The Package
This is a piece of Flash Fiction. The topic: A person arrives home to find a package on their doorstep.
Simeon Langdon felt an unnaturally cold chill as he unbuckled his radiation suit and removed his propulsion pack. Damn, the hairs on my arms are standing on end. Why are they doing that? What is going on with me? He touched the proper sequence of buttons on the control panel, and the pad lifted him to his apartment.
He instantly saw the package as the platform rotated and then locked into place. Huh, I don’t remember ordering anything. I wonder what it could be… He picked up the box and opened his door. He set it down, injected himself with an aqua fluid, and went to the mandatory decontamination chamber. He tried to relax as the toxins were slowly removed from his body.
After about 20 minutes, he made his way out of the chamber and examined the box. He found perfectly symmetrical block letters on all six sides.
BROCKTON LANGDON
256 JOHNSTON COMPLEX
TUSCON, REPUBLIC OF ARIZONA
(TO BE DELIVERED ON FRIDAY, AUGUST THIRTEENTH IN THE YEAR 2652)
Simeon took a deep breath, followed by a long pause. Brockton was his grandfather, and he had been dead for at least 50 years. How is this possible? I didn’t live at this address, there wasn’t a Republic of Arizona when he was alive, how and why did I get this package? He closely examined the box and the material used to seal it. No return address, no other clues, nothing.
Simeon cautiously opened the package. He jumped back as an orb floated up out of the box and settled near the ceiling. A flash of energy engulfed the room, and then a hologram of his grandfather appeared. Not the grandfather he knew, not the aged, mysterious figure who showed no emotion and kept to himself. The hologram seemed to be the 20-year-old version of a man he barely recognized.
Out of the eyes of the hologram came a shot of laser light targeting the data port in Simeon’s left shoulder. He was overwhelmed by the encoded information, all ones and zeros, the binary language of computers. Simeon heard the words the data stream was speaking to him, but he couldn’t understand how and why.
“The Langdon family is directly descended from the beings who seeded this planet with life billions of years ago. The DNA animating this planet is ours. It was me, in consultation with The Superiors, who set the wheels in motion all those years ago to destroy much of the life on Earth. It is now your job to eliminate what is left of it in North America. Your cousins will take care of the rest. You will initially fight and struggle within yourself, but you will do your ancestor’s bidding. Moreover, after you fully understand, you will want to do it, you will be compelled to do it. The orb will deliver the devices, all you have to do is deploy them. You will know where to go, what to do, and when to do it.”
The hologram disappeared into the orb, and then the orb disappeared into Simeon. It felt warm and energizing. He smiled as he basked in the epiphany that revealed his life’s true purpose. As it was, gentleness and compassion never were words in his lexicon. He now felt emboldened, fully realized, complete. He put his head down and started to analyze the Orb-driven algorithms running through his matrix, his concentration only momentarily broken by the faint screams of “HELP!” coming from the kidnapped women he had locked in his bedroom closet.
