CHAPTER 8

  It’s just a piece of strawberry cake.

  “Look, what do you expect me to do with the food that is expired? If I put it in the back, it’s just going to smell. You won’t let me open the door and throw it out. It’s going to start smelling.”

  [Procedure: Scan expired food items to remove from sales inventory and place items in product transportation crate for pickup at next scheduled delivery.]

  “Yeah, so when is the next delivery going to be?”

  [Next delivery is scheduled for 17:00–17:15 today.]

  “And I am supposed to believe it will actually show up?”

  There was no response.

  Yeah, I don’t think so, you damned mutt.

  “The last delivery didn’t show up. The one before that didn’t show up. Not a single delivery truck has shown up all day! You know why? Cause there are no trucks, There are no drivers, there’s no customers, there’s no freakin roads! No one is coming!]

  [Next delivery is scheduled for 17:00–17:15 today.]

  Arghh!

  I silently screamed in frustration. Sometimes talking to the AI felt like I might be talking to a real person. Other times it most definitely did not. These cyclical arguments were driving me crazy.

  By this point, all the fresh food had expired. On the other hand, I think most, if not all of it was still edible, just a bit stale, but now that the sales period had expired, there was nothing I could do about it. I wasn’t even allowed to purchase any of it.

  It’s the end of the world, I am sitting here with a bunch of food, perhaps the last food I’ll ever see, and I’m not allowed to eat it, because it has passed its freshness window? Absolute madness!

  “Fine, so what happens if the trucks do not take the return crate?”

  [If the delivery truck fails to retrieve any item from the return crate, assign the retrieval as NON-CONFORMANCE. Reapply pickup status for each item that needs a rescheduled pickup.]

  “What if items marked as non-conformance are not rescheduled for pickup.”

  [If the delivery truck fails to retrieve any item from the return crate, assign the retrieval as NON-CONFORMANCE. Reapply pickup status for each item that needs a rescheduled pickup.]

  “If non-conformance items are not returned, are there any merit points deducted?”

  Another pause.

  I was starting to get the hang of dealing with Wamna. Whenever it didn’t have an answer, and it couldn’t make something up with its AI, it would go silent. The AI was not actually that bright. It didn’t appear to be able to change any store policies or create any new ones. Instead, it simply tried to imitate a human reaction. The more specific the question I asked, the more it had to rely on data in its system.

  For the most part, it seemed oblivious to anything that went on outside of the store. The big exception to that was that it seemed convinced that the outside was dangerous and that I would die if I took one step outside. This was starting to get annoying since the system kept penalizing my merit points for not doing an external inspection of the store. It required at least one a day, despite having cameras that could capture every detail within five meters of every wall of the building.

  I had tried arguing with Wanma about the contradiction, but it kept circling until it eventually just clammed up. This time, I think I might have figured out a loophole.

  I picked up a piece of cake that had been haunting me for the last few hours, as well as a small salad and a beef curry and rice lunchbox, and scanned them all in, pressing the ACCEPT button each time the expired food warning alert popped up. Then I scanned in a small bottle of drinkable yogurt. This was still fine, so I paid for it using my employee discount. Finally, I logged out of the system for a fifteen-minute break, placing the store in autonomous mode again.

  Throughout the day, I had not seen a single soul outside. No people, no monsters, no signs of life at all. I had hoped to see someone around, but for reasons I could not begin to speculate, I hadn’t seen a soul since Tabata had shown up in the back room. I didn’t know if those kids managed to get away, as they had not returned either.

  I placed the curry rice into the microwave and hit the warm-up button. Fifteen seconds later, the food was piping hot. These industrial microwaves were no joke. They could nuke anything in no time at all, which was important since we usually needed to heat up hundreds of meals during a lunch shift, and when people were lined up, every second felt like a lifetime.

  I took everything into the back room, and just to be safe, I placed the cake, salad, and curry into the blue crate for returns, then immediately took them back out and placed them on the break table, together with my drink.

  I was starving. I had not eaten anything in almost a full day. I also had not slept in more than a day. I finally gave in, and since I didn’t want to risk any more penalties, or get fired for stealing from the store, the only things I had taken from the front had been a bottle of water and a couple of cans of coffee, all paid for properly.

  There wasn’t much fresh food left, after the curry, there were a few plates of fried noodles, some more salads, and a bunch of rice balls. After this, there was a shelf of baked items that would start to hit their expiration in the next day. I didn’t want to waste any of it, since none of it would be replaced, but I also didn’t want to get hit with more merit point deductions.

