---

The Concept Shoppe: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy

By Andrew Dana Hudson

“This place is trash, garbágio, blechalicious,” Rocky Cornelius said appreciatively. “All we gotta do is, as they say, sublevel the vibe.”

“Really? You think so?” The greengrocer, Franklyn, wrung his hands—still caked with black soil from showing her the beet rows in aisle five—a sure sign that Rocky’s negging, one of the most reliable techniques in her consultant toolbox, was working.

They stood in the canned goods section of Primal, soon to be Westwood’s newest and hippest boutique bodega slash survival goods retailer. The paper labels on the tins had been artfully patinated by some design school dropout, ripped and torn to leave just a slash of Roma tomato picture here, a glimpse of fava bean logo there. The shelves looked half-caved in, but were in fact quite secure, welded into place at zig-zag angles. Simulated California sun streamed, dappled, through an ivy-frosted, hole-in-the-roof-shaped skylight.

The idea of this ‘concept shoppe’ was to make shoppers feel like they were looting an abandoned store in a post-apocalyptic, collapseporn paradise. Rocky quite liked the idea. No one wanted to be a “consumer” these days. People—especially Californians, who had lately been through so much—wanted to think of themselves as “survivors,” disaster-hardened protagonists in a return-to-their-roots story of rebuilding and social rejuvenation. It’s just that, if they could afford one of the new quake-proof condos springing up in Westwood, they wanted to do so without having to worry about tetanus, botulism, scurvy, or gluten.

“Let me ask you this,” Rocky said. “What’s the real reason to shop at a joint like this? Is it the, hm, $32 jars of pickles?”

“It’s the experience,” Franklyn said earnestly.

“Wrong, it’s the experience of the experience. If I just wanted an experience, I could put on a headset and sweet talk an algo. Hell, I could go to the movies! ‘Experience’ died when UX designers sleeked up every piece of vaporware and most of the coffee shops. What matters now is meta-experience. Experience squared. That is, how other people experience our experience, you get me?”

Her client nodded in vigorous, lying agreement.

“What I’m saying is, you need more meet-cutes,” Rocky said.

“Oh!” The greengrocer looked around at his establishment, un-abuzz with quiet non-chatter as first-time shoppers examined stacks of artisanally tanned hides and brushed spray-on dust off rebooted versions of classic breakfast cereals. The soft-launch had attracted the expected crowd of foodies, culture critics, crunchy fitfluencers, and neighborhood busybodies. Turnout was decent. Shoppers gave each other polite smiles as they picked their way around the live vegetable beds growing down the center of each aisle. A few held murmured conversations with their earbuds. No one was chatting anyone up.

“I suppose we could serve drinks at the grand opening,” Franklyn allowed. “But our previous brand coach said we should be trying to capitalize on the whole New Solitude—”

“Let me stop you right there,” Rocky said. Never let a client compliment the competition. “New Solitude is performed yearning for an imagined pandemic-era domesticity. Basically voluntary, valorized agoraphobia. What you’re doing here is more like…microdosing post-Hobbesian ennui. It’s solastalgic in approach, not nostalgic. Which means—and sorry for going over pretty rudimentary stuff here—we have to heighten the feeling that permacrisis could be interrupted by the transcendent quotidian, not the other way around, capiche?”

Rocky checked the time: her intervention would be arriving in a few minutes. She needed to close and get buy-in. Redoubling her knowing smile, she gave an expansive wave at the VC-funded foodstuffs, the well-hidden ambient checkout cameras, and the shatterglass storefront windows, postered with ambiguous-but-menacing hazard symbols.

“This place gives great ‘montage of life after The Event.’ But I think it can be more. Do you want to be just the montage? Or do you want to be the Call to Adventure?”

Taking her client by the arm, Rocky crouched and moved with rabbit-like stealth to a corner where they could peer between vintage pup tents at Primal’s overgrown front entrance.

