When Sven told me it was going to be a brief history lesson, I didn’t think he meant the entire history of his planet and people. At least, that’s what it felt like I was listening to. Maybe that had just been the tiredness talking. Then again, when it felt like he’d been speaking for hours, my ears and brain working a split second apart to take in and translate his words, maybe my tiredness was on to something. At the very least, I was prepared to give my tiredness the benefit of the doubt.
As fascinating as it was to hear about their achievements in technology, I zoned out big time. I didn’t mean to, but my body ached, and I desperately needed a nice bed to get some rest in. I couldn’t retain a thing he said—no doubt upsetting every pjulsen historian who would have been eager to share their history with the first human they met—until he mentioned the moggodrackin again. They’d apparently been the aggressors in a war with the pjulsen. I would have been skeptical about having someone tell me that their side in war was only on the defensive if not for the incident I helped prevent at the nightclub. After that nearly went to shit, I didn’t have too many reasons to doubt him.
“Their advancements are weak and they’re undisciplined. They’ve likely only recently discovered fast and efficient space travel. They’re abnormally aggressive and have great numbers.” Apparently, they’d discovered the pjulsen home world, and small cells had made their way to the planet. The four I killed could have either been an entire cell or just part of a larger one. They didn’t know yet. The small invasion had only been going on for about a year, leaving a lot to be uncovered by the pjulsen military intelligence.
“Right, I saw the aggression firsthand.” I rubbed my index finger and thumb against my closed eyelids, fighting to stay awake and look interested.
“Any non-Great Defender caught using a power is a great offense here, Ethan.”
“Yeah, they haven’t been doing well on Earth either. Lots of people died.” I still had trouble taking the title of Great Defender seriously. I considered it a personal victory that I had managed to avoid laughing in Sven’s very serious face every time he brought it up. “Look, I didn’t mean to offend. I saw something bad about to happen, I thought I had the means to stop it, and I did.”
“Well, it’s an offense to people like me whose job and life’s purpose is to protect innocents. To the citizens...it’s a matter of fear. Being selected to gain power from the Spheres is the greatest honor achievable to anyone in our military.” Pride sparkled in his eyes. “There are great physical tests involved, not to mention the psychological strain and evaluation. It takes a lot of time to get where I am now. That’s why there are only thirteen of us, one for each planet we defend.”
“Wait, hold on, there are only thirteen of you with powers?” That was quite the downgrade from Earth’s superhuman population, even if we didn’t have concrete numbers for how many people had Anomalies. Then I had to think about something else he told me. “You got your powers from the Sphere? Sorry, the Spheres? There’s more than one?”
“Yes, there’s only one Great Defender at a time per Sphere. Our friend, you call him Magnus, here is a rare exception. He and his twin brother were brought to the Sphere by their father, which is a severe and dishonorable crime. He was consumed by the idea of gaining its power, and gain its power he did, but he exposed his infant sons to it hoping to start his own small army. He was executed, dying in disgrace, while his sons were societal outcasts.”
“Yeah, growing up was rough,” Magnus admitted, seemingly unfazed by his difficult childhood.
“It took many years for them to become welcomed and accepted by society, and that mostly came from helping us with the war effort recently. Magnus’ power comes in handy when we need to interrogate prisoners of war.”
“How does that work?” Something about the cold look in Sven’s eyes and the tightness of his jaw told me I probably didn’t want to know the answer.
“He connects their brains and we torture them,” Sven said flatly. I wasn’t shocked they were torturing anyone, not any more shocked than I would have been to hear the United States tortured captives in any of its wars, which I knew it did. I was shocked at how casually and easily he admitted it. “It’s not a job any of us take pride in, believe me. It’s not a task I want Magnus to endure. It’s saved countless lives by uncovering plots like the one you foiled tonight.”
“Wait, he feels what the other person feels. He melds his brain with the other guy's. Does that mean he feels the torture too?” That horrified me a little.
“As I said, it’s not a job we take pride in, nor is it one I wish he had to take.” Sven looked at Magnus with gratitude while Magnus shifted uncomfortably. “His power to take in thoughts and instantly overcome language barriers makes it almost impossible to keep information secret, especially with a little...encouragement.”
“I’m glad I got on your good side,” I mumbled, not bothering to hide the chill that ran down my spine.
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“We’re a very proud people, almost to a fault. It’d be more efficient to fight a war with all of our military having powers like I have.” He held up his hand and little flickers of electricity danced between his fingers, bathing the table in blue. “But we don’t do that, because the immense honor of someone being chosen to get these powers is one of the highest in our society. That’s one of the reasons why you were arrested.”
