06/24/2025 Snippet, THE BOOK. (Unfiltered)

Just for funsies.

You’ve probably heard stories about what they got up to in the bad old days, when it came to securing subversive materials. All those rumors about contact poisons or coronary traps weren’t ever true, though. The authorities just spread them around to make people think twice about opening the boxes. If you did open the box anyway, they’d just arrest you, and send you to a colony world.

So I wasn’t worried about setting off a trap as I opened the box. Neither was Jessica. Our nervous chuckles were absolutely just us cringing at all the old stories. And we were right to cringe. Nothing happened! Well, an alarm buzz went off, loud enough to make us both jump back, knocking our chairs over in a clatter and nearly toppling the table. It was a sound right out of the threevi shows of my youth, the kind that warned you the bad guys were about to show up, and hurt people.

But the sound cut out after three seconds, with another, strangled sort of buzz. I laughed it off, once I started breathing again. “Guess that’s where they got the sound effect from. Makes sense.”

Jessica didn’t respond. To be fair, I was only talking to calm myself down. We had an open box, after all.