Chapter 28: Brain Gap Speculators in the Black Market of Memory

As the crone's cerebral sulcus gyrus skyrocketed under a black market microscope, Luna was using a spinal tap needle to extract her own childhood memories.

"On June 12, 1988, you stole rainbow candy from the convenience store register..." The Memory Dealer licked the cerebrospinal fluid-stained lens, "That memory now trades for three cans of sardines, if you add in the shame of having your thighs groped by the store manager..."

Rule #120: All memory transactions are subject to neural tax, Luna's electrodes are inserted into the crone's occipital lobe, and she watches the K-lines on the holographic screen as they bounce around - "Bereavement" is plummeting due to the clone riots, and the "Composite Memory of the First Love and the First Night" package is being sold for an exorbitant price. The eyeballs floating in the glass jar suddenly blinked, their irises projecting surveillance footage of her being molested in a cold storage unit when she was six years old.

"The hash value of this memory," the dealer tweezers a fold of her cerebral cortex, "is just enough to unlock your father's frozen seminal vesicles..."

The deal broke down at the peak of the brainwave.

When Luna's childhood screams are encoded into a blockchain currency, a sudden rain of nerves falls from the black market dome. Gelcoat-wearing speculators opened their mouths to catch the silvery liquid as their temporal lobes began to twitch uncontrollably - a memory virus dropped by HQ to force all brain-groove gyrus transactions into the convenience store cloud.

"Rule 121 addendum!" She made a signal blocker out of the crone's brainstem, "Each memory must contain 30 seconds of advertising implants."

The peddler suddenly ripped open his scalp, revealing a biological hard drive embedded in his skull. As the data cable is inserted into his hippocampus, a holographic screen plays up images Luna has never seen before: the convenience store president implanted a memory chip in her embryo, and all that sibling bonding with Cole was a code-generated hallucination. The most fateful 47th-second image showed that Jax was her biological father.

"Rule 122..." Luna's vocal cords were jammed with static, "... All falsified memories need to be cleansed with native brain matter."

The speculators began to kill each other. They stabbed each other's frontal lobes with bone awls and fought over the uncontaminated raw memories. As the first victor swallows the brain tissue, data lines suddenly sprout from his ear canals, automatically uploading the memories to the servers at HQ.Luna's scanners show that the men's cerebellums have been transformed into bitcoin miners.

"Here comes the big order!" Eyeless Boy pushed his way through the pile of corpses, the end of his optic nerve connected to a projector, "A client wants to buy the dopamine production data from when you killed Cole..."

The buyer projected in a pool of blood was none other than Jax. on his bare chest, Cole's scalp was contracting with the quoted magnitude, "Good daughter, the body temperature when you crushed his heart..." Jax's tongue licked across the screen, "... Made me orgasm seven times at the Darknet auction."

The black market suddenly falls into dead silence as Luna's electrode whip shatters the projector. A convenience store jingle played simultaneously in the brainstems of all the speculators, their earholes oozing a silvery fluid that converged in the air to form a holographic image of their mother.

"Memory is the last womb," the mother's phantom cupped Luna's face, "and you're the best surrogate mother we've ever had..."

The autopsies reveal that each speculator's pituitary gland is embedded with microscopic embryos that are absorbing memory nutrients and growing.When Luna dissects the eyeless boy's skull, she finds lines of laser engraving on his cerebral bridges:

"Progress on patricide 71%, recommend additional betrayal futures."

Moonlight penetrates the radiation-proof lead panels as Luna smears the crone's brains on the trading contract. Suddenly, the memory cans throughout the black market begin to resonate, playing the lullaby of the convenience store president:

"Sleep my canned baby, dream of barcodes..."

As the first clone cracks open its head and is born, Luna inscribes new rules on the corpse skin:

"When memory becomes a commodity, amnesia is the best defense mark."