Doomsday Supermarket

Chapter 7 - Market Price

Chapter 7 · 1,613 words

The days that followed taught Wren more about pricing than the interface ever would, and every lesson cost him something.

Jax's team returned three days later, as agreed, with another haul, smaller this time, maybe a hundred and forty carapace fragments, a single acid gland, and four healing tissue samples. Wren had spent the intervening days thinking about the previous negotiation, and he'd made a decision: he would set the carapace price at one credit each, below the interface's two-credit assessment, to attract more sellers. Volume over margin. The audit needed a thousand transactions, and cheap prices meant more materials flowing through the Store.

Jax's woman, Elowen, the one with the leaf-spring crossbow, looked at the one-credit price on the terminal and raised an eyebrow. "One?"

"That's what I'm offering."

She set the fragments on the counter without comment. Malik, the one who carried the pack, added a second bag of fragments from somewhere deeper in his gear. They were quiet about it, but Wren caught the look Jax exchanged with Elowen, a flicker of something that might have been satisfaction.

The transaction processed. One hundred and sixty-three fragments at one credit each. A hundred and sixty-three credits. The acid gland at nine. The healing tissue at seven each. Total: 190 credits.

At the interface's assessed values, it would have been 354.

Wren wrote it down. *Day 1: carapace @ 1. Volume high. Revenue low. Jax's team seemed happy—too happy?*

He spent the rest of the day processing individual scavengers who trickled in: two more survivors with small quantities of fragments, a pair of women who'd found a dead creature and hacked off what they could carry. He kept the carapace price at one credit. Both transactions completed. The counter moved.

By evening, he'd done the math three times. At one credit per fragment, he was generating transactions but losing potential revenue on every single one. The interface said two credits. He'd gone below that to attract volume, and the volume had materialized, but the revenue per unit was so low that the total didn't justify the discount. He was subsidizing his suppliers out of his own audit progress.

Day two, he overcorrected.

Four credits per carapace fragment. Double the interface assessment. He wrote it on a scrap of paper and taped it to the counter where suppliers would see it before they unloaded.

Jax arrived mid-morning. He read the price, stopped walking, and looked at Wren with an expression that was almost admiring.

"Four?"

"Four."

Jax set his pack down slowly. "You know, there was this settlement about ten klicks south. Used to have a trader out of a gas station. Didn't last long, but while it did, he was paying about two and a half for fragments."

"I don't have a settlement."

"No. You have a Store. And four credits a fragment." Jax didn't put the pack on the counter. He stood there, hands on his hips, and let the silence do the work.

Elowen spoke from behind him. "We can take these elsewhere."

"Where?" Jax said, without turning. But the question wasn't for her. It was for Wren.

Wren's stomach tightened. He had no idea if other Stores existed. The interface had never mentioned competitors. But Jax didn't know that he didn't know, and the uncertainty was a weapon Jax was happy to use.

"Two and a half," Wren said. "Final."

Jax considered this. Then he unpacked the fragments, eighty of them, and set them on the counter. "Two and a half. But the glands are fifteen this time. Risk went up."

They argued for twenty minutes. Settled at three credits for fragments, twelve for the gland. Wren wrote it down. *Day 2: carapace @ 4 → 3. Jax threatened to leave. Glands went UP. I'm losing control of this.*

The individual scavengers that day were worse. Two arrived with fragments, saw the four-credit price, and their eyes went wide. They'd clearly never seen that number. But one of them tried to sell cracked, low-density fragments that the interface flagged as substandard. The other haggled for a higher price on the grounds that he'd "walked forty klicks to get here." Wren held firm at four, but the interaction left him shaken. He was guessing. Every price was a guess, and the guesses were swinging wildly.

By the end of day two, his scrap of paper looked like this:

*Carapace: interface says 2. Tried 1 (too low, lost revenue). Tried 4 (too high, lost trust). Settled around 2.5-3. Jax pushes for more every time. No way to know the real number.*

*Acid glands: interface says 8. Jax got 9 first time, 12 second. Extraction risk = leverage.*

*Healing tissue: interface says 5. Jax got 7. Time-sensitivity = leverage.*

He stared at the list. There was no right answer. The interface gave him a baseline, but the actual price lived somewhere around that baseline, shaped by what the supplier would accept and what alternatives existed. And he had no way to know what alternatives existed because he'd never left the Store.

