Scan, Swipe, Repeat

Angela was thirty-four years old, and she had learned in four months that grocery shopping with Reginald was a two-hour affair no matter what she did to speed it up. He was thirty-four, technically, according to the fake license, though that number had stopped meaning anything around the Bronze Age, and he dressed like someone who had lost a bet with a thrift store. Button-up shirt with a pineapple print. Corduroys. Socks that did not match each other but did match the shirt, which was somehow worse.

They stood in the checkout line at the supermarket on a Tuesday evening, and they were arguing about dinner.

"I can't just summon you a roast goose, Angela," Reginald said. He was holding a basket with a bag of frozen peas and a single lemon in it. "That's not how any of this works."

"You can summon a light out of thin air. I've seen you do it. You did it in the car because the dome light was, and I quote, spiritually insufficient."

"That was a different kind of summoning. That was a small working. A goose is a whole creature. There's paperwork involved. There's intent. Do you know what intent does to a goose?"

"I know what it does to my dinner plans," Angela said. She grabbed a rotisserie chicken off the hot rack next to the register and dropped it into his basket. "There. Congratulations. A mortal killed this for us hours ago and asked nothing in return except eleven dollars."

Reginald peered at the chicken the way other people peer at museum artifacts. "It's sweating."

"It's warm. It's supposed to be warm."

"And you just... buy it. No negotiation. No offering."

"Reginald, the offering is the eleven dollars."

He considered this like it was a koan. She could practically see the gears turning back there, gears that had once turned for emperors and were now turning for a rotisserie chicken. It was, she had to admit, one of the reasons she kept him around. Everything was new to him and he treated everything like it mattered. Even the stupid stuff. Especially the stupid stuff.

The line moved. The cashier, a woman named Dot whose name tag suggested she had stopped being surprised by anything around 1987, scanned the peas and the lemon and then looked at the chicken and then looked at Reginald, who was still staring into the basket.

"Anything else?" Dot asked.

"He wants to speak with the manager about the goose situation," Angela said.

"There's no goose situation," Dot said. "We got chickens. That's it. That's the bird list."

"You see?" Reginald said to Angela, quietly, like Dot had just confirmed a conspiracy. "The scarcity is structural."

Then his eye fell on the little plastic sign by the card reader. Save ten percent with our loyalty card. And his whole face changed. Angela knew that face. That was the face he made when he found a door.

"What's a loyalty card," he asked.

Dot sighed through her nose. "It's free. You sign up, you get points, points come off your bill."

"Points," Reginald repeated. "So the store rewards me for shopping here by enabling me to shop here more. The reward for consumption is more consumption."

"Sir, it's ten percent off paper towels."

"But don't you see the loop in it?" He leaned on the little counter thing where the candy bars go, getting comfortable, which was Angela's signal that this was about to become a whole thing. "You buy, so you are rewarded, so you can buy more. Where does it end? What is a person being loyal to, exactly? A corporation? An idea? Is this a covenant?"

Dot looked at Angela. Angela looked back at Dot. Somewhere in that look was an entire conversation between two women who had both had long days.

"He's new," Angela said.

"New to what?" Dot asked.

"Shopping."

"To loyalty, too, apparently," Reginald said. "In my day loyalty was sworn on a blade and it cost you your life if you broke it, and now it's a card in my pocket that gives me a discount on paper towels. The terms have degraded considerably."

"Sir, do you want the card or not," Dot said.

He did want the card. He filled out the little form with the pen chained to the counter and he read the terms and conditions, all of them, out loud, while the line behind them grew to six people and then eight. Angela stood there holding the sweating chicken and apologizing to strangers with her eyes. He got to the part about data sharing and stopped.

"They intend to share my purchasing patterns with, and I quote, trusted partners. Angela. Who are these partners. Are they trustworthy? Who vets the trust?"

"It's so you get coupons," said a man behind them, with a toddler on his hip who was eating the toddler's own hair a little bit.

"Coupons," Reginald said, writing his name down as Reginald Vex, which was not his real name but was close enough for paper towels. "Fine. But I want it noted that I object to the data sharing on principle."

"Noted," Dot said, in the flattest voice Angela had ever heard, and she had heard Dot say things before.

The card printed out. Reginald held it up to the light like a jeweler. Then, when Dot pointed them toward the self-checkout because she clearly needed him gone, he stopped dead in the middle of the floor.

"There are unattended altars," he said.

"What?"

"Those." He pointed at the self-checkout kiosks. Four of them, humming, glowing, nobody working them. "Machines before which ordinary people place their goods and perform a rite, and the machine passes judgment. Scan. That's the word for it, isn't it. Scan. There's a whole liturgy and no priest."

"Reginald, it's a machine that weighs bananas."

But he was already walking toward it like a man approaching a shrine, and Angela followed because what else was she going to do, leave him unsupervised in a supermarket, alone, with a new loyalty card in his pocket and questions in his heart. She had made that mistake once with a farmers market and there were still people in this county who thought he was a street performer.

He scanned the peas. The machine beeped. He went absolutely still.

"It acknowledged it," he whispered.

"It beeps at everything, yes!"

He scanned the lemon. Beep. He scanned the chicken, turned it over three times looking for the barcode, found it, scanned it, and when the screen said ROTISSERIE CHICKEN PLEASE CONFIRM he put his hand flat on the screen like it was a page.

"Angela," he said. "It knows what it is."

"It knows what everything is. It's been trained on every product in the store. That is the whole, that's the point of it."

The machine asked him to select a payment type, and he asked it, out loud, politely, how it was doing. The machine did not answer. A small crowd had gathered, the way a crowd gathers when a swan walks into a George's. Nobody was filming, thank God, they were just watching, the way people watch a man do something they can't look away from. An older guy in a store polo drifted over with the weary posture of a man who had seen things at this kiosk before and had stopped being paid enough for any of them.

"Sir, do you need help," the polo guy asked.

"He needs to select a payment type," Angela said. "He's deciding, between credit and debit, on moral grounds."

"It's not the payment," Reginald said, still gazing at the screen. "It's that it accepted me. Without a word. Without a name. I could be anyone and it would let me buy these peas."

"You are anyone, that's the beauty of it," Angela said. She got her wallet out. "Come on. People are eating their own hair over there."

She steered him away from the kiosk with a hand on his elbow, muttering sorry, sorry, sorry at the crowd as a woman might walk a large dog through a wedding. He let himself be steered, but he kept looking back at the kiosk, and she could tell he was going to bring it up later. He brought everything up later.

They got maybe thirty feet into the main aisles before it happened, the thing Angela should have seen coming and did not, because he stopped in front of the condiments and simply ceased to move.

"Angela," he said. "There are forty jars of mayonnaise here. This one jar, this single jar, is the size of a human head, and it costs less than the small one."

"It's the bulk size. It's cheaper per ounce. That is the whole trick of it, bigger is cheaper."

"Cheaper," he said faintly.

He was staring at the shelf, at the wall of jars, at the gallon of mayonnaise sitting there under fluorescent light promising