Short Story: The Mall of Madness

Hi guys, 

A new B&F chapter will come on Saturday as always, but I've got a confession to make. I've been in a bit of a funk lately due to RL issues, and while I usually write to clear my mind, working on CE nor B&F didn't help me get out of it. 

I tried to write a Stars of Sirius chap as a distraction, a way to vent out, but instead the muses guided me to a plot bunny that has been stuck in my head for a while. I ended up writing a whole intro chapter/short story of it, which helped me clear my mind. 

I hesitate to put it here on Patreon, since it's just an idea that spiraled into a short story intro/experimental work... but I suppose it's better off here than wasting away on a google drive file. Who knows, maybe I'll write more of it someday. 

So full disclosure: this piece is more of an experimental short story/quest pilot than anything. I don't intend to write regular chapters of it on a schedule like CE or B&F, though I don't exclude returning to write more of it later. Consider this bonus content. 

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Matt Zhū arrives late to the first and most important job of his life.

It’s not his fault. Not completely. He tried to arrive early. He ran for the mall as soon as school ended. Unfortunately, the two are twenty minutes apart at the best of times, and Malta only has terrible traffic days. It’s just a question of how terrible.

In Matt’s case, it’s ten minutes-late bad. When he crosses the pristine automated doors of the Sliema Supermall and finds his new boss waiting for him on the other side, he knows he’s in it for a scolding.

“You’re late, late, late,” Mr. Tanaka admonishes him immediately.

“I’m sorry, sorry, sorry,” Matt replies in perfect synchronicity while avoiding the manager’s gaze. Which isn’t too hard, since Mr. Tanaka is a large mass of muscles tightly bound inside a yellow shirt, tight beige pants and a black tie. He’s ruggedly handsome behind his black glasses, with that Superman jaw and Hiroyuki Sanada killer look.

David Tanaka takes care of himself, because he’s a man on a mission. An apostle of the holy grind. Mr. Tanaka works ten hours a day and spends two more hitting the gym to stay in shape. Somehow he manages to set aside eight hours per week to spend with his teenage daughter Kim, but never one more. Parental attention should be like a pay raise in Mr. Tanaka’s mind: rare and earned.

Or at least, that’s what Kim told Matt. He finds her tale deeply upsetting. Matt rarely sees his own father since his parents divorced, but at least he doesn’t skip calls to work out. This tale confirmed what Matt always thought: gyms destroy families.

Hence why he avoids them.

Matt feels especially sorry for Kim since she doesn’t have many friends at school either. She got him the job after he saved her from being stuck in a locker by Vicky, that bully who used to be his childhood crush. Matt is not sure if it counts as third-degree nepotism, but he’s thankful nonetheless.

Mr. Tanaka throws his new wage slave a plastic bag holding the customary employee uniform–the same clothes he wore himself, minus the tie–and a black key card. “I will give you a fifteen minute tour,” he says with a tone that suggests ‘not one more.’ “You change and start right after.”

“Yes sir,” Matt replies like a good soldier. Somehow, he has an easy time imagining his manager as a military commissar. Mr. Tanaka has the right personality and build; he’s just missing the funny hat and the chest full of shiny medals. “Thank you for giving me a chance, sir.”

“I had no choice,” the man complains with a deadpan face. “Three employees failed to show up to work this month. Kids these days have no work ethic.”

Maybe they got lost, Matt wonders. The Sliema Supermall is a big place, the beating heart of a burgeoning capitalistic fiefdom. Mr. Tanaka runs the place like a fortress. Perfectly organized rows of fully-stocked shelves stand tall behind a defensive line of cashiers weeding out the hungry customers from the window shoppers.

“We close at twenty in the evening and open at eight,” Mr. Tanaka explains while showing Matt the various shelves. “You clean after closing and fill shelves before opening. You’ll find the cleaning products and stocks in the basement.”

