CHAPTER 1

  I hate my life.

  I didn’t even look at the man in front of me. Taking note of their appearance would be just a waste of energy. This was one of the tricks I had learned to survive the nightmare I had found myself trapped in. Ignore everyone.

  “Number 42.”

  “Number 42. Harmony Menthols. Is that correct?” Of course it’s cigarettes. Only drunks and losers here at this time of night. Take your cancer sticks and die.

  The policy reminder would pop up on the screen as soon as I scanned in the cigarettes. I had done this so many times that I had memorized the process anyway. Repeat the number and name back to avoid mistakes.

  All I got back was a barely audible grunt of affirmation.

  I reached the wall of small boxes behind the counter and took one from the cubby numbered 42. Then I placed the pack of cigarettes on the counter upright so the customer could clearly see the package.

  “These are only compatible with Cypress HNB devices. Is this correct?”

  Another grunt for an answer. At this point, I was just standing in for a vending machine.

  “I’ll need to see your identification.”

  Before I had even finished the sentence, a grimy, worn, card was flipped onto the counter. I picked it up, and made a show of scanning the card for information and photo comparison. In truth, I wasn’t even paying attention.

  *Disgusting! I’m going to have to wash my hands and wipe the counter down after this. I don’t even want to know where he was hiding this card.”

  “Thank you, That will be 600 yen. Would you like to pay using Wanma Digital Money?” I said as I pushed the card back across the counter.

  Once again, the same grunt, this time, however, a small handful of coins were dumped onto the counter.

  Great, another one of these freaks. Who even bothers with cash anymore? These coins are probably worse than that card. I need a shower.

  I quickly sorted the coins, and then separated them into two piles. The larger consisted of coins adding up to exactly six hundred yen. The other group was mostly smaller coins, totaling less than a hundred yen together. After dropping the large pile into the coin slot in the register, I placed the remaining change into the small tray beside the register and pushed it toward the other side of the counter.

  “A plastic bag will incur a charge, would you like a plastic bag for your purchase?”

  As if. Who needs a bag to carry a single pack of cigarettes?” Still, I was required to ask. Every. Single. Time.

  I hate my life.

  This time I didn’t even get the grunt for feedback. The ID card, cigarettes, and change quickly disappeared into a heavy coat pocket.

  “Thank you for shopping at One Mart! If you would like to make your purchases using Wanma Digital Money, remember that you get one percent of all purchases in points. You will also be automatically entered into our Spring Extravaganza campaign. Wanma Digital Money cards can be purchased and charged at any time from the WanmaATM located in every One Mart store.”

  Ugh. This is humiliating.

  Before I could even get halfway through the script, the doors had closed behind the customer. Out of sight, all details of the interaction were immediately erased from my brain. If anyone asked me to describe the person who had just stood in front of me, I wouldn’t be able to recall a single detail. The same thing could be said of nearly every other customer I had served in the month since I started this nightmare job.

  I surveyed the now-empty store and let out a deep sigh. It was quiet again, and it could be hours more silent isolation before another customer entered those automatic doors, triggering that infernal door chime.

  My eyes caught something.

  Dammit!

  A disaster. A tiny imperfection that was yet another blemish on my otherwise horrible night. In the tray on the counter was a small, dull, brown coin. It was a dirty old ten-yen coin, and my heart sank as I contemplated the ramifications of its presence.

  Turning my attention to the computer terminal on the counter, I started to navigate through the endless menus and screens on the giant touch-panel until I came to the one titled Forgotten Items.

  [Ten-yen coin.]

  I entered the information and saved the record into the system. Then I dropped the coin into the large plastic lost-and-found tub underneath the counter. It drove me crazy how pointless these systems were set up.

  Dozens of meaningless steps, for what? Ten stupid yen? What a pain. This stupid job!

  I knew that there was no way that guy would come back looking for it, and even if he did, it’s another dozen steps and forms to get the money back.

  This pointless exercise is exactly why companies like this are doomed to fail.

  Sighing, I looked up from the counter. The sight of the empty store, brightly lit with products and full shelves filled me with rage.

  Why do I have to do this? What crime had I committed to be sentenced to this fate? I don’t deserve this.

  I fumed at the injustice of it all. Standing guard over an empty convenience store in the middle of the night. I couldn’t imagine a more meaningless existence, or a more unfair penance.

  My feet hurt. Can’t they at least let me sit down when the store is empty?

  [The current time is 01:30. Please complete store cleaning and shelf inspection before 02:00]

  Right on cue, as if mocking my frustration, the warning message on the register screen lit up. All I could do was stare at it. I had only been doing this ridiculous job for a month and I already hated that terminal more than anything I have ever hated in my life. Even more than my cousin who had graduated from Beijing University and was now working for a big, famous tech company in Shanghai.

