Liquid Cool: The Cyberpunk Detective Series by Austin Dragon Read Free Book Online Page B

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    Inside it looked like an underground football stadium with neon rows of product. People zipped around on hover-carts of all sizes. In traditional markets, the products came to you. Here, you got your own stuff. Other than the hover-carts, there really wasn't any machination of any kind, which was rare for any modern store. But it was a "natural" market, so the presence of robots might clash with the store's image. The sons, however, did wear mech-gloves with store inventory displays on the wrist area, and the hand section was telescopic to pull down things from the top shelves without ever having to get a ladder. The gloves probably had a million other uses like a swiss-army knife.
    I grabbed a small hover-cart near the entrance, sat in the small single seat, and began my spree. The other thing that made the store so popular was precisely because nothing ever changed--fruits and vegetables were on aisle 20, juices and milk products on aisle 15, teas and coffees on aisle 16, meats on 5 and 6, etc. No one needed to ask where anything was because everyone already knew. Good Kosher was not into anything gimmicky or faddish. Mr. Watts would say, "Nothing gets on my shelves that hasn't been in the general market and people have been eating for at least a thousand years." Funny, but true.
     
    "I'm glad to see you continue to eat good food, young man," he said to me as I leaned on the main counter, opposite him. "More young people need to embrace that. The human body is a machine and it always needs the best power to be put into it. I'm glad to see your hover-car enthusiasm has shown you the way to live a long life. Good fuel; car lasts forever. Good foods; human body lasts a little less than that."
    I nodded. "My favorite power station for my Pony. Good Kosher for me."
    "I see a question on your tongue. Mr. Cruz."
    Mr. Watts knew me too well. "Is it customary to get a future mother-in-law something? Like flowers?" I asked.
    When you are a fixture of a neighborhood for so long, own such a popular business for so long, employ the same workers and cater to the same clientele, it doesn't take long for everyone to start feeling like you truly are some kind of family. Every family had a sage--the wise, ol' uncle or wise, ol' grandmother. Mr. Watts was our sage. You did your shopping first, one of his seven sons rung up the order at the cash register, and then you spent however long chatting it up with the Good Kosher Man himself.
    I didn't know how old Mr. Watts was, but he had to be in his late fifties at least, but there was nothing old about him. He had a full beard and mustache with the hair graying at the temple and the edges of his beard. Like his sons, the uniform was a khaki jump suit with a fully-equipped utility belt, beaded necklaces around the neck, and a pointed Chinese bamboo hat to protect from the constant exposure of the artificial daylight lamps, which all its indoor natural plant life was dependent on. The skin techs at Eye Candy, where Dot worked, would be proud. He probably had the rare hats shipped directly from the Southeast Asia territories back when they were affordable. No rice paddies here, but Good Kosher had its own interior gardens in the back and off-limits to customers, growing a wide variety of roses, tulips, and other flowers. Watts and sons would go back into that room, with its steady rain mist falling, and handpick bouquets for customers. Good Kosher was a secret flower shop too and no one had better--if you wanted real ones and not synthetic "garbage" that everyone else sold that could survive a nuclear blast along with the rodents of the city.
    "Mothers-in-law don't get flowers, even if you like them. And even if they did, they surely wouldn't qualify being a future one. The future doesn't exist--there is only the present."
    "Are you sure?" I asked, as one of his sons finished ringing up my order and I handed him my cash card. "It's very important I get on their good side."
    Mr. Watts made