“If you were the last man in Greater Los Angeles, coming in here to stock up on tinned fish to warm over your USD-fueled cookfire, what, in your heart of hearts, would actually make a visit to this establishment really special? Food? You’re hardly starving because, well, starving isn’t cool. An off-brand comic book from your childhood? That’s a collectible, barely even a side quest. Shotgun ammo? Puh-leeze. What you truly desire is for some hot, young-at-heart thing of your preferred gender presentation to walk through that door and lay wary eyes on you across the aisles.”

“What about bandits?” Franklyn asked. “And cannibals?” Clearly he had given some thought to the larger narrative universe in which Primal operated.

Rocky nodded. “Sure, that’s a concern. But everyone knows bandits and cannibals travel in packs. I’m talking about a loner, just like you. Even numbers, which means a default detente. There’s a tension, sure, even a danger, but that’s sexy. And you gotta think that she-he-they wants what you want, thanks to The Event being that great equalizer man had foolishly craved for so long.”

The client took this in, hands reaching out automatically to unstraighten the bundles of emergency flares on the shelf in front of him. He gazed into the middle distance. Rocky could tell that she was inches away from aligning their visions.

“I see what you’re getting at,” Franklyn mused. “Shopping today is too ‘get in, get out.’ Rushed, anxious, fear of judgment. The shame of spending money to eat. But after The Event we’ll have all the time in the world. Shame is of the past. Primal should be a place where you can let your guard down.”

Rocky beamed, and switched from negging to leading from behind. “I think you’re really onto something. The question is, how do we make Primal a venue for post-society socializing?”

She let the client sweat this question for a minute while she checked the position of her nemesis-cum-assistant Amherst, who was doing remote support for her operation.

“We could put in a juice bar, over by the unstructured beehive,” the greengrocer tried. “Maybe encourage in-aisle snacking?”

Time to rip the bandaid off.

“I love that,” Rocky said, “but I’ve planned something a little more direct.” She put a finger to her earbud.

“Oh yes,” Amherst replied, perched-in-recon atop a nearby cell tower, no doubt warming himself against the gusty day with his signature black cashmere scarf and a thermos of dalgona decaf. “There looks to be quite a lively swarm today. I’d get out of the way, if you don’t want to be swept off your feet.”

Elsewhere, wind turbines churned electrons into gridlines, into vast server farms containing the totality of thirty years of dating app data mining—and Amherst’s prompt injection. The Large Matchmaking Models that guided the love lives of at least two million Angelenos turned their wizened eyes on Primal.

After a decade of AI products crashing spectacularly into and out of one sector after another, the dwindling tech firms finally made it to the Plateau of Productivity with the yentabots. Turned out, while they would sneer at mediocre generated art and pick apart uninspired chatbot prose, there was one area of human life where people were perfectly happy for an AI to give them B+ more of the same: romance.

To spice up the otherwise banal process of being set up with the people one was statistically likely to tolerate, many chose to play cat-and-mouse with Cupid, taking their matches in the form of cryptic, conspiratorial yentabot whispers about where and how one might meet one’s mate. Amherst’s nudge to that system had been only mildly invasive, as orchestrated grocery store meet-cutes were a decades old tradition in SoCal.

“Yentabots?” The greengrocer looked a bit alarmed.

“That’s right!” Rocky began to make for the exit, her client falling in behind. “What kind of creative consultants would we be if we didn’t have ins with a few influential computationals? Half an hour ago, several dozen nearby pronoiacs were given the very intense suggestion that they might bump into The One at the soft launch of your establishment!”

“And this will, er, sublevel the vibe?”

“Sir, this will sublevel the vibe to extinction.”

No sooner had they reached the parking lot than the first of the hopeful singles arrived. He was booth-tan and bowflex-strong, but also, by his garb, a post-apocalyptic cosdater in full, raggedy bunkersona. He looked right out of one of those post-Biggie relief spots, as though he’d just been pulling Grandma out of church rubble wearing a “Cali Strong” hardhat. But, also, Rocky was pretty sure she’d seen him in a moisturizer ad. He was, in other words, the ideal Primal customer.

The single gave Rocky a slightly lascivious once-over, decided she wasn’t his soulmate, and entered the grocery. He immediately fell into character, adding a traumatized shuffle to his prowl as he looked for the match he’d been promised.

