“I’d like to sell this bag of bread,” I muttered. I held it up and shook it for emphasis, like maybe BuyMort was some sort of dog or puppy.

My Mortfront sprang to life in my vision and the damned voice came back. “Pod dispatched!”

I winced as the voice flared my hangover. This time I left the door open and waited with my shotgun, until the sleek black pod hovered into my Airstream. It traveled over to the bag of bread and slid to an eerie stop directly over it, lights active again.

“Would you like to sell this?” She demanded, ringing in my ears. She sounded like I imagine a tax auditor might look. Imperious and bored.

I clapped my hands over my ears and grunted in pain, but she didn’t notice or care. “Yes, fuck off.”

The pod cast its beam over the bread, and my account spun up. I stared, wide eyed as the numbers rolled. The bread netted me a shitload of morties. Four hundred and fifty of them to be exact. My eyes went wide.

“Well, shit. I guess if you like the hippy bread, you’ll love what I’ve got for you next.” I wandered through the trailer, grabbing this and that, just selling every bit of random junk I didn’t need in my Airstream.

Pods came and went rapidly.

I even sold an old box of chocolates off one at a time just to raise up their transport costs. Assuming multidimensional monopolies have them. In and out the pods came, each taking whatever I sold.

After selling three paperback books, an old music CD, a rubber stress toy, and a joint my last customers had tipped me, I was up to almost eight thousand morties.

What a rush!

After that little commerce session, I stopped and thought about it for a minute. The TV was spouting all kinds of economic theory about BuyMort, but I tuned it out. Most of it went over my head. Instead, I started exploring my Mortfront. Quickly, I noticed my transaction history and went into the details.

Currency Exchange: 15.34 USAD received, .002 morties dispensed.

Purchase: Biological feed, grain based processed food block, sliced. Rarity, uncommon. Quality, good. 450 morties dispensed.

Purchase: Text, Earth fiction. Howard the Duck, novelization. Rarity, uncommon. Condition, poor. 913 morties dispensed.

Purchase: Audio disk, Earth music. Nietzsche Wasn’t Read. Rarity, uncommon. Condition, fair. 648 morties dispensed.

Purchase: Unknown category. Possible categories: Toys/Cookware/Religious Artifact. Holed metal vessel with rubber handles. Rarity, unknown. 5003 morties dispensed.

Purchase: Intoxicant, herbal. Marijuana, Blue Dream variation. Rarity, common. Quality, good. 4 morties dispensed.

Well, that was educational.

I had a spread of items sold, and a wild variety of morties paid out for each. Stupidly enough, my pasta colander had been the biggest ticket item. These rarity ratings were wonky as fuck too.

Nietzsche Wasn’t Read wasn’t uncommon, they sold triple platinum.

And that Howard the Duck novelization was actually a rare collector’s item, so that price felt fair considering how dogeared and well-loved it was.

I’ll miss that book, shouldn’t have sold it. They go for over a billion morties each now.

The bread I couldn’t make sense of exactly. Sure, it was produced by the hippy commune a little further into the desert and they didn’t produce or sell much of it, but I only paid five bucks for it. Seemed like that sort of thing should play in as well.

Don’t get me wrong though, I was happy to get more from it than that.

Made up for my poor exchange rate on the cash. Looking down at the Blue Dream joint I had sold, its rating said common, and I got paid just a few morties for it, even though it was good quality. Comparing that to my spaghetti colander led me to realize something.

Nobody had tried to sell BuyMort a colander yet. I must have been the first, that’s why it didn’t know how to categorize it or how much it was worth. Religious artifact? Ha! Indeed, it was.

BuyMort had no idea what the fuck it was buying and selling right now, and it had no clue what things were worth. Its economy was in sheer chaos, and right now was when I could make a bunch of money selling it things nobody else was selling it. I had to get outside!

I scrambled out of my trailer into my campsite and started casting around for things to sell BuyMort. I thought about trying a stone, but that seemed immediately like a bad idea.

There were billions of other humans, and hundreds of millions of aliens now probably all doing the same exact thing.

I realized in that moment that this was why the aliens were here. This planet was a gold mine if you knew much of anything about BuyMort. That was why they followed it here, that was why they were here. To exploit the system as it devoured its latest victims.

