Chapter 40: Breathing Credit at the Time Pawn Shop

As the man's lung lobes constricted into pink bellows in the glass display case, the pawnbroker was calibrating the rate sheet with his dying gasps.

"Last breath valued at 0.7 seconds," the hourglass on the skeleton scale flowed backwards, "renewable for three minutes, but requires a mortgage on the retina's twilight memory..."

Rule #235: All lives must have a time account.Luna, fluorescent chrono running through her veins, looked at the time wall behind the counter-thousands of beating hearts sealed in crystals that deducted .03 seconds of lifespan for each contraction. The pawnshop apprentice's knucklebones flopped over the keyboard and were converting the brainwaves of wailing customers into an interest rate fluctuation curve.

"I want to redeem the 23:47 of July 12, 1999." Luna dissects her wrist to reveal quantum entangled blood vessels, "with a pledge of my pain for the next thirty years."

The boss's e-cigarette belches out smoke with memory fragments that condense into a time contract in the air. The terms revealed that redemption of that moment would require payment of compounded time, to be repaid with ten labor pains for every second of delay. Even more deadly was the additional clause - if the timeout was not repaid, the moment would be permanently deleted.

"Rule 236 additional clause!" Luna's pupils fissured into a double helix clock, "Time involving the Being must be quantum notarized."

The notarization ceremony takes place in the time rift. As images of Luna's childhood begin to dissolve, she suddenly sees the full truth of the cold storage - the syringe in her mother's hand contains the convenience store president's gene editor, and Cole's aggressive maneuvers are elaborate tests of obedience. Deadliest of all is a flash of the edges of the image: the five-year-old herself is drawing smiley faces on can labels with a crayon, in handwriting identical to the obedience agent formula in the headquarters file.

"You think you're a victim?" The boss's dentures popped open to reveal the time chip in his gums, "You're the perfect product..." He tapped the hearts sealed in the time wall, "... These are the scraps."

Riots erupted in time paradoxes.

When the first client's time account was overdrawn, his eyeball suddenly exploded, flying shards of his lens forming a countdown in the air. The apprentices raise time guns modified from their ribcages and accelerate the flow of life in passersby tenfold - the white-haired crone is transformed into an embryo in five seconds, and then rewound into a rotting corpse.Luna's chrono starts to reverse the flow, and her wrist veins burst into the notes of "Ode to Joy".

"Article 237!" She shoved the time contract into her boss's carotid artery, "All usury must be repaid with the heartbeat of the lender."

The pawnshop cellar suddenly becomes transparent, revealing the shocking truth: thousands of Luna's clones have been transformed into humanoid pendulums, their wombs are fitted with atomic clocks, and cervical mucus is being refined into a time stabilizer. The oldest clone suddenly opens her mouth, her vocal cords vibrating out of her father's voice: "The purpose of your existence is to produce time for HQ..."

Moonlight is torn apart by the Quantum Clock, and Luna sees her multiple lives in the shards of time and space. Each version is signing a more brutal time agreement: teacher Luna mortgages her students' childhoods, prostitute Luna pawns her clients' dying gasps, and mother Luna even pledges her unborn daughter's heartbeat.

"Dear Product..." The holographic projection of the president's face was made up of time particles, "... The more you struggle, the more time debt is created..."

Luna's quantum veins suddenly burst as the fluorescents draw new rules in the void, "When breathing becomes usury, forge time into a murder weapon." She rips off the clone's atomic clock and transforms it into a bomb into the time pool.

In a big bang, the entire time bank begins to collapse. Customers screamed as they returned to their old age and decayed rapidly, and the hearts in the walls of time burst en masse. The pawnshop owner is transformed into an embryo in the vortex of the time stream, and uses his umbilical cord to carve a record of the final transaction into the amniotic membrane: 

"Subject 48 has developed self-awareness, initiating final recovery protocol."

At the end of time, Luna grabs hold of a floating childhood drawing. The crayon smiley face suddenly cracks open to reveal her father's handwritten annotation: 

"Best product, permanent recycling recommended."

In the distance, a newly opened pawn store lights up in neon, and clones in fluorescent vascular uniforms solicit customers. The Time Vendor's speakers play an advertisement: 

"New Customer Specials! Pledge Luna's moment of remorse and get a free patricide countdown timer!"