More singles soon followed, a steady stream of them. Many had dogs, that classic street-meet icebreaker, now more commendable than ever, what with the swath of pets left orphaned by the past year’s quakes, fires, storms, floods, and attendant troubles. Some singles looked equally the part as the first guy, while others wore office clothes, beach clothes, paint-daubed muralist clothes. (There were a great many memorial murals going up on the streets of Westwood these days.) Soon the concept shoppe was packed and chattering, as lonelyhearts—as well as the original batch of soft launch shoppers—mixed, mingled, and So-Where-Were-You-That-Day?-ed their way toward grocery aisle intimacy.

“Well, would you look at that,” her client breathed. Franklyn’s face was filled with soft-lit longing. Rocky could tell that they had skipped ahead to a profound moment in the man’s internal narrative. She decided to capitalize on it.

“Yes, they’re beautiful, aren’t they?” The crowd of flirting shoppers were indeed an attractive bunch, in the way that only unattached and lightly employed Angelenos could be. “My assistant tells me half of them wandered down from the UCLA Displaced Persons Encampment. Truly we Californians are always, each of us, year after year, building our own personal paradises in hell.”

Rocky was born in Corpus Christi and raised everywhere, but for her West Coast clients she made sure she was always Californian-presenting.

“That’s right. That’s so right,” Franklyn said, eyes glistening. Then he shook himself and returned to fretting. “What happens when it…wears off? My accountant warned me not to get hooked on any kinda promotional maintenance scheme. Said those bots can be right extortive.”

“Don’t worry, this is just to prime the ol’ love pump. From here, it’s a matter of juicing the reputational ripples and getting the right talent agency to handle hiring, which of course I can help you with, given the right retainer, and—”

But Rocky’s closing pitch was cut off by a screech of tires and a battle cry whoop. A trio of light tactical pickups rolled into Primal’s small parking lot, coming from the direction of the ruined and lawless 405.

“Goodness fucking gracious,” Rocky said, while next to her the greengrocer went bug-eyed and shouted, “Technicals!”

Franklyn was right: the older model electric Toyota Hiluxes (two ‘34s and a ‘35, if Rocky clocked it right) had clearly been modified for skirmishing by an irregular force. They had bouncy, uncanny four-wheel steering and were black with poorly applied photovoltaic paint. Two of the truck beds featured swivel-mounted, police-issue LRAD sonic cannons—actually looted, no doubt, as opposed to performatively looted, as goods from Primal were.

Riding in the cabs, manning the cannons, and piled into the back of the third technical were about a dozen toughs, all guys, all sunglasses-wrapped and bandit-masked. Most wore skin-patterned, bristly urban camo designed to spoof gait analysis. Rifles fabbed from plastic and treated timber were held in their laps or slung over their backs. Capable of firing only crumbly, cork-based, compostable bullets, these weren’t the scariest armaments in the world; but, as Rocky knew from experience, they hurt, and worse than rubber. As with the sound cannon, crowd control weapons could be nasty if you found yourself part of the crowd.

The technicals pulled up to Primal’s modest row of chargeports. One of these was already occupied by an adorable minicar one-seater, but—and this really set the tone for Rocky as much as the guns—the intimidating vehicles had no qualms about double-parking the poor tyke in. With militia discipline, the men dismounted. They plugged their trucks into the ports and roughly unplugged the minicar. Rocky and Franklyn took this opportunity to beat it back inside the store.

“Amherst, dearest,” Rocky whispered sternly to her comms, taking cover again behind the tents, “care to explain why a raiding party of canyon roughnecks is here crashing my soft launch?”

To Amherst’s credit, he didn’t make excuses or claim coincidence, which would have been easy and understandable.

“Boss, I do think there’s a chance we might not be the only ones messing about with these yentabots. Possibly they’ve jailbroken an LMM and convinced it to match them to their desire—high quality camping gear and foodstuffs with a durable shelf life. And, of course, we juiced the model to notice Primal.”

“Damn grocery gigs!” Rocky said. “Cursed. Every time. Cursed!”