The third problem arrived on the morning of day three, and it was worse than pricing.

They came in through the entrance, three men, sunburned, their clothes stiff with dried fluid that wasn't water. The one in front carried a bundle wrapped in plastic sheeting, and he set it on the counter with the careful pride of someone who'd risked something significant to bring it here.

"Healing tissue," he said. "Six samples. Fresh as we could get them."

Wren unwrapped the plastic. The tissue was pale, fibrous, recognizable, the same material Jax's team had sold. But the edges were discolored, a greyish brown creeping inward from the margins. The texture was wrong, too dry in places, too soft in others.

He placed the samples on the counter and activated the Store's evaluation. The terminal glowed. Numbers assembled. Then a notification, clear and specific:

**QUALITY THRESHOLD NOT MET. MATERIAL DEGRADED BEYOND ACCEPTABLE PARAMETERS. TRANSACTION REJECTED.**

The word REJECTED sat on the screen in flat, white text. Final.

The hunter stared at it. "What does that mean?"

"The Store can't accept these." Wren kept his voice level. "They don't meet the quality standard."

"We killed the thing two days ago. Cut it open right there."

"How long after the kill before you harvested the tissue?"

The man's jaw tightened. "Couple hours. Maybe three. We had to clear the area. Other things come when you drop a healer."

"The tissue degrades after the creature dies. The Store has a threshold for how much degradation it'll accept." Wren pointed at the discolored edges. "These are past it."

"Three days," the second hunter said. His voice was quiet, which made it worse. "We spent three days tracking this thing. Two of us got hurt flushing it out. And you're telling me it's worth nothing?"

"I'm telling you the Store won't accept it. I don't set the quality thresholds."

The first hunter looked at the rejected samples, then at Wren, then at the Store interface displaying its calm, final judgment. His hands were calloused, cut, still dirty from the field. He'd carried these samples for two days, protecting them, keeping them clean, believing they were currency.

"Nothing?" he said.

"Nothing. I'm sorry."

The word hung in the air. The hunter didn't shout. Didn't threaten. He just stood there for a long moment, looking at the tissue that was worth nothing, and then he picked it up, rewrapped it in the plastic, and walked out. His companions followed.

Wren watched them go through the entrance, past the perimeter lights, into the darkness. Three days of hunting. Risk, effort, injury. And the Store's invisible quality threshold had turned all of it into zero.

He sat down behind the counter and pulled out his scrap of paper. Below the pricing notes, he started a new section:

*Quality standards:* *Healing tissue: must be harvested within — how long? Edges discolored = rejected. Need to figure out the threshold.* *Carapace: low-density fragments rejected (one guy today). Cracked = maybe okay? Need to check.* *Acid glands: container must be sealed? One pair leaked and the interface flagged contamination.*

He wrote until he'd captured every rejection he could remember from the past three days. Then he stared at what he'd produced. It was incomplete, full of question marks and guesses. But it was a start. The Store's quality thresholds were invisible to suppliers until they failed. Without knowing what the Store considered acceptable, hunters would keep bringing degraded materials and receiving nothing.

He found a pen that worked and a clean sheet of paper from the manager's office. At the top, he wrote: **MATERIAL ACCEPTANCE STANDARDS**.

Under it: *Healing Tissue — Minimum condition: pale, fibrous, no grey discoloration at edges. Harvest within 1 hour of kill (estimate — needs confirmation). Rejection reason: degradation beyond threshold.*

It was one entry. He needed entries for every material type he might encounter. But the act of writing it down, of converting the Store's invisible, impersonal standards into something a hunter could read before investing three days of effort, felt like the first real operational decision he'd made.

The priority was communication.

He taped the sheet to the counter where suppliers would see it, next to his pricing notes. Then he went back to the terminal and started reviewing every transaction record, looking for patterns in what the interface accepted and what it rejected.

The benchmarks were rough. The quality guide was a single entry. Both of them existed now as physical objects: paper, ink, information that outlasted any individual transaction. He pulled a fresh sheet from the manager's office and began a second entry.

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