Zander Sawyer — Liam Sawyer's older brother, a decorated TOTE and AFF veteran — used to explain Ether like this: "Ether is a portion of Reality. Reality isn't a single road. It's a braid of possible streets, and every mind weaves its own lane. When minds are the soul's reality — Demons, Threaders, Regulars, even us — the TOTEs, face the consequence of our reality. That's why they police our 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 Zander accepted these rules — for whatever they meant to him.
Excerpt from Liam 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 begrudgingly accepted the trade-off and signed up for the American Federated Forces.
During processing I was offered the TOTE exam, which I happily accepted. 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 sitting without falling unconscious. Most people blacked out within one to two seconds; at the time I hadn't fully understood what it meant to "center yourself" or what was really being tested.
Ten seconds. Nothing. I left thinking I'd failed it with a shrug. I was then to my surprise assigned to an Ether Recruit Training Battalion. Months later I learned why I hadn't felt anything: I'd already centered my reality without realizing it. I was closer to opening my Third Eye than I'd ever been 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 and I was never told. By the time the buses emptied, the line between who would become something and who would be culled back to "Regular" life 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 to solidify your spiritual reality — you were gone, quietly reassigned to jobs they called safe.
Training chewed through people faster than the heat. Military instructors soon became clinical; 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 fell into the same rhythm as your neighbor's. A handful learned it. Most didn't.
Then they put Ether in the water. That's when reality stopped being metaphor and started being physical. 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 grew cold, hollow-breathed, and had a hollow, frosty breath. People showed splits of power.
Almost everyone showed something. Everyone but me and a few others. We all felt it — the opening of our Third Eye — but we didn't produce any significant sign.
Twenty of us opened our Third Eye and got transferred to a holding company — stubborn, hungry, paranoid. The rhythm of possible failure that had tightened over the past few months snapped. We had done it; we had achieved modern-day magic. None of us knew what type of magic we had fully, but for TOTEs, stable income was guaranteed. It didn't matter whether it was in the AFF, as split runners, or in any private sector. We had yet to consider what the price and term of our AFF contract had risen to.
We were introduced to our new "gifts" at the holding company through multiple days of lessons. During a guided session is when I first felt my magic. At the time I instantly knew I needed to maintain a low profile. It was the size of a stadium. It felt symbiotic, like it knew what I wanted. As if acknowledging our connection — what I later realized was my pocket dimension — a cupboard created itself. The door materialized in the real world. Many others had similar experiences, mostly tapping into various forms of elemental magic. It should have been thrilling to get magic or unlock my "gift," but it felt like a check in the box, not unlocking a potent power.
After our little introduction course, I found out the holding company wasn't a promotion so much as a quarantine with nicer chairs. They told us the "gift" was a threshold — useful, dangerous, and to be trained on before any naive curiosity could kill someone. One of the men, "Skinny," who I remember steamed from his head, told me TOTE units would draft from holding, train whatever recruits they acquired, and put you where you were useful.
Weeks later I boarded a transport for port duty. They assigned me to an aerial unit defending a position that smelled of salt and diesel and the off-scale hum of loading cranes. That is where I learned what it meant to become a TOTE: the truth of serving with Ether in our blood, and where I realized my true calling. The rest of my career would be spent training to manifest as much of my pocket dimension as I could. "Blood, sweat, and tears" to pry at reality's seams — but who would pay when the seams finally bled?
x/Etherheads posted by u/UniversalToadwisp • 1 hour ago
Ether is Fascism
During the Fourth World War in 2143, humanity unearthed something that outlived nations: Ether. At first it acted like a killer toxin — fatal to ordinary humans on contact, strangely harmless to everything else. Its structure refused classification; scientists argued whether it was element, compound, or something beyond chemistry. Who coaxed Ether from the wreckage of particle accelerators is lost to history, but everyone agrees on one detail: the know-how vanished with the old world.
By the early twenty-third century, Ether had become a myth. Grandmothers called it the batter of the universe; sermons called it a shard of God; merchants labeled it life or its inverse. No reliable record explained what Ether actually was — only broken experiments and permanent scars.
