Chapter 34: Memory Clearance at the Nerve Auction

Luna's brain-computer interface was being colored pink by his dopamine secretions as the auction gavel pierced the man's frontal lobe.

"Lot 178: First Love, First Night Duplex Memory!" The AI chimed in with a synthesized moan, "Comes with adolescent masturbation guilt, starting bidding at two vertebrae!"

Rule #155: All neural activity must be in auction circulation.Luna's cybernetic prosthetic eye scans the circular auction block, the brainstems suspended in mid-air writhing like jellyfish, each synapse blinking with a bidding red light. The crone in mink was trading menopausal memories for juvenile delinquent patricidal pleasure data, memory-eating nematodes crawling out of her wig.

"I'm going to up-bid this!" The transsexual killer rips open his skull to reveal a formalin-soaked amygdala, "This holds the convenience store president's foot fetish..."

His voice was interrupted by the sound of brain spatter. Luna's irises suddenly cracked when the bidding screen showed that the memory had been auctioned off by an anonymous buyer for three thousand rape memories - the buyer's authentication code turned out to be her erased childhood birthday.

"Rule 156 addendum." She injected formalin into the auction gavel, "Memories involving executives are subject to a 300% blood tax."

A sudden rain of nerves fell from the auction house dome. The stragglers whose hippocampi had been removed opened their mouths wide and allowed the memory solution to pour into their esophagus. As the crone begins to recite someone else's wedding vows, Luna realizes that the rain is mixed with a neural editing virus from the convenience store headquarters - and is formatting the memories of the losing bidders into shopping lists.

Riots erupt when the first memory bomb explodes.

The transgender killer's limbs spell out barcodes in the air, and a scan reveals that it's an access permit for the president's office.Luna's nanobots burrow into his cochlea and read an encrypted message on the otolith: surveillance footage of her being dragged into the cooler by Cole when she was seven years old is being made into a limited edition can of memories to be sold hot off the presses.

"Rule 157!" She ripped out the crone's brain-machine plumbing and let the memory solution corrode the floor tiles, "All illegal bidders are automatically converted to memory carriers."

The auction table suddenly cracked open, revealing a pool of memory dissolution below. Those dissolved remnants of consciousness were reorganizing, gradually coalescing into the outline of Luna's mother. Luna's womb suddenly convulsed as the synthetic humanoid began to retell the memory of the excruciating pain of childbirth - the purchaser of this memory turned out to be her clone #48.

"Surprised baby?" Jax's holographic projection emerges from the bottom of the pool, his mechanical penis flashing a bidding placard, "I bought all of your violated memories..."

His fingers plunged into the memory solution and called up the hidden auction list: Luna's orgasmic fears, fratricidal pleasures, and even a Stockholm complex over a convenience store logo, all broken down into nerve-pulse packages. The most expensive lot was a dark memory from her embryonic days - a 4D image of the convenience store president's sperm being penetrated through the inside of a can.

"Lot 158!" Luna thrusts the auction gavel into her occipital lobe, "When memory becomes a commodity, forge your brain into a safe."

As her brainwaves interfered with the auction system, the entire arena began to quantumize. Those suspended brainstems turned into data streams, the crone's mink coat bursting with nerve fibers that bound the audience into memory cocoons.Luna sliced through the transgender killer's spinal cord to find miniature memory miners huddled inside - converting pain into convenience store points.

"Mom..." The coalesced humanoid of the memory solution suddenly spoke, "... You can't escape..."

The holographic screen exploded into a countdown, and Luna saw her hippocampus being made into a memory canister, being bid on the dark web at a rate of 47 times per second. The highest bidder was a clone of her removed appendix, with three thousand false labor memories stored in the payment account. The bar attached to the transaction pulsates: 

"Each memory is a convenience store receipt nailed into your coffin" 

Moonlight penetrates the quantum fog as Luna inscribes new rules on the nerve fibers. Suddenly, all the memory cocoons rupture in synchronization, and out fly swarms of memory albatrosses-each of their feathers a snippet of privacy being auctioned off, blockchain memory deeds in their beaks.

"Rule 159!" She detonated the brain-computer interface's overload module, "When the memories start backfiring, turn the auction house into a graveyard."

In the white light of a data nuclear explosion, the Memory Albatrosses collectively set themselves on fire. Ashes spelled out in the air as the convenience store president's will, with neurotoxin dripping from every word: 

"My legacy is a browser record you can never delete cleanly."