Dr. Identity by D. Harlan Wilson

coherence.
    “We have to go,” I said.
    “Go where?”
    “Littleoldladyville.”
    Dr. Identity glared at me. “Why would we do a thing like that?”
    “Because I say so. Get your jetpack on.”
    Littleoldladyville was an ADW (Allpurpose Department Warehouse), which sold virtually every product imaginable. Imaginations themselves were available in a range of brands, styles and creative angles of incidence. While cheap, an imagination cost arms and legs to download. Most shoppers couldn’t afford it. And those that could afford it—the student-things that attended Corndog University, for instance—were uninterested in them. They gravitated more towards products like ’gängers, Schizoverse avatars, innovative slang terms (decreed commodities by the Law only last Spring), prosthetic genitals, disco and break dance moves, alternate voices, and other indicators of “personality.”
    Littleoldladyville recently assimilated its last remaining competitors, rendering it the only extant ADW in the Amerikanized world. Every major city harbored five or six of them, and their great bulk constituted roughly thirty percent of each city’s superstructure. It was easy to get lost inside. I once got so lost it took me almost three days to get out. Precisely the idea. The elusive, labyrinthine structure of the ADW prohibited many shoppers from finding their way out when they wanted to. In order to maintain a sufficiently breakneck flow of consumerism under such conditions, a law was imposed: No customer will exist for more than thirty minutes without buying at least $100 worth of products under the penalty of death.
    Products could only be bought by means of retinal scans. Cashiers had gone extinct. All a shopper needed to do was run a product’s barcode across its eyes. At birth everybody’s vision was registered with the government so that they could buy things simply by looking at them. If shoppers failed to make a purchase inside of thirty minutes, a mechanical Bug-Eyed Monster attacked and swiftly tore them to pieces. Littleoldladyville had impeccable surveillance technology. On the occasion of my going astray, I forgot to buy something within the designated time frame, and just moments after a half hour elapsed, I heard the monster scuttling towards me from a nearby aisle. Luckily I made a purchase before it made an appearance. Although horrifying, the BEM was a nice touch from a literary perspective—yet another instance of reality imitating science fiction. In the end my three day misadventure skidrowed me. But I was already skidrowed. Everybody was always-already skidrowed.
    The name Littleoldladyville had been devised by its founder, Hilda Grumpstead. Coincidentally she was a little old lady at the time of the name’s conception. A profound love as a child for her grandmother Babetta, a shopping queen who had won awards for her many consumer-capitalist accomplishments, had invoked a lifelong fantasy of a superstore full of grandmotherlike beings who might consume products to their heart’s content. Not until Hilda was a grandmotherlike being herself did she amass enough capital and technopolitical clout to bring her pipe dream to life. By then Babetta was long dead, although she had recreated an android in her image. She had recreated thousands of them. And whereas Hilda died last century and Littleoldladyville was hardly the utopian superstore she originally envisioned, the machinic versions of little old Babetta continued to populate the store—as managers, stock girls, aisle guards, mannequins, consumer spies, in-house plastic surgeons, and shoppers themselves. This demographic was complimented by the majority of the ADW’s shopping community, which predominantly included little old ladies and their ’gängers. Some came there to die. Others refused to let elderliness get their goats; for them, Littleoldladyville was an opportunity to prove that they still possessed youthful (or at least middle-aged) spunk.