This was true, as they both knew well. Amherst had scored his job as Rocky’s protégé after a rough-and-tumble territorial dispute at an Illinois Costco.

Rocky had not come to this particular consultancy dressed for serious combat. She had a sheathed push knife on her keychain, and her jeans and blouse were both made of carbon-weave fabrics that would hold back stray rounds of most low caliber biodegradable ammunition. But that was it. Her sleek, grayscale outfit had no silhouette breaks for target scattering, no sewn-in armor plates, nada. Her handbag was discotech-small and her shoes wobbly stilettos. She surreptitiously stepped out of the latter as the raiders approached.

One of the toughs strolled up to Primal’s entrance and tried the doors, which Franklyn had locked behind them. Rocky corrected her previous assessment: under the bulky fleshtigues, this figure definitely leaned more femme. The bandit doffed her sunglasses and cupped her hands to peer through the glass. Then, with a shrug, she stepped back, shouldered her rifle, and emptied half a clip into the already artfully shattered storefront windows.

Mustard-colored puffs of seedshot burst against the glass, which gave way like a sheet of crumbly cake. Add a little unlikely LA rain and bulletgrass would be sprouting up in thick, feathery clumps. Which, Rocky thought, might not be a bad look for Primal, adding a little contemporary authenticity: selling this apocalypse, not just any apocalypse. Assuming, of course, that the raiders didn’t mix their ammo with something nasty, like ragweed or goldenrod or poison oak.

Around her there were gasps and screams and canine yelps. In their canoodling, the shoppers had been oblivious to the arrival of the bandits. Now they raised their heads as one, a herd of antelope startled at the watering hole.

As the gunfire clatter died away, the shooter stepped carefully through the broken window and spoke, projecting with acting-class confidence through her balaclava.

“Hey everyone, happy Sunday! I’m Ryder, she/they, and we are the MountainGate Country Club Autonomous Recovery Collective. As you know, recent tours by everyone’s favorite rock band, Biggie and the Storms, have brought hard times on many a Californian. The feds aren’t doing shit. The damn acting governor sure as heck isn’t doing shit. It’s been a year, and the canyons are still cut off, and we’ve taken in a lot of hungry mouths. So we’re out here today collecting mandatory donations. Cash, phones, jewelry, pharmaceuticals, products from this fine establishment. Whatever you have, we’ll take it. Remember, folks, every little bit helps!”

Rocky had heard of these notorious highwaymen. After The Big One and an insult-to-injury typhoon season, they’d terrorized Bel-Air and occupied The Getty for weeks. Their ransoming of Caltrans damage assessment teams was a big part of why Governor Eilish had chosen to abandon the 405 and pursue the “Decade of SuperTrains” boondoggle that had cost her her career. They must be pretty emboldened if they were now making forays south of Wilshire Boulevard—or pretty desperate.

“I gotta call the cops,” said Franklyn, as the irregulars gathered behind Ryder and shook open MountainGate-branded tote bags. “Or FEMA? The International Guard?”

Rocky grabbed his arm before he could touch his earbud. “You’ll do no such thing. Look.”

She pointed down the aisle at several pairs of soft launch attendees, half-crouched, peering through the shelving. They had all, in that moment of sudden adrenaline, clutched hands and pressed their bodies against each other, each couple the perfect box cover silhouette of action movie leads thrown into danger. Everyone not in the hospital tonight would surely be getting laid.

And more importantly, their free hands were reaching for improvised weapons—faux-rusted soup cans and bowie-styled breadknives, jars of Central Valley cherry preserves and heavy, ruggedized flashlights. The checkout cameras were still rolling, and the fine print on the entrance had a clear You Break It, You Buy It clause. If it came to a food fight, Primal would make bank.

“Don’t you see?” Rocky hissed. “This is your perfect brand debut! What better way to give your customers the experience you’re selling than to have them fight off real marauders?”

Now that she was saying it, Rocky wished the whole thing had been her idea. She could charge way more for such a custom, high production value marketing intervention. And think of the case study this would make on her CV! Maybe, just maybe, there was still time to take ownership over this new concept descending on the concept shoppe.

