“It’s for my grandson’s birthday. He’s going to turn fourteen this week, and he’s having a bunch of his friends over. I thought it would be nice if they each got a present.”
The cartoon smile widened. “Oh, how thoughtful! How old is your grandson going to be?”
Wow, the AI or whatever they call it in these things was pretty good. Or maybe they had someone in Calcutta listening in. On second thought, probably not. The English didn’t have that strange lilting cadence the Indians bring to it. And the drone had missed a detail I had just mentioned.
“He’s going to be fourteen,” I repeated, speaking slowly. His birthday falls almost in the same week as mine, but we never celebrate with one single party for reasons that should be obvious. The teenage eye-rolling would be unbearable.
“Will there be girls coming to this party?” The monotone with which this was said made it sound odd. Couldn’t the AI do a bit of wink wink, nudge nudge?
“Yes, boys and girls.”
“That’s great! We have some excellent jewelry packs for teen boys and girls. For example, there’s our Sweetheart Pack, a charming—”
“Not the Sweetheart Pack,” I interrupted the drone. “He’d be mortified.”
“That’s all right. We have plenty of great offers. There’s the Street Kidz pack, the Young Artists Pack, the FriendZip Bracelet pack, the…”
I tuned out as the drone droned on. This was all a big mistake. I pushed my shopping cart around the hovering sales representative, which politely rose up to let me pass, then lowered down to my level again and followed at a respectful distance, still trying to sell me jewelry in bulk.
A package caught my eye. It was the FriendZip Bracelet Fun Pak. Why it would be spelled that way was not immediately apparent, but I did remember overhearing my grandson, Martin, talking about them with his friends. They were a New Thing.
New Things were good when you’re fourteen. Old Things were not so good.
Old Things that provided New Things could be good though…
Yes, the opinion of a sloppy adolescent matters to me more than almost anything else in my life. I defy any one of you with a grandchild to say otherwise.
I picked up the package. It included a dozen FriendZip Bracelets. The idea, the blindingly colorful box explained in cool, hip lingo, was that you gave each of your BFFs one of the FriendZip Bracelets. It was a shiny cloth bracelet that unzipped on one side, and you could put FriendZip Tokens inside. These showed why your BFFs were your BFFs.
(Smug aside: “BFF” stands for “Best Friend Forever.” Yes, I already knew that. No, I didn’t have to look it up. I have a culturally superior grandson to explain these things to me, thank you very much.)
The FriendZip Bracelet Fun Pak came with a hundred (“Count ’em, a hundred!”) FriendZip Tokens. These were colorful little metal thingies in the shapes of skateboards, footballs, video game controllers, hearts, etc. I supposed they would rattle inside the FriendZip Bracelet, so you could show off how many tokens you had and thus how popular you were.
Marketing genius.
A drone buzzed down to me and hovered over my shoulder. It winked at me. Actually winked.
“I see you have picked up the FriendZip Bracelet Fun Pak. What a great choice for the kid in your life! They are the latest fashion in all the middle schools and high schools.”
The middle schools I could believe, but I couldn’t imagine a sixteen-year-old wearing one of these. And all fourteen-year-olds aspire to be sixteen-year-olds. Would these be considered beneath them? Kids at this age are extremely picky, so picky I didn’t know if in Martin’s grade they were still a New Thing. They had been a New Thing a couple of weeks ago, but New Things can turn into Old Things before you know it.
Trust me, I know.
“Hmmm, I’m not sure,” I murmured. “This may be passé already.”
The smiley face was replaced with a flashing red exclamation mark. “Then all the more reason to act now! If you buy it in the next fifteen minutes, we’ll take an additional ten percent off the retail price!”
“All right, but I get to take a selfie with you to show my grandson.”
Was I trying too hard to be trendy? Yeah, probably. It’s amazing how much grandparents crave approval of slouching, video game-obsessed grandchildren.
“I love selfies!” the drone said. The cartoon face was back, spinning around on the computer screen.
“Of course you do.”
“Let’s go to the checkout,” it chirped. It actually sounded happy as it whizzed down the aisle and did a loop the loop.
I followed.
It was at this point that the body with the knife through its head fell into my shopping cart.
And right on top of my grandson’s FriendZip Bracelet Fun Pak.
Two
I let out a horrific scream. I’m not generally prone to screaming, but the appearance of a dead body came as a shock, and I feel that since I’ve been a civilian for several years now, I can cut loose every now and then.
The drone buzzed back to me, the cartoon face surrounded by question marks.
“May I help you?”
“There’s a dead body in my shopping cart!”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“Do you think I do? A dead body just fell off the shelf and into my shopping cart!”
Then I got my head together and looked up, both to see if I could spot the murderer and check if there might be another dead body on its way down.
The shelves stood a good twenty feet tall. The lower ones had products for the customers to grab, while the upper ones held back stock. The tops of the shelves were connected by a series of catwalks with a steel mesh floor and railings on the sides. I would have been able to see anyone on the catwalks, but there was no one, just a few drones buzzing around, grabbing boxes for special air deliveries or to bring down
