Normal Day

The sky was oil and the oil shone pink and blue and yellow under a liquid sun. The mechnoilluminators strode with a giraffe-like confidence across the chalkboard roads. All was void. None was sun. But the illuminators, blessed as they were, brought in a cool crisp lightbulb sting to help show the automobiles their way. The poor, living things were sometimes swallowed by the darkness—the cars, that was to say, and their equally-living passengers. It was the way of life. The darkness ate the people, and the people ate the darkness.

The landing pad was surprisingly packed. Normally no one shopped at this Supplier. No one at all. Within, the aupers and gortras were rotting fecund on the shelves; gortra tendrils grew wild and wispy, their ends covered with coarse trichomes. Year by year it had been the job of the old timers to don the ceremonial runes axes and hack these vines from the shelves, so they couldn't get at the Supplier's then-specialty, hooba beans. Canned hooba beans. Hundreds of thousands of cans, all through the dozens of shelves. They had to diversify after they'd hired Eleanor because by that time the gortras had eaten all the hooba beans. It had led to a long famine until they had brokered a contract to import retribs, burburts, and qex'an. This had given them enough customers where they'd been able to diversify. Still, they kept a save file of the original market, roots and hooba cans and all, for those who craved the original feel. As it has been said no one shopped here before they diversified, but that didn't mean that there weren't entities that prowled the halls of the original depot. Those beings would get terribly angry if they weren't allowed to have their old settings back, and the old timers were told that the things they'd seen when that anger wasn't satiated were just hallucinations, and they got down and prayed to Kul'ul and Gekkos that that was true.

Eleanor clocked in, handing her card to the Runist to etch. She chipped the sign-in Runes into the stone and handed it back to her. Two hundred etch-hashes left before she would be subjected to a new covenant; perhaps she'd be taken further off-world this time. Some of her Block would actually get vacation time for getting their hashes in early, but then, there was also at least a 79% chance they'd get reassigned new hashes to fill time before the covenant.

The terminals told them that when they did their seasonal quizzes. Through the computers they had learned their Odds, and they had to use those to their advantage to handle the customers. A cashier, or godok'riia as the New Texts had it, had to be expected to run precise Odds on whether an object would fall out of the suction-tunnel, or if a child would topple a neutoro-cart, or when the display simulacrum's reality would fail and therefore dematerialize all of the product into nuclear subspace. Or when the Hypno-Drone would get up to his Steel Maiden shenanigans again and they'd have to start de-spindling people.

Eleanor hated the balance between “when” and “if.” She hated the sting of the Steel Maiden and the cold chill of the Resurrection Pod but they kept saying it had to be used.

Once her Runes were chiseled she left her molt in the cocoons so she could recover it later. She could eat it for sustenance, and then maybe, just maybe, her New Eyes would sprout from the stimulus of protein.

She shuddered. Even for one such as herself (why would a being think of itself as odd if it knows nothing else? she wondered) she found the phrase “stimulus of protein” to be horrific. Still, it was the truth. She gained mass from everything she ate and the genetic recovery from eating her own molts was stupendous. It was like royal jelly to Sherlock Holmes.

Scrolling down the tunnel she stepped out into the Main Cashiering Chamber. These days foodstuffs and all the other artifacts they sold were digitized and transformed into an instant credit value. Ransomware then locked the files for their purchase until they paid. They got the codes to unlock their food and once it downloaded it recombined for them. Among the Odds they had to learn was the reassembly failure rate (sometimes called RFR but no one outside leadership ever called it that). They had to be careful for binary transfer glitches that would turn the goods into something they weren't supposed to be.

As soon as she was on her terminal, she had a few minutes to polish the display taxidermy before the store leader came up to her, in full uniform—mask and all. He had with him a customer, who pulled into her line with a full cart. She'd never seen a model like his before—a good knit, if a bit rough on the eyes. The customer wore half-material blue robes that covered a vast green trunk, where the knots in the wood erupted into forever-closed eyeballs. His arms were green octopus tentacles, and his head was a mass of the same, undulating and crawling over each other. Inside his head was a great cyan light, which she realized somewhat swallowed and re-ejected the matter of the suckered arms that were his head—they became less like tentacles and more like fish, with no heads or tails, swimming in a crisp, hypnotic cyan void.

“NEM'ONEE MO SHUNKI QX'VANOTH!” roared the customer proudly, as he laughed with a strange gelatinous filter to the sound. “CHUNK-KII WANNA! CHUNK-KII WANNA!”

“Eleanor, this is a good friend of mine, and one of our oldest customers. I want you to serve him like you'd serve your own mother.”

“Gladly, sir. You can just place your items on the belt, and away I'll—”

“MOSHISHO NIA CHUNK-KII WANNA!!”

“S-sir...?”

“Well, c'mon, Ellen, help him out!”

“EEEEE OOO NIA Ah. AH.”

“By the deities, Helen! He's reaching the next stage! Help him!!”

“Sir, I don't know how!!”

The customer reeled his head back. He was twitching violently at this point. The other customers marched onward, into the parallel lines. The lights were ill-placed, and the shadows were getting hungry in here again.

“AH. AH! AH!!! MIKONIY YIGO!! MIKONIY YIGO!!”

“Just tell him where to find his medicine!”

“I don't know what his medicine is!”

The man continued to bellow, but the light inside his head began to dim, and his slippery head-tendrils looped together into a tighter central mass. As they did so, Eleanor saw that they secreted a neon-green ichor which slowly stuck the slick arms together. Some of this slime splashed on the belt, and on the Supplier leader, and she swore his pupils widened as the fluid vanished beneath his skin.

Soon the customer's head was a crusted alliphituber of knotted slime. This surface began to crack open like a fresh chickenyoungling spat out alive in its own embryo. Eleanor wanted to look away but couldn't. The chickenyoungling of sweated ectoplasm broke open into a starfish-pentagon of reaching, probing red tentacles.

There was no pretense of suckers along the surface of these tendrils; all the suckers were replaced with beaks and hooked teeth. It was like a flower of flesh and from the center, long wriggling staffs emerged, like the rattles at the end of serpent's tails—they served the same purpose, shaking erratically as if to give a warning to nearby animals. The customer at once was simultaneously vegetable, icthyoid, humanoid, and reptilian all at once. What remained of his “torso”—now splitting open at the seams as the flower of bat-wing skin overtook him—was frozen in place, as his feet ate downward, becoming roots that sank deep into the Supplier's floor.

Eleanor's scream was as true as the crimson splashed across the surface of the thing's tentacles. It was as true as the shadows that stalked the store in invisible dimensions. She screamed and screamed, and this scream was a fact in space, in time: but all around her, all were deaf to the screams. The rattles shook harder as the customer's belching roars turned to rising and indescribable sounds of hunger. Bleeding neon ichor, the quintet of tentacles began to probe out into the other lanes, slurpily searching for warm prey full of blood.