Painting: The Fish Market, Dieppe: Grey Weather, Morning by Camille Pissarro, c. 1902
What we thought was only a preservative in a jar of alien food turned out to be sentient. So there was that.
We’d pulled the jar from among countless others in a grocery store as big as Pluto, a structure that was speeding through the Kuiper Belt like it wanted to knock Pluto out of orbit and take its place. It was a wandering, aisle-cavitied mass of alloys and composites. A megamart megalopolis.
A parking garage the size of Connecticut welcomed our Earth ship with not frigid but warm docking pads. They glowed in pastels, light pink and baby blue.
The lights were on, but no one was home.
Actually, it was all self-serve and we assumed self-checkout, which had fallen out of favor on Earth for a century and some change.
Avi, who still retained some organic components, said he missed those days, those interactions with cooler than a metal cucumber kiosks, vaguely metallic stands that required thumbprint. That scanned all the groceries in your cart as soon as you were near, and unscanned them if you forgot something and moved away. To check out, it was one smearing touch against the glass and then done.
Avi missed having fleshy digits to do things with and the rest of us nodded as if we knew what he was talking about. We were mostly young. Eager.
Yet this was delightfully exotic, Rose said—trying out that phrase as if for the first time—down to the textures projecting from the walls. Yellow wallpapers with movement under their surfaces. Patterns that seemed to inch like the eyes of some portrait paintings were said to do. Baroque, climbing-wall-esque labyrinths that the fingers could lose themselves in while navigating. The backwash of nostalgia became thinner, a distant note, a hint of the sap of an extinct tree. It wasn’t our nostalgia but a shared one. It belonged to ages and to civilizations spread across the jam of light-years.
Down the aisles we went, giddy as children with eyes peeled for the toy section.
Having probed beforehand, we had an idea what we were walking into, but there were surprises.
Surprises like how there wasn’t any true intelligence, of the artificial variety or otherwise, running or maintaining the store. Surprises like how the store aisles were so varied and numerous that we came to a section that looked exactly like those from grocery stores of 20th century Earth.
Cali said one particular aisle was about the spitting image of the nut butter, honey, and bread aisle of a Delchamps in a docu they still had stored on internal memory and hadn’t bothered moving to cloud.
It was on that aisle Emma, operating on an impulse all of us felt and transmitted to each other, pulled a jar from a shelf. It was cashew butter, or appeared to be.
We waited for alarms to go off, for something to tell us we’d erred.
It was quiet, other than a very low series of hums that might either be the side effect of electronic equipment or intentional music, depending on who you asked.
The way back to where our ship was docked, how easy it was to get back despite traversing such a large store (Indigo joked that they had gotten in all their steps for a week, according to their nonexistent wristwatch), was surprisingly easy, but also somewhat expected. Why not have elevators that strapped you in like amusement park rides, conforming no doubt to a multitude of body types, and jetted you horizontally as well as vertically at swift but ostensibly unhazardous speeds?
It moved so quickly and seamlessly that a couple of us joked, half-seriously, that we’d been teleported.
Another surprise: There were no checkouts, which was sort of great because we had no idea how we would pay. We had everything on Earth credit and were unsure how that would go over with other civilizations.
We waltzed through the front door with our single jar of nut butter, again partly as a test to see if we could get out of there without setting off any alarms.
Should we leave something behind, as a trade? This or some variation of it was thought by a few of us and shared among the group.
The others and I relented, because even though I didn’t agree with leaving a big footprint behind, it also didn’t seem right just departing the store with an item from the shelf and not paying. And to be sure, we had all sort of planned on something like that, or some cultural exchange or other if it were allowed.
We left behind an external storage device with the grocery store documentary from Cali’s internal copied over onto it.
“My favorite part of that documentary was the ice cream buffet one store had,” Cali said. “The green mint chocolate chip on top of a scoop of strawberry looked interesting. You scooped the different flavors out yourself and put them onto cones. Imagine all the aisles that needed cleanup.”
She transmitted the borrowed nostalgia to us, and once inside our minds it was further diluted.
Back on our ship, we put the jar of seeming nut butter through a series of scans. It was a plant-based item, with some compounds deemed to be preservatives.
It wasn’t until I was studying the jar in my lab on Earth that one of those compounds—which was indeed functioning as a preservative to keep the plant-based material fresh—spoke to me. It spoke to me through reactions to our touch. Not an ordinary rection or from a clock that ticked down like rot or decay.
My lab mates and I puzzled out the language using a similar compound that we manufactured and injected into the nut butter. We soon got the compound talking to something with the same apparatuses for communication.
Hello? it said. I’ve come back home.
Greetings, we signaled back. Can you elucidate?
Sure. Home is where the heart is, and my heart is entangled.