  I on the other hand decided to go abroad for college and then graduate school. I had somehow managed to blow all my interviews, and now I was stuck here, working in a convenience store in the middle of the night. My boss wasn’t even a person. I was reporting to an AI-powered cash register wearing the skin of a cartoon mascot dog.

  This insane company skipped right past replacing its workers with AI and jumped straight to management. The One Mart store management system effectively ran every aspect of the business operation. It could even deal with unexpected situations, but in my experience, it was no better than those chatbots they used to handle customer service complaints on websites. Now my place in the world was to be humiliated by taking orders from a cartoon dog on a high-tech cash register.

  How could my life get any worse than this?

  I cursed my situation, fully aware of how over-dramatic and full of self-pity I sounded.

  I grabbed the broom from the closet and quickly swept the floor. They wouldn’t even give us a vacuum since “loud noises may disturb a customer’s shopping experience.” The customers I see at night are barely even human. Drunks, weirdos, and shady-looking punks, that’s who comes into a suburban convenience store after midnight.

  Luckily there was no mud or footprints on the floor, or I would have had to get the mop and bucket. After sweeping the floor, I used the disinfectant towels to wipe the counter as well as the handles on all the refrigerated cabinets. Every surface commonly touched by customers had to be wiped clean, even if no one had touched that spot in days.

  I have a graduate degree in business administration and I am nothing but a night janitor. How is this fair?

  My final task was to check all the product displays and shelves. All the stock in the store was constantly monitored by the cameras, so my job was to make sure each product was displayed attractively. The potato chip bags had to be upright and straight, the bottles in the refrigerators had to have their product labels facing outwards, and the canned food needed to be stacked neatly. After checking the magazine racks and straightening the prepaid card displays, I could finally go back to the register to confirm the store status using the register terminal.

  [Store inspection in progress.]

  [Store inspection complete.]

  [Grade: A-]

  [Hygiene: 95%]

  [Floor: 91%]

  [Fresh food display: 93%]

  [Refrigerated food display: 96%]

  [Frozen foods: 90%]

  [Snack food display: 89%]

  [Office supplies and convenience items: 99%]

  [Books and Magazine rack: 88%]

  [Prepaid cards display: 95%]

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  [Wanma ATM: 82%]

  [Please adjust sub-satisfactory areas and perform inspection again before 02:00 in order to avoid merit point deduction.]

  Dammit!

  I had forgotten to clean the ATM. What a pain. I grabbed the towels and went over to the ATM in the back corner of the store and wiped the whole unit down, making sure that the touchscreen, keypad, and printer area were all clean and in order. After checking the snack food displays and magazine racks again, I went back behind the counter and ran the inspection again. Luckily this time I passed, with every area getting a 90% rating or better.

  I have no idea how many cameras they had in this place watching my every move. They even mentioned during training that the number was a company secret and no one was supposed to know how many surveillance cameras they have watching, and where they are located. The footage is all processed by the store AI, so even the video that I can see from the terminal is composite generated, rather than actual live footage. What is clear is that every millimeter of the store is checked by the AI, and my employee performance was graded in real-time, based on the perfectionist whims of that nightmare of a software program.

  Someday I’m gonna delete that damned dog

  I saw that it was still eight minutes until 2AM according to the clock on the register. Somehow, I managed to complete the store cleaning with time to spare, and my scheduled fifteen-minute break was coming up. Finally, the fog of indifference that clouded my vision started to clear. Grabbing a can of hot coffee from the warm drink dispenser, I used my employee discount to purchase the coffee. Then I entered the command to put the store into autonomous mode.

  To add insult to injury, One Mart had added the unmanned autonomous store system nationwide less than a year earlier. This was due largely to the lack of workers, and was made possible by the recent advances in technology and automation. Not only were many of the store operations managed by AI, but it could actually function, although in a limited way, without any human employees at all. Ironically, this innovation had been a subject of one of my graduate school seminars. I never dreamed that I would be observing the impact of this change in business first hand, and from the bottom, looking up.

  While in autonomous mode, the store could remain open without any employees present, but certain features were automatically locked out. Alcohol and tobacco sales were restricted for one thing. So were all the counter services, such as bill payments and prepaid card charging. Normal food and beverage sales were fine, provided the customer had a profile already set up with the store, that included 3D facial images that were used to verify identity. Customers simply picked up the items they wanted, and walked out of the store. Purchases could only be made using Wanma Digital Money, funds that were linked to the pseudo-bank run by One Mart’s parent corporate entity. The AI would calculate all the items taken once the customer reached the doorway, and the large screens on both sides of the entrance would confirm everything before charging the digital wallet directly.

  To date, only about five percent of One Mart customers used this form of payment. Most people preferred to stick to their old habits, and there had been some bad news stories about automated stores that made most people cautious of the technology. This is why they had added the sales pitch for digital money to practically every script for customer interaction. That script was responsible for countless glares and even a few curses I had received.

