know this was a story that you originally wanted to tell many years ago, so i’d love to learn more about the direct influences, past and present, that you feel have shaped the story and may continue to do so.