Buymort grand opening, p.1
BuyMort: Grand Opening, page 1
BuyMort: Grand Opening
A BuyMort Novel
Joseph Phelps
Damien Hanson
A Sconnie Books Production
Copyright © 2022 Joseph Phelps, Damien Hanson
All rights reserved.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.
For more information, address: damien@damienhansonbooks.com
FIRST EDITION
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 9798351389240
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We want to thank every arbitrary fee, every overcharge, every fine print item, advertising algorithm, and predatory firm in existence for the production of this story.
We couldn’t have done it without you!
I want to dedicate this book to all of our fans at Royal Road and ScribbleHub. Without you, this story would not be what it is today.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1 – Day 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11 – Day 2
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28 – Day 3
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Epilogue
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Prologue
My little corner of the world wasn’t exactly fantastic before BuyMort came to earth and fucked everything up, but it was mine dammit. I liked my Airstream trailer, and I liked having it parked in the middle of nowhere, Arizona.
My name is Tyson Dawes, and I used to manage the Crappy Trails Campground, in the Skull Valley Desert just outside Prescott. It’s actually the Happy Trails Campground, but Skull Valley is the depressingly real name of my zone on the map. Supposedly the name has some big historical relevance.
Dunno, never learned it. Or cared to, really. I keep out of shit that doesn’t directly affect me, as a rule.
Some jackass told me it was a big important name in the campground office one day while I was trying desperately to pay attention to anything else. People talk way too much to complete strangers who hate them in that industry.
Before we go much further, I need to tell you something about myself. I became a warlord, yes. But I did not start out that way. My story starts out at the end, really. The end of my world yes, but also the end of myself. I had burnt out. Stopped trying. Stopped caring. I was already done for, even before the world came crashing down around me.
I used to do normal things with my life but hiding on the edges of the world seemed like a better option after I got chewed up and spit out by it. Worked what most would call normal jobs most of my life.
I was a good employee too. A slacker at life, yeah. Not very involved with stuff, sure. But I always stayed and worked whatever job I had until they decided they got tired of me and laid me off.
Like that time my last boss lost big on the stock market and suddenly 1500 of us weren’t up to performance standards. Boom. Job gone.
But let’s not forget the pandemic. Everybody’s getting sick, so let’s lay ‘em all off to save the CEO’s yacht club membership. Fuck the rat race. I’m happy to leave it to the rats.
So, I bought my gorgeous little 1962 Airstream Tradewind on loan, towed it out to the first campground to promise me a remote site, and started the last job I would ever have. Well, till the world as we knew it ended, anyhow.
I was a campground attendant.
The work was mostly landscaping, whatever good that did in the land of hot rock and steaming sand. Oh, and picking up empty cans of Thunder Eagle, that piss-water local brand of brew with an American flag-caped Bald Eagle flipping the bird that somehow topped ten percent alcohol content and netted me five cents a can at the recycling plant.
And, of course, the office work. The campground hired strictly minimum wage so there was a steady influx of bubble gum chewing belly shirts who cycled through weekly. It got to the point I didn’t even bother learning their names.
For that workload, I was given a site with generally reliable power, water, sewer, and a monthly stipend that barely covered my necessities.
Still, the owner also owned a local liquor store, and never ‘noticed’ me stealing bottles off shipments, even when he caught me red-handed. Fuck ‘em, the bastard owed me for being the only thing that kept his shitty campground from falling apart.
When BuyMort came to Earth, all of that fell apart within the week, but until then it had been a sweet deal. I was in my early 30’s, no romantic prospects, family, friends, or even pets. I was chill with the spider that lived in my kitchen, but that was about it.
Turns out, all I need is peace and quiet, and the odd occasional bottle of hooch to live life on my own terms. Good enough for me, I can smile and nod with the best of them. And, while Prescott was kind of famous for being crime-riddled, I had my old Mossberg Shockwave, and wasn’t too worried. Criminals around here tended to prefer victims with more stuff to steal than buckshot to share anyway, and nobody wanted my anime stuff but me.
I should probably explain BuyMort. You know those big box stores that show up in your town, sell crappy versions of everything to drive actual small businesses out, then close up and kill the whole town once they’ve sucked all the money out of it? That’s BuyMort, but on a universe-spanning scale.
I don’t understand it all perfectly yet, but literally no one does. That’s the sheer majestic horror of this entity. Nobody really knows what it is or how it works, but it pretty much rules the entire multiverse. With shopping.
Motherfucking shopping destroyed the world.
Chapter 1 – Day 1
So, one peaceful October morning, I was doing my usual. Mowing the lawn around the campground pool, pretending each blade of grass was one of the guests and listening to a little Nietzsche Wasn’t Read, my favorite band. Just pretending it was going to be a perfect day. No day ever is but I was right at that moment where I was still stupid and groggy enough to believe in miracles.
