SEATTLE—Explaining that the larger containment center was necessary to keep up with increased demand, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced Thursday the completion of a new suspension tank that will allow the online retailer to house even more of the psychic beings who foresee each shopper’s future orders.
The glass-walled vat reportedly takes up five stories of a building in Amazon’s downtown Seattle campus and holds 750,000 gallons of the psychoactive nutrient fluid necessary to sustain the 256 pale, hairless humanoids who, every day, predict the online purchases of millions of consumers across the world.
“This facility will allow us to double our population of clairvoyants, which means we will receive more prophecies of orders we can then ship to people who don’t even know they want them yet,” said Bezos, noting that the completely silent, temperature-controlled tank will keep the beings comfortable and focused as they foretell 10,000 individualized orders for razor blade cartridges per second. “Whether by divining the exact hiking boots your dad wants for his birthday or envisioning which of 20,000 different earbuds is right for you, one of our seers will send you the correct product days before you would have even thought to buy it.”
“This expanded capacity means every single person with an Amazon account will now begin to receive orders they are not yet conscious of wishing to place,” Bezos added.
According to the CEO, the empaths, who float motionlessly in their reservoir, have no consciousness outside the temporal retail continuum. He explained that because no one empath can focus on the entirety of Amazon’s product offerings, they must specialize, with the psychic beings occupying separate sectors of the suspension tank specifically dedicated to areas such as books, electronics, pet supplies, Prime customers, gift-card balances, or Kindle downloads.
Amazon representatives confirmed that the ageless, translucent-skinned clairvoyants are clustered in groups of eight throughout the tank and lie supine in radial patterns. They said that upon receiving a product vision, a being’s eyes will widen, and in a soft monotone it might say, for example, “Charmin Ultra Soft Mega Roll.” It will then reportedly be answered by a flutter of voices all around it—“Product number 5000477488831,” “24 count,” “Guaranteed delivery date: Aug. 1, 2017,” “No gift receipt,” “Estimated tax to be collected: $2.52”—while the fluid in the tank pulsates rapidly in fluorescent colors.
“Within a fraction of a second after a patio-and-garden clairvoyant has received a premonition, it will search through thousands of different wind chimes, bird feeders, or bug zappers to locate it,” said Bezos, noting that orders available exclusively from third-party vendors might take a seer slightly longer to foretell. “Once the items have been vocalized, they go into the customer’s shopping cart, inventory data is updated, and the order is processed before the customer has any notion that somewhere deep within the inner reaches of their subconscious, they nurture a desire to order these exact items.”
“Then their credit card is charged,” Bezos continued.
According to company sources, construction on the new, upgraded suspension tank was expedited to ensure completion well before the 2017 holiday shopping season, as the number of last-minute gift orders placed last December overtaxed the psychic beings’ temporal lobes, damaging their precognitive functions. The problem is said to have gone unnoticed until employees discovered an unusual number of gift-wrapped lawn chairs being sent to addresses all over the world, each containing a gift message printed with random words from a dozen or more languages.
Amazon lab technicians told reporters that on Dec. 23 they found the clairvoyants thrashing about in their tank and screaming out strings of order confirmation numbers that didn’t even exist. The liquid in their neural bath had grown dangerously thin, almost completely depleted of nutrients, and it reportedly took weeks to bring them back online.
While most customers have hailed the convenience and speed of Amazon’s ordering psychics, some shoppers—wary of the intrusiveness of preconscious buying—have expressed skepticism.
“I just don’t know if I like these big corporations having my personal data before I even have it,” Chicago resident Willard Moser said. “It’s definitely creepy, and I’m sure there’s a million ways this could be abused.”
“Then again,” added Moser. “This new food processor they sent me is amazing.”
