Well, I received a second small manila envelope today. This time there is no mysterious metal briefcase attached but the return address is labeled Armacham Technology Corporation and it’s stamped “Level II Classification.” Obviously this is an invite to the “Fear Lab’ that Mr. or Mrs. ‘R’ warned me about last week.

Inside is a letter from A.T. Harmon, the C.O.O of Gaming and Simulation Division of Armacham. The letter opens with ‘Dear Candidate:” and continues with a request for my attendance in an upcoming “Fear Lab’ at an undisclosed location. Also in the envelope is an eight-page in-depth dossier and a press release from the Psycho-Kenitic Genetic’s division. The dossier concerns the Psychotronic Amplified Neuro-Inductive Cognition project (P.A.N.I.C., very cute). In it, I’m instructed go over all this information to determine my “Psi” abilities or lack thereof, and then fill out the attached questionnaire.

Now the question looms. Do I follow up on this pamphlet or do I heed the warning words of ‘R’ and await the code that will open up the metal briefcase?

Thoughts?

In the relatively short amount of time that Empress Eve and I have been running Geeks of Doom we’ve had a multitude of stuff just show up in our mailbox. Some of these packages have been pretty geeky cool, like the one-of-a-kind props sent to us by the animators of the upcoming stop-motion feature Coraline. Others have been hard to swallow, like the cans of unreleased soda for us to sample (get it? Swallow… I make a pun). So yeah, some downright diverse shit just shows up in our mailbox on the daily, and after a time we started calling these unsolicited mystery packages Doom Deliveries, a moniker that works on multiple levels.

Well, this Tuesday brought one of the more intriguing Doom Deliveries to date. The intrigue began with the circumstances of its arrival, which took place as I was out for a lunch break. When I returned to my office there was a small metal briefcase on my desk, the kind with a numerical tumbler lock. The one thing that immediately tugged at my stomach was that it wasn’t in a parcel that had been mailed to me, but had been seemingly hand delivered — this in disregard to the fact that my office door was locked and I work in a moderately secured building. I had taken notice there was a small manila envelope taped to the top of it with simply “Dave” handwritten on it, but being me, I ignored it and immediately tried to open the lock with one of the old standards. 666 (ala Pulp Fiction), 911, 411, 212, 718, 917… nothing. That’s when internal Dave said, “Okay, genius. How about you open the envelope?” Well, that and “‘What‘ ain’t no country I ever heard of. Do they speak English in ‘What’?”