1. Your homemade crystal radio squeals like a high-score arcade machine. After searching the airwaves for three hours you’ve happened on an obscure signal. It repeats itself over and over again, filling you with dread.

“Attention Earthlings, Attention Earthlings, This is Zardok, High Commissioner of the Martian fleet. We are coming to claim your planet for our own. You have no chance but to surrender. Your puny weapons will do nothing to our technology. Surrender now or prepare for invasion!”

Your brother steps into the room. “What’s that?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” you reply, “a message from Mars!”

“Wow!” your brother says. “You’d better do something!”

You know he’s right. You have to do something. You have to warn people.

Go to Section 2.

2. You think about who you should warn–maybe the President, or the United Nations. But after thinking for a while you realize that the one person you really want to warn is Mindy. Mindy was a good friend of yours in high school, but then she moved away to Washington D.C. She had shoulder-length blond hair, and bright eyes. Even in the falling rain she would walk outside in her flip-flops. Together, you talked about everything. Now that you know the Martians are coming you want to make sure she knows.

You wonder how you should contact her. You have her phone number so maybe you should call her. You also have her email address, so maybe an email would be better. You also wonder what she will think about your message.

If you decide to call Mindy, go to paragraph 3.

If you decide to email Mindy, go to paragraph 6.

3. As you dial her number you remember the first time you called her, back in high school. You sat on your bed, holding the cordless phone in your hand for 20 minutes. You were lost in the forest. You wondered what you were going to say, and how she would react. You finally just closed your eyes and dialed the number really fast so that you couldn’t get out of it.

The phone rings once, twice, three times, four times. You hear a click on the other end. You hold your breath.

“Hello,” a strange computerized voice says. “You have reached the voicemail box of …” Suddenly you hear her voice: “Senorita Mindy Dale!” The computerized voice continues “If you wish to leave a call-back number, press five now–to leave a message, stay on the line until after the beep.”

If you wish to leave a message, go to section 4.

If you decide to hang up, go to section 5.

4. You hear the beep and think about what to say. “Hey Mindy!” you start, “It’s me.” “I’m just, um, calling you to see what’s, uhh, up …”

You think of what to say. You remember the time both of you went with a bunch of friends to see Kartchner Caverns. You and Mindy sat in the back seat of your friend’s suburban on the way home. At first you both tried to read Cry, the Beloved Country at the same time, but that didn’t work so well since she was ready to turn the page before you were finished reading it. You wanted to oblige her, but you also wanted to understand the story. After that you got into a conversation about how you should lobby to stop racism against invisible people, “Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they don’t have feelings!” she proclaimed.

As these thoughts go through your head you realize that your message is still being recorded. “Uh, okay, Call me back when you get this message!” you stammer. You hang up the phone and set it down. It suddenly rings! You anxiously pick it up, “Mindy?” you ask.

“Hello, Earthling! This is Zardok! Surrender or die!”

You slam the phone down in disgust. You sit down, and stare at it for a while.

Two weeks later and she hasn’t called you back.

End

5. You hang up quickly and set the phone down. “Maybe she’ll see my number on her caller-ID” you think, hoping. You remember that Mindy was the first girl you took on a date. You went to dinner and then to the high school dance. You remember going to pick her up and smelling something strange in your mom’s car. You nervously hoped that she wouldn’t notice the smell, but it was there the whole night. After the dance was over and you took her home, you were surprised to find that your mom had left two fifty-pound bags of steer manure in the trunk. It was a miracle that she talked to you after that.

Two days go by, and you decide to call her back. The phone rings four times again and you hear her say “Senorita Mindy Dale!” You hang up again and wonder, Maybe the Martians already got to her…

End

6. You open up your google email account. You have to delete twenty spam emails from “zardok@martians.com”. There are really two strategies to email Mindy: the short “Hey, what’s up?” one and the longer one where you talk about what’s happening in your life, more like a Christmas card. You like the long one because it feels more like communication, but you remember the one she sent you a few months ago that just said: “BOO!”, and it wasn’t even close to October.

If you chose to send Mindy a short email, go to section 7.

If you chose to send Mindy a longer email, go to section 8.

7. You hit the compose button and stare at the blank text box on your screen. You want to write something quick and comical to get the desired effect. You write: “Mindy, Help! Martians! Quick!” but that doesn’t seem right, so you delete it. Then you write: “Mindy, FINALS ARE KILLING ME!!!!” but that seems a bit much, especially since finals haven’t started yet.

You and Mindy had an inside joke going for years about goats. She would draw pictures of you as a goat and you would draw pictures of her as a goat. It all culminated the night you bought the square container of goat cheese, left it on her doorstep, rang the bell and ran. She knew it was you right away. But try as you might you can’t think of a quick goat message, and you settle on: “Mindy, this is an email.”

Five days later and you’ve only gotten spam from Zardok, still threatening an invasion. You wonder if you should send Mindy another email, or if that would make you sound too forlorn. That’s the last thing you want.

End

8. You start writing the long email. “How are you? I’m doing great. Arizona’s not so cold. School is tough.” You launch into a log of your week, writing about the computer program you wrote for your class that takes the mean median and mode of a given list. As your hands mechanically type you go back to that night when you and she went to your friend Greg’s wedding banquet. You tried to figure out how weddings could be better. She suggested that it would be better if it were on a remote beach, and everyone wore pirate costumes. “Thar goes ye bride!!”

Another time you sat with a group of friends at your house, looking at art books. Mindy opened the big book, “Pre-Raphaelite Painters” and you discussed the realism in those depictions of old English legends. Your email rambles on about your weird geology professor. How do you type laughter? How do you write these words? They run and leap about the forests inside of you. They eat, they drink, they breathe in and smell the deep soil, and the flowers, and the falling rain. But when you pull them out, and slap their dark shapes onto the white illuminated screen, it’s just a field of dry bones. Desolate. Dead.

You finish your email: “Hope to see you during Christmas Break!” You send it, stand up from your chair, and turn off the computer.

End