Jade scrambled to ring up the purchase quickly enough. It had been months since he had struggled this hard at his job.
He had barely pushed the receipt over the counter before the man was gone, and the next person took his place. This woman nervously piled a stack of their cheapest snacks on the counter beside three toothbrushes. One adult size and two smaller ones.
Jade rang everything up, and gave her the small total. The woman winced, and pushed a couple of the snacks aside. Jade subtracted them from the order and she paid. He grabbed a sack from beneath the counter and loaded it with her items, and then she lifted it tiredly.
Jade wondered how long it would take her to notice that he had included the two she had set to one side in her bag, as he rang up the next man's purchase.
Emily pushed through the door a moment later and slid to a halt, gazing around the shop for a moment with a disbelieving air.
"Restock or check?" Jade called to her.
Emily lifted the plate that separated the public from the space behind the counter, and slid through it with a mild flail of elbows. "I'll check," she declared.
Jade finished the current transaction, and then logged off. Emily stepped up and signed in nearly as swiftly as he had ever seen her move, and began ringing up the next set. Jade slid into the office and grabbed several of the boxes of the extrabasic supplies that had been delivered a few weeks ago.
A moment later he was squeezing in between the tired looking people filling the shop, while refilling nearly empty shelves.
Possibly the most amazing thing about the crowd was the way that there was not so much as a hint of a fight in even the roughest looking of them. Despite the crowd, each person yielded to the next every time they overlapped their paths.
Jade whisked through the restrooms with extra soap and paper next.
"Do you have a place to go?" Emily asked the rather feeble looking elder holding a single bottle of soda and a packet of chips.
"I don't know," the elder replied faintly.
Jade paused, and looked at Emily. Her worried expression was tightly controlled, but she nodded and directed the elder to the nearest place they could sit and rest for a while.
Several of the younger people listened to that advice with obvious appreciation, and Jade realized suddenly that almost everyone who had come in tonight was a stranger. Orbital Jade answered his silent question promptly. The war had begun again, and people were coming into this city in droves.
When the flow of people finally ebbed, Jade kept moving at speed. He cleaned and restocked everything that they still had supplies for, while Emily sat at the counter in a daze.
"Do you think..." she began, and then trailed off.
"I'm thinking as quickly as I can," Jade promised. He thought that it was unlikely that every shop in the city had been this well prepared. He thought that things were going to get very messy very soon.
Orbital Jade had a broader view of events, while the little ball at home with his mother and the body driven by the Jade Emperor was nearly oblivious to the situation.
Jade was a little shocked to realize that the game's Emperor had somehow knownwhat was going to happen in advance. Orbital Jade assured Jade that his home city, while on the outer edge of their country, was not involved in any of the current conflicts.
"Will we be okay if we're this busy for very long?" Emily asked as she finally stood up again.
Orbital Jade calculated their reserves versus the shipping delays that they would likely be expecting soon, and informed Jade that they would likely be empty with only three more days like this one.
Jade shook his head, but then shrugged. "We'll be fine, but the shop will be empty. Think we should offer to let people stay here then?"
"What?" Emily asked blankly.
"Well, people will be looking for places to stay," Jade pointed out.
The door opened again, and they both straightened up, until they recognized the young man who sidled over to the counter, and breathed, "Made it."
"Yeah?" Emily replied as though she doubted him.
"I got called in early," Keeton protested.
"What's it like out there?" Jade asked as though he couldn't look out the windows himself. Or through the cameras on the street if he wanted to, but most people couldn't see that.
"Oppressive?" Keeton ventured after a moment.
"What's that mean?" Emily scoffed questionly.
"There's a lot of extra people around," Keeton muttered.
Orbital Jade grumbled about the lack of respectable news coverage of the battles that had to be occurring in the distance. But Jade himself froze for a moment when Keeton opened up a very familiar app on his phone, before he logged in for the night.
When asked, Lifegild's Jade, like the Jade Emperor, already knew more about the situation than either Jade or Orbital Jade had, but hadn't regarded it with any emotional impact. Lifegild's Jade was too busy to care. Over a quarter of a billion people were now running Jade's app.
That Jade turned out to be part of the reason this particular shop had been so very busy during this Jade's shift. Each of their new customers who had been using Lifegild had been guided to a place that Jade knew the available contents of through this Jade.
Jade clocked out on schedule, leaving Emily and Keeton behind with less worry than he'd expected after dealing with the flood of newcomers. New people were still trickling in of course. And the next day might be just as bad, even if Lifegild's Jade stopped sending its players directly.
Jade went straight home, but he didn't log into the game like usual, instead he logged himself into his own server. Jade's system was much smaller than Orbital Jade's, even with part of the server given over to Harmony. Part of the station's hardware had been set aside to run Lifegild and his other applications, reducing his available hardware drastically, but he still wasn't as limited in many ways, as the earth bound Jades were.
Even so, Jade was still the primary Jade. And Jade was achingly aware of how silly that might be as he used Orbital Jade to filter information from Lifegild's Jade down to chunks small enough for him to use. Lifegild's Jade listened to Jade's plan, created on the fly.
And slowly, people moved. People completed small, seemingly unrelated, tasks for tiny virtual rewards. Empty spaces filled. Overfull spaces emptied. Needed goods moved faster. Unnecessarythings moved more slowly. One tiny challenge at a time, everyone connected began to move in unexpected synchrony.
For a moment all the parts of Jade worked together, and for that moment Jade felt like he ruled the world. He didn't, of course, but Jade thought that it was a little scary how close that possibility might have become if he had held access to as many servers as copies of Jade had ever been installed on.
