40 years ago humans started blasting all their trash off-planet. A few weeks ago, trash started falling from the sky, but it doesn't look anything like what was sent away. Is the trash first contact with an alien race or our own refuse come back to...
Time is short. The great weeding is upon us. Others are tossing valuables into the trash in hopes of preserving their legacies. All I have worth saving are my memories and the answer to a question about the strange life we once led. But in order to understand the answer you must first understand the question and in order to understand the question, you must know how we got here.
II.
No one knows precisely when the trash started falling from the sky. Our ancestors did not pay garbage the same attention that we do now, so for all anyone knows, we spent decades blasting rubbish off-planet, only to have it boomerang back to Earth to be collected and rocketed into space again. That is of course if you believe the trash that falls from the sky is our refuse returning to us, which is an opinion I do not share.
III.
The first person to make a stink about the trash was Dikenzie Lopez of Marlboro, Wyoming. According to the marker outside her home, on April 18, 2075, Mrs. Lopez found a food wrapper on her front lawn that frightened her so badly she called the FBI about it. When she reached the operator at the Cheyenne Field Office, she described the wrapper as a silver sheet covered with strange black markings which she believed were either Chinese or Russian characters. Mrs. Lopez speculated that it was a message to sleeper agents inside the USA, activating them to start a new world war.
The operator suggested that Mrs. Lopez place her garbage in the nearest trash capsule and not bother the FBI about it again. Mrs. Lopez refused to destroy "the evidence", and promised to call back. Mrs. Lopez kept her word and phoned the FBI every day for two months until the Chief himself promised to send an agent to her home.
IV.
According to the report that Agent Marlo Holden filed, the moment he parked his black Camaro in front of Mrs. Lopez's farmhouse, she shot off her porch like it was on fire. Agent Holden wrote that he unholstered, but did not aim, his weapon as she sprinted toward him, dragging a cloud of dust behind her, and waving a ziplock bag above her head.
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"It's Russian ain't it?" Mrs. Lopez asked as Agent Holden scrutinized the wrapper through the cloudy ziplock bag. No matter how he turned it, he could not make sense of the black squares, rhomboids, and triangles that adorned the silver sheet.
"I don't know what it is but I'll ask the boys in the lab," he said which satisfied Mrs. Lopez enough that she gave him the wrapper on his promise that he would update her once he got the lab results from HQ. When Agent Holden returned to the Field Office, he filed his report, then he shoved the wrapper into his desk where he promptly forgot about it.
***
Agent Holden was reminded of the wrapper three months later when an Agent from the San Francisco Field Office, called him with a question about strange trash after having been gifted his own strange wrapper him by an old hippy. He wondered what kind of headway Holden had made in the time since his report was filed. I do not know what explanation Agent Holden gave Agent Wilson, but I assume it was a lie.