It’s a lot to take in for a newbie, but Matt is a good listener and eager to impress. He’s anxious. It is his first real, serious job, and he needs money. He really wants to visit his sister Anna on the mainland for the next holiday, and plane tickets don’t pay for themselves.

The hours will be tough, but Matt does not complain. It’s not like he has any friends left to hang out with nowadays. He drifted away from the old ones and struggled to make ones since he… since what happened with Mark. His appearance doesn’t help either.

“Is there a place to hide my bag, sir?” Matt asks shyly. He keeps his laptop in the latter; the silicon chest where he stores his photos, his files, his digital soul. And there’s the sketchbook. His beautifully sensitive paper heart. The mere thought of losing his stuff fills Matt with dread.

“We keep employee lockers in the basement too, with showers.” Mr. Tanaka points at a large elevator located at the back of the supermarket, squarely between the seafood stalls and the bakery. “You can use this with the keycard.”

As the tour reaches its end, Mr. Tanaka leads Matt into the elevator; a coffin of steel with a camera eye looking down from a corner and a video screen atop a button panel. The ride to the basement is not too long, but the screen shows a missing person’s picture. A girl Matt’s age, with curly black hair and black eyes. Her name, Marie Shaw, appears right above a phone number.

The picture bothers Matt a great deal. Seven hundred people were reported missing each year in Malta, but 2023 feels especially bad. His mother can’t turn on the news without hearing about another disappearance alert anymore. It took Matt a lot of convincing for her to let him take the job.

Mr. Tanaka gives Matt a tour of the basement, a bunker with an array of metal keycard lockers and showers on one side, and a stocking room on the other. The whole place smells of sweat, oil, and asphalt. Matt hates it already.

“I must go,” Mr. Tanaka says when his Apple Watch strikes sixteen and a half. “You change and start now with stocking shelves.”

“Yes, sir!” Matt replies dutifully, but his boss is already back to the elevator before he can string the two words together. His enthusiasm deflates instantly. He has just become a cog in a big machine, he thinks.

Unabated, Matt picks up a locker and starts changing. He takes a bit longer than most, since he still struggles with depth perception two years after the accident. His right eye was the better one, and the left isn’t quite up to the task. Once he’s done, he locks his normal clothes and bags behind a door of steel with his keycard. Even though Matt is fully clothed, he feels naked without his sketchbook.

There’s an employee bathroom near the showers that reeks of smoke and things Matt is too young to know. He goes to the only mirror and stares at him. The yellow shirt and beige pants look a bit off, and the uniform would benefit from a cap, but Matt is amazed by what he sees.

He’s no longer a man, he realizes. He’s been reborn.... as an employee. The Homo Economicus. Matt feels like he’s been put in a suffocating box, which his uniform isn’t too far from. For once, he’s almost happy that his eyepatch lets him stand out a bit.

You see, Matt is not like most sixteen-years old boys. He has inherited his Chinese father’s black hair and his Maltese mother’s natural tan. He’s a bit thin for his age, but not gaunt either. Some girls used to call him cute once. And he still is… if you ignore the white surgical eyepatch covering his right eye.

It’s quite off-putting to most, though less than the dreadful scar and glass orb hidden underneath. Humans like normalcy. When they look at Matt’s face and see a single black eye staring back at them, it reminds them of their own fragility. And they don’t like it. At all. Most people never say it, of course, not to Matt’s face. His other potential employers used other excuses to refuse his candidacy, but he knows the truth. It hurts each time it happens.

A pity the age of piracy ended three centuries ago. Matt would have fit right in then. He’s not sure he would have felt happier with a parrot on his shoulder, but at least it would have been fun.

“Excuse me?” Matt asks a passing employee upon approaching the stocking room, hoping for guidance. “I’m new, and uh… how do I–”

The retail drone does not answer him with words, but by dropping a tightly bound pack of six water bottles at Matt’s feet. Then he disappears back into the stocking room.

