Supermarket

A new virtual reality game had moved into town. The operators had bought a supermarket (I think it was the Town&Country Fairway in Victoria) and set up their equipment. I went down with some friends to check it out.

They had divided the place in half. The left half, as we faced the building, was the actual play area, and looking in the windows it still looked like the inside of a supermarket. The right half was for administration and control; it was mostly blocked off, but there was an arena-like space at the front in which we could see four men in motion-capture garb, going through what looked like martial arts moves. Presumably, they were controlling non-player characters in the game. The operators all looked identical. They had short grey hair and full beards.

In order to play, we had to buy tokens called "Canuck Bucks". There was some kind of promotional tie-in with the hockey team, but I never found out just how that part worked. The tokens looked like Canadian two-dollar coins ("twoonies"), with a gold-coloured centre surrounded by a silver-coloured ring, and they cost two dollars each, but they were larger than twoonies and the hockey pictures covered the entire "tails" surfaces of the coins, instead of being confined to the centre disc like the polar bears on twoonies.

We rented shopping carts by putting the tokens in a machine - six tokens per cart, twelve dollars to play. Then we pushed our carts through turnstiles into the play area.

Inside, there was a computer simulation superimposed on the reality we'd seen from outside. The game was a shopping game; we'd push our carts along the aisles and take things off the shelves to add to our carts. Every cart had a triangular flag on it with a number. Mine was number nineteen.

There were two kinds of non-player characters: the skinny human-controlled men we'd seen from outside, who walked around watching the players and occasionally stopping to talk to each other; and large-breasted women with vacant stares, who pushed carts of their own. It was obvious that the women were computer-controlled sex dolls. All the NPCs wore white uniforms. The men were wearing aprons and I mentally classified them as "managers" or possibly "butchers". The role of the women (if they had a role besides "sex doll") was harder to identify, but they looked a little like nurses. I noticed that the flags on their carts displayed asterisks instead of numbers.

The usual behaviour of my fellow players seemed to be to push the cart for a while, then stop, take something off a shelf, and freeze in place. I guessed that selecting an item caused one to be taken to another part of the game, leaving a frozen "ghost". But I didn't take anything off the shelves myself. I just pushed my cart down one aisle after another. I thought that I was a different character class from most of the other players, subject to different rules and goals.

Pushing my cart became a more and more difficult task as the aisles grew more and more crowded with frozen players. My cart appeared to have some motive power and guidance system of its own; it would pull itself in the right direction to avoid collisions, even if I didn't steer it. As I approached a place where the aisle was completely blocked by other carts, I felt my cart wrench upwards, and it leaped over the blockage, carrying me with it and touching down gently on the other side.

A short time after that I found a display of dust mops at the end of one aisle, right in front of the large windows at the front of the store. The mops looked a little like whips. They were made of transparent plastic, with colorless handles that split into four or five clear blue tentacle-like segments at the end. When I held on in my hand, the tentacles moved, and I knew that the device was interfacing with my nervous system; I could control it by thinking commands at it.

I wanted to try it out, but the floor was spotlessly clean already. As I looked around I saw that other characters were moving away from me, creating an empty space. I had a sense of the game world warping, as if viewed through a fisheye lens. Then, I saw tiny glowing squares appear on the floor. The game was creating some dirt for me to clean up. I flicked the whiplike mop out at the glowing squares, and the tentacles brushed across them. The squares stuck to the tentacles and were lifted away. I dropped the mop into my shopping cart and started pushing it again. I noticed that the flag on my cart now read "19.33333". It had grown much longer to accomodate the added digits.

The game was almost over; it was time to proceed to the check-out counter. I overheard two of the male NPCs talking. One told the other to start hurrying people out the door, and also to "find the sucker who got nineteen and a third, and prepare him for the ordeals." That filled me with dread. I had to get rid of the fraction on my cart number.

I looked down at the handle of my shopping cart and I saw there was a black cord tied around it; I looked at other characters' carts and saw that everyone had them. Each cord had a little black cylindrical spring-loaded device on it, the same kind of fastener one might see on a winter jacket. My cord also had a pointed black plastic thing that looked like a knob from a piece of electrical equipment, attached at one end. I realised that the cylinder represented the base number of the cart (in my case "nineteen") and the knob represented "one third".

I grabbed the cart belonging to one of the sex-doll NPCs who was walking nearby. She stopped and stood, docile, while I pulled the "one third" knob off of my own cart's cord and fastened it to hers. My flag changed back to "19", and hers changed from "*" to "0.33333". Later, after I exited the game, I thought back and wondered if I might have censored that memory, and actually ended up hiding the plastic number token in one of the doll's body cavities. At the time, I thought that the game designers had probably intended that I should be unable to get rid of a token by transferring it to an NPC; I had to get out of the simulation before they realised that I was exploiting a bug in their software.

I hurried to the exit and was one of the first to push my cart through the turnstile. As I exited the play area, the whiplike dust mop in my cart vanished, as did the flag and all the other things that had been superimposed by the simulation. I pushed my cart into the outdoor rack and stood, with other players, facing the building. Some of them were talking about the game; I was silently thinking. I knew that the game was a trap, and the operators were concealing some kind of sinister agenda. They were trying to addict people to playing the game, but there was more to it than simply trying to make lots of money. They had almost caught me this time. I resolved never to play the game again.

As we were standing there a short and fat middle-aged woman came up to us and, quite unbidden, told us about her experiences playing the game. She had been playing regularly for a long time; since the game I had just played was the first one ever played at this location, I thought that the company must have other franchises elsewhere. I looked at the woman and thought she was a pitiable addict.

She was approaching some kind of goal in the game, like achieving a new level with her character, but she needed to earn one more Canuck Buck token. She had 99 and needed 100. Either she didn't have two dollars to buy the last token, or getting them wasn't as easy as I had thought, not just a matter of paying a fee. I dug around in my wallet and found that I still had one left. Maybe I had been given it when I exited. Maybe you earned one for each successful play. I would have no use for it because I would never play the game again; and I didn't want to be tempted by having it. I gave the token to her and she thanked me effusively.

As she walked away I called her back and she turned and looked at me with a resigned expression, as if she expected that there would be strings attached to my giving her the token. I said, "Listen. If some day you wish you hadn't accepted that, I really hope you won't blame me for giving it to you." She agreed. I turned and walked away, feeling disgusted.