Chapter 7
Samantha gently knocked on the door of the house. "Hello, is anybody there?" she called. It was late morning already, but the house seemed to be empty. There were no cars in the driveway, and no activity was visible through the windows. But Samantha knew that the occupant would probably not be anywhere else, so she kept knocking.
Finally, after a few moments, the door creaked opened, and a younger boy peered out. "What are you doing here, Samantha?" he asked.
"I'm here to ask you a few questions, Erez," Samantha replied. "May I come in?"
Erez Beacan was a timid fifteen year old boy. He was fairly short with brown hair and glasses. He was not very social, and often cooped himself up in his parent's basement when he was not at school. Part of this was because he was an easy target for bullies, being rather shy and unable to defend himself. But he was still quite intelligent, and would often work on advanced projects of his own in his basement. His parents were friends with Samantha's mother, so she had been friends with him growing up. She was also one of the few people who would visit him at his home.
"Is this about your fight with Gerald yesterday?" Erez asked, opening the door for Samantha.
Samantha frowned. "How do you know about that?"
"It's all over the Internet," Erez said, heading back down into his basement. "Gerald and his pals were bragging about in on social media. As is expected anytime they bully someone."
Samantha sighed. "Great, that's going to do wonders for my reputation. Now in addition to people thinking I'm a tomboy, they'll also think I'm weak."
"Oh, I doubt that," Erez said, as he entered into his basement lab. It was quite a room to behold, with three tables filled with electronics equipment, and another desk taken up by three massive computer monitors. One window was displaying a paused video game Erez had been playing, but the others were opened up to webpages, including some social media sites. Erez sat down next to the computer and started pulling up some examples.
"The rest of Gerald's gang mentioned that you punched him right back," Erez said. "Although Gerald himself neglected to include that bit in his posts. Granted, not all the feedback has been positive. Let's just say that tomboy is one of the least derogatory terms used against you. But weak hasn't come up yet."
Samantha glanced over some of the messages and frowned again. "Well this isn't going to help my reputation either, but it is taking it in a different direction, I guess."
"So what do you want me to do?" Erez asked. "I could hack into their accounts and delete the messages. But honestly, this stuff has been up all night, so if you want to get it off the internet, you're kind of out of luck. You should've come by earlier."
"I didn't even know about this until right now," Samantha admitted. "So do these guys go home after a long day of bullying and then engage in cyber bullying? What the hell is wrong with them?"
"Wait, if that's not what you wanted to talk to me about, then what did you need?" Erez said.
"It's kind of complicated," Samantha said. "First of all, I guess I have some questions. What do you think about alien life?"
"Well, probabilistically, life should exist elsewhere in the universe," Erez said with a shrug. "But the odds of us exchanging messages on the same frequency are quite low, so I doubt we'll ever contact any of them."
"What would you do if one appeared in the middle of your room?" Samantha asked slyly.
"Well, to be fair, I'd probably freak out," Erez admitted. "But it would be cool to communicate with alien life. I mean, they have this whole other perspective of the universe. Did their civilization develop like humans did, or did they take a completely different path? All the same, there would be a ton of complications with a first contact between alien species. What if one side has germs that the other has no immunities against? How would they even begin to communicate? And that says nothing of hostilities; even if the humans were passive enough, maybe the aliens would be the kind to strike first and ask questions later. There's quite a lot to consider."
"Well, what if they're peaceful, know English, and are mostly robotic?" Samantha asked, holding back a grin.
"That's rather specific," Erez said, confused. "And incredibly unrealistic. But I mean, I guess it would still be cool to see one."
"Great," Samantha said, pulling out the Hero Core from her handbag. "So this is what I wanted to show you."
Erez raised his eyebrow. "What exactly is that?"
"Just don't freak out," Samantha said, pressing her finger on the center of the H. The core suddenly expanded and began to form Furno. Erez yelped out and pushed his chair to the far wall.
"What is that?" he exclaimed, as Furno's eyes lit up.
"I told you not to freak out," Samantha pointed out.
"I said… you said…" Erez stuttered, and then he slowly pieced things together. "Wait, that was not a hypothetical conversation?"
"Nope," Samantha said. "Erez, meet Furno, a robotic hero from a distant galaxy."
"So this is real?" Erez said, approaching Furno slowly.
"What is it with your species and not believing what you see right in front of you?" Furno grumbled. "Yes, I'm real."
Erez leapt back again. "It speaks!" he said. "It's speaking English. There's no way an alien would come along and be able to speak English. That stuff only happens in bad science fiction."
"It'll happen if you have a language chip," Furno said, tapping his helmet. "It needs some examples to properly translate for me, but once it works, it's an effective communication tool."
"May I?" Erez asked. Furno extended his hand, and Erez started examining it. "Quite remarkable, the mechanics of this are super precise. But I don't quite get how he appeared here."
Samantha quickly began to fill Erez in on the events from the previous night, about how Furno's Hero Core had fallen out of the sky, how Samantha had reactivated him, and how the drone had attacked. Erez took in the info, but was still mesmerized by Furno's robotic body.
"So by pressing onto the core, you can deactivate him," Erez said. "Can I… try it?"