Matt stares at the bottles for a second, then grabs them in resignation. They’re heavy, mostly because he’s thin and doesn’t exercise. Nobody wants to partner up with him when it comes to team sports, for good reasons. But he doesn’t relent.

It’s not too bad, Matt tells himself. Do it for your country. Do it for the money. Do it for the vacations.

Like a soldier transporting a crate of ammo to the frontline, Matt drags the goods to the elevator while gasping for air and smashes the up button. He’s alone when the elevator’s steel doors close on him. Matt whistles as it goes up. Simple enough so far.

Except… The doors don’t open again.

Matt waits, and waits, a seafood ad playing on the video screen. After a while, he realizes something has gone wrong. “Hello?” he asks no one in particular, then to the camera looking down on him. “Is something wrong?”

Matt receives no answer, so he simply smashes the buttons on the control panel. Open doesn’t work. Close doesn’t work. Up doesn’t work.

Down does though.

The elevator travels back to the basement. Back to where he started. Matt lets out a heavy sigh, as he realizes that this shall be his lot for the next year: sharing a dysfunctional shaft with a pack of water bottles. That kind of takes out all the wonders of a first day of work. Matt glances at the ad to distract himself. It shows a sushi chef cutting an octopus to ribbons with a knife.

It saddens him a bit. Matt often wonders if octopuses live alone because they have split personalities. Each of their tentacles have tiny brains, so maybe they argue back with the body? It must be nice to have a family inside one’s head. Or friends.

The elevator does not stop.

It doesn’t freeze in place or anything. It simply goes down and down, slowly and methodically, to the tune of shifting steel gears. Down, and down, and down, without stopping or bumping into anything.

Something’s not right, Matt thinks. There should be only one basement and parking lot. And yet, the elevator goes down. When Matt looks around, trying to find an indication whether he has reached his destination or not, he notices an eerie light filtering between its metal doors; a bright shade of purple, almost violet

The elevator does not stop.

It’s a dream, Matt tells himself. He always had a powerful imagination. That’s why he uses his sketchbook so often, to expel ideas from his mind like unwelcome guests eating away at his thoughts. It will stop soon.

The elevator does not stop.

New colors flash on the video screen. Pitch black. Bloody red. Bright orange. Golden yellow. Vivid green. Sky blue. Starry violet. Ethereal white. Then back to black. Back to the dark.

“Is… is this a prank? Am I being pranked?” Matt asks, his breath short, his heart pounding in his chest. He looks up at the camera. “H-Hey? Someone? Help!”

The elevator does not stop.

Matt grows anxious. He pushes the ‘stop’ button on the panel. It does not work. So he tries all the others, each time more forcefully than the last. The elevator’s lamp turns off, but the violet light beyond the doors only grows stronger. Matt’s skin turns magenta under its eldritch glows.

The elevator does not stop.

The elevator will not stop.

Now Matt’s getting scared. His lungs fight to breathe. He wants to say something, to call for help, but something drowns out his own voice. He holds his chest, his heart pounding so hard it hurts. A pressure spreads its tendrils through his veins. His old friend, panic attack, has come to visit him.

Matt collapses in a corner of the elevator, confused, trembling. He remembers his exercises. He closes his eye to escape the violet light, to focus, to retreat into his own head where nothing can hurt him. This is not real, Matt tells himself. Snap out of it! Nothing is real!

Matt’s wrong. This is real. It just doesn’t make sense. Logic is no longer the only game in town. It went out to buy cigarettes and fell down into the abstract hole.

A catchy, electronic tune fills the air. Matt breathes in, and out. In and out. His heartbeat slows down, slightly, alongside the elevator. When he calms down enough to open his eye again, he notices an anomaly. The video screen shows an ad. A logo in the shape of a six-teeth gear, each of a different color: red, orange, yellow, green, blue violet. They surround a white orb as bright as the hall outside. What Matt assumes to be a company’s name and motto are written below in big black letters.

Lerne Industries.

