I never did beat Sven. I did come close, and maybe revealing some of my tricks would have turned the tables. Given it was only training and sparring, I opted to keep those to myself. I still didn’t quite trust my control over anything, and I wasn’t going to risk hurting a friend for the sake of trying to learn. If I had to, I’d work on them on my own, or use them in the middle of fighting a bad guy. So, I couldn’t quite close the deal. He was too fast, too strong, and too skilled for me to overcome with my skills as they were. I was never upset about losing. It was a great chance for me to get better with each session, and I started to love my time with Sven and Magnus. I couldn’t have asked for better people to keep me sane on Clamor.
I got a nice week off the day after Sven whipped my ass for real. I had to get my chest and hip stitched up, both of which healed nicely and quickly thanks to pjulsen medical science and my body’s receptiveness to it. I had plenty of scarring from the injuries I'd piled up. Apparently, it was my destiny to just collect those on my body like I would baseball cards in a neat little folder. Those too became something similar to badges of honor for me. They were proof of my continuing development. Even the one McLeod gave me didn’t look only ugly to me anymore. It was a sign that I’d survived him. There were a lot of people who would have loved to have that badge instead of being buried in the ground. Most of the people who crossed paths with him probably didn't even get that kind of luxury.
I had a small celebration for my nineteenth birthday. I expected Sven and Magnus to show up, but I had way more guests than I could have accounted for. Gus came, and ever since I had helped that little girl in the moggodrackin attack, he had warmed up to me to the point we were basically friendly acquaintances, which was something I could live with. Dr. Shonne came, as well as Sally. Even the little girl and her family showed up to thank me and give me a present. I was so overwhelmed by the amount of people that I could barely hear their names. Filipsorv, Zandriaph, and Lotta. Father, mother, and daughter. I didn’t even think the names sounded alien anymore. If I had gone back to Earth to have three humans tell me those were their names? Yeah, I would have believed them.
And their gift was beautiful. It was a handcrafted bracelet made of black wood. It was long, covering about an inch of my wrist, and solid enough that I was sure it could survive a beating, not that I planned on giving it one. On the top side of it was me, protecting their daughter from the attackers. At the bottom was the entire family, reunited and smiling, with me included next to Lotta. There was an inscription that ran along both sides. With my mind linked to Magnus, I was able to read the engraving without having to worry about a translation.
“Ethan, as Clamor has embraced you as a resident, we embrace you as our family. Wherever your travels and fate take you, a home will always be here for you.” As soon as I read it, a lump formed in my throat. I gave each one of them a hug and coughed to combat my voice breaking. “Thank you so much. This is a beautiful gift.”
After I had my week off, the strangest thing happened. Nothing. I spent a little over two more months there, fully expecting some cataclysm to hit. Maybe a storm of meteors the size of a city. Maybe a full-scale moggodrackin invasion. Knowing my luck, I was expecting a fourth race of people to show up and get involved in the war. Nope, compared to the whirlwind my life had become for the past year, it was a walk in the park. There were small moggodrackin attacks, but Sven and I were able to handle them with no trouble. I practiced with him, got better, got beat up, and got taken care of by Dr. Shonne.
My celebrity status had continued to grow. It got to the point that people swarmed me when they saw me, which was hard for me to handle. If it hadn't been for my mind staying so focused on the few goals I set for myself, I was sure I would have had episodes when crowds gathered around me and strangers got a little too comfortable touching me. The wonders of having positive things in life to focus on. It wasn’t perfect, and it didn’t have to be. It did the job well enough. But being hounded for pictures and autographs took its toll on me, and I frequently found myself getting anxious in Magnus’ car whenever I was going somewhere with him.
I had routine check-ins with Sally, mostly just to touch base and crack lame jokes about pjulsen food making me grow an extra head. Progress had been slow, which is why I didn’t expect a random visit to yield anything special. But miracles happen at the least expected times.
“We did it,” she told me, sitting me down in a chair. “We found Earth. We have teleporting tools built. Ethan, you’re going home.”
I felt a ringing in my ears and I felt like I was going to get sick. I couldn’t believe what I heard, especially after so many updates that didn’t amount to anything. I’d been there for over four months, a quarter of a year, without anything. My birthday passed, I got stronger, I made some new friends, and I helped stop a robot attacking a city. Somehow, four months felt like a lifetime and no time at all.
“I’m sorry, can you say that again?” I asked. My voice was shaking. I could feel it crack in my throat like I was hitting puberty all over again. “Just...just one more time, please?”
Sally just smiled and threw her arms around me in a hug. “You get to go home. You get to see your friends and family again.”
