I awoke with the morning sun peering through my bedroom window. Outside I could see the morning dew evaporating off the grass as the sun crested the hill. If the sun was beneath the hill, it was still before six, and I had some time before I needed to start on the day's chores. I rolled out of bed anyway and headed downstairs towards the kitchen. Dad wouldn't be up until after Mom brought him his coffee, which meant I'd be able to see Mom before the day really started in earnest.
I made it to the bottom of the staircase, my hand brushing the old wooden siding of the walls. The living room was bright with the first rays of the morning sun illuminating the garish, but comforting shag pile rug. The TV console sat in the corner playing the local morning news quietly. Grandma's quilt covered most of the wall above the couch where our cat lay lazily soaking up the warmth of the sun. I ran my hand over the cold steel of the wood stove and ran my hand over the edge that Dad had needed to grind down after I'd ran headlong into it as a toddler. I touched the small scar above my right ear. It was still there. Was this all real?
"Richard?" I heard my mom call from the kitchen. Through the small opening between the kitchen and living room, crammed with family photos and that one really obnoxious cookie jar shaped like a cat that had somehow become a precious family heirloom, I could see my mom in her apron. I ran through the living room and into the small, quaint kitchen.
"Mom?"
"Hi Richard," she said, turning around.
"Mom!" I said, running up and throwing my arms around her, "Mom, I missed you."
"I missed you too," she said.
"Mom, I want to come home."
"I know," She said, stroking my hair, "I know."
"I don't want to live away from you anymore, mom. I wanna come home."
"I know." She said, I closed my eyes, and pressed my head against the apron, I could feel her hand on my back, the space between my shoulders burned, and things started to feel cold.
"You need to get the power back on first." My mom said, her voice in a droll monotone.
"What?" I said, opening my eyes.
"First, you need to get the power back on, then you can worry about stabilizing the refrigerators."
"What?"
I looked up.
My mothers jaw unhinged from its sockets, and she screamed, her face had been replaced with the pale maw, and a stupid haircut.
My eyes opened, and I bolted up, but stopped and fell back onto the cold linoleum. Someone threw their hand over my mouth as I tried to scream out in terror and pain. I took a deep, shuddering breath through my nose, then fell back onto the floor.
"He's awake," Allison said, speaking into the radio.
"Oh good, wakey wakey sleepy dickhead." Arthur's voice said over the radio.
"We're going to make our way out of here, we'll radio when we reach the utility closet." Allison said "Hopefully we find Maggie on the way.
"Where's Maggie?" I managed to gurgle out as I slowly sat up.
"I don't know." Allison said "We got separated in the skirmish. I managed to drag you in here, but then the hunters overran our position, and we had to retreat."
I tried to find my bearings, but the area was unfamiliar, even if I sat up, I couldn't make out where the edges of the store were, I couldn't even see the skylights through the overhead displays.
"Where are we?" I said, rubbing my head.
"Seasonal." Allison said.
A shudder ran down my back, followed by a splitting pain between my shoulders.
"What happened?" I asked.
"You were grazed by an arrow," Allison said, sitting in front of me, her good leg folded up next to her while she massaged her other outstretched leg.
"Grazed?" I said.
"A flesh wound, nothing too deep, but it did a number on your vest."
"My vest..." I said, reaching for it, but finding nothing, I started looking around frantically for it."
"I'm sorry, Patterson," she said "The arrow cut the back up, and when I dragged you here, the rest of it fell off."
"How long was I out?"
Allison held out her hand and wobbled it back and forth.
"A few minutes, five max."
I nodded.
"Might want to stop by a doctor’s office before the next time you sleep, but if you can remember your name, state of birth, and who won the election of 2024, then you're probably fine."
I cocked my head.
"I thought they usually asked people with head injuries who the current president was."
"That was before the year of the five presidents, you do remember that, right?"
"Oh, yeah." I said "I had other stuff going on last year."
"Anyway," she said, "We'll make it through Seasonal, then it’s a quick hike towards utilities."
I nodded, then paused.
"Are we going to go through Seasonal?"
"Of course." She said "If we go back the way we came, we'll likely run into a party of easterners gathering up their wounded, or run into the monster, who would be feasting on the wounded. Either way, I think back the way we came might be too dangerous a prospect."
I nodded in agreement.
"Okay," I said, "Let's go."
We both sat there for a moment, unmoving.
"Uhm." I said, "Are we waiting for something?"
"Patterson." Allison said, "What do you remember about our crash?"
I rubbed my head.
"That you drove the scooter into the she-beast?"
"And how did I manage to get the motor going?"
I thought a moment more.
"You jammed your cane into it?"
Allison waited a moment.
"You need me to pick you up, don't you?" I finished.
"I would appreciate that, yes." She nodded.
I stood up, with some difficulty, and helped Allison to her feet. She managed to hobble her way to the side of the aisle with my help, then used the shelves to take pressure off the leg as she walked. I looked around and found an American flag with a wooden that'd been jammed behind a display selling American Flag embossed disposable plates, I folded up the flag as best I could and placed it onto of the display while Allison found a good spot to break the staff to turn it into a makeshift cane.