Emo, Ergo Sum

Matt has never heard of Lerne Industries, and he hasn’t done enough Latin to understand the sentence below. The ad does not stay up for long anyway. The screen changes to gray static, then the shadow of a face.

“Welcome, Matt,” a woman’s voice comes out of the screen. “What took you so long? We’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

A person appears on the screen, sitting behind a mahogany desk and before a white background. Though he’s still terrified, Matt can’t help but blush at what he sees. He’s shy, sixteen, and the creature in front of him comes straight out of a Maxim cover. The woman can’t be any older than twenty, with long scarlet hair woven into a braid tied by a white flower. Her body reminds him of Michelangelo’s perfect sculptures, with a face carved from pale marble and aesthetically pleasing curves. She wears a white short-sleeved shirt and a black choker around her pale neck. Her eyes are pale gray, her smile bright.

She is perfect. Too perfect. She must be a dream. She wouldn’t know Matt's name otherwise.

“Who…” Matt clears his throat and struggles to find his words. It’s reassuring to speak to someone, but something about that woman feels… wrong. “Who are you?”

“I’m Lerne. Pleased to meet you, Matt.” She joins her hands together and leans forward, as if trying to escape the screen. “How much is your life worth?”

He blinks in confusion. “My… my life?”

“Your life.” Lerne does not blink black. She rarely remembers to do that. “How much is it worth?”

“Uh…” Matt’s anxiety slowly crawls its way back in. The woman’s smile feels reptilian, almost predatory. “I don’t know…”

“If you can’t put a price on your life, how do you know if it has any value?”

The question deeply unsettles Matt in a way he can’t quite understand. He doesn’t want to provide an answer, or even consider one. A mistake. It will come to haunt him.

“We strive for price stability here,” Lerne says calmly. “So I say… you’re worth one hundred credits. That’s your life’s starting account.”

A floating number appears in the darkness that used to be the right side of Matt’s vision, red like blood. One hundred.

All his efforts to recover fail him. He lets out a cry of surprise and frantically scratch at his own eyepatch, trying to… seize the number? Claw it way? Check if he has grown a real eye out of the glass facsimile in its place? Whatever, he fails. He’s not thinking straight, and the number will not leave anytime soon.

“Come on, don’t be such a scared kitty cat,” Lerne taunts him with a light chuckle. It sounds like a song to Matt’s ears, perfectly melodious and artificially practiced. But there’s a mean edge to it. “You’re a winner, Matt. You’ve won the ultimate prize.”

“I… I don’t understand!” Matt crawls his way toward the screen. “I don’t get it!”

“You’ve won access to this place, of course. The Megamall Dungeon. The Planes’ Markeplace. Your future tomb.” Lerne’s head tilts to the side, like a predatory bird appraising its meal. “Don’t die too soon, alright? I want to see how long you can last.”

The screen goes dark, and the descent ends with a light bump. The doors open.

Matt doesn’t look. Not immediately. It takes him a full more minute to calm down, to build enough courage to do so. The violet light is gone. A great hall sprawls beyond the elevator’s threshold. It’s almost white. Pearly, pallid white. Nothing like the mall nor the basement.

Matt doesn’t rise up from his corner. His hand moves to the control panel and presses the up button. He wants to leave, to return to reality, to avoid confronting whatever awaits him beyond the threshold. He fails. The elevator does not move an inch.

There is no escape.

Matt breathes in and out, then manages to rise up. He gathers his courage and steps beyond the elevator, slowly, warily. He hears the steel doors close behind him the moment he crosses the threshold.

The elevator flies up without him, alongside the water bottles. Mr. Tanaka will be disappointed, Matt thinks. It sounds absurd in this situation, but it keeps him grounded.

At that point, Matt is too confused to turn back. He has entered a huge hall as vast as his family’s entire house, with vast landscape windows on each side. The floor seems made of pearly marble, polished and stainless. Crystal columns hold the ceiling in place over five meters above Matt’s head. Potted plants and flowers he does not recognize grow in their shadow, filling the air with a sweet, welcoming smell.

