What's in the box, Jeremy?

Jeremy Gordon had a secret, one that would have gotten him locked away for a very long time if the wrong people ever learned of it.

He kept his secret hidden within another secret: a small room behind a false wall he'd built in his bedroom closet.

Building the room had not been easy; he had to buy all of the supplies in tiny quantities, bit by bit. A stick of lumber here, a small box of nails there. Everything in amounts small enough that he could still legally use cash; anything over twenty dollars and he would have to use his government-issued finance card. And that put him at risk of setting off behavior-pattern alarms; inevitably he would have a visit from a faceless man in a clean suit and a neat haircut who would politely ask him why an accountant needed homebuilding equipment.

And so Jeremy had gathered his seditious supplies, hiding them under a huge pile of old clothes in his attic. When he had enough he began working - quietly! - creating a secret room in the back of his large walk-in closet. He worked late at night using only difficult-to-find hand tools - excessive power usage at odd hours would also attract curiosity from bureaucratic monitors. He used only screws instead of nails so as not to attract attention with the sound of hammering. And in the mornings his back would ache from the long, slow strokes he used to saw his wood to length.

He lived in a state of constant anxiety for the two months he worked on his project. If any officials from Homeland Security had visited he would have been found out immediately; he could think of no way to conceal the construction as it was ongoing. But finally it was finished, and when he had hung the last piece of clothing on the rack that concealed the false wall and checked it with a critical eye, he could feel the stress easing from his back and shoulders.

He waited a week before he met with his contact and told him he was ready. They made a plan to have Jeremy's secret delivered, and the following weekend a truck pulled up in front of Jeremy's house and delivered what appeared to be a government-manufactured widescreen television (two hundred channels of Homeland-approved programming!). The delivery men (who either spoke no english or merely chose not to reply when Jeremy spoke to them) brought the heavy box into his living room and left silently.

Jeremy drew the curtains and dimmed the lights. His heart began pounding as he contemplated the crime he was about to commit. Finally he opened the box and gazed on the contents with a mixture of fear and joy. He reached in and removed one of the offending items and brought it to his face. He breathed in the musty odor of ancient pulpy paper, his eyes wandering over the fading but still garish colors of the magazine's cover, savoring the sound of the title: "Future Fiction". He looked at the piles of magazines in the box - "Fantastic Adventures", " Amazing Stories", "Weird Tales" and dozens of other titles, each volume a tiny treason against the state.

After a moment Jeremy reached back into the box and lifted out a heavy stack of magazines. He began to carry them back into his secret reading room.