“But—” Franklyn began, but Rocky slapped him hard across his blond-bearded face.

“Snap into it!” she said. “You wanted The Event? There is no single The Event. Catastrophe isn’t evenly distributed and never will be. Some folks will get knocked back to the Stone Age, while others will keep on as sales reps and foot models and costume designers. Some will go greengrocer and others will go bandit. This here is your The Event! So get to it!”

It was a risky play, riskier than the minor negging she’d deployed not twenty minutes earlier, but it did the trick. Franklyn nodded, eyes suddenly wild, seeing not just his threatened store but the whole narrative he’d constructed around it.

Hands shaking but movements wax-on sure, he grabbed a bundle of emergency flares from the shelf in front of them, ripped one out, twisted off the strike cap, and smacked it against the business end with a gritty CLACK. Fiery red light erupted from the flare, which he thrust up into the air above the shelves. Even with the midday SoCal sun streaming through the broken windows, the burning beacon turned everyone’s eyes their way.

“Attention Primal shoppers!” he bellowed over the hiss of his torch. “Attack!”

And they did, rising up with a desperate, eager—indeed, primal—energy. It was, Rocky thought, a long pent-up release. The problem with modern day disasters was that, for every thousand or ten thousand who experienced direct material suffering, millions more meta-experienced the crisis through screens, feeds, casts, celebrity fundraisers, and discourse. That psychic damage accrued like a gritty, hard water crust. Even the very comfortable now believed that one day they’d be the ones displaced, crushed, abandoned, flooded, burned out, or dragged down into that big sinkhole that had swallowed Miracle Mile.

In fact, the more comfortable they were, the more they felt like victims-in-waiting. After many months of looking over one’s shoulder for exactly this kind of brazen banditry, it was a relief to face it head on, to catch that nasty virus going around and live to tell the tale. That relief could be a paralyzing balm, which Ryder was probably counting on, but today it wasn’t. Today many of those who happened to be at Primal also happened to have fresh, hot sexual prospects to impress.

The shoppers let fly with whatever was at hand: vintage cans of diced tomatoes, but also heirloom tomatoes picked right off the in-aisle vines. They sicced their dogs on the marauders, a few of which actually bounded forward, snapping at shins. Smacked and splattered, the startled MountainGate irregulars fell back. Shots flashed out of their plastic rifles, but even dressed up as ruins, industrial-strength grocery shelving made great cover. Bioammo exploded into yellow starbursts, filling the air with dust and pollen. Sensing weakness, and their own superior numbers, the shoppers charged.

The bandits, however, were no pushovers. They might not have expected such strutting resistance, but they hadn’t survived a year of crackdowns by state troopers, FEMA-backed mercs, and Mother Nature herself by being disorganized. As Ryder retreated, last, out of the store, she raised one fist and made a series of deft commando hand signs. Immediately the irregulars manning the cannon-trucks jumped into action, spinning the sonic weapons around on their turrets and pointing them at the concept shoppe.

All of a sudden Rocky had a migraine, and her body was giving serious consideration to the virtues of throwing up. Next she noticed the pain, and her addled brain slowly, distantly connected that pain to the sound bombarding her body. She fell to the ground in the fetal position, trying to cover her skull.

Then the noise ceased, or at least the sound cannon did. The screams—including, Rocky realized, the one coming from her own vocal cords—took another second to die down. She pushed weakly up to her hands and knees and saw that the rest of the shoppers had been similarly affected. The dogs were whimpering in agony. A few patrons had even lost their brunch. Franklyn lay prone by the entrance, his flare spitting wetly in a smoothie-green pool by his beard. The whole scene was decidedly not sexy.

Now, Rocky had been in worse scrapes in her years as a top-shelf creative consultant. She’d been in Tampa when the whole FloodCoin scene went to hell. She’d been a fucking uncool hunter, stalking the most backwater sales trends in the Midwest, and hadn’t that been a rough-and-tumble way to make a living? But even by Rocky’s standards, this situation was getting out of hand. She might have permanent hearing loss, and, worse, she’d just given her client advice that was quickly looking tactically unsound. If she didn’t do something, and fast, the whole soft launch would be ruined.