  If it wasn’t for the fact that I was required to link my bank account to a Wanma Digital Money wallet as a term of my employment, I would be happy to never have to think about that system for the rest of my life. In fact, like all One Mart Employees, I was actually paid through the digital wallet first, and then I was able to transfer the funds, free of charge, to my regular bank account. I was sure this was just a trick used by some executive to artificially pump up the numbers of transactions, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

  [Store #11,512 entering autonomous mode. Employee: Hwang, Ming (Temporary, Part-time), Scheduled break approved. Return and disengage autonomous mode before 02:15 in order to avoid store operations interruptions or merit point deductions will incur.]

  I watched as the main register terminal screen went blank. At the same time, all the other monitors changed to show the picture of Wanma, the brand mascot. A cartoon Akita puppy that looked so cute I wanted to punch it in the face. This included the in-store screens and the two giant panel screens that flanked the entrance.

  [This location is operating as an Autonomous store until 02:15.] The timer appeared under the animated dog.

  “If you would like to make a purchase, please let Wanma help you!” The screens all chimed in cheerfully as the animated mascot rolled around and smiled with a silly grin.

  You could interact with the store AI by standing in front of any of the screens and speaking to it directly. The microphones and cameras missed nothing. The whole thing gave me the creeps just thinking about it, so I quickly exited the store through the staff entrance, taking my coffee with me.

  The staff room was as claustrophobic as usual. When I had first come back here, I had been shocked. It was much smaller than I had imagined. Instead of the large storeroom I had envisioned, there was only a small area behind the drink cabinets where boxes of bottles were stacked up high. There was barely enough room to squeeze by in order to refill the refrigerators from the sliding glass doors on the back of the refrigerators. There was a small space for other products, but it was barely the size of a small closet.

  During training, I had learned the amazing truth that nearly all the products that the store sold were delivered to the store, on-demand, during the many scheduled daily deliveries. A truck would drop off boxes of fresh lunch boxes, drinks, snacks, and other products as needed every two to four hours. Real-time inventory data was shared by the Wanma AI, and the system used predictive analysis to stock up on high-demand items before peak demand periods.

  This left just enough space in the back of the store for a small office desk and computer used by the store manager, a few small lockers for the employees, and a washer/dryer machine that was used to wash staff uniforms. I wasn’t even allowed to take my uniform home after my shift. Instead, all the uniforms were left in the store, and it was the job of the late-night coverage to wash them all and place them in the hamper by the lockers. Since I currently had this duty, I was allowed an extra uniform, so I could have one to wear while the washing cycle was on.

  I usually did this at the beginning of my shift, before I took my dinner break, and while there was another employee to watch the front, so the clean uniforms for today were all folded and ready, along with a stack of towels we used for cleaning.

  Along the back wall, there was a small table and chair by the lockers that we were allowed to use during our breaks. Since it was still cold outside, I usually sat there in that windowless, dreary space and drank my coffee while watching some streaming videos on my phone. Phones needed to be stored in our lockers and we would get penalized for using them in the front of the store. Everything we needed to do could be done through the main register terminal.

  I still had five minutes left on my break when the alert popped up on my cell phone.

  [ALERT! Seismic activity has been detected and potential earthquakes may be indicated. Please take steps to protect yourself and stay alert.]

  Uh oh.

  A few seconds later, another warning appeared on the phone’s screen.

  [ALERT! Seismic activity has been detected and potential earthquakes may be indicated. High possibility of earthquakes in the following areas.

  Hokkaidō Prefecture

  Aomori Prefecture

  Iwate Prefecture

  Miyagi Prefecture

  Akita Prefecture

  Yamagata Prefecture

  Fukushima Prefecture

  Ibaraki Prefecture

  Tochigi Prefecture

  Gunma Prefecture

  Saitama Prefecture

  Chiba Prefecture

  Tokyo Metropolis

  Kanagawa Prefecture

  Niigata Prefecture

  Toyama Prefecture

  Ishikawa Prefecture

  Fukui Prefecture

  Yamanashi Prefecture

  Nagano Prefecture

  Gifu Prefecture

  Shizuoka Prefecture

  Aichi Prefecture

  Mie Prefecture

  Shiga Prefecture

  Kyoto Prefecture

  Osaka Prefecture

  Hyōgo Prefecture

  Nara Prefecture

  Wakayama Prefecture

  Tottori Prefecture

  Shimane Prefecture

  Okayama Prefecture

  Hiroshima Prefecture

  Yamaguchi Prefecture

  Tokushima Prefecture

  Kagawa Prefecture

  Ehime Prefecture

  Kōchi Prefecture

  Fukuoka Prefecture

  Saga Prefecture

  Nagasaki Prefecture

  Kumamoto Prefecture

  ōita Prefecture

  Miyazaki Prefecture

  Kagoshima Prefecture

  Okinawa Prefecture

  Please take steps to protect yourself and stay alert.]

