The screen flashed in bold, cheerful letters:Item rejected. Nutritional imbalance detected.
Beryl blinked. “Well,” she said. “That’s new.” She tried it one more time but got the same message.
“Kinda judgy, if you ask me,” one young female patron toward the end of the line said.
She had not asked and didn’t intend to poll the customers for their deep thoughts about grocery purchases and whether they were valid.
Beryl ignored the whispering in the line and shot Francine a look. “Did the system get an update that I didn’t hear about?”
“Not that I know of, unless it did it itself. Maybe it’s become self-aware,” Francine said with a teasing half-smile. They’d had more than one conversation about robots taking over the universe, but they’d been drinking at the time and not really serious.
“Not funny.”
Francine grinned. “It’s a little bit funny.”
Beryl exhaled slowly and tapped a few commands, overriding the system to help maybe clear out a glitch.
“All right, let’s try that again.” Instead of the candy bar, Beryl grabbed a different item from a nearby basket intended for return to stock, to see if it was just the candy bar that was a no-go or if everything was going to be a problem. The scanner beeped and everything looked normal. Then the screen flashed a new message:Item rejected. Unsafe for human consumption.
A ripple of whispers went through the line behind her. She looked at the pint of strawberries she held, thinking they looked pretty good to her.Unsafe for human consumption, my sweet patootie.
“Unsafe?” came a different voice from the line.
“You’re saying we can’t have candy bars or strawberries?” asked a red-faced man. “What’s unsafe about either of them? It’s not a chainsaw, for pity’s sake. What kind of place are you running here?”
Beryl forced a smile. “Let’s just move everyone over to Register Two. We’ll get you all checked out the old-fashioned way.”
Francine nodded and started redirecting customers, herding them with practiced ease toward Register Two, where Tanya waited to efficiently ring everybody up. There was some grumbling, but everyone seemed to just want to ring up their items of choice, whether candy or fruit, and get on with their lives.
Beryl was all for that.
Tanya called over the intercom for another cashier to come to the front to help customers at Register Four, and the crowd slowed their annoyed whispers.
Beryl stepped aside, pulling her small tablet from her apron pocket. Accessing the store’s scanning system, she swiped a few screens to get to the settings. “System diagnostics,” she muttered as she saw the slow spiral of death circling, not booting up. “Come on.”
The diagnostics screen appeared and…it seemed normal. There was nothing odd, no matter what she checked. Inventory. The scanners. Everything read normal. Which meant it was something else. Great.
“Beryl.”
She looked up to see that Francine was no longer standing nearby. She had moved to stand over by a row of produce at the far end of the checkout area. And this time, she lookedveryconcerned.
Beryl stomach tightened. “Please tell me the mini carrots aren’t attacking anyone.”
Francine rolled her eyes, but she didn’t smile. “Just come look.”
As Beryl approached, Francine pointed to a small table with several pints of strawberries stacked efficiently in a pyramid shape. They were just like the pint she’d tried to scan from the return basket at the checkout line.
Beryl didn’t see what Francine did. At least not at first. As she gazed at the strawberries, she realized what seemed off about them. They were absolutely perfect.
Tooperfect.
All the strawberries in each clear pint container looked exactly the same. They were all the same size. They were all the same shape. They were all the same color.
Exactly. The. Same. Each and every strawberry in every clear pint box.
That meant they were clearly not of this world.
Space potatoes!
