All and Sundry

Do not let your children stand in the shopping cart. Do not let them ride in the bottom of the cart, where pigtails or small hands could get trapped in the filthy wheels. And never — never — leave them unattended in the store.

You will linger while looking for the price of party-size packs of gummy bears or thumbing through a book on string theory, and then she will be gone. She was just right here, you’ll say, or just one aisle over. It will feel like less than 30 terrestrial seconds have passed. You’ll call her name, check around corners, look for a helpful employee in a hyper-spectral blue vest. But soon, your hopes will be crushed by the vastness of the shopping megaverse.

To hold all that you could ever want, OmegaMart extends from the outskirts of the suburbs to the edge of the exoplanet sphere. Good luck remembering where you parked. You will be exhausted just by walking from the garden center to the plane that contains comfy flip-flops and replacement cyborg feet. You will need to stop for a bright blue slushie and soft pretzel.

The thing is, OmegaMart has everything. All the things you need. The things that you don’t need but your neighbors have so you think you do. The things that you’ll break and the things to replace them. The things that you’ll lose and the things that will make you forget about them. All of your hopes and dreams and regrets and untapped potential – all at very low prices.

You will not forget your child, but at some point you will concede that she will not be found. At least not by you. And perhaps she will have even toddled into the aisle with the isekai boxes and have been transported to a realm more happy and enchanting than your own.

Actually, you will momentarily forget and fill your cart with economy-value boxes of training pants and applesauce pouches, and then have to put it all back.

You will cross things off your shopping list. You will try to concatenate the logic of the store layout. Will the biological things on your list be near the produce aisles? Why is it so hard to find gin?

By improbable happenstance or a slushie-fueled fever dream, you will find aisles X1 – X137: a plane of companions.

There are boyfriend-shaped body pillows and boyfriend-shaped boyfriends. There are androids spanning the whole uncanny valley, depending on your preference and price range. There are girlfriends, too. One aisle over, there are iridescent betta fish in individual bowls and robotic dog and seal pups to comfort seniors with dementia. One aisle past that, you will hear the ma-mama chorus of shelves of babies.

There are babies that eat and pee and coo and even cry real tears. Like the dimpled dollies you’d played with as a child, there are chubby babies of every hairdo and hue — all with official certificates and extra jammies packed in their portable vivaria. There will be one with freckles just like yours.

There are also faceless baby-shaped magneto-active solid-liquid phase transitional machines. Those will conveniently re-form to fit any car seat or carrier. They have the weight and heartbeat of newborns without the mess.

And there are xeno-biological babies with the softest fur you can imagine. They smell like soap, fresh bread and milk.

You will spend an inordinate number of terrestrial minutes making your choice. It should be a good one this time, one that will last even if it costs a little more. If you chose a nice enough baby, you could finance it with no interest for the first two astronomical seasons.

Then, you need to rearrange the cart, so the baby box doesn’t get crushed. And get another slushie. And then, of course, you will need to backtrack to the aisle of diapers and food pouches and mommy-and-me matching outfits to get all of the accessories.

You will need a playpen. A strong one. Graphene, maybe, if you can finance it as well?

Those things are always such a pain in the ass to assemble. But if you’re making the investment in a good baby, you simply can’t lose it again. It requires a pen in time and space that’s safe, happy and near you almost always. And it should be escape-proof for the times you need a break.

When you finally find the checkout line, things will add up fast. You’ll look over the baby one more time to make sure it’s a good one before you tap to pay. You’ll keep the paper receipt in your left hand and push the extraordinarily heavy cart with your right.

While you wait by the exit for a vested employee to check your receipt, you may hear a faint cry. Mama, mama, mama. Soft and tearful at first, then louder — Mama! — then gone. It could be coming from inside the box. It could be for another of the many mothers in the vastness of the OmegaMart. It could be a cry from a freckled toddler who has, against inconceivable odds, found her way almost to you.

You will take your receipt and push the cart forward into the boundless parking lot. You will look into the void with fear, fatigue, hope and wonder.

You won’t return to the megaverse store until you need to replace something lost or something broken. It will be sooner than you think.