“Okay, wow,” Ryder said, shouting to be heard over the ringing in their ears. “I think the cameras will show that you guys rushed us first. This is exactly the kind of bias, discrimination, lawless aggression and, let’s be real, disregard for common decency that our collective has been struggling against all year. If we believed in the carceral state, you bet we’d be pressing charges.”

Rocky had to hand it to Ryder: that was some grade-A gaslighting. She wondered if Ryder had been a fellow consultant before Biggie, and if, perchance, they might have crossed paths at some networking happy hour or TV premiere.

Which gave Rocky an idea.

Limbs still shaking from the debilitating sonic attack, she forced herself to scuttle down the aisle, head bent low, palms pressing into rich soil. Bear walking had been a major micro-trend while she’d been in business school. At a vine-shrouded, “Staff Only” exit, she glanced back. Franklyn had staggered heroically to his feet and had begun to make a speech of grim, heartfelt defiance. This was good, Rocky decided. Get Ryder acquainted with Primal’s broad narrative appeal. She pushed through the swinging doors.

In the back of the concept shoppe, the collapse-porn illusion had been mostly abandoned, probably for OSHA-related reasons. More nebulous-but-insistent hazard signs had been put up, to warn away curious explorers. The air smelled of lemongrass disinfectant.

“Amherst,” Rocky said hoarsely, hoping her phone still worked, “What’s the fastest back way out to the parking lot?”

“The loading dock is to your right, but the window in the manager’s office might be quicker,” her assistant replied. “Rocky, are you quite sure you don’t want me to call in the authorities? That LRAD model is banned in the EAU, and scuttlebutt says this Ryder character is a real piece of work.”

“Kid, if you’re going to make it in this business, you can’t let a little sonic strafing get in the way of helping a client unlock their full potential. As for Ryder, you heard that vocal training. No way was this her intended career path. She’s probably looking for an opportunity to jump ship.”

“What’s your pitch?”

“Just the secret desire of all Angelenos. A chance to make it in showbiz.”

Franklyn’s office was wall-to-wall video game concept art and gloomy photography of Chernobyl, Cyprus, Fort Worth, and other sad, abandoned places. On his desk sat a dozen half-painted zombie miniatures and an award from the Art Directors Guild. Rocky’d had no idea the greengrocer was so accomplished! She grabbed the chunky glass award and used it to bash out the window.

By the time Rocky made it back around to the parking lot, the battle for Primal had escalated to a pitched melee. The Primal forces, including a number of disoriented but enthusiastic dogs, had made another charge. This time they’d gotten around the sonic weapons and partially disabled them with improvised missiles. One cannon still let out sputtering bursts of hell-sound, but the other was bricked. A harpoon—where’d that come from?—was lodged deep in the speaker’s delicate, boxy bulk.

Emboldened, the shoppers were swarming the three trucks, where most of the MountainGate forces had retreated, claiming the high ground. Rifle fire held off the bloodthirsty Primals and provided cover for a trio of scouts, who had dashed, harried by a pack of snarling chihuahuas, into the store to fill their tote bags. The air was thick with the earthy smell of seedshot. Franklyn, shirt ripped, dueled a machete-armed bandit with a two-by-four.

Both sides had taken losses. A handful of injured shoppers were being dragged to the relative safety of the produce aisle, while two of the MountainGate irregulars had been laid out on the pavement by well-aimed jars to the head. The glass jars hadn’t even broken. They sat pristine beside their victims, like little round Davids triumphant over Goliath. That was the kind of well-crafted packaging you got when you paid $32 for pickles, Rocky thought.

The consultant found Ryder at the edge of the parking lot, in the narrow shade of a palm tree well beyond the fray, taking pot-shots with her rifle into the scrum. She’d rolled her balaclava half-way up and was puffing with pretty lips on a stubby vape.

“Bored already?” Rocky asked. Ryder turned, leveled her gun on Rocky’s midsection, and fired.