What survives are two forms: trace Ether carried in human blood and Conquered Ether — refined residues harvested, traded, and weaponized since TOTEs first surfaced and began hunting demons. Conquered Ether no longer kills like the raw substance once did, and it doesn't reliably open the fabled Third Eye. Whether raw and Conquered are the same, and whether either is worth the cost of the wars fought over them, drive everything: conquest, worship, commerce, sabotage. Ether is scarce power — healing, longevity, reality-bending, a throne. Whoever controls it shapes the future; everyone else becomes a footnote.
Worse: powerful TOTEs and Threaders cushion themselves in luxury, selling favors to the wealthy or angling to join their ranks. People still starve while the elite hoard immortality and rule. Ether didn't end inequality — it fossilized it.
] Liam Sawyer — 3:00 AM — 23 AUG 2316 [
Liam was driving east toward Region One, with his CAD (Common Access Device) propped in the dash, scrolling a feed that had no business being called news. The x/Etherheads posts were the semi-conscious dialogue most people nodded at and then forgot.
Anyone following x/Etherheads would have seen a dozen takes on Ether that morning alone — religion, economics, revolution. It's likely few of the activity members of the community have any true experience regarding Ether, though TOTEs have become more common in the last fifty to one hundred years.
Liam, a TOTE himself, with a loose grip, let his car cruise through the Interregional Highway. Most people — "Regulars" — think the AFF registry and the public records made a TOTE employable and considered it a safeguard against "gifts."
Reality painted a far crueller picture and is partially why Liam was driving to Region One to meet up with some friends. In the AFF registry Liam was labeled a C-level spatial specialist with a recorded one-door spatial closet. Liam was probably closer to an S-level reality specialist with a spatial size of one hundred cubic meters and the ability to manifest up to twenty doors. But this put him in a tough position, considering there has never even been a B-level spatial specialist. The registry decided whether a TOTE was a hired hand, a tool, or a weapon in some cases. Spatial specialists were tools, but the least used, with how modern combat had begun to change; spatial specialists can normally only manifest one door of varying sizes. That's the only reason the AFF let Liam leave after he'd become a spatial TOTE.
Liam's eyes snapped up, looking into the rearview mirror. A movement caught his eye: a rip in space hovered above the backseat like a bad sticker on a windshield. Something — small, winged — flapped through it: a demon-bat the size of a pigeon, eyes like smudges of coal. It breathed a little puff of cold smoke as it tried to land on the headrest.
With a light laugh, Liam reached and flicked the creature back into his pocket dimension. Maintaining a door to his space had become natural to him; he had to ensure certain areas had proper ventilation.
If the AFF ever learned Liam wasn't a mere C-level spatial specialist, they'd drag him back to service. They'd make him useful in many ways: the loud, brutal sort of usefulness that ended friends and futures.
Liam coasted into a rest stop in Region 47; no cars were around. There wouldn't be, not since the AFF used Conquered Ether to make the first beasts. The spirit animals were fine; they never purposefully harmed humans, but now with both beasts and demons in rural areas, it's uncommon for regulars to leave populated areas.
The engine ticked like a small animal after Liam turned the car off. At some point in his career — between drills and med-checks — he learned no one truly is what their label says. Everyone's gift after opening the Third Eye wears a label: Material, Biological, Elemental, Psychic, Reality, Organic, Spatial, Kinetic. The lines are mixed and blurred, unique, but the AFF loved categories. Liam leaned toward spatial abilities. But his pocket dimension obeyed him, melted to his will. Nothing flashy, not explosive firepower. But large space, control, and the ability to manifest multiple doors.
For years Liam pretended to be a C-level while strengthening his magic with the support of mentors and friends in secret. With their help Liam learned of Ether, increasing his capacity to manifest his pocket dimension through willpower and meditation rather than using Conquered Ether.
Conquered Ether was currency: messy, addictive, reserved for the bred and the bought. Those born into elite lines used it as inheritance, mutating their genes with arranged marriages and their privileges all at once. They disgusted Liam more for what their privilege did to everyone else than for what they were.
Liam reclined the seat, enjoying the darkness around him. Region One awaited his arrival, and with it people — his people — opportunity and plans to follow through on. For the first time in a long while, his sleep came easy.