Chapter 27: Organ Stock Exchange

As the heart beats out the Nasdaq in the glass display case, the bald broker is checking his client's credit rating with a colonoscope.

"AA+ rating on the left kidney, hidden cracks in the right kidney from childhood domestic abuse..." He pulled out the endoscope and shook off the mucus, "Recommend shorting bladder futures to hedge the risk."

Rule #117: All human organs must be listed.Luna's electronic eye scans the trading floor, the livers suspended from the dome swaying like wind chimes, each lobed protruding gland flashing a real-time stock price. Aristocratic women in mink coats were trading the umbilical cords of aborted fetuses for the menisci of teenage Olympians.

"I want to pledge my vocal cords to buy Youthin!" The over-the-hill starlet rips her throat open to reveal barcode tattoos on her vocal cords, "Anyway, this voice has been... since she slept with the producer..."

Her voice was interrupted by an electronic clock. Moments after the opening, the crowd surges to trading desk #3 - where the frozen spermatophore of the convenience store president is being auctioned off.Luna's pupils constrict as she realizes that the date of manufacture on the label of the spermatophore is the same day her own embryo was implanted in the can.

"Rule 118 addendum." She plugged the sperm sac into the polygraph, "Reproductive organs are subject to a 50% blood tax."

The holographic screen suddenly exploded with a blood-colored warning. DNA testing of the seminal vesicles revealed that 47% of the customers present carried the genes of the convenience store president-including the nun who had raised a bidding card and whose pregnant belly under her black robe was moving fetus-like with the magnitude of the bidding.

Riots erupted when the first kidney exploded.

When the teenage champion's meniscus is converted into a concealed weapon to shoot through the broker's eyeball, Luna sees the secret under the trading table: all the organs are hooked up to miniature transmitters that send bio-data in real time to headquarters. In the most hidden trading slot, number 37, soaked in formalin, was the very appendix that had been removed when she was six years old and was currently sending Morse code at a rate of three times a minute:

"Countdown to patricide 71 hours."

"Rule 119!" She activated emergency protocols as the exchange floor cracked open to extend mechanical tentacles, "All offending organs automatically converted to enemy recognizers."

The mink-wearing noblewoman goes into sudden labor. The baby cries, and Luna's scanner reveals that the newborn has been implanted with a securities chip - the left ventricle is imprinted with a stock code, the right ventricle with a futures contract. The nun takes the opportunity to slit open the pregnant woman's belly and wipes the blood on the trading screen with the placenta, activating the hidden shorting program.

"Look!" She waved the umbilical cord in a frenzy, "Luna's uterine P/E is plummeting!"

The holographic projection exploded with images of her mother's labor footage doctored into financial advertisements. The moment the convenience store president's sperm penetrated the egg, instead of the miracle of life, a scarlet stock market ticker popped up:

"Long convenience store genes, short human ethics!"

Luna's electrode whip wrapped around the nun's mechanical spine, "Who gave you that biochip?"

"It was your dear brothers~" the nun crunched the cyanide in her back teeth, her pupils reflecting Jax's reflection before she died, "They stored it in your ovaries... Stored..."

The autopsy reveals micro-miners coiled in her fallopian tubes, transforming her eggs into a cryptocurrency wallet.The moment Luna crushes the miners, the exchange alarms boom-all the frozen organs suddenly come to life, forming giant barcodes in the air, scanning them, and then jumping to a live Darknet feed:

"Real-time auction for Luna's ovulation cycle, current bid: 47 cans of beef."

Moonlight pierces through the shattered colored windows as Luna puts her bloody fingerprints on the transaction voucher. Suddenly, the starlet with the pledged vocal cords starts screaming, strings of securities codes drilling out of her throat, projecting the latest rules on the wall:

"When kidneys become circulating currency, morality becomes a decimal fraction."