Zander Sawyer — my older brother, a decorated TOTE and AFF veteran — used to explain Ether like this: "Reality isn't a single road. It's a braid of possible streets, and every mind weaves its own lane. When minds are uncentered — Demons, Threaders, Regulars, even us — the TOTEs. That's why they police focus. That's why they built the rules."
They didn't build the rules to make life pretty. They built them to keep the seams from tearing. And, if you asked Zander, those rules also kept the vibes intact — whatever that meant to him.
Excerpt from Tripp Sawyer's Autobiography — Enlisting in the American Federated Forces
I wanted to be a soldier before I could name the sky. Service was family religion: the seal on our coat of arms, the default answer to every question about the future. Our line stretches back before Ether. After the Great Job Stabilization in the early 2200s — when trades were locked to bloodlines and upward motion was structural theft — enlisting wasn't ambition. It was the only ladder left.
I didn't resent the trade-off. Guaranteed work felt like certainty in a world that kept shifting. So I stamped my name next to the family crest and signed up for the American Federated Forces.
During processing I was offered the Soul‑Power Exam. They told me it was a simulated reality split. The room looked like a clinic waiting room — fluorescent, too‑clean chairs, a small camera in the corner. They sat me in a plastic folding chair and told me to breathe. Ten seconds was the test. Ten seconds of keeping your center without the simulation consuming you. Most people blacked out, most people left the test marked as "incomplete."
Ten seconds. Nothing. I left thinking I'd failed it with a shrug. Before I was assigned to an Ether Recruit Training Battalion. Years later I learned why I hadn't: I'd already centered my reality without realizing it. I was closer to opening my Third Eye than I'd ever be aware of.
They shipped three hundred of us to an Ether Recruit Training Battalion in a mountainous region. I do not know the exact location. By the time the buses emptied, the line between who would become something and who would be culled showed itself in small, clinical ways. "Centering Yourself" our first task was the currency. If you couldn't align your perspective — purpose, ego, and the shared world — you were gone, quietly reassigned to jobs they called safe.
Training chewed through people faster than the heat. Drill sergeants became clinical instructors; physical runs turned into isolation-tank schedules and meditation drills. The word "centering" stopped being theory and became somatic: the way your heartbeat matched the hum of the barracks lights, the way your breath filled the same rhythm as your neighbor's. A handful learned it. Most didn't.
Then they put Conquered Ether in the water. That's when reality stopped being metaphor and started being medical. Food and sleep became optional; the body stopped sending its usual complaints. The meditations began to have visible effects. Brandon's hair rose like static. Skinny's skin flushed a violent red and steam crawled off his scalp. One recruit went—cold, hollow-breathed, like someone had turned winter on inside him. People showed splits of power like weather changing.
Everyone showed something. Everyone but me.
Culls became quieter. Twenty of us opened our Third Eye and got transferred to a holding company. Four were dismissed. Ten remained — stubborn, hungry, paranoid — including me. The rhythm of failure tightened into a few fast months where everything either snapped into place or broke.
My first real change came like an accident. During a guided session I kept thinking about my gloves — how wet and useless they felt after a rain march. My thought was stupid and small: make them dry. They dried, like the world folded to answer a petty demand. That should have been thrilling, but it felt like a checkmark in a box of new liabilities.
A few weeks of experiments followed. A pebble rolled along my palm when I let my intent shepherd it. It was never power porn; it was appliance-level strange — objects obeyed small whims, then stopped, then obeyed again. Then I saw the door.
It wasn't a painted prop. In meditation it flashed: a gold rim, depth beyond expectation, a hinge where the hinge shouldn't be. For a moment the world went syrup-thick and the door pulled at the edge of everything I knew. Before I could move toward it, someone tackled me flat. Security voices, hands, the antiseptic glare of an intake room. I was told to gather my things and transferred to holding.
They warned me: never open the door. The holding company wasn't a promotion so much as a quarantine with nicer chairs. They told us the door was a threshold — useful, dangerous, and to be trained on before any naive curiosity could wreck someone. One of the men, "Skinny" who steamed from his head, told me TOTE units would draft from holding, train whatever you'd opened, and put you where you were useful. That was the promise and the pitch.
Weeks later I boarded a transport for port duty. They assigned me a unit and a position that smelled of salt and diesel and the off‑scale hum of loading cranes. That is where the AFF story, the long ugly truth of serving with Ether in our blood, really began. The rest of my life would be spent learning what that golden door meant, what it cost to pry at reality's seams, and who would pay when the seams finally bled.