  What the hell? That’s like… the entire country… Hokkaido to Okinawa? That’s the entire northern Pacific!

  Panic crept into my head as I pondered what this might mean. I thought it had to be a glitch in the system. There was no way an earthquake that large was even possible.

  There’s no way… Right?

  I quickly went through my options in my head. In all my years of living in Japan, I had been through dozens of earthquakes. Most had been small shakes, but a few were larger and quite frightening. If this really was a massive one, then I was probably done for. Much more likely, this was just a small earthquake, or even a glitch in the reporting network. Such things had happened before.

  If I ran out of the store now, and it was nothing, I would certainly get some demerit points from my software overseer. If it was truly a dangerous event, It probably wouldn’t make much difference what I did. Rationally thinking, there was not much to gain from panicking. As long as I stayed away from large glass windows and stacks of heavy objects I should be fine.

  Oh crap!

  Eyeing the towers of boxes filled with bottles and cans filling every free corner of this room, I thought about the large windows along the front of the building and the glass cooler doors lining one wall inside the store, and one wall of the break room.

  My eyes fixated on the handle of the door leading to the parking lot on the side of the building.

  Maybe I should—

  Just as I took a step toward it, I felt it.

  It was unlike any earthquake I had ever experienced. It was simultaneously milder and much much worse. A sudden wave of nausea as vertigo slammed into my senses. It was like I was flipping upside down and inside out at the same time. My vision flashed every color in the spectrum, and then, many more that I had no words for. I felt like I had been flattened, crushed paper thin, but strangely, I also knew that my body was completely intact and unharmed. I watched as everything in the room flew into the air as if the building itself had been thrown into space, then I felt my body get simultaneously get crushed and ripped apart. The walls flew apart and boxes, cans of beer, and shards of glass exploded around me. Then everything went white.

  It was over in an instant, but I felt like I had been tossed around for weeks. Then it was over.

  I fell to the ground and retched. I could taste the coffee and my stomach bile in my mouth, but managed to avoid soiling the floor. Then I noticed the can of coffee. It was still on the table exactly where I had set it down. Nothing had shifted at all during the earthquake. Not even a millimeter. As I stood up, I felt fine. I could vaguely remember the horrible sensations of just moments ago, but those images were already starting to recede into a dull memory, like a dream that disappeared moments after I woke up.

  For a moment I didn’t know what was real. I checked my phone to see if the alert was still there, or if a new one had shown up. Instead, my eyes caught the clock in the corner of the screen.

  [2:15AM]

  Oh crap. I’m late.

  Perhaps it was because of the strange earthquake that had occurred, or maybe because it was just so late, and my mind was groggy and I couldn’t think straight. Whatever the reason, my instincts kicked in before I could think straight and I reflexively ran for the door to the store. I rushed to the terminal to log back in, but as soon as I got behind the counter I saw a series of new and unfamiliar messages filling the otherwise dark screen.

  [SYSTEM ERROR]

  [NETWORK NOT FOUND]

  [ATTEMPTING TO RECONNECT…]

  [CONNECTION FAILED…]

  [CONNECTION FAILED…]

  [CONNECTION FAILED…]

  [CONNECTION ESTABLISHED]

  [SYSTEM UPDATE REQUIRED]

  [SYSTEM UPDATED]

  [SYSTEM RESTARTING]

  [PRESS ANY KEY]

  I moved without thinking. I needed the system up. Without that, the store was dead and I couldn’t log my time. Without a moment of hesitation, I hit the first key I could find on the keyboard.

  [Wanma AI has been updated.]

  [Store #11,512 has been designated a SAFE ZONE.]

  [Touch here for details.]

  I stared at the screen for a few seconds, trying to understand what was going on. It was clear that something had happened, and whatever it was had affected the store AI. The computer seemed to be booting up into some kind of safe mode. I was glad that everything else looked alright. There was no obvious damage to the store. There was no sign of anything at all having been affected, everything was as it had been before my break. Even the potato chip bags were still in perfect formation.

  Still, something was wrong with the system, and it was hours until anyone else was scheduled to come into work. The manager wouldn’t be in until 8AM at the earliest. Without the AI, I was less than worthless. I couldn’t even lock the doors or turn off the lights. All of those things were controlled by the AI. Hopefully, this was something I could fix, but realistically, I knew there wasn’t much I could do. I was just a temporary part-time worker after all.

  Nervously, I reached out and touched the screen above the last glowing message. As I did, every screen in the store flashed a green background with the same short message.

  [SAFE ZONE ACTIVATED]