Roses Burning

(Scattering Ethan's ashes into Swan Lake in Central Park)

Snow mixed with ashes and crushed diamonds drifted in Central Park's Swan Lake, and Violette's Valentino haute couture cape burned to blockchain ash in the minus-twenty-degree air. She labels Ethan's urn as a Sotheby's auction, and the shimmering quantum chip inside the box is compiling the dead man's DNA into apocalyptic cryptocurrencies-each carbon atom carrying thirty trillion dollars of dirty secrets.

"Last lot." The darknet auctioneer's voice came out of a bone-conduction headset wrapped in a Hermes silk scarf, "Starting bid: the gravitational acceleration of a mother jumping off a building." Scarlett's mechanical remnants burst through the ice as a Tesla electric whip shatters the urn, the ashes congealing in the moonlight into the faces of the Federal Reserve's past chairmen. Her rusted uterus spews crypto code, the lake begins to boil, and three hundred bitcoin miners under the ice overload simultaneously.

Violette skates to the center of the lake on Jimmy Choo ice skates, and the crushed diamonds on her Gucci belt chain are scanning the ashes into a 3D holographic projection. As Ethan's hologram begins to read the dying will, she whips out a noose woven from her daughter's umbilical cord, "It's time for your estate to change heirs." The hologram suddenly distorts and the terms of the will become a notarized certificate of the blockchain from a murder twenty years ago, each word absorbing the resonance energy of a swan's mournful cry in the lake.

Scarlett's mechanical fingers pierce the ice and yank out the titanium safe buried deep at the bottom of the lake. Upon seeing that the frozen embryo inside the box is the very fetus she aborted, her Tesla-coiled womb bursts into gamma rays, "You're even counting on death!" The rays pierced the ice and a dark red lake gushed out, mixing with the toxicological waste dumped by Ethan Pharmaceuticals to form a blood-colored vortex.

"The countdown begins." Violette's Van Cleef & Arpels necklace suddenly disintegrates, the four-leaf clover pendant transforming into a quantum drone that rushes into the vortex. The swan flock suddenly mutates, its metallic feathers refracting the live feed of the simultaneous meltdown of the world's financial centers. She scatters her last handful of ashes in the direction of the United Nations building, and the nanobots in the ashes begin to gnaw on the corneas of the bronze bulls on Wall Street.

Scarlett's mechanical vocal cords suddenly return to a human voice, "Remember the rooftop at Wharton?" She ripped off her chest armor to reveal a quantum heart grown from fetal stem cells, "The day you said you wanted me to be the brightest on Wall Street..." Before the words were out of her mouth, Violette's ice blade had stabbed into her energy core, freezing liquid mixed with fragments of a confession tape from twenty years ago spewing into ice crystals.

When the bidding price on the darknet exceeded the imaginary limit, a monument made of ashes and diamonds rose from the center of the lake, and Violette stood at the top of the monument with her daughter in her arms, and the baby's cries suddenly changed to Chopin's "Funeral March". All the electronic screens in the world go black at the same time, and only one line of blood-colored code burns on the human retina: MATRIARCHY 2.0 INITIALIZED.

While Secret Service helicopters are being torn apart by a quantum storm, Violette is writing a new financial constitution on ice with her breast milk. Swans skim over the ruins of Nasdaq with Ethan's ribs in their mouths, and the wreckage of mining machines at the bottom of the lake suddenly surfaces en masse, spelling out giant androgynous symbols - the very code that was at the heart of her daughter's gene-editing atlas.

"Good night, Wall Street." She kissed the last rose ash on the ice goodbye and leapt into the quantum clouds on her Prada parachute satin. Below, in burning Central Park, Scarlett's mechanical remnants were dancing their last tango with mutant swans, the shockwaves of their dance melting the Federal Reserve vaults into a rain of liquid gold, drenching every tombstone that had ever knelt before the financial hegemony.