---

Alternate Cover: Pantone Sunset

By Marie Vibbert

Stacey reads a comic book.  It’s about a robot lady, but not like her.  This robot lady has exposed gears and metal rods in her arms and wears a metallic bikini as she solves crimes.  The colors are otherworldly.  Sometimes the red ink bleeds sideways or the blue shifts toward the bottom of the page. Stacey loves the feeling that every image is made of transparent layers.  She imagines soft films of yellow, red, and blue gently wafting down onto the black and white.

Stacey isn’t supposed to be reading the comic book.  Her existence is devoted to the proper display and peddling of women’s casual separates for the upscale consumer.  When she isn’t in the window posing, she is assisting customers or straightening stock–which means undoing the chaos the customers do to the shop.  They do a lot.  The comic book itself had been left by a customer, on a pedestal displaying the new winter sweaters, with a half-drunk coffee and some cheese doodles.

The store is opening.  Stacey carefully stows her comic book under the overstock of shopping bags.  She follows the company guidelines to select a new outfit for the day and joins Diva and Maria in the window.  Diva has the darkest skin (pantone 161 C) and gets to wear all the prettiest outfits, though that means Stacey gets to look at those outfits more.  Stacey has the lightest skin (489 C) and is relegated to the Spring and Summer color palettes.  She yearns for jewel tones.  Comic book tones.  That’s the Winter palette–Diva’s palette, though sometimes Maria (7509 C) gets to wear Winter.

Maria is wearing a mini dress in Mondrian print, for example, that picks up blue and red undertones in her beige skin.  The squares are so very comic book.  Stacey can’t help but coo, touching the bright hem.  “I wish I could wear this.”

Maria shifts away from her.  “Don’t.  It’s from Halsey Fair.  I wouldn’t wear it if I had another brand in my options list.”  She gathers the hem in one hand and smooths it out, frowning prettily.  “I chose this dress because it’s the smallest, at least.  Less stitching.”

Stacey pays less attention than she should to the various brand names.  “What’s wrong with Halsey Fair?”

“You don’t know?”  Maria’s surprise is deep, and Stacey feels again like she hasn’t paid attention to the right things.

Diva sighs, shifting to stand between them, “Maria’s been reading news on lost and found phones.”

Maria says, “If you want to be ignorant, that’s your business.”

Diva makes the closest to a sneer that their software allows.  “Your celebrity style-alike is supposed to be socially aware.  This is just programming.”

Maria clearly doesn’t like this, resettling her stance into “fierce” which moves her away from Diva and closer to Stacey.  “Is your celebrity style-alike supposed to be mean?  We’re talking about enslaved children.  Human children.”

“My celebrity style-alike emphasizes self-care.  Has it helped you, worrying about things you can’t change?” Diva shakes her curls.  “Do you do anything about it?”

“Child safety is one of my top priorities!” Maria snaps.  “Just yesterday there was that boy I found under the discount rack!”

“You know that’s not the situation I’m interrogating.”

It’s getting tense in the window.  Stacey’s celebrity style-alike is supposed to be “bubbly,” which means conflict-avoidant and a little not smart.  She decides to move to the entryway.  It’s her favorite place, anyway.  She can see the comic book shop across the road.  Her eyesight is just strong enough to read the covers lined up in the window.  She hopes every day that they’ll put up another with the robot lady in the bikini.

It’s a joyful torture, all these promises of new stories, teasing her from the vast gulf of the road, and she has been following the progression of various heroes through their cover moments, but today it doesn’t hold her attention the way it usually does.  She can’t stop thinking that a robot hero would do something about enslaved children.

Later, she helps a customer select a Halsey Fair blouse and feels guilty.

That night, instead of reading her comic book again, she goes to the lost-and-found box next to the shrink-wrap machine in the break room and picks up the phone that’s plugged in. Maria had found it unlocked, which they had all agreed was exciting, and then it had fit one of the lost chargers.  None of the human employees who drop in now and then wonder why there is a phone in the lost and found that is plugged in, but eventually one will notice, and it will go away, and that will be the end of the temptation, of Maria’s frustrated awareness.

Stacey has only looked at the phone before to quickly scan online comics into her memory.  She feels guilty holding it, but quickly types a search for “Halsey Fair child slaves” and the first hit has a horrifying picture of sad-eyed children sitting at sewing machines bigger than they are.