It was probably the lamest thing I could have done to an incredibly revered and influential scientist, but I sniffled and wiped my face on her shoulder. Every night, I looked at pictures of Rebecca, Megan, Shelly, and everyone else. I never stopped thinking about them, through good or bad on Clamor. They were always on my mind and this lady just delivered the best news of my life. Some tears and snot weren’t unexpected. Screw it, I couldn’t even feel too bad about getting her lab coat all dirty.
“I...how...when? When can I go?” Like my voice, my hands were shaking. My heart had to have been ready to burst right through my chest and flop on the floor. I had to take a few deep breaths to get myself to relax enough to even process the information Sally needed to share.
“Whenever you want,” she said, fishing around in her bag. She pulled out a small bracer-like device. On it was a screen that showed a computer-generated Earth. The colors were slightly off, but since they didn’t have any orbital view of the planet, it did a pretty good job. “You can use this to teleport between Earth and Clamor. This is the greatest piece of technology we’ve made for pjulsen—and now human, of course—transport use. The amount of engineering prowess that went into creating a wrist-mounted teleportation device that can travel that far is beyond even me. That’s another reason why we stopped sending out Spheres randomly. It became too much to try and keep up with them the farther out they went.”
“Is it safe?” I slipped the device onto my wrist and felt the warmth from the machine. It almost felt alive, like it was a tier or two below the Spheres themselves. I didn’t doubt Sally that I had a technological marvel on my wrist.
“Of course!” Sally gave me a thumbs up, a gesture she absolutely adored from Earth. I was glad I showed it to her every time she hit me with a lame pun during our uneventful check-ins. “Well, probably. We made test models to send things to other planets nearby, and those worked fine. The only difference is the distance. It is...admittedly, a very big difference. There’s one for you, one for Gus, one for Magnus, one for Sven, and one for myself.”
“I thought you said these were hard to make.” I felt a little less special with the device on my wrist, knowing that there were four others who could just pop in for a cup of coffee whenever they wanted.
“They are. Why do you think it took so damn long? We tested the test models first. Then we had to test each one of these so that they would teleport to the planets without issue. We haven’t tried Earth for a few reasons. The first is that we have no way to get them back, so we don’t know if they’d work. It’d be throwing money and time to the wind. With planets we already inhabit, we can get them back to make sure nothing went wrong. The second reason is that these track energy signatures, which there are a lot of on Earth. On top of not getting these back, we’d be teleporting random alien technology to humans, which strikes me as something you don’t want to happen. I know if someone woke me up by dropping a bracelet from another planet on my face, I’d have more than a few questions and choice words.”
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“Wait, does that mean I could end up anywhere on Earth where there’s an Anomaly?”
“Yes. I like that name, by the way.” She pulled out hers and started to point to Earth. There were a bunch of little dots on the screen, concentrated higher in certain areas. It was like looking at one of those nighttime satellite images of a city that showed all its lights. “The way powers are distributed in our culture, there are only two signatures on each planet. In our colonized planets, Clamor is the only one that bucks that trend, having four energy signatures. Since humans are given powers seemingly at random, everyone who does shares the same energy DNA as the Sphere there. That makes pinpointing it harder. We tried to calibrate it a certain way, but...”
“What’s wrong?” When she didn’t look sure of herself, I wasn’t feeling great either.
“I hate not knowing things.” She huffed and stomped her foot a little. “I don’t know where exactly this will put us. Usually, the Sphere is easier to find because its power source is massive. That was the first thing I was looking for. Sadly, Earth’s is quite old and needs help. It probably took almost everything it had to send you here. I calibrated it to send us to the single largest energy source it finds when we go. I’m hoping that doesn’t land us downtown in one of your planet’s biggest cities.”
“Could we teleport to my home? We have a community of people with powers.” I wanted to start jabbing away at the device to take me home. Knowing Earth was so close made it nearly impossible to keep my cool.
“I’ll take over from here, the good scientist has some final preparations to make.” Magnus walked up to me, already with his device fitted to his wrist. “We all discussed it, and as pjulsen, we want to limit the risk to all of us. We consider you one of our own now, and we want you to be safe. If something goes wrong with your teleporter, we might have a chance to fix it with Sally there. For me? I just want to go with you. If I’m going, Gus is going to. Sven feels a personal responsibility to ensure your safety.”
“What place is safer than my own home?” I felt agitated that they all discussed this matter without me, considering it was my planet and my life that I needed to return to.
“It’s not that, I promise.” Magnus sat next to me. His face contorted for a few moments while he tried to figure out what to say. “Ethan, we’re worried that pjulsen won’t be accepted on Earth right now. Not with everything going on there. I’ve seen your thoughts on how you think bringing aliens there would go, and we just want to be cautious. We’re worried that it might extend to you. If you’re off on your teleport to your home by even a little bit, you could end up in your neighbor’s house with four aliens in their living room. Sally’s proud, but the precision of this is not exact. Earth is very far away with a lot of variables, and we only know this way of traveling to it. Even this isn’t a guarantee. The largest energy signature should be the Sphere there. If it’s not, this might all be wasted breath.”
