Chapter 7: Mistress Diary Pledges to Issue War Lottery Tickets

The gas lamps of the Washington Underground Auction cast a treacherous shadow over the small of Eleanor's back. She reclined on the auction table covered with drafts of the Emancipation Proclamation, the split in her skirt revealing a hot gold branding - a tamper-proof mark branded by the Morgan Bank in war bond code.

"Lot 37: Lincoln's mistress's pregnancy diagnosis." The auctioneer lifted the velvet curtain, and the specimen of embryo floating in a glass jar sent the room reeling, "Comes with an undisclosed map of the President's chromosomes, which verifies the heir-"

"Five million dollars!" The banker in British uniform raised his emerald encrusted civilized staff, "The British Empire is willing to pay for the rightful bloodline of the United States of America."

Eleanor suddenly grabs a hammer and smashes the glass jar, and a mechanical chip the size of a fetus's finger clanks to the ground. "Gentlemen there is a misunderstanding," she licked off the formalin splattered on her wrist, "this is a miniature telegraph removed from General Grant's vas deferens...the bidding is now open, and the testicles of one of the family's heirs need to be pledged for each raise."

Screaming, CSA-03 bounced and scurried up to the chandelier. The child's waving auction book featured a sketch of Eleanor kissing General Robert E. Lee in the trenches, and below it was labeled, Lot 66 - Uterus Leasehold (implanted with an artificially fertilized egg to give birth to the Civil War Terminator).

"Mom, they bought lottery tickets with the Gettysburg Fallen List!" CSA-02 yanks in bundles of blood-stained betting slips, "The winning number is your temperature on the day of your miscarriage...38.5 degrees Celsius corresponds to the 38.5 degrees North latitude battlefield coordinates."

In the midst of the chaos, the doors to the auction room were blasted open by cannonballs. William Sherman, a colonel in the Northern Army, barged in with twin guns, their barrels still smoldering with the residual smoke from the burning of Atlanta. "Your uterus," he ripped at Eleanor's girdle to reveal a mechanical gestation device, "should be classified as contraband of war."

Eleanor backhanded the auction hammer and stabbed it into his throat, "Darling, every civilian home you burned down..." she churned the handle of the hammer triggering a waterfall of blood, "appreciated my war lottery by 10%."

Suddenly, the embryonic chip activates automatically. The National Telegraph Network frantically prints out the winning numbers - each corresponding to a mass grave coordinate.CSA-01 takes the opportunity to herd the Northern prisoners into the gladiator arena, where the child screams, lottery redemption ticket in hand, "Rip your opponent's throat out for gold! Mommy said so!"

As the auction room is reduced to a casino of blood and flesh, Eleanor slips into the secret room and flips through the blood-stained journal. The newly surfaced words made her pupils quake, "Each miscarriage you have adds 1% interest to the time loop." Suddenly, the mechanical womb in her belly began to count down and the display lit up: time remaining in pregnancy - 2140 minutes (synchronized with the end of the cryopod).

"Surprise?" Sherman's corpse suddenly jerks to its feet, and Lincoln's voice emanates from his abdominal cavity, "This embryo was grown with your cryopod DNA...should I call it CSA-04 or Fed Primary Governor?"

Eleanor rips off the mechanical uterine catheter and inserts the electrified embryo chip into the auction house safe. The giant steel door blasts open, and inside is a mountain of lottery tickets printed on the very pulp of a mistress' diary, each one drenched in a different man's sperm stains.

"Love is a Ponzi scheme," she held up the bloodied embryo to the rushing press corps, "and my womb...is the only bank that never bursts."

Three hundred miles away, the Gettysburg battlefield is being transformed into a giant lottery drawing center. The bodies of fallen soldiers are hung with numbered plaques, while the heartbeat of CSA-04 travels across America via telegraph - the number of heartbeats per minute being the closing price of the Dow Jones that day.