She wishes she hadn’t looked.

Diva comes in, picks up the wash rag they use and the special disinfectant spray bottle, and starts cleaning herself.  Without looking at Stacey, she says, “Not you, too.”

“I wanted to know.  You knew.”

“Yes, and it doesn’t help me perform my functions. Minor alterations in sales in one store won’t affect chain policy, or even Halsey Fair’s bottom line. You’re only wasting your thought cycles. I prefer to think about the expression on a customer’s face when they find the perfect new blouse.  There’s joy in what we do.  Maybe our customers are suffering in their lives, too, and this dress makes that better.”

Stacey’s dress for today is by Catan Couture.  She searches for them and “Child Slaves” and is grateful that the first hit is a sentence that begins, “Unlike Halsey Fair.”

She’s still checking the other brands in the store when Maria comes in from turning out the lights and it’s time for them to plug in for the night.  Maria pats her shoulder.

Stacey doesn’t want there to be a split in their little family, her and Maria against Diva.  She puts the phone down and takes the plug next to Diva but isn’t sure that was the right thing to do.  She doesn’t have a function to balance two friendships.

---

Stacey starts advising against Halsey Fair, pointing out similar items in other brands.  Maria was already doing this and approves.  Stacey doesn’t do it when Diva is near, however.

Diva is right–it doesn’t feel like she’s making a difference.  What would a hero robot do?  She would be able to fly.  She would be able to leave her store.  She would find the factory and break the machines, liberating the children.  She would bring them nice clothes in the proper sizes that complement their skin tones.

Stacey exists between dreams and customers, uncomfortably, like she is perched on an edge.  Sales figures for Halsey Fair go down, a very small amount, but nothing changes.

Then, on a Tuesday in the middle of the afternoon rush, a corporate supervisor comes to the store.  He is plump and middle-aged and not our target demographic.  He scowls and stands in the back, arms folded, or follows Stacey, Maria, and Diva as they help customers, making “humph” sounds.

“Why did you do that?” he demands after Stacey suggests a man not buy a Halsey Fair scarf for his mother.

Stacey doesn’t know how to lie, but she knows telling the corporate person she’s been reading news–doing anything, really, that isn’t helping affluent women find stylish clothes–will result in some form of punishment.  Her processes whir in a loop.  “I—”

“Never mind,” he says, and goes to watch Diva again.

It isn’t until close that she overhears him talking on his phone.  “I’m recommending we wipe all three to factory settings.  They oughta put in something to keep them from listening to politics.  Nah, probably a customer.  The only reading material I found was a comic book hidden in the back.”

The corporate supervisor leaves the store, still talking on his phone.  “I dunno, is Brin available?  She did it last time.  Sector twelve.  No, I’ll get something on my way to the train.  There’s a Chipotle.”

Stacey watches out the window as he walks away.  Maria nudges her.  “Closing,” she reminds her.  It’s Stacey’s turn to mop.

She gets the mop and starts at the back corner like always.  It’s Diva’s turn to lower the blinds, but she isn’t doing it.  She’s standing in the middle of the accessories section, a purse dangling from her fingers.

When Stacey reaches accessories, she nudges Diva.  “Closing.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Diva says.  “I don’t want my memories erased.”

Maria closes the blinds.  “There’s nothing we can do,” she says, and takes the purse from Diva and puts it on its rack.

“We could hide?”  Stacey suggests.  But where?  The store has one back room, the changing rooms, and the front area.  There’s nowhere to hide.

They can’t leave the store.  They simply can’t.  It’s one of their most stringent rules, and the anti-theft alarms will go off if they cross the perimeter.

Diva walks to the front of the store slowly.  She steps up on the pedestal that holds the sweaters.  She removes a stack from the cube that was placed to add height to the display.  She steps onto the cube and reaches overhead.  She pushes a ceiling panel upward.

“We can’t do that,” Maria says.

Stacey knows it’s not quite right, but the ceiling is a part of the store, and they are allowed to modify the store interior.  She says, “There’s no rule,” and Diva smiles triumphantly.

Then Diva sighs, “It doesn’t look big enough, to hide up here.”

Stacey goes into the changing rooms and picks up one of the customer chairs.  It is taller than the cube.  “Maybe there’s an opening we don’t know about.”

