As we crouched down and listened, we realized the voice was coming from just over the shelves to our left. I looked through the merchandise and could see a faint light. I pushed through the merchandise on the shelves, which seemed to be collectible train cars, each themed around a different military intervention of the United States. I reached my hand through and moved aside train cars themed around World War Two, The Gulf War, and the 1871 Punitive campaign against the kingdom of Korea. There seemed to be a soft glow, emanating from behind the shelf.
"...an still be salvaged, so long as everything is operational before sunrise, we can still salvage this." Came a frantic voice from the far side of the shelf. It paused as if listening to someone else.
"If nothing else, we can sell it to my cousin at Lockheed, they'll eat this shit up."
Another pause.
"Oh that? I mean, I think it still needs work, but it's certainly viable."
another pause.
"We have 1,782 simulations that say it works, and 2 case studies that say it needs work, that's fine, we've done more with less."
I couldn't make sense of what was being said, but I decided to look further, I'd forced about half my torso into the gap between shelves, and I started to pull back to see about finding a way to reach this strange man. As I pulled myself out of the gap, I bumped into a train car remembering the Quasi war, and it fell to the ground with a dull thud.
"What?" The man's voice said, sounding now rather frantic "Wells, I'll call you back, keep looking."
A plastic click sounded, followed by the opening of a drawer as I frantically got out of the shelf and stood up.
"Smooth." Allison said.
"Did you hear that?" I said.
"I heard you giving away our position, yes."
Allison started stepping back, away from me, and disappearing into the darkness of the aisle as I listened to the rummaging behind the aisle. Suddenly, the soft blue light began to shine next to me, and part of the shelf began to push out from the rest, knocking over trains commemorating the Mexican-American War and the US Annexation of the Philippines.
A man in a lab coat stepped out, he was timid and lanky, and he held a booklet out in his hand.
"Denise?" He said "Denise, is that you?"
I kept myself flat against the shelf and watched as this strange man walked in the aisle. He looked around, and his eyes fell on me.
"Oh, hello." He said, lowering the booklet, "Sorry, I thought you were someone else."
"Oh, okay." I said, stunned at the development, to really say anything, "Who did you think I was?"
"Oh, that hardly matters," the man said "Anyway, was there something you needed, or can I return to my work?"
"What are you doing?" I asked, as casually as if I'd walked up on my uncle, constructing his model trainset.
"Oh, like I said when we walked in, just some demographic and statistics studies, really."
Suddenly, the memory hit me like a cane to the back of the head.
"You're one of the scientists, from the...place..." I said, forgetting the name.
"Ah yes! You're the new door man. Well, I'm Doctor Prendick, with the American Association of Retail Scientists, we saw each other at the front door."
"Yeah," I said, still laying on my butt and baffled, "Right before the attack."
"Huh?" He said "Oh, yes, terrible business, most unfortunate, but I trust you'll have everything squared away by morning, yes?"
"Hopefully," I said "Who were you talking to in there?"
"Hm? He asked, "Ah, yes, Doctor Wells, he's somewhere else in the store, we're keeping in touch."
"You have a phone?" I said, suddenly hopeful.
"Oh, no, sorry to disappoint, we just have short range radios. Cell phones don't work in these stores."
"Oh," I said "Because the steel frame and cabling create a faraday cage effect?"
"What? Oh no, because we built the stores to block cell signals unless you pay for a premium membership, then you can connect to the store's cell network. Clever little move that increased premium memberships by 3% last quarter. Unfortunately, the mechanisms that block cell coverage do essentially create a faraday cage, but the systems that bypass it were taken out when the grid went down."
"That's neat." I said, glancing back to where Allison had been standing a moment ago, but had now left.
"I think I need to go." I said "My coworker seems to have wandered off without me."
"Oh?" Dr. Prendick said "What coworker?"
And that's when Allison hit him in the back of the head with her cane.
"What the heck are you doing?" I cried as I scrambled to my feet.
"Getting answers." She said, dragging Dr. Prendick into the secret compartment he'd opened. I looked down and picked up the booklet that he'd dropped when Allison had brained him with the stick.
"Allison!" I said, following "This is insane, what are you doing?"
"I don't expect you to understand, Patterson."
The room was a small, circular structure. In the center were two desks with computers, now off. Allison sat at one of the desks while I walked the short perimeter. Along the walls were a number of television monitors, all of which were dark, but they had afterimages burned into them. As I walked along the perimeter, I started to recognize some of the shapes.
"This is the meadow." I said, pointing at one of the monitors, "And this is the front door." I continued down the line, all the televisions had been tuned to a security camera and had been on long enough to burn the static parts of the scene into the screens.
"I had heard a rumor about this place when I first started working here." Allison said.
"Allison." I said, looking over to her, "I thought we were cutting through Seasonal to get to the utilities room.”
Allison dug through one of the desks, opening every drawer and rummaging around. She opened a drawer with a number of tabs and started flipping through them. I walked over and looked over her shoulder as she vigorously and methodically ignored me.
"August, September, October," she said, flipping through the file names. "Here, November of last year."
She opened the folder and dropped it on the desk. She sprawled the documents out. There were reports, testimonies, and security camera footage of three different people, one of them was berating a coworker, and in the next, he was laying a shallow pool of blood. Four other pictures showed similar progressions, someone running, then doubled over, dying."
"This was the incident." I said, "From nine months ago."
"I knew that if this place did exist, then they had to know something about what had happened." Allison said.
I looked down at the booklet in my hand and flipped it open.
"what's that?" she said, half-heartedly asking.
"Book of coupons I think." Said, stopping and reading them, "Most of these are expired anyway."
