Archerfish

It begins

Your answer was right the first time you checked it. You checked it twice more anyway, and the second and third passes found nothing, and some part of you knew they would find nothing before you ran them. The Archerfish corrects for the bending of light before every shot it takes, and it can tell a correction from a stall.

The sight

You see where things actually are. Everyone looks at the same meeting, the same message, the same family dinner and takes it at face value; you automatically correct for the medium, the politics, the performance, the mood somebody carried in from the car, and aim at the true position underneath. This is your animal's entire trade. From below the surface it sights an insect through water that bends the light, calculates the distortion, and hits a target that is never where it appears to be, at three meters, with nothing but its own body. Virgo runs that correction in you, constantly and mostly unnoticed. The Dragon year is the part that believes the shot is worth taking at all, the reach that aims at things your position says you should not be able to hit. So you are rarely fooled by framing, you know which stated deadline is the real one, you hear the actual question inside the asked one. The distortion you have the most trouble with is the one standing in your own water.

The warning

Somewhere along the way, checking became a place to live. The calculation finishes and you keep running it, one more pass, then one more, and you tell yourself this is rigor when it is really a way of never being wrong in public, which is another way of never quite being in public. Meanwhile the insect does what insects do. You have watched more than one target lift off the leaf while you refined a shot that was already true, and you graded yourself on the accuracy instead of the absence.

The lucky window

Your window opens at the first quarter, the half moon, when the line between lit and dark runs perfectly straight down the middle of it. Yours is a boundary animal; it makes its living at the exact seam of water and air, and the quarter moon is that seam drawn across the sky. Those nights favor the shots whose calculations are already finished: the send, the submission, the answer given instead of reviewed. Half full and dead straight is easy to recognize, which is the whole point of it.

The practice

Stand a pencil in a glass of water and look at it from the side. The break you see is the lie your animal corrects for on every shot, and the pencil, note, is fine. Now name one decision where you already know the true position, say the actual thing out loud once, and act on it before you sleep, with zero further passes.

The bond

The shot lands where the calculation said it would; it always did. What you have been calling checking, the water has been calling waiting, and you are allowed to surface.