Colorful motes float in the air like particles and provide light. Whether red or blue and violet, they dance like fireflies and evaporate before Matt can touch them. Matt feels like an astronaut walking among stars in the midst of a white space. He’s not far off the mark. This place does not belong on Earth. Matt glances around in both fear and wonder, until his eye notices words crudely carved into the marble floor.

YOU KEEP WHAT YOU EARN

YOU KEEP WHAT YOU STEAL

YOU KEEP WHAT YOU KILL

DO NOT STAY AFTER CLOSING HOURS

SEVENTH FLOOR ONLY SAFE SPACE

THE STAFF ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS

DEBT IS HELL

DETENTION IS SLAVERY

THE GUNMAN IS DEATH

Matt notices an ominous tenth line written below all the others, with more depth than the others.

DO NOT FEED THE HYDRA

Matt does not yet understand the meaning behind these words. But he will, in due time. Perhaps bitterly.

But for now, the boy folds the warnings in a corner of his mind. Something else catches his full attention. Great golden gates stand at the end of the wall, right next to what looks like a vending machine of some kind.

“H-Hello?” Matt calls out to someone, anyone. No one listens. No one answers. “Anybody?”

He moves closer to the nearest landscape window and takes a good look at whatever weirdness he expects to find beyond the glass. All he can do is gasp in shock. Nothing could have prepared him for what he sees.

There is a world waiting outside this hall. An underground metropolis thriving under a silicon sky.

From his viewpoint, Matt looks down on a sprawling maze of steel floors and crystal staircases far larger than his hometown of Birkara. Stores of all sizes jostle for space, their facades a mix of futuristic neon and old-world charm. Some resemble cozy boutiques with wooden signs and glass windows showcasing their unique wares, while others are sleek, chrome stalls boasting strange gadgets. Hordes of people seem to walk in front of their windows, though Matt is too far above them to see them clearly. On the ceiling, a patchwork hologram of blue screens and lamp-stars provides a virtual illusion of a sky.

“Is this a dream?” Matt mutters to himself and receives no answer. He has a vivid imagination, but the last seed of human doubt in his brain does not relent. So he pinches himself in the arm. The pain is sharp, but he does not wake up. At first, Matt is amazed, but he’s also smart. He remembers what the woman told him.

Don’t die too soon.

Beneath all the glitz and glitter, this place is dangerous.

Matt gulps and looks for an exit. Breaking the windows and plummeting into the void isn’t a solution, so he instead walks toward the golden gates. They’re tightly shut, so his gaze wanders to the big black vending machine next to it.

Six glass bottles full of swirling liquid await behind the glass panel, each a different color: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. A hole in their midst indicates there used to be a seventh choice, but it ran out a while ago.

Matt glances at the machine’s keypad. Words glitter on a tiny screen above the buttons.

SUPERPOWER IN A CAN! YOUR FIRST PICK IS FREE!

Energy Red - Orange Matter - Yellow Concept - Green Life - Info Blue - Spacetime Violet.

Matt stares at the bottles in confusion, and time comes to a standstill.

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HIS FATE IS IN YOUR HANDS, OBSERVER. CHOOSE WISELY.

PICK A COLOR

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A/N: yeah, as you can probably guess, this idea is a semi-serious/surreal Perfect Run spinoff (different Earth, same multiversal corner); I had the idea on the backburner for a while. The concept in my head was to offer each chapter as a quest with different poll choices as the main character tries to deal with a deranged dungeon-dimension similar to Monaco. 

But as I said earlier, I'm dedicated to writing Commerce Emperor and Blood & Fur until either's completion, so the question of when or if I write more of this tale remains open. I just leave it here as bonus content.

Otherwise, I'll probably take a week off either at the end of August or September to recharge my batteries (haven't taken a true break since April), but no dates yet. As always, I'll keep you informed.

See you Saturday for the next B&F.