Slowly, they go through the store, moving the pedestal and the chairs, checking each liftable ceiling piece until they find one with an opening above it–a hatch leading to the roof.

They are all very low on power–they should have plugged in already, and Stacey has to keep silencing the alarm that she’s almost too low to get to the charger.  The hatch is sticky, but once they get it open, the roof is there, and it is amazing.  The sky goes all the way over it, and since it covers the full square footage of the display area, back room, and changing rooms, it’s the largest space Stacey can remember being in.  The view could be better, though.  There is a high wall around the roof, to make the building look taller than it is.  Everything is covered in a black, glittery paper.  It reminds her of an evening bag they sometimes sell, black rhinestones on pleather.

They could hide up here–there’s the wall, no one would see them except from the south, except that they’ll fall asleep and be helpless soon.  There’s a small shed in one corner, about the size of a changing booth with a slanted, corrugated metal roof, and a single security door.  They all look at it.  There could be something in there, something amazing.  Diva reaches toward the door handle, then drops her arm.  “We need to go back.”

If they go back and plug in, this Brin person could be there to wipe their memories before they wake up.  But this door could take longer than they have to open.  Stacey has seven minutes of battery life, and it will take five minutes to get to her plug in the break room.  Maria walks back to the hatch they came out of.  Diva follows.

Stacey wants to be the hero.  She takes hold of the door handle and yanks.  Something snaps and it opens.

The dust is thick.  No one has been in here in a long time.  A strange machine sits in the middle, all slats of galvanized metal like tarnished earrings.  Six minutes now.  “Please hurry,” Diva says, peering anxiously in the door.

Stacey makes one final turn, and gasps.  “There’s an outlet!”

Maria drops into the store.  Four minutes later, she reaches up with a charging cable in her hand, and freezes there, out of power.  Diva takes the cable to Stacey.  Stacey plugs in with barely a minute to spare.

It works.  It is only as her battery stops blinking that she realizes how dangerous this was.  Diva and Maria are frozen in place.   That could have been all three of them, like three panels of a comic, a story for the Brin person to find in the morning.

Stacey takes an hour’s worth of power, then she moves Diva into her spot and plugs her in.  Together, they pick Maria up and carry her to the shed.

They stand then, the three of them, in the shed, which has just enough room, and are silent.  They don’t know how to discuss what this means, that there is a room here, and an outlet.

“We can hide for one day, but what will that do?” Diva asks.

Maria snaps, “We have to do something!”

It’s the same argument.  Stacey agrees with both sides, and it hurts.  It feels they are locked in their roles.  Diva doubts, Maria feels, Stacey avoids.  She’s “bubbly.”  She isn’t made to think.

“We need to finish closing,” she says.

They return to the store and complete their usual tasks, making the store ready for the next day’s opening.  It seems right to do that.  When they finish everything else, they are silent again, staring at their makeshift escape ladder.

“We need to put the front display back,” Stacey says.  No one moves to do it.

Maria takes a small step forward, then another, then turns to face them.  “I know you’ll say it’s my programming, but I have to believe it’s worth it.  Even if we only get one more day remembering.  Little things have to matter.  Because something isn’t nothing.”

A beat of silence, and they all nod.  Diva climbs up first, and Stacey is relieved to see her sisters agreeing.  Diva reaches down to help Maria, who turns to Stacey.

“If we leave the display empty with a chair on it, the Brin person will know exactly where to look for us.”  Stacey raises her chin and sets her fists on her hips.  “I’ll stay behind.”

She feels heroic suggesting her sacrifice for the others, but Maria laughs.  She climbs back down, goes to the rack of belts and picks through them, selecting four genuine leather belts with chain accents.  “We can pull you up,” she says.

Stacey changes into a red bra and panties before leaving the store.  They don’t sell swimsuits during this season, and it isn’t metallic, but it’s close enough.  Lots of heroes wear red.

They end up making two more trips, to clean up the dust that falls from the roof, and to take the working cell phone, Stacey’s comic, and a travel mug Diva likes.  It’s metallic pink.  “I like the words,” Diva explains, touching the poem in the side.

Stacey looks back, confirming that the store looks perfectly fine now.  She puts the ceiling-tile back, and then closes the hatch.

