Chapter 25: The Pain Futures Exchange

Luna was calibrating the electronic scale with his sciatic nerve as the man's screams were converted to a bitcoin exchange rate.

"Pain level 7.2, duration 43 seconds," the exchange AI announces in a synthesized female voice, "exchangeable for 0.7 cans of chickpeas."

Rule 113: All physical pain must be entered into the futures market, Luna's electrodes plunged into the man's lacerated gums as she watched the K-chart pulsating on the holographic screen - at the moment the futures price of Labor Pain was plummeting due to the clone riots and Radiation Festering Pain was up due to the acid rain stopping.

"Add in a little mental trauma..." The broker rips open his suit to expose his chest and inserts a childhood sexual assault memory chip into the trading slot, "... Can you round up for a can of sardines?"

Luna's pupils suddenly contracted as the man's skinned spine hung from the auction gavel. His third lumbar vertebrae was engraved with the number of a convenience store employee, which was consecutive to the number of the body she'd found in the freezer - all of these "voluntary traders" were live sensors put in place by headquarters.

"Rule 114 addendum." She channeled neural currents into the futures algorithm, "Each transaction is subject to a 15% recall tax."

The exchange dome suddenly exploded.

Instead of building materials, thousands of frozen tear ducts fell. Traders in mink coats frantically scramble to get the glands into their eye sockets - the latest black market tool for emotional leverage, manipulating market prices through fake tears - and Luna's heel crushes one of the glands, and a miniature camera emerges from the mucus, transmitting data in real time to the Emotion Analytics Department at the convenience store's headquarters.

"Big order!" The balding manager pushed through the wall of people, his skull was converted into a transparent trading screen, "A customer wants to liquidate 50,000 units of bereavement..."

Luna's gas mask fogged over the moment the display lit up. The seller was none other than her missing mother-at this very moment, on a live feed from the convenience store headquarters, cutting her own uterus with a laser knife, each piece of tissue corresponding to a trauma from Luna's childhood. The pop-ups are frantically swiping gifts, the most expensive "Comet of Despair" special effect being a picture of a crushed parent-child.

"Article 115." She plugged her mother's eyeball iris into the trading system, "Affinity-type pain sensations need to be ransomed with a double handling fee."

The balding manager has a sudden seizure, and bloodied futures contracts are ejected from his nostrils. Documents show that HQ began hoarding Luna's painful memories twenty years ago: frostbite at age six, rape on the night of her first orgasm, Cole's body temperature at the time of the fratricide... All of these were created into the Luna Pain Index, which served as the baseline exchange rate for post-apocalyptic finance.

The riots erupted when the futures plummeted.

When the first trader swallowed a gun and killed himself, his brains splattered on the wall in a K-chart. Suddenly people realize that pain can be faked - they bite each other to create wounds, inject hot sauce into their eyeballs to simulate radiating pain, and the exchange is instantly reduced to a flesh factory; Luna's polygraphs explode one after the other as the market's "purity of pain" falls below the tipping point.

"Rule 116!" She activates emergency protocols as the floor of the exchange suddenly cracks open, "All counterfeiters are automatically converted to human raw materials."

Torsos falling into the processing pool are transformed into bio-calculators, intestines turned into fiber-optic cables, and screams modulated into trading beeps.Luna steps up the human ladder to the console, and discovers the most secretive of trading records - HQ is shorting human civilization with her pain futures, and the collateral turns out to be an option contract on the uteruses of all the survivors.

Moonlight pierces the shattered dome and shines on the last contract. The buyer is the Jax-controlled Temple of the Phallus, which is in the process of massively acquiring Kinslayer's Pain. The rider was written in semen:

"Dear sister, for every brother you kill, my dick grows an inch longer."

As Luna burned the contract, the entire exchange began to collapse. Streams of futures data coalesced in the air into a holographic image of her mother, her broken lips spitting out bloodied investment advice:

"Now long desperation, short hope, leveraged 666 times."

The surviving trader crawls in a pool of blood, carving new financial laws into the wall with his severed finger.As Luna turns to leave, she hears the AI recite the latest quote in a synthesized voice:

"Luna's Misery Index has broken through an all-time peak, recommending additional death futures..."