That’s when fire began to rain from the sky.
Wicked.
That was my first thought. I mean fire from the sky is pretty damn cool even if it is going to torch everything and everyone you love. And super big bonus — I had jack shit in both of those departments. Unless you count my collection of anime films, shows, and memorabilia.
Honest-to-god my first reaction was to get excited. I was amped up, full of coffee plus a hard dose of Nietzsche Wasn’t Read rolling on repeat in my brain.
Burn! Burn!!
It was the sort of sick shit that made me mosh-like-mad at a concert and here it was coming out to visit me at the worst damn place on earth.
Sweet.
It was exciting, seeing all this crazy shit. Everyone else was just as excited, too, buncha rubber-necking dumb shits just like me, lining up to see the next bit of mindless entertainment.
One dude in a mohawk was even doing devil horns, screaming up at the sky while playing air guitar with his other hand. Dude was awesome.
Or drunk, couldn’t tell. I wondered if maybe we’d be best friends after the apocalypse.
Or if I was the guy whose skull he’d be drinking from when it was all over.
It all really just looked like a meteor shower. Just meteor after meteor after meteor, all clustered together and coming way too closely on each other’s tails. I actually started to think that it looked sloppy, somehow.
Rushed.
Not at all like the Flying Spaghetti Monster rapture I had been secretly kind of hoping for most of my adult life.
It got better when they got closer though. There were thousands of fireballs raining from the sky, each a different size. And the closer they got, the more they changed in color. At some point there was a full spectrum of shimmering energy fields and blazing trails, ranging from red through violet, with the occasional green or yellow.
It was fascinating watching it all, a lot of colors I just didn’t have a name for. It made for a tremendous spectacle, and I have to admit that nowadays I’m surprised some alien go-getter didn’t get ahead of the crowd and sell us tickets to watch.
It was a mass landing event. See, BuyMort has this following. Groupies of a s
The aliens were our first clue that something wild was happening. First contact hit us and was nothing like what we expected. But, I must admit that the gift baskets were a nice surprise.
All that night, I sat in front of the TV in my Airstream, cradling my shotgun, and drinking cheap tequila from the bottle while I waited for aliens to invade my campground. I almost blew off my damn door when something clanked into it. I opened it up to find a cute little parachuted pod that said Welcome to the BuyMort family. Inside was a piece of candy, a cheap plastic flower, and an envelope.
At least I think it was an envelope.
It was envelope shaped, but it had a mouth. A horrible mouth. A pair of fleshy lips embedded into the envelope that attached to vibrating vocal cords and a small inflating bladder. It rested on the counter, leaning forward to point its lips directly at me and shrieked, “OPEN ME, I’M IMPORTANT” over and over again. It would wiggle a small flesh-tab at me and added, “TEAR HERE! TEAR HERE, PLEASE!”
I know what you’re thinking, cause I obviously thought it too. Don’t open the envelope. But you didn’t hear the voice on this thing. It was like razorblades being dumped into my ears. I did try not to open it. Even approached with my shotgun and poked it a couple of times. The insistent demands grew labored, and ragged, taking on a new decibel level.
“Enough!” I screamed, grabbing the thing and tearing off its side. It screamed in agony and then was silent.
Paper. The thing inside it was paper. Just paper. It was that disgusting flesh the envelope had been made of, but lighter and folded like any other letter. Thank the Great Spaghetti in the sky there was no blood. I unfolded the document and read it through bleary but rapidly sobering eyes.
CONGRATULATIONS PROSPECTIVE
CUSTOMER!
SOON YOU WILL EXPERIENCE THE JOYS OF BUYMORT. TO PREPARE YOU FOR YOUR UTOPIC DESCENT INTO MULTIDIMENSIONAL ONE SHOP CONSUMER JOY WE OFFER YOU A FREE GIFT CARD WITH 10 MORTIES!
ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS START A CREDIT ACCOUNT WITH BUYMORTSAVINGSPLUS ON ASCENSION DAY AND USE YOUR NEW CREDIT ACCOUNT TO PURCHASE AN ITEM OF 11 OR MORE MORTIES AND HURRAY YOU HAVE JUST RECEIVED 10 FREE MORTIES!
BUT ACT FAST BECAUSE THIS OFFER WILL EXPIRE IN ONE FULL EARTH YEAR.
And it ended there. That envelope creature had died for a mildly garish advertisement. Nothing else. No aliens ever came to visit me but watching the TV I learned a shitload of seemingly unimportant details that first night.
We were being settled. Aliens of all sorts were crashing, or landing, or even, in one case, setting up some sort of ready-made pop-up city.