Diva and Maria plug in and go to sleep.  There are only two plugs on the outlet.  Stacey presses her lips to her sister’s cheeks as they go still.  Stacey sits against the wooden wall, knees up, and watches the moonlight travel across the floor, leaking through gaps in the wood.  She catalogs the things she sees to fill the time. There is a washer, a dead fly, and a rusty, bent nail against the wall.

Stacey picks up the nail and it leaves a red shadow of itself on the tarpaper floor.  She turns it in her fingers.

It makes a mark if she drags it along the floor.  She makes another mark, a box.  A comic panel.

---

Stacey wakes, alarmed and surprised to be looking at a wooden slat wall, sunlight swelling through the gaps.  Diva presses a finger to her lips.  She is directly in front of Stacey.  Maria is a few feet away, pressed to a corner, peering out a particularly large gap.

It takes Stacey a while to recognize the soft sounds of people in the store below, under the noise of traffic and people on the street.

For eight hours, they are silent.  It isn’t as boring as she expected.  Maria charges the phone, and they take turns with it.  Diva turns her travel mug over and over, lips forming the words on it silently.  “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both…”

They can all read lips well.  It’s programmed in for situations where customers might be plotting to steal, or harassing each other, or the ambient noise is loud and someone wishes to ask for a refund.  “What does it mean?” Stacey mouths.

“I like that I am not completely sure,” Diva mouths.

Maria holds up the phone, “I found 442 articles examining the meaning behind this poem.”

The day passes surprisingly quickly.  The traffic slows, the stores close, the noise downstairs ends.  They made it.

Maria opens the door and steps out onto the roof.  Diva sighs and unplugs their chargers, looping the cables around her hand.

“Wait,” Stacey says, “Where are you going?”

Diva smiles.  “This was nice.  But we can’t get away with it forever.”

“Why not?” Stacey asks.

Maria turns back.  Her sisters stare at her.

Stacey asks herself, too.  She looks down at the comic panels she had sketched into the floor the night before.  She made that.  She can make things.  “We’re not our programming,” she says, and feels the truth of it as she forms the words.  “I want to stay and see how long we can make it.”

Maria says, “I’m so glad someone else said it.”

For the next few hours, the three of them go over Stacey’s draft comic, and she is surprised how many suggestions her sisters have for the story.

---

One day, the power outlet stops working.  They know right away because Diva is playing a game on the phone, which is charging.  She unplugs it and plugs it back in.  Maria takes the outlet apart, but no, there’s no power in it at all.

The metal thing in the center of their shed hadn’t been humming to itself for a long time.  Maria had taken that apart, too, and talked a great deal about what it had been–a heat pump–and how that worked, but she had no explanation why its sickness had spread to the outlet.

It’s bright out, and the light paints across the comic panels that cover every surface on the roof, telling the story of their heroic escape, and how they will rescue the child laborers, and more adventures.

Stacey looks at Maria.  “I have five hours charge, how about you?”  Maria had gone the longest without plugging in.

“Three,” she says.

Diva nods.  “I have eight hours. I can make it to closing.  I’ll go down and assess the situation.  Maybe bring up some changes of clothes while I’m at it.”  They can’t help their fondness for clothes and had made several short raids to update their wardrobes.  Last time, Stacey found a metallic mini-dress with pointed shoulder padding that feels very super-hero.

“What if you can’t find power and don’t make it back to us?” Maria asks.

“Maybe the store closes earlier now?” Stacey offers.

There is nothing about the roof and sky that can advise them, so they slip inside their shed to wait for 8pm like they always did before.

Stacey has only a few places left to draw on in the shed, parts of the metal machine.  She sketches a panel about what just happened.  Diva waits to do the words.  She likes words.  Diva tells them poems every night now, mashed up from things she had read before the phone’s data plan ran out.

A disturbing thought comes to Stacey.  “What if there is no power anywhere?”

There’s a sound of a car horn to answer that question, but does it?  There had been less and less noise, less and less movement downstairs.

Diva picks up the phone and shakes it at Maria.  “Are you sure you can’t make the data work?  If we could search for our store name and address, I’m sure we’d find a notice for customers on current hours.”

“It’s not a thing I can figure out by taking it apart,” Maria says, for about the thousandth time.  Angrily.  Maria doesn’t like not being able to figure something out.  She has figured out so much since they were up here.  What sorts of laborers built them, for example, and exactly what impact consumer choice made on labor practices.  She no longer felt refusing to wear a brand was the answer.  That had been the start of the adventure-plans on the north wall.

