Alien Stories. E.C. Osondu
answer sounded satisfactory to my clients.
The Instarating prompt came on and they all set about rating me.
When they left, I checked. They’d all awarded me Excellent.
Later that evening all of the enactors gathered for a Groupcrit. Our Leader gave his usual speech telling us to have the right attitude to Groupcrits. We should embrace the opportunity that Groupcrits offered us to become better enactors. There was no doubt that those who performed best were those who saw Groupcrits as a way to improve their performance. He looked pointedly at me, nodded, and cracked a tiny, little smile.
I smiled back broadly.
He nodded at Ling. He did not smile.
Ling stood up.
From every corner of the hall voices rose at Ling. She looked thinner and frailer than she used to. Her eyes were red from crying.
“I know I have not been pulling my own weight these past few weeks but I promise to do my best to improve,” she mumbled.
“Promises are not good enough. Promises are nothing without practical applications,” our Leader said.
“Am I right, enactors?”
“Promises are nothing,” we echoed.
One by one, individual voices rose from different corners of the hall.
“By not pulling your own weight you are pulling the Ranch down.”
“You are dead weight.”
“The Ranch is as strong as its weakest link.”
The Leader nodded and smiled, and this no doubt increased the tempo and furiousness of the enactors as their criticisms came on fast and furious.
“You are bringing us down.”
“You are not working as part of a team.”
“You are lowering team morale.”
“You are not doing enough for China.”
“You are doing China a disservice.”
The Leader, meanwhile, paced. He was pacing through the four corners of the hall as the criticisms rained down. His head was up, but his eyes looked at no one, they looked straight ahead.
“I can see that we all agree promises are not enough. The Ranch is standing today because we all pull together. We cannot allow any lone individual to pull us down. I need time to think.”
He walked out of the hall with his hands behind his back.
The rest of us began to troop out. I did not look at Ling. I had to be careful not to be seen as joining myself with an enactor who was pulling the Ranch down.
The next morning I did a welfare check on Ling but her face didn’t come up on my Palm screen. Where her face should have been, there was a black spot. This could only mean one thing—her fire had gone out.
I shook my head, but only for a brief moment. I remembered a common saying at the Ranch—enactors come, enactors go, but the Ranch remains.
As I looked at Ling’s black spot, I resolved to work even harder to maintain my excellent Instaratings.
Memory Store
One of the things he found most fascinating about America were the Memory Stores that could be found on almost every street corner. A person could simply walk into any of the stores and sell their memories for money. It was that straightforward. He had come to the realization that certain things were undoubtedly straightforward in America. Take American beers with their twist-off caps. Twist-off caps may not seem like a big deal to most American beer drinkers but he remembered buying a cold bottle of beer when he was back home and bringing it to his room and ransacking the entire room in search of his bottle opener. He eventually found the opener lying underneath a pile of old newspapers. By then, the beer was already lukewarm and tasted flat on the tongue.
Even in matters that did not appear so straightforward, he still admired America. He loved the fact that in America there were a dozen different kinds of doughnuts. There were even doughnuts without holes. Back home, he had grown up knowing only one kind of doughnut: light brown with a hole in the center. He recalled his first time in an American doughnut shop.
“I want a doughnut,” he said to the sales clerk.
“Which one of them do you want?” she asked.
He had pointed vaguely in the direction of the glass display case. The sales clerk looked at him and began pointing out and reeling off the names of the different kinds of doughnuts that they had.
“Glazed, Chocolate, Vanilla Frosted, Powdered Sugar, Old Fashioned …”
Looking at her, he had pointed at the light brown doughnut with a hole in the middle.
“Honey, you mean Old Fashioned? Why didn’t you say so instead of messing with me?”
She sounded relieved and laughed.
The coffee-laden atmosphere had lightened. He too had laughed. He had repeated the words “Old Fashioned” and had vowed to commit it to memory.
A Memory Store, ah, only in America. He planned to visit one and find out how it worked. He had no immediate plans to sell his memories but there was no harm in knowing about their operations. He was sure the operators of the Memory Stores would be as polite and pleasant as he had found most American storekeepers to be. Here in America even when a storekeeper did not have an item that you wished to buy he would direct you to another store where they had the item, sometimes at an even cheaper rate. That would never happen back home. The best a shopkeeper would do for you would be to tell you to wait while he dashed to a neighboring store to get the same item and sell it to you with a markup.
The first time he went into a Memory Store he walked in furtively like a Catechist walking into a brothel. First he looked right, then left and then right again and then he ducked in.
As soon as he entered the shop, all his apprehensions disappeared.
“Hi, buddy, I am R,” the guy who manned the shop said.
He in turn introduced himself by his first initial.
Everyone went by their initials these days. It was one of the laws introduced to unite the country after what had happened during the previous regime.
He could tell that the man was Hispanic. He could tell from the man’s accent. You could not get rid of accents by a simple legislation. Did the R. stand for Ramos, Ramirez, Rodriguez? It was inappropriate to ask. Such things did not matter anymore. Everyone was American and that was all that was important.
“It is very easy, my friend,” the guy said
He had looked around the store. He had expected to see lots of gadgets but there were actually just a few.
“First, I will need to wipe down your hands with rubbing alcohol and then you’ll place the five fingers of both hands on this glass panel in front of me and then you’ll focus your mind and recall the memory you want to sell to us. Your memory will appear on the screen right here and I will tell you how much we are able to pay for it. If we agree on the price then I will give you a card loaded with the amount for which we bought your memory. You can use the card to make purchases anywhere. There are stores down the road from here, they sell good stuff. The process is painless,” R. explained.
He told R. that he had only come to look around and find out how the thing worked.
“Look around, my friend. Take your time and feel free to ask me if you have any questions,” R. said.
He looked around but there really wasn’t much more to see than what R. had showed him. It looked like a pretty basic operation. Just then the bell rang announcing the arrival of a customer. R. showed him out through another door.
He