Glasshouse - Charles Stross [32]
“Sure.” He takes my stuff. “Did you read the tutorial?”
“I started to—I needed something to help me get to sleep. Let’s . . . how do we get downtown?”
“I called a taxi. It’ll be here to pick us up in a short while.”
“Okay.” I look him up and down. He’s back in costume again. It still looks awkward. I can’t help tapping my toes with impatience. “Clothing, first. For both of us. Where do we go? Do you know how the stuff is sold?”
“There’s something called a department store, the tutorial said to start there. We might run into some of the others.”
“Hmm.” A thought strikes me. “I’m hungry. Think there’ll be somewhere to eat?”
“Maybe.”
Something large and yellow appears outside the door. “Is that it?” I ask.
“Who knows?” He looks twitchy. “Let’s go see.”
The yellow thing is a taxi, a kind of automobile you hire by the centisecond. There’s a human operator up front, and something like a padded bench seat in the rear. We get in, and Sam leans forward. “Can you take us to the nearest department store?” he asks.
The operator nods. “Macy’s. Downtown zone. That will be five dollars.” He holds out a hand and I notice that his skin is perfectly smooth and he has no fingernails. Is he one of the zombies? I wonder. Sam hands over his “credit card” and the operator swipes it between his fingers, then hands it back. Sam sits back, then there’s a lurch, and we’re moving. The taxi makes various loud noises, so that I’m afraid it’s about to suffer a systems malfunction—there’s a loud rumbling from underneath and a persistent whine up front—but we turn into the road and accelerate toward the tunnel. A moment of darkness, then we’re somewhere else, driving along a road between two short rows of gray-fronted buildings. The taxi stops and the door next to Sam clicks open. “We have arrived at downtown,” says the operator. “Please disembark promptly.”
Sam is frowning over his tablet, then straightens up. “This way,” he says. Before I can ask why, he heads off toward one of the nearest buildings, which has a row of doors in it. I follow him.
Inside the store, I get lost fast. There’s stuff everywhere, piled in heaps and stacked in storage bins, and there are lots of people wandering about. The ones in the odd-looking uniforms are shop operators who’re supposed to help you find things and take your money. There are no assemblers and no catalogues, so I suppose they can only sell the stuff they’ve got on display, which is why it’s all over the place. I ask one of the operators where I can find clothes, and she says, “on the third floor, ma’am.” There are moving staircases in a central high-ceilinged room, so I head for the third level and look around.
Clothes. Lots of clothes. More clothes than I’ve ever imagined in one place—and all of them made of dumb fabric with no obvious way of finding what you want and getting it adjusted to the right size! How did they ever figure out what they needed? It’s a crazy system, just putting everything in the middle of a big house and letting visitors take their chances. There are some other people walking around and fingering the merchandise, but when I approach them they turn out to be zombies, playing the part of real people. None of the others are here yet. I guess we must be early.
I wander through a forest of racks hung with jackets until I catch a shop operator. “You,” I say. “What can I wear?”
She looks like an orthohuman female, wearing a blue skirt and jacket and those shoes with uncomfortable heels, and she smiles at me robotically. “What items do you require?” she asks.
“I need—” I stop. “I need underwear,” I say. The stuff doesn’t clean itself. “Enough for a week. I need some more pairs of hose”—since I tore the one on my left leg—“and another outfit identical to this one. And another set of shoes.” A thought strikes me. “Can I have a pair of pants?”
“Please wait.” The shop operator freezes.