Furno sighed. "Go ahead. It's not like it's painful to me, but it is a bit disorienting."
Erez tapped on the Hero Core, but nothing happened. "Did I not do it right?"
Furno, too, was also confused. "It deactivated me earlier," he said.
"You have to press it like this," Samantha said, tapping the H. This time, Furno deactivated and turned back into just his Hero Core.
"Wow, that was amazing," Erez said, picking the core up. "Like something straight out of a movie! It's quite light like this. It seems quite durable too. And you just have to press the H again and he comes back."
"That's how it's supposed to work," Samantha said, but she watched as Erez tried and failed to reactivate Furno. "That's strange; why is it not working now?"
"You don't think we burned him out?" Erez asked fearfully.
"No, I've done this a couple of times without issue," Samantha said, picking up the Hero Core and pressing the H. Sure enough, Furno reformed again.
"That's funny," Erez said, as Furno's eyes lit up. "Maybe only you can activate and deactivate him. You said that you were connected earlier; maybe that is why?"
"Still doesn't explain why he can't get too far away from me," Samantha pointed out.
"Well, maybe it's something on multiple levels," Erez said. "About how far can he get away from you before he gets stopped?"
Samantha shrugged and looked to Furno for an answer. "Based on your units of measurement, the distance is within a radius of one hundred and six meters," Furno said.
"And that is…" Samantha pressed.
"About a quarter mile," Erez said. "Interesting, I wonder if we could test that. Is it strictly the distance between your two persons, or are there other factors in play?"
"Actually, we had a few other questions that we were hoping you could answer," Samantha said. "Something that maybe you can figure out."
"Okay, but I'm not exactly an expert in alien technology," Erez said. "I mean, I'm a bit of an amateur astronomer, but…"
"Actually, we were hoping you could identify these bits," Samantha said. She took a few pieces of the broken drone out of her bag, including the damaged laser.
Erez frowned at the wrecked pieces. "What is this?"
"It was an enemy bot," Furno explained. "But I defeated it with ease. Still, I am unable to discern the origin of the bot, and it would be beneficial to know more about our advisory."
"It was the drone that attacked us," Samantha clarified. "I've never seen something like this before, but you're a machine expert, so I thought you might be able to figure it out."
"Where's the rest of it?" Erez asked, examining the dented rotor.
"These are the only bits that are salvageable," Samantha said. "Furno did a number on the rest."
"Well, I can tell you that this isn't any commercial model," Erez said. "I don't recognize the basic design at all, but I'm not finding any serial numbers. If any of these parts had been mass produced, then there would be markings to help with all that legal copyright stuff. But this is clean, so it must be a custom design."
"What about this," Samantha said. "It was apparently a laser of some sort."
"That's interesting," Erez said. "This looks like it's a high end device. They've managed to miniaturize the power source for mobility… which of course also weaponized the thing. This is either military grade or from an advanced science laboratory. Or both, since those two things aren't mutually exclusive."
"So the military could potentially be after us?" Samantha said with a frown.
"I'd like to think the military wouldn't open fire on someone's house, but we can't exactly rule it out," Erez said. "However, they haven't followed up on their attack since last night. If it was the military, they're rather inefficient."
"Good point," Samantha said. "But you can't get anything else from that?"
Erez shrugged. "Maybe if I had the full drone to look at I could narrow it down some more, but this is the best I can do from a few broken parts."
"That is unfortunate," Furno said. "But it is not my most pressing issue. You see, I had teammates who were in trouble the last time I saw them, and I fear they may now be in the same situation as me, where they're trapped within their Hero Cores. So I must seek them out as quickly as possible."
"Can you think of anything that might help us find them?" Samantha asked.
Erez paused for a moment to consider. Suddenly, he turned back to his computer and began typing furiously. Concerned, Samantha leaned forward and asked, "Um, Erez, did you hear my question?"
"You said Furno's core fell out of the sky like a meteorite," Erez said. "Furno, what do you remember last before you were activated here?"
"I was in a fight, but then Von Nebula opened this portal," Furno said. "The next thing I knew, I was reactivated within Samantha's homestead."
"So you may have passed through a portal, or a kind of wormhole," Erez surmised. "Wormholes are a theoretical method of traversing large distances, which could explain how you appeared in our galaxy. So that means perhaps you and your friends didn't just appear in our atmosphere, but rather some point in space, and then happened to fall into the Earth's gravity well. To an astronomer, you would appear to be a meteorite."
"And if that happened to you, then maybe it happened to the rest of your team too," Samantha said.
"Exactly," Erez said. "Now, there are thousands of amateur astronomers out in our world, and they all like to share their sightings. Meteorites would be a thing they'd write about. So right now I'm running a search on the web, trying to get a list of all the meteorite sightings from last night."
"That is quite brilliant," Samantha said. "Good job!"
"And we have results!" Erez said, as lists began to appear on his monitors. "There were indeed a lot of sightings last night. It may be possible to use the locations from the various sightings and triangulate the crash sites of the various space objects. And if we can do that…"
"Then we'll know where to find the other Heroes," Furno finished.