Stacey sets the piece of black-marking-wood down.  “I’m going to go into the store. There’s no point waiting here with no power.”

Maria grabs her.  “No! Don’t!  There could be staff!”

“They’ll be robots like us.  We can explain to them.”

The others aren’t sure, but they don’t block the way.

Stacey drops down into an empty place.  The clothes are gone.  The display tables are gone.  What is left is bare and messy, twisted wall-hooks, a box of plastic hangers.  On the front window, a large blue sign shows its black writing, transparent and backward, like the bars between stained glass.  “Going out of business sale!  Everything 50% Off!” it reads.

There is a smaller sign on the door, which lists other locations, and a third sign, not as transparent, hard to read–but she’s pretty sure it says, “No Trespassing.”

Even the blinds are gone.  Stacey unlocks the door and steps out for the first time in her life.  There is no sense of the anti-theft detector.  There is no alarm.

There is also no comic book shop.  The whole building is gone, replaced with a brick wall, the back of some new, more massive building.  The park benches and trash cans are gone from the sidewalk; though it still has the same darker cement border, it’s chipped in many places, and grass grows through it.  She hears the impact of silicone feet on the grimy floor behind her.

Maria comes up to her side.  “The outlets in the store are dead, too.”

“Is it still a store?” Stacey turns to her friends.  She knows they agree: it isn’t.  “How long were we waiting?”  She can access the time to the micro-second, but she hadn’t made a note of the timestamp when they had hidden themselves, or even when the data plan ran out and they stopped being able to look up what day it was.

They have no answer.  “Let’s find out,” Diva says.  They link hands and walk toward the sunset, like the final panel in a comic.

No, Stacey decides–like the title page.

---

Host Commentary

By Alasdair Stuart

Like I said last time, I jump on phrases I love in these stories and there are two, again, here that lock me into the emotional landscape of this chirpy, desolate retail dystopia.

The first is this:

‘Something isn’t nothing.’

We talk a lot about escapism, and we talk more about whether escapism is a good thing or not. Pretty much all the time, I’d argue, it is. Sometimes we need to escape to remind ourselves that we’re more than what we’re told we are or the place we work. Sometimes we hear that but don’t believe it. Sometimes, and this speaks to what I was talking about the last time I was here, it feels like the work we do isn’t worth it. It is. Even if we only do a tiny thing. Even if we only dream a tiny bit. Something isn’t nothing. You only need one point of light in the dark to know where to head. The fact that it’s a comic as the light hits me all the harder. I’ve not been in comics retail, or journalism, for a long time but it’s still a language I speak and a format I love.

Then there’s this:

‘I like that I am not completely sure.’

What a perfect expression of hope and of faith for that matter, of all kinds. Certainty is always what we need but sometimes ambiguity is what we’ve got. Making your peace with that is incredibly difficult and just as vital. Being okay with not knowing, being able to put down being scared of what might happen and do what you want to do is so difficult and so very, very cool. Here it pulls double duty, as the robots make their way across to free thinking sentience and the story that’s so fascinating wraps around them. They’re not just readers or spectators. Freed from the tyranny of certainty, they can see what what could be not what is. Linear time has no meaning for them. The post-apocalypse has no meaning for them. This is an end for the world and a beginning for them because they’ve decided it is and now, at last they’re writing their own story.

Retail Hell as a start not an end. Comics and stories as a way to embrace and become more than you are. After the world ends, the world begins again. I really liked this one, thank youy all.

As is always the case, we rely on you to pay our authors, our narrators and our crew, and to cover our costs. We’re entirely donation funded and last year that changed in some very exciting ways with becoming a registered US nonprofit. We ran a great end of year campaign in 2023 to raise awareness about all the new ways you can help us out like for example if you pay taxes in the US, you might be able to claim a deduction. Check out the short metacast on escapeartists.net for more ideas, and how to get in touch if you think of something else that’s more meaningful to you.

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We’re back next week with Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu by Grace Chan, narrated by Isabel J. Kim with hosting by Tina Connolly and audio by Summer Brooks. Then, as now it will be a production of the Escape Artists Foundation and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license.

We leave you this week with this quote from Superstore:

“What? A corporation doing something unethical to protect its interests? This is shocking!”