Savior with Expiration Date

Luna was hooking up her father's heart to electrodes when the polygraph machine that li had invented spewed its first whiff of human oil tar.

"This is an ultimatum." She kicked the dying snitch at her feet, "One wrong word and your daughter's left kidney turns into lunch meat."

Rule #59: All persons entering the warehouse must pass a cerebral cortex lie detector test. The machine, converted from a gastroscope and a microwave, is roasting the cumin-scented frontal lobe of the seventeenth subject.Eli stands in the shadows, the blood stains on his white coat spelling out the convenience store logo, his masterpiece dyed with the priest's duodenal fluid.

"I'm... My daughter is at the base of Noah's Ark..." The man's eyeballs bulged out from intracranial hypertension, "She eats strawberry shortcake every day..."

The vacuum hose of the polygraph machine burst, and Luna looked at the genetic profile on the display - the Y chromosome belonging to the man was a 100% match to the saliva sample of his so-called "daughter", who he violated day in and day out, and who was currently hanging from a warehouse beam, her lower body stuffed with radioactive cockroach eggs.

"Execution method?" Eli's breath sprayed the back of her neck, "Suggesting an enema melted from the gold bar in his appendix."

Luna's pupils constricted behind her gas mask. Three days ago she'd found this doctor mixing zombie spinal fluid with glucose injections, and now the bulging outline of the right pocket of his white coat was clearly the stump of her missing teddy bear.

"Upgrade test." She inserted electrodes into her temples, "Start with me."

As the polygraph probe pierced the hippocampus, the holographic projection exploded in an acid fog: six-year-old Luna locked in a convenience store cooler, her mother using a hot cocoa can to burn barcodes into her inner thighs. And Cole, who's supposed to be dead, appears in the surveillance footage, slipping birth control pills into her kindergarten lunchbox.

"Memory is the cheapest form of perjury." Eli suddenly pushes the override button, "Let's see the black box in the amygdala..."

Sharp pain causes Luna to bite down on two molars. A new image flashed: Cole in the conference room of the convenience store headquarters, placing her as an infant into the canning and sealing machine. And where the metal lid should have been, embedded was her mother's severed labia.

The warehouse suddenly loses power.

In the 13 seconds it takes for the backup power to kick in, Eli's scalpel is pressed against her carotid artery: "You know what? What this machine really does..." His tongue licked across the surface of the blade, "... Turn lies into reality."

Easter egg-like sirens blared as Luna glimpsed the hidden compartment at the bottom of the polygraph machine. There were three thousand pieces of human vocal cord mucosa piled up there, each labeled with a missing convenience store employee number-including her mother's piece, with lipstick prints stuck to the edges.

"Rule number sixty." She pressed Eli's thumb into the shredder, "All inventors are required to use their own organs for prototypes."

The doctor's screams were drowned out by the mechanical roar. As his right hand is reduced to mush and fed into the polygraph machine, the display bursts into a torrent of data: the so-called "radiation apocalypse" is nothing more than a starvation marketing experiment orchestrated by Convenience Store HQ, the clouds of acid rain are sprayed by a fleet of drones at regular intervals, and Luna's canned goods emporium is the planned "Observatory of Consumer Behavior".

Even more deadly is File 47, the video of her birth. There's no doctor in the delivery room, just the president of the convenience store implanting the embryo into a can of green beans, and Cole, as the quality inspector, stamping the label with a "pass" stamp.

"You're the first canner." Eli's broken wrist foams with blood, "We're all programmed to..."

Luna stabbed the polygraph cannula into his throat. As the machine extracts Eli's cerebrospinal fluid, all the cans in the warehouse begin to resonate, projecting real-time surveillance of the convenience store's headquarters on the wall: mothers immobilized on the assembly line, their breasts connected to the feed tubes in Luna's warehouse, each drop of milk mixed with radioactive dust infused into the cans of beans.

"Thank you for the dying gift." She loads Eli's eyeballs into the iris scanner, "Now I'm going to rewrite the rules."

The polygraph machine suddenly spits out years of frozen film. In the projection, the father didn't die of radiation sickness - he was shoved alive into a canning machine by Cole to test "the optimum ratio of human flesh to beans." In the final frame, the father's fingers pick out the words in blood on the glass:

"Don't be born."

A mob roars from outside the warehouse.

Luna activates the plenary broadcast and plugs a lie detector into each survivor's neckloop, "New rule, everyone has thirty seconds to say 'I love convenience stores' to the screen."

The first man's head exploded into pea mush as he finished his fifth word. Polygraph data revealed his true beliefs to be "Supermarket Supremacy" and the convenience store was categorized as a hostile camp. In a shower of blood, Luna changed the final clause:

Rule #61: When the truth lethality rate exceeds 87%, a lie is automatically elevated to biblical.

"Your turn." She turned her gun on the trembling figure in the shadows.

Maya crawled out of the trash, the Y-shaped sutures on her abdomen oozing pus. When she says "I love," the lie detector suddenly plays Jax's voice: "Sister, do you call your daddy's name when you orgasm?"

Bulletproof glass bursts all over the warehouse at the same time.

Moments before the mob pours in, Luna hits the master switch. The polygraph machine's ultimate program was activated - all connections began to recite the convenience store employee code in their native language, barcode projections emerging from their pupils. She took the opportunity to burrow into the secret passageway, and behind her came Eli's final maniacal laugh:

"You're the biggest lie of all!"

At the end of the passage, the film spit out by the lie detector machine begins to play automatically. Infantile Luna opens her eyes in a culture jar, and the face of the convenience store's president closes in, his irises reflecting a myriad of identical culture jars, each containing an embryo with a face similar to hers.

"Welcome to the new world." The father in the holographic projection said, "My canned daughters."