  I had stemmed the bleeding in my merit point total by picking up the extra shift, but there was only so much I could do. For now, I just needed to play along with that ridiculous AI. If this little trick worked, then at least I would get a couple of days of food out of it, and also avoid a bag of rotting garbage I couldn’t properly dispose of.

  Ordinarily, Taking the food from the return crate would also cause problems, but the returns were not scanned again until they hit the warehouse. If the truck never came in, and the warehouse never checked, then no one should actually notice the food had gone missing. I assumed that no one was sitting in the distribution warehouse, diligently checking for missing items at a time like this, so unless the problem was entirely contained within a few blocks of this store, I doubted anyone would even notice the missing expired food.

  The perfect crime.

  I wolfed the food down like a starving man, because that’s exactly what I was. The curry was perfectly fine. The microwave can cure all ills. The salad, however, was starting to wilt, and the cake was getting a bit stale. Still, I finished it all in a shockingly short amount of time. I hadn’t realized how hungry I had become, and was mostly numb from shock and sleep deprivation. Once I had started eating, however, I couldn’t stop shoveling food in my mouth until everything was gone.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  I leaned back and closed my eyes, feeling better than I had since even before I had started work. Despite the very real nightmare scenario that was playing out around me, the realization that all my other problems had just been canceled was starting to seep into my consciousness.

  It really didn’t seem to be an issue that I didn’t have a real job right now. It didn’t matter that I barely made enough to cover my rent, and had to work in a convenience store. If anything, this was turning out to be a very good place to be at this exact movement. I might have died during the night at home, crushed under the cheap apartment building I lived in, or ripped apart by those frog monsters. Instead, I was safe, I had food, water, and electricity, even if I had to keep up the charade of a mindless part-time worker to keep these luxuries. The world had gone mad, including all the parts that I hated.

  I checked the tablet, and so far, things were looking good. No warnings for rule violations. I washed the plastic containers that the food had come in the sink, then set them to the side to dry. There was no sense in accumulating smelly garbage, or throwing away things that might be useful later, so for now, I just set things aside. I had a few minutes left on my break, so I drank my yogurt while checking my phone.

  I had connected my phone to the PC on the manager’s desk to keep it charged up. The computer itself was useless as I didn’t know the password, but it still could act as a phone charger. I checked the One Mart app, the only application that seemed to be functioning, and noticed some things that were both interesting and concerning.

  The banking app I used to check my accounts did not work, but the passthrough access did, at least at first glance. I could see my regular bank account total through the app, but there was a problem.

  I usually got paid at the end of every shift I worked. The system calculated my pay, and then deposited the money into my One Mart digital wallet directly within an hour of the end of my shift. This is how all temporary workers were paid. If you were a regular part-time employee, you were paid at the end of each week, and full-time employees were paid each fortnight. Everyone received their payment via the digital wallet. I had set up automatic transfers to my regular bank account, so that as soon as the money hit my digital wallet, it was moved to my regular account. This was allowed, and since I was an employee, the transfer fees were waived. I suppose that’s how they had been allowed to pay us in such a convoluted way.

  My payment for my last shift, 9,984 yen, had been credited to my wallet, but the transfer to my bank had apparently failed. The money was still sitting in the digital wallet. I could see my regular bank balance, just over two hundred and forty thousand yen, but it seemed that I could not transfer money into the account.

  I tried to send the funds over again, but it failed. It didn’t give me any warning or message, and I couldn’t use my bank app to verify the problem. I also couldn’t transfer money the other way without using my bank app. Everything was frozen. I kept a bit of money, around 10,000 yen extra in the digital wallet to pay for things I bought in the store, mostly snacks and drinks I bought during my breaks, so my total now was just under 20,000 yen, but that was the limit of my funds. I only had a couple of thousand yen in cash in my wallet, not that there was anywhere to buy things right now, but considering I now had a system for purchasing supplies without getting flagged as a thief, I had to consider how much money I had on hand if I wanted to keep things moving smoothly.

  I could keep taking shifts and that should provide me more than enough to buy whatever I wanted from the store, while the stock remained at least. For now, I wouldn’t need to worry about my savings, or my bills for that matter. It’s not like people were waiting for my share of the rent, and paying my cellphone bill while the network was down wasn’t a priority either.

  In many significant and very practical ways, my life had been massively simplified. Survival was simple, for a while at least, all my other worries were put on hold, and all I needed to do was act like a good employee. This would give me time to plan my next steps, like what to do when rescuers appeared, or if the supplies in the store dwindled.