"Hold onto it, anyway." She said "Just in case."
Allison picked up another sheet, and read it to herself, then looked over it again, and again.
"Uhg..." Came the voice from below of Doctor Prendick.
"How long was I out?" he said, looking up at me.
"Oh, only a few seconds." I said.
"That's good." He said "In the movies they make it seem like it's normal to be unconscious for hours, but really, anything beyond fifteen minutes is likely to cause severe brain damage."
"What about five minutes?" I asked.
"Probably fine." He said, "But I'd probably want to see a doctor before I went to bed."
I made a mental note of seeing a doctor, just as soon as I had the means to do that.
Allison spun around in the office chair to face the man, still crouched on all fours.
"Doctor Prendick." Allison said, paper in hand.
The doctor looked up.
"Ah, Allison Rodrigues." he said "How are you, did you ever see that therapist we recommended?"
Allison held up the paper and read.
"Post action report, November 18th, 3:47 am."
"Ah." he said looking down.
"Project Headley was undergoing a live trial at store number 0137 in northern Illinois in the lead up to the holiday shopping season."
"Allison, I know what the report says, I wrote it."
"A worker dropped an item, and the force of the drop caused a sound which Project Headley misidentified as a gunshot."
Doctor Prendick looked down at the floor.
"The AI identified the source, as well as behavior it considered to be hostile."
I stared down at Prendick as he nodded along.
"The system determined that, with the lack of customers in the vicinity, the risk of collateral damage was low, and decided to fire."
Allison's hands were trembling, and she had the start of a nearly sadistic smile on her face.
"Two more employees were identified as possible threats, primarily on the basis that they were running, and had merchandise on their person."
Doctor Prendick looked up.
"So you didn't go and see the therapist we recommended?"
Allison read, ignore the doctor "With three confirmed KIA with three deployments of countermeasures, while the false triggering of the protocol was unfortunate, this incident demonstrates the effectiveness of the software in tracking and guiding the hardware, all that is now required is a tweaking of the activation protocol, we recommend that the process be subject to manual activation only."
Allison dropped the paper.
"Yes, that looks bad out of context." Prendick said "But you have to admit, the fact that we hit three moving targets is rather..."
"Shut the fuck up." Allison said "Shut up, all the way the fuck up."
I was taken aback, Allison sounded genuinely shaken, and there was an actual hint of inflection in her voice.
"What do you want me to say?" Prendick pleaded, "Sorry? I'm not the only one involved in this, take it up with corporate.
"Prendick, I think you misunderstand." She said, her composure returning "I know that this place is fucked, I know this place doesn’t value the lives of its employees, and I knew, eventually, that I could find something that tied your organization to the deaths of my friends and coworkers."
"Then what is it that you need from me?"
Allison slid out of the seat and pointed to a single line near the end of the report.
"'we recommend that the process be subject to manual activation only.' Yes, what about it."
"Was that implemented?" Allison said.
"Well of course." Prendick said, "We couldn't risk the system going off in the middle of the shopping day."
"Of course not." Allison said.
"So what?" Prendick said.
"I was standing next to Paul when the protocol was activated an hour ago." She reached out and grabbed Prendick by the hair. "He didn't press the button."
A wave of realization crossed Prendick’s face.
"Who activated Riot Control Mode?"
Prendick gulped. Allison seethed, I stepped back...
And someone started breathing heavily.
We all looked to the open door, pale blue light was pouring from the observation center, into the hallway, past the scattered mess of trains depicting scenes from the US Intervention in Panama, and straight to the feet of the She-Beast. Standing, head cocked, white tank top streaked with blood.
"Oh shit." Allison said.
The she-beast cocked her head as she looked from me, to Doctor Prendick, to Allison.
"Do you work here?" the woman whispered.
We were all stunned, motionless.
"It looks...like you work here..."
Prendick was glancing around for something, and his gaze kept going towards the creature's feet. Right where he'd been struck by the cane earlier.
Right where he'd dropped the book.
The creature took a step forward.
"You know..." she breathed "It's very rude...to ignore...a customer..."
Her tone was becoming frustrated, and murderous.
"I think...I'd like to speak...with your...mana..."
"Hi ma'am!" I said, putting on my best customer service voice. The sudden sharpness of tone pierced the eerie silence. The woman snapped her neck to look at me.
"Do you work here?" she whispered frantically.
"Why yes I do!" I said, "And we...value you as a customer, and I wanted to express our gratitude for your..."
I looked to Allison, frantically as words failed me.
"Patronage." she whispered.
"Patronage, that...uhm...we'd like to present you...uhm..." I held out the book. "With these."
The creature took a few steps forward, the smell of death and decay stung my nose and watered my eyes. Her breath was hot and choking, but I held out the booklet with both hands. Her eyes passed over the booklet.
"These..." she said "look expired."
"Well, you know." I said "Walton's Promise is that we honor all coupons, even our competitors." I glanced at Allison "Even expired ones."
I was fully prepared to be torn in two. I wondered what it would feel like to die in multiple pieces. My only hope was that, as she ate me, she would start with the pieces she'd torn off first.
She snatched the book from my hands, put it in her mouth, turned, dropped to all fours, and skittered for the door, climbing over the shelves, and disappearing into the dark. I let out a breath and looked over to Allison.
She glanced at Prendick, then to me, then to the door that the creature had just left through. I could see the gears turning in Allison's head, trying to piece things together in a way where she could extract more information from Prendick. To my delight, I got to be the clever one for once.
"So." I said, pointing to the doorway "Denise, I presume?"
No comments:
Post a Comment