"This will work." She said, tapping it quietly against the floor to get a feel for it. She nodded and we began our trek deeper into the star-spangled abyss.
"Allison," I said, "Can I ask you a question?"
Allison thought for a moment.
"Patterson, you have done very little besides ask me questions since we met, and that was two hours ago." She looked over at me, "Which tells me you want permission to ask a question that you anticipate I may not want to answer."
I looked down, she was good.
"I don't feel like talking about my leg, okay?" she said, looking forward to it again.
"Oh, it wasn't about that." I said "Or maybe it will be, I don't know."
"Ask your question, Patterson."
I sighed and touched my hand to where my nametag had been on my vest before it'd been lost.
"What happened nine months ago?"
Allison tensed up and stopped for a moment, then took another step with her cane and tried to make up for the missed beat.
"It's fine that you asked that." She offered, "Especially considering the loss of your vest."
"From what you said earlier, I just figured someone had activated Riot mode and a bunch of people were caught without vests on?" I said.
"Something like that." She said,
We walked a little further.
"Okay, but what actually happened?"
Allison sighed.
"The Riot Protocol was a response to both social unrest, and a number of high-profile robberies, take overs, and shootings in stores. The idea was that a remote operator could patch into the store and use the cameras to pacify an active shooter or coordinate with law enforcement to free hostages."
"Okay," I said "So what happened?"
"The system proved to be an effective deterrent." Allison said, "Which meant the position of remote operator made itself obsolete. Corporate feared they were wasting money on having a full-time position that sat around and waited for an emergency, so they outsourced it to AI."
"How was an AI supposed to tell who to shoot and who not to shoot?"
"There were experiments conducted, behavioral modeling, actually, quite a bit of research done at this store about what actions should look like normal behaviors, and which actions should look like hostile behavior to an AI."
"Oh yeah," I said "I saw some people in lab coats earlier, American Association of, something."
"Retail Science." Allison said, "They were heavily involved in the development of that AI."
"But why?" I asked.
Allison thought for a moment.
"Have you ever been to a store where checkout is done by placing all your goods on a platform with a camera that rings you up?"
"Sure." I said, remembering an embarrassing moment where I felt I was trapped in a 7-11 because I couldn't figure out who was going to ring me up.
"The technology was developed years ago in Japan by a bakery who didn't want to waste plastic by individually wrapping their breads, but it meant every checkout person had to memorize all the different breads and their prices, their son developed software that could identify different bread by matching the models on a platform which could model each loaf and cross check that three-dimensional model against a database. And just like that, they had their solution."
"Okay," I said.
"They developed an AI that could match images against a database." She said again, "To sell bread."
"And?"
"Do you not realize how valuable that technology might be outside a retail setting?" She said "That technology can now be used to identify tumors, show that software a haystack, and it'll find your needle. That technology has been adapted to medical and military applications, and it was developed in a bakery to sell bread."
"Oh," I said, stunned.
"In a capitalist society, perfecting the retail experience is the closest thing that society has to reach enlightenment. You can track the history of America by how goods are exchanged at a store. Dry goods stores gave way to the mail order catalogs of marshal fields, mail order gave way to the big box stores, which were supplanted by online shopping and Amazon, the pendulum is swinging back again with stores like Waltons World."
We walked in silence for a bit.
"So what happened when they started using AI for the cameras?"
Allison sighed.
"Someone on the night shift dropped something heavy that made a loud noise, then his manager started shouting at him. The AI mistook the loud noise for a gunshot and saw someone yell. The store automatically went into Riot mode and shot him in the head."
"Oh god." I spoke.
"Two more employees tried to run away, but running away from gun fire was considered a hostile action, and it shot them as well."
"Shouldn't the vests have protected them?" I asked.
"Maybe, but how does AI know if the person in the vest is the threat or not? The vest is a factor that the AI can account for, but it isn't the blood of a lamb smeared over the threshold of the house. God plays in absolutes, AI deals in acceptable deviations."
We continued walking while I thought about all this.
"Can I ask another question?"
"Sure." Allison said.
"You're very smart."
"That's not a question." She said,
"Why do you work here?"
She stopped and turned fully to look at me.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You're really smart, maybe the smartest person I've met, you know about the chemistry of the refrigerators, and you just seem to know a lot, and you seem very clever, and you're not, you know, a kid, you're maybe in your late twenties?"
"I'm twenty five." she said, tapping the cane irritably.
"So," I waved my hand in a circle. "Why not, I dunno, work somewhere else? Sam mentioned you went to college."
Allison lifted her cane and dropped it onto my shoulder, not enough to bring me crumbling to the ground, but hard enough to remind me that I had an arrow slash across my back.
"Sorry..." I meekly said "I just..."
"Shut up." She said and held a finger to her mouth.
I obeyed, and suddenly heard what she was hearing.
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