Chapter 13. “Black Hole Bouncing Ball: When Capital Meets Vacuum”

When the sun collapsed to the size of a basketball, Wall Street's gilded shield began to crack. The rich and powerful screamed as they plummeted into black hole vision, their bodies stretching into glowing streams of data - Marcus Sr.'s face twisting into a stock K-chart in a gravitational field, his mouth spewing crypto-coin mining card residue.

"Welcome to the womb of Ross." A mother's mechanical sound effect came from the depths of the black hole, and twelve white dwarf baskets began to spin. Lucas and Marcus were handcuffed together in quantum chains, Elena's mycelium wrapped around their mutated limbs, "If you want to live, play a perfect match."

Marcus's spinal orb suddenly fissioned into a bitcoin miner, beams of arithmetic power shooting at the chemical equation in Lucas's chest, "Fail to decrypt it, and I'll put your ribs up for auction on the blockchain!"

On the other side of the black hole, Raine's mechanical heart is disintegrating. His mother's fingers descend from the clouds and insert his memory chip into the black hole singularity - and the security footage from March 16, 2001 begins to play: Raine rushes out of the fire with two babies in his arms, only to throw Lucas into a dumpster and Marcus into a gold-plated cradle.

"It's time to top off your gratitude." Marcus projects the adoption papers with his eyeballs, the elder Marcus' signature stained with his mother's bloody fingerprints.

Suddenly, Elena's mycelium pierced the brothers' temples, forcing them to meet head to head to form a human basket. The black hole gravity begins to reverse, and the Regal's stream of data screams as it is sucked into the basketball net and condenses into a dark matter basketball.

"One last shot," the mother's phantom held up the ball fused from the Federal Reserve vault, "and with this shatter the Marcus family's century-old trust."

Marcus suddenly ripped open his chest, his gold-plated ribs automatically assembling themselves into the silhouette of a bronze Wall Street bull, "Come on brother! Just like your mom smashed my family's engagement party back in the day!"

The moment Lucas leapt up, he saw slum kids at the edge of the black hole building ladders out of bone spikes. Their mutant pupils reflected the same string of formulas-the code of vengeance that their mother had buried in the genes of all the poor.

As the ball strikes, Elena's mycelial network suddenly covers the globe. Every person crushed by capital raised a rotting hand, and billions of parabolas merged into a torrent of light.

As old Marcus's vault ball melted, Raine's mechanical heart suddenly played a dying recording, "Ross, it was me who switched the babies back then...your own son is wearing gold-plated ankle cuffs."

The eagle's head birthmark on Marcus's ankle begins to ooze blood, and the adoption home firemark emerges from Lucas's festering palm-their stitched-up lives are nothing more than jump-ball gestures for the game of capital.