Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
“It’s up to you. We gave you the clues. Now choose.”
“But the clues don’t make any sense!” He strained against the bindings holding him in place.
“If you cannot choose, then guess. But guess now.”
Trembling, he reached into one of the holes in the wall before him, and waited.
The conquest was complete. They were free to do as they wished with this planet and its insipid inhabitants. All that was left was to decide which skin suit to wear when revealing their true nature to the world. The potential donors eyed them in fear as they waited to be chosen.
He’d spent hours staring at the paper on his desk. The longer this took, the more clear it was: the most difficult part wasn’t the tubes in his arms that pumped blood into the quill in his hand, but figuring out just what to say. The former was far less painful than the latter.
The elderly woman was always at the same spot at the corner, sitting on a bench and watching people go by, and she always had a smile for him. She was so familiar that it was decades before he started to wonder that she hadn’t died—or even aged as far as he could tell.
The old house stood abandoned at the end of the street, slowly decaying as the years passed. The only signs of life were the sickly grayish weeds that would force their way up through cracks in the boards, covering and engulfing everything except the bodies seated at the table.
They had been trying for hours to get the hull plates to bind together properly as air slowly leaked out into the void of space. Something was preventing the solvents from working, and it was only a matter of time before their suit’s tanks would be their only breathable air.
The idea first proposed for early unmanned missions to Mars eventually (and somewhat surprisingly) became a standard part of manned landings. As he watched the landing pod inflate, he looked forward to another wild ride careening across a planet’s surface in a giant hamster ball.
The signals were clear, and after much checking, it was agreed that they were likely not natural and of probable alien origin, but the source was puzzling: an apparently empty point exactly 758 feet above the geometric center of Tilly Anderson’s house in Atkins, Arkansas.
“What was that?” He stopped to stoop down to the child who had spoken to him as he walked along the path.
Suddenly the child reached out and grabbed him, pulling him off-balance before scrambling on top of him as he landed in the dirt. He only got a glimpse of sharpened teeth.
Historians now note that what’s particularly noteworthy about the 20th and 21st centuries in the geopolitical region then known as the United States is how long it managed to exist so near the point of collapse before the final dissolution into several independent nation-states.