Chapter 16. “Womb Chronicles: basketballs breathe when the umbilical cord breaks”

The amniotic fluid of a mechanical womb is molten gold coins, and Marcus's new god body is being strangled by an antimatter umbilical cord. He attempts a cesarean section with the scepter of God, and the tip of the scepter drips Lucas's bone marrow - the only legacy of the collapsed Supreme Court.

"Fine for failure to deliver: $648 gaiety." A holographic debt collector's order from old Marcus emerges from the inside of the womb, the interest column scrolling with the pupil lines of all the poor people of the parallel universes.

Elena's spores suddenly germinate in a rain of gold coins, and the mycelium wraps itself around Lucas's mutated right hand, forcibly reconstituting the clean palm of infancy. Twenty-three universes of basketball undead burrowed out of the fungus cap and chiseled their mother's final code into the uterine wall with bone spikes, "RH-=Reborn Humanity - dunking is childbirth."

Marcus growled and ripped open his abdominal cavity, his gold-plated innards jetting out to datastream the basket, "Come on! Throw yourself in the position your mom taught you!" His kidneys fissioned into two NBA Halls of Fame, the inscriptions inscribed 'Honorable Birth of Holt Capital Group.'

The moment Lucas leaps, the undead build a human ladder out of his spine. Every bone flickers with the memory of him and Marcus splitting fried Oreos at the dump, until the mycelium forcibly overwrites that piece of data-replacing it with the real reason his mother incinerated the lab: she buried class antibodies in all her basketball genes.

The mechanical womb suddenly implodes as the ball touches the basket. Marcus's godly body shatters into 648 gold bricks, each bearing the poor man's retinal ID.Elena's spore flower blooms in the ruins, its pollen spelling out the new laws of the universe:

Rule number one: air belongs to everyone who leaps.

Rule #2: Basket height is determined by the shortest player.

Rule #3: Hate over a threshold automatically converts a three-point shot.

The remains of Rayne precipitated out of the black hole, mechanical fingers being transformed by mycelium into a seeder: "Ross said heaven should smell like grass ..." He scattered grass seeds that instantly spread across the universe, each blade of grass a miniature basketball court.

Marcus held up half a gold brick at the end of the void, Elena's radioactive blood seeping out of the cracks: "I can still buy ..." Before he could say anything, the gold brick was transformed into a plastic basket he'd lost when he was five years old, the rim of which was still stained with Lucas's teeth marks.

The newborn cry resounded through the sea of stars. Lucas picked up the basketball-shaped embryo, the sphere patterned with the poor man's palm prints of twenty-three universes. The last of Elena's mycelium wrapped around his wrist and bloomed into a burning daisy.

On the ruins of Wall Street, Raine poured the first basket rack of the new world with a robotic arm. The rim was glued with old Marcus's will, and the net was his mother's burnt wedding dress.

"Welcome to the real." The mycelium whispered in the wind, rolling away Marcus' last gilded tears.