Chapter 1: The Unwanted Receipt

Chapter 1: The Unwanted Receipt

The blue light of a triple-monitor setup was the only thing disturbing the cool, minimalist dark of Arthur Pendelton’s Manchester flat. Outside, the evening drizzle slicked the streets of the Northern Quarter, but inside, everything was ordered, clean, and curated to within an inch of its life. Art, as he was known to the handful of people he tolerated, valued this order. His digital life, in particular, was a fortress of pristine efficiency. Zero-inbox policy. Meticulously organized cloud storage. Spam filters trained with the ruthless precision of a drill sergeant.

Which was why the email, when it arrived with its cheerful, intrusive ping, felt like a brick through a stained-glass window.

He didn't even have to look. He knew the sender. The digital equivalent of a persistent housefly. He navigated to his inbox, his jaw tightening almost imperceptibly. There it was, nestled obscenely between a server status update and a project confirmation.

From: Tractor Supply Co. [email protected] Subject: Your Receipt & Loyalty Points Update!

A muscle in Art’s temple twitched. Tractor Supply Co. The very name was an affront to his sensibilities. It conjured images of dust, diesel, and men in flannel shirts discussing the price of fertilizer. He was a man whose most rugged purchase in the last year was a Scandinavian-designed ergonomic keyboard.

He clicked it open, a morbid curiosity overriding his immediate instinct to obliterate it. The logo was a rustic, bold font in a shade of green that screamed ‘organic manure’. Beneath it, a digital receipt for one Jedidiah Stone.

• 1 x 50lb Bag, Producer's Pride Premium Chicken Feed… $22.99
• 1 x Post Hole Digger… $34.99
• 1 x Pack of Work Gloves, L… $8.49

And at the bottom, the line that had been appearing for months, the real grit in the oyster of his digital peace:

Thank you for your loyalty, Jedidiah! You’ve earned 133 points on this purchase. You now have a total of 897 points. Only 103 more points until you unlock a $10 reward!

“Jedidiah,” Art muttered to the empty room, the name feeling clumsy and foreign on his tongue. “Jedidiah, you magnificent dolt.”

This had been going on for six months. At first, it was a minor annoyance. A welcome email. Art had sighed, assuming some poor sod in the American heartland had fumbled his own email address during checkout. He’d created a filter. sender:tractorsupply.com -> delete. Simple.

But Jedidiah was persistent. Or rather, persistently ignorant. He seemed to use a different checkout terminal or a slightly varied sender alias every time, and a few emails always slipped through. Each one was a small, greasy fingerprint on the clean glass of Art’s world. He’d seen Jedidiah buy engine oil, dog food, a length of heavy-duty chain, and something called a ‘Bale Spear’. Each receipt was a dispatch from a bizarre, parallel universe he wanted no part of.

His initial impulse had been simple: find a corporate contact, explain the situation, and have his email removed. But that felt… like work. It required talking to people. Probably on the phone. The thought alone was exhausting. No, digital problems required digital solutions.

Tonight, however, the annoyance curdled into something else. It was the "103 more points" that did it. The sheer, banal ambition of it all. This faceless American oaf was polluting Art’s pristine inbox, all in the pursuit of a measly ten-dollar discount on what, another bag of chicken feed?

The petty streak that lay dormant beneath Art’s calm, professional exterior began to stir. He wasn't just annoyed anymore. He was insulted. His email address, [email protected], was a thing of beauty. A relic from the beta days of Gmail. Four letters, no numbers, no underscores. Elegant. Simple. And this Jedidiah was dragging its good name through the digital mud of some rural American superstore.

He scrolled back down the email, his eyes narrowing. There was a link at the very bottom, in small blue text. ‘Manage Your Account’.

A thought, sharp and wicked, sliced through his irritation. He hovered the cursor over the link. The URL preview appeared. Standard stuff. tractorsupply.com/account/login. He clicked.

The website was exactly as he’d imagined. Garish green and yellow, pictures of smiling families in cowboy hats, and a prominent banner for a sale on cattle troughs. He ignored it all and went straight for the login fields. He typed [email protected] into the username box. Then he clicked the link below it.

‘Forgot Password?’

The system prompted him to confirm his email address. He typed it in again, a slow, malicious smirk beginning to form. He hit ‘Send Reset Link’.

He flicked back to his inbox. He didn’t even have time to take a sip of his cooling tea before it arrived.

From: Tractor Supply Co. Subject: Reset Your Password

Art leaned back in his chair, the blue light of the monitors glinting off his glasses. The smirk broke into a full-blown grin. It was better than he could have hoped. The man hadn’t just made a typo on a single transaction. He had registered an entire loyalty account, the bedrock of his ten-dollar quest, using Art’s email address. An email address he had no access to, no control over. An email address that now held the key to his kingdom of chicken feed and post hole diggers.

Jedidiah Stone had not just been borrowing Art’s address. He had, in effect, gifted Art the deed to his digital farm shed.

He clicked the reset link, the gears in his mind spinning furiously. The initial plan—to simply log in, change the email to something nonsensical like [email protected], and be done with it—evaporated. That was cleanup. That was maintenance. It lacked… poetry. It lacked panache.

Where was the lesson in that? Where was the justice for six months of unwanted receipts? No, Jedidiah didn’t deserve a simple fix. He deserved confusion. He deserved a subtle, creeping madness. He deserved to have his small, ten-dollar world turned completely upside down by a digital ghost he couldn't see, hear, or comprehend.

He created a new password, something simple he could remember for now. TractorTroll123.

He logged in.

The account dashboard was a masterpiece of rural consumerism. Jedidiah Stone, address in a town in Tennessee Art had to Google to confirm was real. A purchase history stretching back for years. A whole life, told through invoices. He bought the same brand of dog food every month. He bought spark plugs in the spring and de-icer in the winter. A simple, predictable, analog life.

And there, in the top right corner, was the prize. 897 Points.

Art stared at the number. So close to his goal. Jedidiah was probably already planning what he’d buy with his glorious discount. A new pair of work gloves, perhaps. Or maybe he’d treat himself to the premium brand of motor oil.

Art’s grin became predatory. He saw the points, not as a discount, but as a resource. Ammunition. He began to explore the website’s other features, his fingers flying across the keyboard, clicking through tabs. ‘Redeem Points’. ‘Special Offers’. ‘Shop by Department’.

He wasn't going to delete the account. He wasn't going to change the email. He was going to take the wheel of this runaway tractor and drive it somewhere truly, spectacularly weird.

Jedidiah Stone wanted to save ten dollars. Art Pendelton was about to make him pay for it in ways he couldn't possibly imagine. The game was afoot.