Member-only story
BABY SHOES-HALF PRICE-ACT NOW!
By Lina Rather
Sunday night I dreamed I was pregnant, which was a horrible mistake. One minute I was picking out a onesie with a top hat-wearing elephant on it and the next my alarm rang. When I came to I groaned because I knew what was coming next.
The drones were already waiting for me outside my apartment. A bright red Target-branded one lit up with a ticker-tape message. ALL YOU NEED FOR BABY. Its onboard projector flashed sale-price diapers and formula on the side of a vacant building as I hurried past.
At the office, Diane winced when a blue drone appeared outside our sixth-story window and bleated, “Bassinets on sale this week!” with the voice of a twenty-year-old theater student who probably got paid a hundred bucks for the job.
“Bad luck,” she said. “After Shelley proposed, those things hounded us for months with ads for venues. It’ll get better eventually. Especially since it’s bad targeting.”
By lunch, the web crawlers had trawled my social media and discovered that I was not, in all likelihood, pregnant. The algorithms reshuffled themselves and a pink drone appeared outside my window to project ‘THREE IN FIVE MARRIAGES BEGIN ONLINE. TRY MATCH’ onto my cubicle’s convenient beige.
