It is a sunny day and you are outside enjoying the soon-to-be-spring air. A wonderful cool day to remulch your flower beds.
As you sling another shovel of decaying organic material around your azaleas, you notice the quality of the light around you start to change, as if someone in a ridiculously bright, neon yellow shirt has just entered a small white room.
You glance over your shoulder and do a classic double take. “What the…?!’” you ejaculate. Hovering over you is a giant craft. From below it appears round but you have no problem imagining in your mind’s eye that from the side it would appear as a saucer.
Two smiling grey faces with big grey eyes peer down at you. They appear to be waving. The thought that all the tired clichés about aliens since 1947 appear to be true.
They lower something down to you on what appears to be a rope made of glass. It undulates in the wind, but does not break. As it appears before you you hear a strange voice eminating from it. “Howdy!” it says. Gomer Pyle you think? These aliens must have learned English from television signals that left earht decades ago!
You stare blankly at the end of the rope.
“What up, my nigga!?” it says. Apparently they have developed a catalogue of greetings.
You gently pull the glass rope to your lips. You gently speak, “Um, hello?”
The neon yellow seems to be coming from inside your own head and in a matter of seconds the glow behind your eyes fades to black. You have the sensation of falling.
You awaken in the craft. The interior looks remakably like a kitchen from 1958. Plastic injection molded seats. The countertop is red with the outlines of green and yellow boomerangs. On one wall there what appears to be a refrigerator with the word “Kelvinator” in a chrome script.
A grey creature sits next to you. He hands you an Old Milwaukee beer in a can with a pull tab. "Earth will be gone in 24 earth hours. You have been chosen to be the sole survivor. We want to take an item with us that best represents this planet. We have to carry something approximately the size of one of your 1952 Buicks.
“We can travel anywhere on the planet to get this item. You are obviously in a better position to choose what one item will best represent the earth to other civilizations.”
What will you choose?