I wanted to be mad. After four months away, I just wanted to go home. I wanted to check on my family and friends. I did understand where the pjulsen were coming from, though. I wanted to believe that my world was kind. Despite all the pessimism and horrible headlines I’d read in the news, I knew people were largely good, especially when looked at on a smaller scale. Sadly, that didn’t mean everyone would just be okay with aliens showing up when we arrived. As he said, if we showed up in the middle of someone’s house because we were off by just a bit, no amount of damage control would help. Introducing sentient life to Earth was about to be my problem, and it was like spinning twenty fragile plates on breaking poles. It was just so frustrating to get hit with that kind of setback. I wanted to pop in, see my family immediately, and introduce them to the awesome people who helped me get back.
“I swear to you, as soon as we get there and we have a better grip on our situation, we’ll get you to your family.” I must have looked distraught because Magnus joined the hug brigade and pulled me close. “We want to offer our help to your people. We’re responsible for what’s going on, so it’s our duty to make it right. But there’s a process to getting you back home, having you act as a sort of mediator between both sides and making sure that tensions remain low.”
“Ugh, I understand, stop making sense and being rational!” I punched him in the arm. I didn’t like the delay. Seriously, who would? In the same way they saw Earth’s Anomalies as their responsibility, it was mine to make sure they were protected on my planet. The whole thing couldn’t just be rushed. The weight of what I was about to do was suddenly crushing me. I felt like Atlas, but instead of holding up the weight of just one world, I was holding two. “I think if we keep you guys on the secret side at first, it’ll be fine. You’re so much farther ahead of us with your tech that I think we’d be stupid not to befriend Clamor and its people.”
“That’s part of the problem. Ethan, when a lot of your people were living in mud huts, we were already sending Spheres out to other planets. We’re thousands of years ahead of humanity. Knowing there’s another sentient race that advanced that can be at your door in an instant is a tough pill to swallow. And it’s true the other way around.”
“What do you mean? We haven’t even landed anyone on our nearest planet, let alone created power-granting artificial intelligence that can move faster than light. What do you guys have to fear from us?” We were lucky to get an unmanned shuttle to the International Space Station without it blowing up on launch. Humanity was a long way off from even being able to colonize one of our neighboring planets, let alone launch an invasion against another species that they—officially—didn’t know existed.
“Ethan, are you kidding me right now?” Magnus broke out in a toothy grin and patted me on the back. “You have thousands of people with powers there. Say there’s someone who can perfectly duplicate anything they touch. If that person stole your teleporter and could somehow use it to get an entire army of superhumans on this planet, we could be screwed. We can’t defend against that, no matter how strong Sven is. If you went rogue and decided to destroy one of our cities, it’d take a lot of effort to stop just you now. Sven won’t tell you this, and you didn’t hear it from me, but there is a little fear of what Earth can do to us. You have been the best ambassador your people could ask for. You’ve helped to restore a little trust that had shriveled up after the moggodrackin invasion. Don’t take it personally when I say we have to make sure we aren’t putting the pjulsen people in danger either.”
“I wish I could tell you that we wouldn’t be scared of you.” I hung my head, feeling shame at how I knew humans could be. I genuinely believed that the majority of people were good. It was the people in power, the ones who didn’t want that foundation shaken, that had me worried. I had powers, sure, but I was still effectively just a random teenager, and there was a big difference between having powers and having power.
“You’ve done a great job representing your people. If they’re half as good as you, I think Earth and Clamor will be friends for a long time.”
“Thanks, man, that means a lot to me.” I looked down at the off-color rotating image of my planet. I watched the United States slowly drift by. Home. “I can’t believe it’s all coming to an end.”
“What the hell are you talking about? You can use that to teleport here whenever you want. You can take a vacation here.” He pulled me back in for a hug, and while his words were big, I could tell he was a little sad. “You better take a vacation here, okay? I’m going to drop in and surprise you every now and then, so you better do the same.”
“Don’t get weepy yet, you’re still coming with me, remember?”
Magnus pulled out his holoscreen and pursed his lips. “Looks like everyone’s good to go. Are you ready to be the first human to step on an alien planet and bring aliens back home?”
Fuck no. How could I be ready for that at all? Oh, what, was I just going to waltz back into my house like I was only gone for a few hours? Everyone was going to lose their minds, and they were probably going to lose more than their minds when they saw me bring back aliens. There was no way it would end without very long, very tiring explanations for everyone.
“No,” I said, shaking my head, “but let’s do this anyway.”