2074
"Welcome to Vendor Mammoth, my name is Ashley. How may I
help you?"
The customer gave the red-haired Elf girl at the front of the
store the barest minimum of acknowledgement, managing to miss both the strain
in her voice and her obviously forced smile. Instead he headed into the store,
losing sight of her quickly in among the shelves. For her part, Ashley spared
them only the minimum of glance before returning her attention to the door.
A metahuman store greeter seemed like an incredibly
anachronistic element in the 2070s, especially to a chain that primarily
stocked cheaply made items designed for and marketed to those that couldn't
afford better. However, there was actually a certain logic to it.
With the advent of Matrix 2.0 and AR, Vendor Mammoth had
originally commissioned an entirely virtual store greeter, intended to guide
them to the items they were after, notify them of current sales and other
offers and above all else, provide an illusion that the company actually cared
at all about them. And while it had been a great idea in theory, the actual
application had been problematic.
The portability and accessibility of the new Matrix had
resulted in Vendor Mammoth’s AR greeter being a frequent target, and not only
for hackers. Pretty soon it seemed like every kid with a commlink was taking a
shot at it, resulting in the store’s greeter spewing obscenities at shoppers as
they entered. Or showing them Troll Porn. Or, even worse, advertising rival
stores. And while there was every chance that this was less malice as it was
boredom at play, there was clearly a problem.
Soon Vendor Mammoth stores nationwide were suffering from similar
vandalism, and the head office wanted to know how to stop it. Their IT
department ran the numbers on upgrading the hosts for every store, firewall improvements,
new software, a better response team and other such changes needed to prevent
this from happening, and found that the answer was more then a little on the
expensive side. Vendor Mammoth’s board were not impressed, but they also wanted
an end to their AI greeters directing customers to the nearest Kong-WalMart (or
beaming them more Troll porn)
At the same time, some bright spark ran the numbers on each
store hiring a few minimum wage metahumans to stand out the front and greet
customers in person, and found that it was actually a lot cheaper then
upgrading their systems. And so the decision was made to quietly retire the AR system
while hiring a bunch of kids to perform an elementary task for them.
Besides preventing customers by being hit with a barrage of profanity
as they entered the store, Vendor Mammoth found that there were several other
benefits to this change. The first was that it generated a surprising amount of
goodwill for the company. After all, they creating more jobs for young Metahumans,
something that played well to the media. The second was the discovery that if
there’s a cute young Elf standing at the front of your store, then people are
more likely to step inside to buy something.
 |
| Keep smiling. Fake being nice to people. Try not to kill everyone in the store |
What it did provide her with was a cashflow, something that
was vital to her future plans. And so, with each wave, each repetition of the
canned greeting, each forced smile and each repetition of the specials of the
day, she was crawling closer to her goal.
She did a few quick sums, counting down how long she still
had to go on the day. It wasn’t just the urge to be out of there, of course. Ashley
had plans for the night, not the least of which involved her second job, the one
she actually lived for. That would not only get her more experience, but also
would provide her with a much needed cash boost that would bring her that much
closer to her goal.
And on that day when she got there, she would leave Vendor Mammoth,
never to tread upon its ground again. She would burn her uniform, and laugh about
it as she did. Ashley would die, and she would be reborn as the person she had
wanted to be for so long.
It wouldn’t be her first ‘death’ either. “Ashley” didn’t
have much of a life outside of Vendor Mammoth. In fact, she had about enough to
pass the minimal checks that a discount store chain would perform on a minimum
wage greeter who had no responsibilities beyond waving at customers and who’s
job perks were an ill-fitting uniform and access to the lunch room. And, as
such, getting rid of Ashley wouldn’t be that hard either.
All she needed to do now was keep at it.
-----
“Why on earth would you go with that?” Ashley asked herself
as she scrolled though the file on her Commlinks’ screen. “I mean, cramming all
those electronics and junk into a heavy pistol sounds like you’re asking for trouble.”
Sighing to herself, she scrolled down the screen to the next weapon along. “Okay,
so this looks a little more interesting…” She took a bite from her sandwich, a
soul-deadening construct consisting of a slice of passable meat substitute and alleged
cheese squeezed between two chunks of something that could be charitably called
bread.
Right now she was in the lunch room in the back of Vendor
Mammoth, a joyless cinderblock hellhole that was more akin to a sensory deprivation
tank with a few company posters thrown in then anything else. Simple plastic
chairs were functional enough to sit in but uncomfortable enough to suggest
that you should get off your butt and get back to work, and were a great accompaniment
to the obviously fake plastic plants that were the only other décor. There was
a single trideo screen in the room, and its remote was firmly under the control
of somebody further up the food chain then the kids.
The net result was that the lunch room atmosphere was usually
one of isolated individuals hunched over their commlinks looking at whatever
they thought they could get away with and trying to avoid any interaction with
anyone else.
That suited Ashley just fine for several reasons. The first
was that it gave her time to do research and reading in private, something that
she got very little of otherwise. The few hours she had in each day that weren’t
dedicated to making customers want to buy crappy brightly coloured and ill-fitting
clothes were usually taken up by laying the groundwork for the next stage of
her life, something that was very demanding to say the least. And that was
before her admittedly intermittent second job, which ate up much of what was
left.
The good news was thanks to the handful of people that she
knew, Ashley had access to a lot of information that was far from public knowledge.
While far from being privy to the innermost secrets of the Megas, she was still
getting a very good idea of life on the shadowy side of Seattle, and what it
entailed as well as what one would need to do in order to survive. That’s why
she was currently reviewing guns and making her own mental notes on them.
“And then Ares will just bring out a new Predator next year
and everyone will buy that instead,” she smirked to herself.
“Hey Ash. What are you looking at?”
That was enough to grab her attention, Ashley flicking away
from an index of weapon reviews to something inane and pedestrian before glancing
up from her commlink. Standing before her was Dennis, another employee who was
about her age and worked on the checkouts. As near as she could tell, his
primary life goals were to get lots of tattoos and work entry-level jobs until
he found somebody richer then him to sponge off. Oh, and to hit on every woman
around him.
And that was the other reason why she liked the quiet of the
lunch room, because if she tried talking to any of her fellow employees she
would probably end up hitting them instead. She couldn’t think of a single
person that she’d miss when she left. In fact, she could think of more that she
wouldn’t mind putting a bullet into herself.
“Funny cat videos.” She replied without a hint of interest.
It was the default answer to the question, really. And definitely less likely to
raise questions.
“Hey Ash, we finish at the same time this week,” he
continued. “I was wondering if you wanted to go see that new Kaiju trid with
me.”
She resisted the urge to say that what she really wanted to
do was smash his knees with a baseball bat and then slam his fingers in a door,
and instead looked down at her comm again. “I have a thing on tonight,” she
replied instead, an answer that was actually true.
“Oh, well how about tomorrow?” He asked again, not missing a
beat.
“Can’t. Have a thing on too.” Ashley replied, going back to
the gun list. It was about to become relevant.
“Well, if you change your mind or your thing doesn’t happen,
let me know.” He finished. “I’ll be here”
“Yes you will,” she muttered after he left. “But hopefully I
won’t be for too much longer”
No comments:
Post a Comment