On the TV, news agencies scrambled for the on-scene scoop. On Electronic World Talk there was a reporter standing in her cool full-length trench coat zipping her news van over to where a cigar-shaped ship had just slammed into the earth.
Eyes wide, I watched as she got out with her cameraman and rushed on over. I could hear the clinks and clanks of the cooling aircraft and I suspected that something big was about to go down.
Then a door opened, and three green-skinned aliens popped out and threw up all over her, shiny bottles of alien hooch in hand.
The apocalypse was like that. No rhyme or reason. No solid theme. On another channel I watched as a ship shaped like a pancake popped open and flames coursed out, rolling over and incinerating the reporter.
Over and over, channel after channel, I saw first contact. Some were good. Others not so good. And I saw battles. In some places Americans went full-on second amendment, blasting at newcomers and getting blasted back in return. Sometimes the aliens shot first.
It was a mess.
And let me tell you something else.
Orcs are real. Play with that in your head a little bit. Battle axes, roaring, screaming at you like a maniac.
Except, apparently, they are actually really nice until you’re a dick to them. There was a small issue with some kind of professional LARPing group that heckled a group of Orcs to some kind of confrontation, but for the most part it was all peaceful interactions with them.
The real issue was the affiliates. Those came in bigger ships, which were all manned by multiple races of aliens. Orcs, giant snake people, blue people with antennae, hyenas walking on their hind legs, and a near constant stream of tall gray humanoids with pebbled skin. Some of them even wore uniforms.
Wherever a bigger ship landed, armed conflicts quickly broke out and news coverage in the areas became spotty at best. Whatever affiliates were, they were dangerous, and they were an integral part of BuyMort itself.
I think it’s time to tell you exactly what BuyMort is before we get into my daily fight to survive it. BuyMort is a self-replicating nanorobotic intelligence structure that has been programmed to bring a Mortfront to every sentient being in the known multiverse. That’s right, it’s a fucking store. A gol-damned targeted marketing scheme. A god of commerce, drifting through the fabric of reality, aiding anything that can shop with its specific shopping needs, by force. Thank you for shopping at BuyMort.
Hate the name yet? I know I did ten seconds after it arrived in my head.
See, these nanobots just fly through space, infecting every creature on every world that exists anywhere. They set up shop on your planet, in your brain, and in your wallet. Then they collectively speak to each other and choose a name for your species.
For humans, it tossed every bit of known commerce we had ever engaged in and kept records of into a shitty AI blender and picked the name out of that. It claims the name was chosen carefully from the very best parts of who we are as a people.
Fuck that.
But, once your species has a chosen name for the storefront, it translates any other version of that name into yours and you can literally never know what anyone else calls it. Even if they write it down or carve it into stone, you’ll just see it as BuyMort.
It’s just BuyMort forever now, and we get no appeals.
Chapter 2
So, the big night of aliens passed uneventfully for me. Well, excepting the gift basket and my passing out over the gummy, sticky flesh paper of the credit application form, further wrecking it with my spilled tequila. Looked like I somehow spilled some in my shotgun also. And in my sink apparently?
It was a wild night that I didn’t remember a lot of to be honest, but that’s the worst thing that happened to our little corner of the Arizona desert. I didn’t sleep much anyway and woke up with my usual tequila sunrise. Or as it’s more commonly known, a hangover.
The next day I arose to my headache and the same news of the aliens. The number of arrivals kept expanding, but few communicated with us.
The Orcs saw to that after they had tried.
It seemed most of the other alien races behaved subserviently toward them. Made sense, they were the single biggest faction so far, with hundreds of ships on each continent, and millions of people. Well-dressed, wealthy looking green skinned humanoid sightings were normal, and any hostility was met with immediate lethal response. They had plasma weaponry; it was fucking terrifying. People just flared to ash on TV right in front of me.
Several countries attempted to use military forces to control the Orcs movements, but they were easily swatted aside. Here in Arizona a local militia tried to do the same sort of thing, and no one knows what exactly happened to them. Their compound was emptied, and families all went missing overnight.
The Orcs didn’t seem to be doing anything much, just exploring, and taking pictures. Sometimes they would hold short, impromptu auctions at certain locations. One such event garnered much interest at the White House, and speculation was rampant on TV. They never attacked though, just held their strange auction, celebrated with the winner, took some pictures, and left.
Just as I was thinking that I sure hoped my idiot boss didn’t expect me to work today, BuyMort hit me. I took a funny breath that smelled like burnt copper and my head nearly exploded. It was like my hangover learned how to throw its own mosh pit in my skull, and a horrific bell chimed. My eyes crossed, my tongue lolled, it was so loud that I’m surprised my skull didn’t crack.
