So, one peaceful October morning, I was doing my usual. Mowing the lawn around the campground pool, pretending each blade of grass was one of the guests and listening to a little Nietzsche Wasn’t Read, my favorite band. Just pretending it was going to be a perfect day. No day ever is but I was right at that moment where I was still stupid and groggy enough to believe in miracles.

That’s when fire began to rain from the sky.

Wicked.

That was my first thought. I mean fire from the sky is pretty damn cool even if it is going to torch everything and everyone you love. And super big bonus — I had jack shit in both of those departments. Unless you count my collection of anime films, shows, and memorabilia.

Honest-to-god my first reaction was to get excited. I was amped up, full of coffee plus a hard dose of Nietzsche Wasn’t Read rolling on repeat in my brain.

Burn! Burn!!

It was the sort of sick shit that made me mosh-like-mad at a concert and here it was coming out to visit me at the worst damn place on earth.

Sweet.

It was exciting, seeing all this crazy shit. Everyone else was just as excited, too, buncha rubber-necking dumb shits just like me, lining up to see the next bit of mindless entertainment.

One dude in a mohawk was even doing devil horns, screaming up at the sky while playing air guitar with his other hand. Dude was awesome.

Or drunk, couldn’t tell. I wondered if maybe we’d be best friends after the apocalypse.

Or if I was the guy whose skull he’d be drinking from when it was all over.

It all really just looked like a meteor shower. Just meteor after meteor after meteor, all clustered together and coming way too closely on each other’s tails. I actually started to think that it looked sloppy, somehow.

Rushed.

Not at all like the Flying Spaghetti Monster rapture I had been secretly kind of hoping for most of my adult life.

It got better when they got closer though. There were thousands of fireballs raining from the sky, each a different size. And the closer they got, the more they changed in color. At some point there was a full spectrum of shimmering energy fields and blazing trails, ranging from red through violet, with the occasional green or yellow.

It was fascinating watching it all, a lot of colors I just didn’t have a name for. It made for a tremendous spectacle, and I have to admit that nowadays I’m surprised some alien go-getter didn’t get ahead of the crowd and sell us tickets to watch.

It was a mass landing event. See, BuyMort has this following. Groupies of a sort. Desperate, dangerous, devious aliens that form a loose band while they follow the store’s trajectory through space.

The aliens were our first clue that something wild was happening. First contact hit us and was nothing like what we expected. But, I must admit that the gift baskets were a nice surprise.

All that night, I sat in front of the TV in my Airstream, cradling my shotgun, and drinking cheap tequila from the bottle while I waited for aliens to invade my campground. I almost blew off my damn door when something clanked into it. I opened it up to find a cute little parachuted pod that said Welcome to the BuyMort family. Inside was a piece of candy, a cheap plastic flower, and an envelope.

At least I think it was an envelope.

It was envelope shaped, but it had a mouth. A horrible mouth. A pair of fleshy lips embedded into the envelope that attached to vibrating vocal cords and a small inflating bladder. It rested on the counter, leaning forward to point its lips directly at me and shrieked, “OPEN ME, I’M IMPORTANT” over and over again. It would wiggle a small flesh-tab at me and added, “TEAR HERE! TEAR HERE, PLEASE!”

I know what you’re thinking, cause I obviously thought it too. Don’t open the envelope. But you didn’t hear the voice on this thing. It was like razorblades being dumped into my ears. I did try not to open it. Even approached with my shotgun and poked it a couple of times. The insistent demands grew labored, and ragged, taking on a new decibel level.

“Enough!” I screamed, grabbing the thing and tearing off its side. It screamed in agony and then was silent.

Paper. The thing inside it was paper. Just paper. It was that disgusting flesh the envelope had been made of, but lighter and folded like any other letter. Thank the Great Spaghetti in the sky there was no blood. I unfolded the document and read it through bleary but rapidly sobering eyes.