There was nothing quite like taking a gunshot in the guts to make a lady rethink her life choices. Rocky went down. The wind went out of her. Her back slammed painfully against the xeriscaping by the curb. Gasping for breath, she pawed at her blouse, checking for blood. Her fingers found cork crumbs and possibly two broken ribs, but no rip in the fabric, no growing wetness. She’d have a bad bruise, and a hell of a drycleaning bill, but she’d live.

“Not bored, just waiting for the boys to blow off steam,” Ryder said, swiveling the muzzle of the plastic rifle to point down at Rocky’s nose. “When you run an egalitarian outfit like ours, you learn how important it is to find outlets for the impulses that lead to toxic masculinity.”

Rocky raised her hands in surrender and unsteadily got to her feet. Ryder didn’t stop her, but gave a stern wag of the finger, the universal sign for “no funny business.”

“Outlets like getting roughed up by a crowd of angry Angelenos?” Rocky said. It was brash talk given her own helpless state, but she had to find out the bandit’s read on the situation.

Ryder shrugged. “Your guys are going down faster than our guys. Pretty soon that crowd will scatter, and we’ll take our loot home. What’s it to you, anyway? You an investor in this dump?”

She was right, Rocky saw. The ranks of the Primal combatants were thinning. She needed to close, and soon. Moving slowly, keeping her hands in sight, Rocky popped open her clutch and extracted her business card. She lifted it so Ryder could read the exquisite hyper-serif font.

“Tell me,” Rocky said. “What’s your endgame for this whole bandit schtick? Hide in the canyons forever? Keep raiding off the 405 until you’ve got enough ‘loot’ to live in low-grade luxury? Steal a yacht and sail off into the sunset?”

Ryder’s eyes narrowed. “Something like that.”

“It’ll never happen. The state will get its act together and bring the hammer down. You need an exit plan. A way to go legit without losing the rep you’ve built.”

“Oh yeah? And how do we do that?”

Rocky spread her raised hands like she was opening the gates of Eden.

“Santa Barbara!”

“Pardon?”

“After Biggie, all the major studios moved up the coast. They’re sitting on shitloads of capital from insurance payouts, but their project schedules are all shot and their top talent is in the wind. Conditions are perfect for a classic pivot to reality.”

The gun didn’t waver, but under her eye-watering fleshtigues, the young bandit’s body language was no longer bored.

“Reality? Like cooking contests and game shows and shit?”

“More like a riveting serialized docudrama featuring your charismatic band of outlaws! Embed footage of your daily exploits, cut with interviews about how you endured the wrath of Biggie, how you forged something new and liberatory in the aftermath, how the government wants to crush your pirate truth. Survival, not Survivor, you get me?”

Behind them the sonic cannon barked, and another shopper went down. Franklyn was on his back, grappling with a bandit, straining to hold back the machete as it inched toward his face. Ryder ignored it all, suckling on her vape, its little drag-light glowing thoughtfully.

“You could make that happen, huh? Miz,” her eyes flicked to Rocky’s card, “Cornelius.”

“Sure, I know people. I can get meetings. But even if I didn’t, we could cold call and this would still be a slam dunk. Just look at this place.” Rocky gestured at the concept shoppe. “You could have knocked over a Whole Foods, but I think you came here because it spoke to you. It speaks to all of us, to something rattled in our collective spirit. Californians want their stories told! Raw, unfiltered, complicated stories about the tough choices and moral gray zones we’ve all faced since Biggie. You’re perfectly poised to catch that wave. With the right guidance, of course.”

It was tricky, pumping up a potential client. She didn’t want Ryder to get too big for her britches, start thinking she could make it just fine on her own, without cutting Rocky her fee. But the situation was dire, and Rocky had no time to run up a psych profile, A/B test negotiation tactics with a mimicbot. She just stared Ryder down and waited for the hunger to growl.

“And what do you want?” Ryder asked finally. Her voice was still wary.

“Eventually? Fifteen percent and a producer credit. Right now? Take a dive. Hightail it home. But, you know, make it look good, leave a truck or two. A couple technicals is nothing compared to what you can buy if we land a staggered Sunday release. Make those shoppers feel like they turned the tide at the last moment. Show me you can put on a show.”