Before I did anything, I hurriedly upgraded my personal account to be able to use basic preference settings, and then paid a little extra to turn off the voice. All of my interactions with BuyMort would be text based from that moment on out.

It was expensive, hundreds of morties, but I needed it. That voice was clearly designed to get people to purchase this upgrade, so I paid my ransom and made myself free of it.

For a month.

Casting about, I noticed the overgrown planter and summoned a pod. I told the mute thing that I wanted to sell every flower and cactus in my garden, and it hovered over the area, warping them away one by one.

I checked my account and was thrilled to notice it had jumped to just over 87 thousand morties. I had no idea what I could buy with a Mortie yet, but that seemed like a good number, and I wanted to grow it. This was definitively the new law of the land, and Mortie gathering was going to be on everyone's minds.

As if to punctuate my thoughts, screaming and gunfire erupted from the campground over the ridge. I retreated into my Airstream and grabbed my Mossberg. I did give half a second of thought to selling it, but without any way of knowing how many morties it was worth without letting it go, I needed to keep it on hand for whatever bullshittery my species was going to pull next.

My phone rang, and for a moment I thought about selling that too. Especially since it was fricking eight o’clock in the morning. Then I saw it was my boss. The campground’s owner. It rang a few times, then cut out, and then started ringing again. After he called back a third time, I grabbed it and hit the green button.

“Yeah?” I tried to pretend I was out of breath, like I had been doing something important.

Mr. Sada didn’t care. He almost never cared. “What the fuck are you doing!? The guests are freaking out and calling my personal line, get out there and keep the peace!”

“Yeah, I mow the lawns dude, I’m not sheriff or something.” My response came with a snort.

“You work for me, asshole. You live on my property, and you work for me. Go shut down the camp, don’t let anybody but the cops in.” He sounded serious, somehow, while whining in fear.

“We’re in the middle of the desert, Mr. Sada.” I stepped out of my Airstream with the shotgun and started walking to the top of the hill my site was surrounded by. Just a flat-topped earthen mound about six feet high all the way around, but it helped keep the noise out. These trailers are just aluminum cans, you hear every fuckin’ thing. “And everyone is dealing with this BuyMort thing anyway.”

From the top of my hillside, I could see the campground. It spread out toward the south, in a grove of Joshua trees, dotted with scrub and cacti. Most of it was just desert sand and blacktop, with trailers and RVs parked all over the place.

The campground was small, only had a capacity of about fifty. At least three areas were on fire, and gunfire rang out sporadically from each.

So, things hadn’t changed that much, to be honest. The crucial difference here, though, was that the bullet holes were plocking into the sides of trailers instead of into full beer cans or clouds in the sky.

“Mr. Sada, honestly. I don’t know what you expect me to do, I’m not getting into a gunfight for you.” I shrugged and stared at the trouble brewing in the park.

He hesitated at that. “They’re shooting at each other already?”

“Yeah man, they’re shooting. This is the States, what’d you expect?” I shrugged again.

“Shit, man. Sorry. Just on edge. Don’t get yourself shot over bullshit. Just . . . go lock up the office and the entrance gate. Don’t let anyone else in.”

His anger had died out, I was pretty sure he could hear the gunfire in the background of my call. The owner of the campground lived close by, in a McMansion down the road.

It was gross.

I had to drive by it on my way into town anytime I needed groceries. The hideous thing stood by itself at the edge of the block. Like an evil looming castle to try and sneak past. Had to look at his brand-new Tesla in the driveway while remembering he had told me there was no money in the budget for more dog poo bags for the campground too.

“I . . . alright Mr. Sada. I’ll go lock up. Stay safe.” With that, he hung up on me and I slipped the phone back into my pocket. At least those still worked, and there was no point trying to sell it to BuyMort anyway. Everyone carried a phone. I’m sure that had been done to death.

I hefted my little sawed-off Mossberg and started walking toward the main gate. My campsite was near the back of the campground and had its own exit road with an iron bar gate. It was the dirt road to town, and nobody used it but me and Mr. Sada.

But the front entrance was a different story. That had a single lane road with a large wrought iron gate set in brackets. It was pretty secure against vehicles. The office kept all our cash and records. I assume Mr. Sada hadn’t realized it was all worthless, but it would be very little work to make sure it was closed.

Or so I thought.