10

 

Hebdomad: in some Gnostic systems, a group of seven “divine emanations”, each personifying one of the seven then-known planets of the Solar System; collectively, the whole sublunary sphere.

 

 

9.00 a.m.

 

IN ALL SIX hundred and sixty-six departments, the lights go from half strength to full, bathing the counters and displays of merchandise in brilliance.

At each of the four corner entrances the bolts in the doors shoot back and a handful of waiting shoppers swarm forward. The guards, for whom opening time means night shift’s end, hold the doors open for them and usher them through, a courtesy that largely goes unremarked. The guards then head indoors themselves.

In the hallways, the lifts to the car parks are summoned down.

Escalators on every floor, frozen in place, start to crawl.

Outside, the window-shoppers, who have been growing increasingly agitated and excited as nine o’clock has neared, sigh with one voice as the curtains in the windows part.

The green LEDs on the closed-circuit cameras that scan every square centimetre of the shop floor come alight. Signals flash along the cables threaded through the spaces between the walls, a fibre-optic web whose thousands of strands radiate throughout the store. All the cables originate in the Eye, a long, low bunker in the Basement where several dozen half-shell clusters of black-and-white monitors occupy all the available wallspace, each cluster attended by a screen-jockey in a wheeled chair. The only light in the chamber comes from the monitors and the screens of the terminals affixed to the chairs’ arms: flickering, sickly, blue-grey. The screen-jockeys begin speaking into their headset microphones, at the same time unwrapping Days-brand chocolate bars and popping the ringpulls on cans of Days-brand soft drink.

The two banks of monitors in the Boardroom also come on. Fuzzy bands of static jump down their screens simultaneously, then stabilise and resolve to show different corners of different departments. The images start to change, switching at random between feeds, one after another at seven-second intervals, a hypnotically shifting televisual collage.

Sales assistants take their places, adopting practised expressions of mild, polite interest. Floor-walkers stand ready to greet the first influx of customers. Promotional reps tense, poised to pounce with their samples and testers.

Oblivious to all this activity, the creatures in the Menagerie continue to go about their business, secretly beneath the jungle’s green canopy.