  After stepping back behind the store counter, I deactivated autonomous mode. Immediately a message appeared on the terminal, and for a moment I was worried my food disposal scheme had been flagged. Instead yet another ridiculous message appeared.

  [Violation: Uniform presentation substandard. Reminder. One Mart uniform must be clean and presentable at all times. 5 merit points deducted.]

  What? You have to be kidding me.

  I looked down and there was a small stain of curry that had spilled onto the front of my tunic. Just as I had found a plan that brought me some level of peace, I was brought back down to the reality.

  This job really sucks.

  I quickly went back into the break room, threw off the uniform, which in all fairness was starting to get a bit ripe anyway, and pulled on the spare top that luckily was cleaned the night before. I threw it into the washing machine, but suuddenly had another thought before I started the cycle.

  I went out into the store. In the daily goods aisle, there was a small selection of cheap, disposable clothing. These were items like a simple white dress shirt in case something spilled onto yours during the work day and you didn’t want to walk around with a soiled shirt, or you spent the night at a friend’s place and needed to get fresh clothes to wear to school or work. I quickly scanned what was there, then grabbed a white undershirt, a pair of remarkably thin socks, and a package with two underpants. I rang these items up at the register and winced at the price. Together, it totaled nearly three thousand yen, and that was after my discount. While employees enjoyed a somewhat generous twenty-five percent discount on fresh food items, most other items only came with a ten percent discount. Things like services and prepaid cards had no discount at all.

  I grit my teeth as my digital wallet balance dropped, then ran back and quickly changed my clothes in the small bathroom. I realized it was rather silly, as no one else should have been able to enter the back room anyway, but it just felt more proper to use the bathroom.

  The cheap, emergency clothing wasn’t very soft or comfortable, but it was at least clean. Then I threw all of my dirty clothes, along with the uniform tunic, into the washing machine and started the cycle. To my relief, the machine started up, and I could hear water pouring into the chamber.

  Well, if that stupid AI is going to micromanage every single rule, I will need to do at least this much.

  I rushed back to the register before Wanma decided to ding me for being away from the front of the store for too long. Mentally, I started making a list of other items I should pick up, like a razor, scissors, and a toothbrush. Some soap and shampoo might be a good idea too, although the amount and cost of the things I needed to get were disheartening. Luckily, everything I needed was available in the store, the downside was that the items that we stocked were picked out and priced for desperate needs. Things were often of poor quality, and cost more than normal items did, and they usually were not made with comfort or aesthetics in mind.

  If I got everything in one swoop, I would probably wipe out my entire wallet, so I would need to space out the supplies over several shifts. Without even realizing it, I was now planning as though I would be here for days at least, if not longer.

  [The current time is 16:30. Please complete store cleaning and shelf inspection before 17:00]

  This is Hell. I died, and this is Hell.

  I had to go through two more inspections before the end of the pick-up shift. By then I was exhausted and annoyed. I was bothered mostly because I only had one hour to rest before my normal night shift began. By the time I finished it, I would have been awake for over two straight days. I didn’t want to skip the shift, however, as the loss of both merit points and pay was too risky in my current situation. I logged out, then went straight to the break room, took off my tunic so it wouldn’t get wrinkled, set an alarm on my phone, then turned off the lights so that I could get a quick nap in.

  The most comfortable option was to sit in one of the break room chairs with my head on my arms, slumped over the table. I doubted I would be able to get any rest at all in that position, but I had barely closed my eyes when the phone alarm went off.

  No. No no no no NO! I can’t… I… I. Just can’t.

  It was so hard to get moving again. Thirty minutes had passed in a fleeting moment, and now I needed to get ready for another full nine-hour shift. I splashed some water from the sink on my face, then got dressed again and checked my appearance in the bathroom mirror, vowing to get the toothpaste and toothbrush during my next break.

  Before going back outside, I checked my phone. The payment for my last shift had come through, but I was surprised that the amount was less than I had been expecting. It took a moment for the truth to settle into my sleep-deprived brain. I got paid 1,600 yen per hour normally, but that rate only applied to the late-night shift, from 21:00 to 06:00. The shift I had picked up was a normal daytime shift where the maximum pay was 1,400 yen. After taxes and deductions, I barely made eight thousand yen.

  I couldn’t have been in a more surly mood when I walked back into the store. I was about to walk over to the register when my heart stopped in my chest. I could feel cold sweat, suddenly, slowly moving down from my neck, and down my back, causing the hair on my arms to rise up.

  I slowly turned my head to look at the sight that I had caught out of the corner of my eye.

  The frogs were back.