Ding, dong. The sound of the doorbell echoed through the cluttered apartment, finding its way through empty and discarded pizza boxes along with randomly strewn pieces of mechanical equipment to the young, sandy blonde man who sat hunched over a desk, furiously typing something on a shiny laptop computer. He looked up, irritated, for the source of the annoying sound that had dared to disturb his work. Once his sleep-deprived brain had locked the source of the noise as the doorbell, he grumbled, standing up from his chair and yawning while stretching his cramped muscles. “Coming!” he yelled, and started to navigate his way through the trash and machinery to the door. It probably was time for a break, anyway.

Finally arriving at the door, the man completely ignored the peephole in favor of simply jerking the door open and giving one of his famous death glares to whomever standing in the doorway – which turned out to be empty. Grumbling, he redirected the glare down, where, just like he expected, the innocent brown paper-wrapped package stared mockingly up at him. The white sticky tag shouts out BENJAMIN WEST, and the man continued to glare at the neatly wrapped box before finally picking it up and navigating his way through his mess of an apartment to plop the surprisingly heavy box down on his unmade bed.

Ben West, as he preferred to be called, was your average 22-year old, with messy, sandy-blonde hair and a five foot four stocky, muscular frame. He had a job developing anti-virus computer programs, but that was usually boring and no fun. So he spent his spare time inventing little robots for fun, though the blueprint for his current project – the “mechon,” as he liked to call it – was for a robot on a bit of a larger scale than his normal little remote-control squirrels.

Sighing, Ben tore open the paper with a pocketknife he had lying on his cluttered nightstand, not even bothering to see who the sender was. Just as he suspected, a cardboard box lay in the package, with a neatly folded letter taped to the top. He tore the letter off without ripping it (he had experience at this sort of thing) and unfolded it while simultaneously balling up the wrapping and making a shot at the wastepaper basket by the door.

It missed.

Sighing once again, Ben gripped the now open letter while walking over to put the ball where it belonged, but something caught his eye and he froze midway to his destination.

Whatever you do, don’t answer the door. That was what the first line of the letter said. There wasn’t even a greeting on the top. Just that strange sentence. But nobody had –

Ding, dong.

Well, wasn’t that creepy. The door or the letter? The letter did say to not answer the door. In the end, Ben resolved to listen to the strange letter instead. “One minute!” he yelled to whatever visitor he had, before quietly sprawling onto the bed to read the rest of the letter.

Well, if you don’t do that, your life will be thrown into a violent chaos, and there will be absolutely no point in reading this letter. If you didn’t answer the door, then you’re good for now, so read on. Well. That was good. Step one completed. So, introductions. I’m your future self. Wait – what? And to prove it, I can tell you that you just missed that shot to your trash can. Ouch. So I’m your future self in a parallel universe. In other words, I made the shot, was priding myself on making it and so didn’t see the letter, answered the door, and that mechon that you’re sketching became the largest weapon of mass destruction ever known. Well then. Ben was secretly priding himself by saving the world with one missed shot. The fact that he had missed such an easy shot was slowly becoming irrelevant. But the Spoke at your door is probably becoming impatient and is about to re-ring the doorbell. Right on cue, the ring echoed through the apartment, and Ben quickly shouted “Hold on! Be there in a sec!” before redirecting his attention to the letter. So, do exactly what I say and we can hopefully prevent Armageddon. Right. Listen to the letter and the world won’t end. It could be a prank, but honestly, it was probably the most interesting thing that had ever happened in Ben’s boring life, so he resolved to listen to that sheet of paper. Inside the box are a phone and a mechanical gauntlet. I’ll relay further instructions to you over the phone by texting, and there’s a few important phone numbers preprogrammed in there as well. The gauntlet is all I managed to get done on the mechon before my (our?) blueprints got stolen by the Wheel. The Wheel? I’ll explain later. You should know what the gauntlet does, you designed it. So grab some supplies (but no credit cards), clothes, the stuff I sent you, a pocketknife of some sort, this letter, definitely a phone, and all of your mechon blueprints and research. All of it. And run! And with that, the cheerful letter ended.

The – what was it, a Spoke? – knocked on the door this time after ringing the doorbell once again. “You deaf or what?” Ben shouted. And suddenly getting an idea, he added on, “Can’t a man even go to the bathroom nowadays in peace?” He rushed to the bathroom, screwing both taps open, before rushing back out and grabbing a large black duffel. Tossing in a camouflage-patterned windbreaker, some extra t-shirts and a few pairs of sweatpants in addition to his current white shirt, gray hoodie and jeans, he shoved the box and the letter along with the stainless steel pocketknife that had probably just indirectly saved the world into the bag as well. He all but ran to his desk to get his laptop (all the blueprints were on there), stopping to properly throw away the paper ball, almost as an afterthought.

With the running water still masking his sounds, Ben strode over to the desk with his long legs, slamming the fortunately shut down laptop closed and also pushing it into the bag along with an extra battery, a charger, and his mouse. He quickly shrugged the bag on, depending on the window as his means of escape. Fortunately, his apartment was on the ground floor, so broken bones weren’t a risk. Quietly unlatching the window and slipping out, he shut the cold glass behind him, the water hiding the wind’s howling, and hit the ground running as the sound of a lock clicking echoed through the apartment.