Rocky held out her business card. There was a long moment when the consultant was sure all she was going to get for her trouble was another compostable round in the chest.

“You know, I was at an audition when Biggie hit,” Ryder said, almost wistful. “I remember the part, ‘Marauder Number Three.’ I was crushing it, too. Then the building started shaking like the whole world was coming apart. The studio roof collapsed. The casting team died instantly, but I threw myself under the catering table. That’s what saved me. It took me three days to dig my way out, surviving off bottled water and shrink-wrapped cheese plates. No one helped me. When I finally saw the sun, I swore I’d never audition again. No more flirting with the director, no more ass kissing agents, no more degrading myself for two-line roles. I’d take what I wanted, because life’s too short to beg.”

“I hear you, kid,” Rocky said. “But you’re not begging. This part’s yours for the taking.”

Ryder lowered her gun and pulled off her balaclava. She shook out her hair, short and sun damaged. Her eyes were red, and she was badly in need of a facial. But all that roughness only amplified her perfectly symmetrical features, her expressive cheekbones and strong-but-delicate nose. Holy shit, Rocky thought, as Ryder reached out and took her card. She’s going to be a star.

Turning back to the battle, Ryder whispered into her comms. A few moments later the irregulars started giving up ground. They stumbled, fumbled their weapons. Their shots went stormtrooper wild. It was hard to tell under the masks, but Rocky suspected Ryder wasn’t the only bandit with acting chops. They weren’t quite the Washington Generals setting up the Harlem Globetrotters, but with a little practice they might come close.

Sensing the narrative swing his way, Franklyn shoved aside his suddenly fatigued foe, wrenched the machete out of his two-by-four, and vaulted onto a technical. With a primal howl, the greengrocer swung the machete at the turret, decapitating the sonic cannon like he was lopping off a head of broccoli.

The Primals hooted and barked and rushed forward, climbing onto the other turret truck to rip down the already-disabled LRAD. The irregulars hauled their wounded into the remaining pickup and backed out of the parking lot, charge cable trailing pathetically.

“Call me!” Rocky yelled to Ryder, as the bandit hopped onto the technical’s running bar. “We’ll do lunch next week!”

When the MountainGate vehicle was out of sight, the crowd of Primal shoppers let out a jubilant cheer. There followed much hugging and hand shaking and dog petting, and even more making out. Cans of imperial kombucha and bottles of Napa bubbly were brought out of the cooler section. Toasts were made. Rides to hospitals and veterinary clinics were arranged, but most toughed it out, wearing their cuts and gashes as post-apocalyptic badges of honor. Primal’s soft launch was a triumphant success.

Amherst arrived—never one to miss a party—and the two consultants indulged in a bit of well-deserved, perks-of-the-job celebration. When five o’clock hit, and the soft launch officially ended, the crowd dispersed, off to happy hour drinks and dinner dates. Rocky found Franklyn staring dazedly at the ruins of his already pre-ruined store.

“You were magnificent,” Rocky said, sitting down beside him gingerly, her ribs throbbing. “If that doesn’t get us a write-up in L.A. Mag, I don’t know what will.”

“You really think so?” The greengrocer, crashing down from his high, wrung his blood-smeared hands.

“Absolutely! It was crude and a bit improvisational—all opening nights are—but I think we nailed the narrative highlights. I’ll get a script doctor to take a look at the security footage and punch up the dialogue. We’ll be ready for next time.”

“Next time?” Franklyn was alarmed.

“Of course! What you delivered today was a genuine, authentic experience. Better than meta-experience, to be honest. People are going to want more. Hopefully we can lock MountainGate in for a full season of raids before one of the majors snaps them up.”

Rocky declined to mention her burgeoning conflict of interest on this. Instead she got up and brushed bullet-seed off her jeans.

“I’ll invoice you,” she told the greengrocer. Then she turned to her assistant. “Come on, Amherst. We’ve got locations to scout.”

And Rocky walked out of the concept shoppe and headed for Santa Barbara.