“Sorry, but I wasn’t chosen to have powers,” I admitted. They both stared at me, clearly confused. “Some humans are just born with these Anomalies. That’s what we call the powers we have. I was just a regular student months ago. A girl who’s now one of my best friends met me at my school. She told me that I had some hidden power I didn’t know about because someone else with powers discovered me. I was with nearly a dozen people with powers before I ended up here.”
“And how did you get here, Ethan?” Magnus studied my face intently. I wasn’t sure what he was looking for. It wasn’t like my expression was going to give away anything he couldn’t already pull from my mind.
I decided to humor him anyway. “There was a white orb in a mountain on Earth, my home planet. Powerful people claiming to be its protectors tried to make us, or at least my girlfriend, join them. We were there because we wanted to form an alliance to stop another threat. It’s a bit of a long story, but the point is, I touched the Sphere, saw someone who looked like my late mother, and it sent me here to get help. I have no idea what that help is.”
“A Sphere on his planet? How can that have happened?” Magnus’ eyes were huge. He looked me up and down like he was hunting for some way to prove that I was lying, misremembering, or just flat-out wrong. I just looked at him with a blank expression. I was telling the complete truth as I remembered it. He wouldn’t find any lie in my thoughts or memories either.
“Our planetary expansion has only settled down in the past few centuries. We’ve been creating the Spheres for over four thousand years now. There was a time when we thought they were only devices that could help terraform planets to be habitable for us. Back in their infancy, little was truly understood about how they worked. Even today, thousands of years later, we don't fully grasp what we've created. In our eagerness to expand with our newfound technology, we sent them out everywhere, with many never to be seen again.” Sven scratched his chin thoughtfully.
That was a history lesson I would have been interested in hearing. They were terraforming planets. No, they had been terraforming planets. Not even a hundred years ago, we’d only landed a few people on the Moon. It felt like we could barely launch anything unmanned into space without it exploding. Landing people on Mars was an inevitability, but how long would it take to get there? The pjulsen could probably blink and be there with some kind of teleporter that let them move at speeds faster than light.
I wondered how different their centuries were from mine when it came to advancement. Was four thousand years here nearly eight thousand back on Earth? I guess it didn’t matter much. Both were long stretches of time I couldn’t wrap my head around, so I quickly stopped trying. The bottom line was they’d been making incredible technology since humans were probably just starting to work out true civilizations.
“Wow, if a Sphere ended up on his planet, who knows when it got there.” Magnus smirked and shook his head in disbelief.
I didn’t have an answer for him. The Sphere had casually talked about degrading over centuries. I felt like it was telling the truth. Maybe, like me, it was just telling the truth as it knew it. There was so much helplessness and desperation in its voice when it talked to me. If the Sphere was in as bad of shape as it seemed, who knew if its sense of time was even accurate? If my mind was degrading that badly, I wouldn’t have been able to tell someone what year it was.
“I don’t know either. The people protecting it, they called themselves the Sentinels. They said it was there long before they were. Luna, the people who took my family in, have stories dating back at least a few centuries on Earth. I’m sure how we measure time is different, but it’s safe to say it’s been a long time. At least two of my maximum lifetimes.”
“I still don’t understand how you ended up here.” Magnus huffed in frustration, tapping two fingers on the side of his head. I could see his mind going a million miles an hour trying to figure out a reason. I didn’t have much to offer him there, but I did try.
“When I touched the Sphere, it was very much alive. It called to me the moment I was near it. I was about to die when I touched it as a last resort. It felt like it was the only option I had left. The living part inside of it told me that it was sick and that none of my people could help it. It said it would send me to the only place to get help. Then I woke up in a forest just...some direction from here.” I gestured vaguely, unable to remember which way the forest had been.
I stood up to show them the wound I received from Ordosi. It was swollen and purple against the rest of my pale body. Thinking about it made it throb with a dull, annoying pain. Somehow, the wound being a little subdued made it more annoying. It was just trying to hang on to the edges of my awareness. More concerning than its appearance was that the pain was inside my body. I still needed to get whatever was damaged in there looked at.
“Well, there’s only so much we can gather tonight,” Sven said, looking impressed at my wound. Maybe he was impressed by how nonchalant I seemed about it. “Do you want to go to a hospital? I admit, we might not know how to treat you exactly, but our medical advancements are likely thousands of years ahead of what you have on your planet.”
I just shrugged. I knew I had to get it taken care of sooner rather than later. Having a wound they weren’t sure how to treat was bad enough. Throw an infection on top of it? No, I wasn’t looking forward to that.
I didn’t have it in me that night. I chose the risk of infection over being the alien admitted to the hospital. “I feel like I haven’t slept in days. My family is probably trillions of lightyears from me. I don’t even know if they’re still alive. If they are alive, I have no idea how I’m going to see them again. Honestly, I want a good night of sleep first, then we can tackle this nasty thing tomorrow.”