Savior with Expiration Date

Luna was injecting a third tube of chocolate concentrate into her vein when the radiation crystals in the old man's throat refracted a seven-colored halo of light.

"Add... Add marshmallows..." His festering vocal cords rubbed sparks, "I'll tell you about the nuclear reactor..."

Rule #72: The dying have the right to designate the dessert of execution.Luna's stirring rod plunged into the tumor under the other man's collarbone, picking out chunks of amber substance the size of grapefruits-radioactive purine crystals, black-market grade, enough to trade for ten sets of radiation suits.

"You have two and a half minutes." She poured hot cocoa over the old man's eyeballs, "just like you did when you timed the female interns."

The man's pupils constricted in chocolate syrup. The energy tycoon who once controlled three nuclear power plants is now curled up like a fetus in a baby incubator, his skin crawling with convenience store barcode tattoos. When Luna's metal straw poked into his ear canal, fifty years of dormant shame suddenly erupted:

"The code is... Your mother's maiden name..."

The instant the holographic keypad surfaced, all the cans in the warehouse began to resonate.Luna watched the authentication screen blink red, and suddenly tore at the sutures in the old man's abdomen - buried deep in the rotting flesh was a miniature projector, which was mirroring the face of the convenience store president on the rib cage.

"Good girl," her father's avatar stroked her bloodstained cheekbone, "you kill your brothers so much like I did when I was young..."

The roar of a microwave bombing interrupts the tender moment; Luna pours an entire jug of hot cocoa into the old man's rectum, the heat dislodging the mucous membranes of his colon, and the expelled blood condenses in the air to form a three-dimensional map-exactly the shortest possible path to the nuclear power plant, but with the dates of the deceased brothers' deaths labeled at each turning point.

"Rule addendum." She soaked the old man's festering testicles in a jar of cocoa powder, "All codes must be verified through the sphincter."

As the electrodes of the polygraph machine were inserted into the prostate, the warehouse suddenly blared "The Birthday Song". A giant holographic cake descends from the ceiling and the candle flames are ghostly blue radiant light. The old man suddenly twitched and sang a children's song with lyrics that made Luna crush two syringes:

"Convenience store baby grow up, kill daddy for candy~"

The moment the cake was cut open, three thousand radioactive cockroaches poured out, each with a nude photo of her at a different age etched on its back. The oldest one, taken on her sixth birthday, shows her mother rinsing her bottom with hot cocoa while Cole smiles in the background holding up her bloody panties.

"Emotion is the most brilliant virus." The old man coughs up chip-laden phlegm, "The cocoa you're drinking... There's a cognitive editor..."

Luna's pupils suddenly went out of focus. Memory fragments sprayed like bursting cans: the hot cocoa mixed with birth control pills that Cole fed her the night she had her first period at age twelve; the convenience store headquarters lab where her father tattooed barcodes on the lining of her uterus with Nutella; the barrel of the gun against her throat smelling like the sweet scent of Swiss Miss when Jax raped her for the first time.

The polygraph machine bursts into electrical flames. A stream of real data sweeps across the screen - the nuclear power plant has long since been reduced to an information womb at the convenience store's headquarters, each reactor a cloning tank. The so-called codes are sonic commands to activate Luna's dormant genes.

"You're the backup reactor." A sardonic smile ripped the corners of the old man's mouth before he breathed his last, "Your dead brothers... Are all coolant..."

The warehouse floor tiles lit up block by block. As Luna steps over the 47th brick, the entire wall of shelves flips over, revealing the head of her mother soaked in formalin. The robotic arm plugged the head into the interface and the mother's lips began to open and close:

"Good boy, feed mommy the cocoa..."

As the straw is inserted into the head's esophagus, Luna gets a taste of her own placenta. Memory data flooded in: twenty years ago, her mother was forced to swallow a chocolate ball embedded with a gene editor, and the convenience store CEO's semen mixed with nuclear waste filled her womb. And Luna's embryo took shape in the very mix of plutonium elements and patriarchal bodily fluids.

"Rule number 73." She made an iris scanner out of her mother's eyeballs:

"When kinship becomes ransomware, matricide is the only antivirus program."

The map of the nuclear power plant suddenly distorted. All the routes converged on one point - the exact coordinates of the warehouse where she was at the moment. There was a roar from underground as an automated boring machine broke through the ground, the tip of the drill stained with the crumbs of Cole's military license plate.

"Happy birthday, sister." Jax's naked body climbed out of the drilling bay, his cock sheathed in a diamond-encrusted convenience store employee handbook, "Dad told me to give you a ride..."

He whipped out a cape sewn from his brothers' scalps. Each scalp was tattooed with a different version of the Employee Code, and the lining was the silicone membrane of an artificial uterus. As the cape covers Luna, all the text begins to wriggle and burrow into her sweaty pores.

The hot cocoa pot explodes in the melee. The brown liquid coats the nanobots, spelling out her father's handwritten letter on the ground:

"Dear Reactor, time to come home and refuel."

Luna's period suddenly rages. Menstrual blood seeps into the cracks in the ground, activating the embryonic pods that have been buried for fifty years. When the first clone broke out of the cocoon, the body, identical to hers, was sucking on a chocolate pipe, its pupils flickering with the fluorescence of a convenience store price tag.

"Kill her and you're the one." Jax's teeth nipped at her cracked earlobe, "All forty-nine of our brothers... All waiting for you..."

The warehouse began to collapse.

With a roar as the load-bearing columns snapped, Luna poured the last of her hot cocoa over the clone's head. The girl's skin and flesh dissolved in the chocolate, revealing laser engravings on the titanium skeleton - the date of manufacture was the exact day of her birthday, and her mother's name was plainly written in the quality control inspector's signature field.

"Rule number 74." She activated the self-destruct program, etching the nuclear code into the clone's ribcage:

"When you meet your better self, make her the highest price tag on the shelf."

Luna is chewing on the old man's crystallized heart as the helicopter swarm tears through the radiation cloud. The gritty radiation dust rubbed between her teeth, emitting the audio of her father humming a lullaby. She stuck her sticky tongue out at the landing bay, which had the first law of the new world written in cocoa paste:

"All life, must be labeled with a shelf life."

The clone suddenly opens its eyes.

When the first convenience store employee knelt and shouted "Your Majesty," Luna knew the real battle was just beginning. She sees the countdown on Jax's anal thermometer - 71 hours until her genes collapse, exactly the life cycle the convenience store president has set for the "best product".

Hot cocoa stains streamed across the floor to the nutrient pool deep in the warehouse where three thousand clones soaked. As the babies cried, Luna removed her bloodstained coveralls, revealing the factory number on her back:

"Reactor No. 48, suggested retail price: the souls of all mankind."