Chapter 30: Tear Purity Center

As the man's tear ducts were crushed by the hydraulic tongs, the tester showed an emotional purity of -17%.

"Despair index not met," the appraiser said as he used a pipette to extract blood tears from his eyes, "triple emotional damage tax required per Rule 9 of the End Times Tears Act."

Rule #130: All tears must be certified by a chromatographic analyzer, and Luna's fingertips run across the matrix of teardrops on the holographic screen - at the moment, the price of Tears of Mourning has plummeted due to the clone revolt, and Tears of Betrayal have skyrocketed in purity due to the acid rain stopping. Tax collectors in white coats are using centrifuges to separate the remorseful components of their clients' tears, and the residue is directed to the sewers, which are swarming with radiation-blind eels that feed on guilt.

"These are my first love breakup tears!" The young girl slapped the bulletproof glass, her freshly implanted bionic tear ducts were oozing fluorescent blue liquid, "Your detectors must be jammed with nuclear radiation!"

The appraiser suddenly ripped open her scalp to reveal a miniature projector on her cerebral cortex. The hologram showed her masturbating with an onion in the ruins last night, her virtual boyfriend's AI voice still stolen from Jax's moan recordings.

"Section 131 addendum." Luna poured the teen's cerebrospinal fluid into the burette, "False tears need to be hedged with a memory wash."

As the young girl swallowed the pills and began to recite the code for convenience store employees, the blast door to the VIP room slammed open. The mink-coated noblewoman holding the crystal vial screamed, "One hundred percent pure tears of repentance! I killed my own clone daughter before..."

The shrill alarm of the mass spectrometer interrupted her. The data showed that the tears were mixed with 0.3% orgasmic secretions - from her forbidden intercourse with her clone husband. The ceiling suddenly lowered a robotic arm to "emotionally distill" her in accordance with Chapter 47 of the Tear Act: the left brain was converted into a tear duct incubator and the right brain into a wastewater processor.

"Rule #132." Luna applied the noblewoman's brains to the test window, "All affectionate tears must be kept frozen."

Suddenly, the entire floor of the center began to shake. The Tear Collector from the convenience store's headquarters emerges from the ground, a mechanical monster with a tear pump attached to each tentacle, extracting traumatic childhood memories from identified customers, and Luna's cybernetic eye penetrates the metal casing to see her own cry-frozen eyeballs from when she was seven years old soaking in formalin at the monster's core.

Riots erupt at the data breach.

When the first client discovers that his grief has been made into erotic lubricant, he digs out his bionic tear ducts and shoves them up his anus to blow himself up. Splattered brain tissue forms teardrop-shaped blood trails on the wall, which happens to spell out the convenience store president's lip-sync, "Cry harder, my daughter."

"Rule 133!" Luna activates the self-destruct protocol and the liquid nitrogen tanks in the tear warehouse begin to leak, "All illegal tears must be crystallized and recovered."

Recovery teams in chemical suits stormed the site, they used sound waves to shatter the frozen tear crystals. Suddenly, the tear crystals in one of the sealed canisters begin to glow-the last tears shed by the mother before she was dismembered, and tests show that the purity exceeds the instrument's upper limit because it's condensed with her betrayal of her 47 husbands, her pleas for forgiveness to the president of the convenience store, and the ecstasy she felt as she sealed Luna's embryo in the canister.

"Rule 134 addendum." Luna embedded the tear crystals into her mechanical spine, "The Tears of the Founders may be exchanged for the right to commit patricide."

The moment the Tear Crystal touched her nerves, the entire center's holographic screen simultaneously played forbidden images: the convenience store president making a cocktail with Luna's menstrual blood on her fifth birthday, the salt grains on the rim of the glass the very bones of other daughters' ground-up skeletons.

Moonlight is refracted into blood by the tear crystals, and Luna sees the truth behind the tester - all the tears are transmitted in real time to the headquarters "emotional refinery", where they are purified into a psychotropic drug that controls the survivors. The main ingredient in the best-selling Confession Spray is the tears she herself shed the night she killed Cole.

"Rule 135." She crushed her mother's tear crystals, letting the edges cut into her palm, "When tears become currency, even grief has to be priced."

The alarm sounded and the transformed noblewoman suddenly came back to life. Her brain matter ejected from her tear ducts, forming the latest trading ticker in the air:

"Luna patricide futures surge 700%, time to short human civilization."