CONGRATULATIONS PROSPECTIVE CUSTOMER! SOON YOU WILL EXPERIENCE THE JOYS OF BUYMORT. TO PREPARE YOU FOR YOUR UTOPIC DESCENT INTO MULTIDIMENSIONAL ONE SHOP CONSUMER JOY WE OFFER YOU A FREE GIFT CARD WITH 10 MORTIES! ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS START A CREDIT ACCOUNT WITH BUYMORTSAVINGSPLUS ON ASCENSION DAY AND USE YOUR NEW CREDIT ACCOUNT TO PURCHASE AN ITEM OF 11 OR MORE MORTIES AND HURRAY YOU HAVE JUST RECEIVED 10 FREE MORTIES! BUT ACT FAST BECAUSE THIS OFFER WILL EXPIRE IN ONE FULL EARTH YEAR.

And it ended there. That envelope creature had died for a mildly garish advertisement. Nothing else. No aliens ever came to visit me but watching the TV I learned a shitload of seemingly unimportant details that first night.

We were being settled. Aliens of all sorts were crashing, or landing, or even, in one case, setting up some sort of ready-made pop-up city.

On the TV, news agencies scrambled for the on-scene scoop. On Electronic World Talk there was a reporter standing in her cool full-length trenchcoat zipping her news van over to where a cigar-shaped ship had just slammed into the earth.

Eyes wide, I watched as she got out with her cameraman and rushed on over. I could hear the clinks and clanks of the cooling aircraft and I suspected that something big was about to go down.

Then a door opened, and three green-skinned aliens popped out and threw up all over her, shiny bottles of alien hooch in hand.

The apocalypse was like that. No rhyme or reason. No solid theme. On another channel I watched as a ship shaped like a pancake popped open and flames coursed out, rolling over and incinerating the reporter.

Over and over, channel after channel, I saw first contact. Some were good. Others not so good. And I saw battles. In some places Americans went full-on second amendment, blasting at newcomers and getting blasted back in return. Sometimes the aliens shot first.

It was a mess.

And let me tell you something else.

Orcs are real. Play with that in your head a little bit. Battle axes, roaring, screaming at you like a maniac.

Except, apparently, they are actually really nice until you’re a dick to them. There was a small issue with some kind of professional LARPing group that heckled a group of Orcs to some kind of confrontation, but for the most part it was all peaceful interactions with them.

The real issue was the affiliates. Those came in bigger ships, which were all manned by multiple races of aliens. Orcs, giant snake people, blue people with antennae, hyenas walking on their hind legs, and a near constant stream of tall gray humanoids with pebbled skin. Some of them even wore uniforms.

Wherever a bigger ship landed, armed conflicts quickly broke out and news coverage in the areas became spotty at best. Whatever affiliates were, they were dangerous, and they were an integral part of BuyMort itself.

I think it’s time to tell you exactly what BuyMort is before we get into my daily fight to survive it. BuyMort is a self-replicating nanorobotic intelligence structure that has been programmed to bring a Mortfront to every sentient being in the known multiverse. That’s right, it’s a fucking store. A gol-damned targeted marketing scheme. A god of commerce, drifting through the fabric of reality, aiding anything that can shop with its specific shopping needs, by force. Thank you for shopping at BuyMort.

Hate the name yet? I know I did ten seconds after it arrived in my head.

See, these nanobots just fly through space, infecting every creature on every world that exists anywhere. They set up shop on your planet, in your brain, and in your wallet. Then they collectively speak to each other and choose a name for your species.

For humans, it tossed every bit of known commerce we had ever engaged in and kept records of into a shitty AI blender and picked the name out of that. It claims the name was chosen carefully from the very best parts of who we are as a people.

Fuck that.

But, once your species has a chosen name for the storefront, it translates any other version of that name into yours and you can literally never know what anyone else calls it. Even if they write it down or carve it into stone, you’ll just see it as BuyMort.

It’s just BuyMort forever now, and we get no appeals.