Savior with Expiration Date

Jax's cock ring was stuck in the gallows gears while Luna was giving her clone a dying oiling ritual with menstrual blood.

"Good sister," his mechanical prosthetic eyes shot out convenience store price lasers, "Daddy asked me to teach you one last lesson..."

Rule #88: Family lineage authentication is required for the ritual of regicide.Luna's umbilical knife slashes across the clone's throat, and artificial blood sprays onto the inverted cross formed by the drones, each drop congealing into a barcode in mid-air. When the seventh clone stopped convulsing, the genetic authenticator in Jax's collar finally flashed green - the execution of forty-nine clones with the President's blood in their veins was a necessary sacrifice for the birth of a new god.

"Now, it's your turn." Jax's hydraulic arm crushes the skull of the last clone, brain matter forming a stigmata pattern in the radiant wind, "Spread your legs like mom did back then, maybe you can..."

Luna's uterine contractions suddenly burst.

The miniature reactors buried in her fallopian tubes began to overload, the ultimate insurance policy pre-programmed at Convenience Store HQ - to automatically detonate the carriers when patricide was detected. The countdown hovered over the holographic screen: 00:71:00.

"Surprise?" Jax licked the clone's stump, "Your uterus is HQ's portable nuke..."

The steel beams of the warehouse buckled in the heat as Luna ripped open the abdominal sutures to reveal a metal uterus engraved with "Best Before" and inserted an oxygen tube into the clone's carotid artery. As the artificial amniotic fluid mixed with menstrual blood flowed backwards, the genetic lock began to disintegrate.

"Rule number 89." She chewed on the mucous membrane of the clone's vocal cords, "The Godslayer must be better at making miracles than the gods."

Jax's robotic arm suddenly went out of control. He watched as hydraulic fluid tubes plunged backwards into his eye sockets and sticky lubricant mixed with brain matter gushed out of his nose - a viral program that Luna had fed into the console with umbilical cord blood.

"Why do you think I kept you until the end?" She stomped on Jax's testicles, "You're in a mechanical prosthetic... With daddy's favorite backdoor program..."

The man suddenly laughed maniacally as a holographic projection popped up between his ribs. The face of the convenience store president hovered over the burning pile of clones, "My good girl, you missed a sacrifice."

The alarm hissed as Cole's cryopod rose from the ground. The supposedly dead man is covered in IV tubes, and a clear window in his abdomen exposes the ear bones of the digesting Luna - the "love token" he swallowed in Chapter Eleven.

"Double surprise." Jax coughed out gears, "Cole was only the 50th son, your first night date and..."

Luna's pupils shrink to pinpoints. Streams of memory data swept across her retinas: the same genetic barcode had surfaced on her neck when Cole had raped her with hot cocoa on her sixth birthday. The convenience store president's parenting logic was so clear-let his daughter learn the taste of power at the crotch of her brothers.

"Kill him and the Godhead will be complete." The president's projection caresses Cole's cryopod, "Or be killed by him and become the womb of a new god."

The radiation cloud cracked open like a church colored window.

Luna's menstrual flow suddenly reverses, and menstrual blood is injected into the powered exoskeleton along the grain of her leg armor. When Cole's cryo-pod unseals, his decaying right hand still clutches the teddy bear he gave her back in the day - the doll's eyeballs are now modified prosthetic eyes from the convenience store president.

"Fawn..." Cole's vocal cords vibrated with her father's voice, "It's time for your medicine..."

Luna's anal thermometer exploded. She made a choice in a thousandth of a second - insert the fuel tube of the powered exoskeleton into her cervix. Nuclear menstruation erupted, painting the dome with the logo of a burning convenience store, and all the drones instantly turned their guns.

"Rule number 90." She rips open Cole's chest cavity and shoves the frozen heart into the reactor, "The best coffin for the old god is the womb of his most perfect creation."

Jax's robotic arm bursts into action, hoisting Luna up to the gallows. As the synthetic fiber rope strangles her throat, all the screens in the warehouse are synchronized with footage of the mother's birth - the President is stuffing the infant Luna into a can of beans, while Cole stamps the label with a "pass" seal.

"Mom ... The... Gift..." Luna struggles to shoot the pocket syringe.

The anticoagulant injected into Jax's mechanical heart interface and his cybernetic nerves began to dissolve. As the man staggered and collapsed, Luna took the opportunity to slip the noose back around his neck. The screams of father and son rise up - Jax's mechanical body is devouring the president's holographic projection.

"You win." Cole suddenly regained his senses and stabbed his saber into his temple, "Now take me..."

Luna's teeth acted before her brain. She bites through Cole's carotid artery and swallows blood mixed with cryolite and radiation medicine. When the genetic authenticator beeped "New god registered", Cole's left hand was resting gently on her dissected abdomen, as steady as it had been when he taught her to pull the trigger twenty years ago.

The warehouse began to quantum collapse.

In the chaos at the junction of matter and data, Luna saw her uterus grow out of the flesh and blood servers. The consciousness of three thousand clones wailed in it while the convenience store president's mind was trying to transfer from Jax's mechanical remains.

"Rule number 91." She shoved enriched uranium into her vagina, "The first flush of a new god, when annihilating the menstrual blood of the old world."

Cobalt blue flames erupted from between her legs. As the nuclear blast shockwave tore through the warehouse, Luna saw in a near-death vision that her mother-the woman pinned to the production line-was oozing blood from her nipples, writing the final rule in the void:

"All gods, must personally deliver their own deaths."

What's left of Jax's head is still hissing as the radioactive dust settles, and Luna stomps on his mechanical prosthetic eye to discover that it's hiding a miniature embryo pod-soaked in nutrient solution of the very same clone she had when she was six years old, with her bellybutton attached to a datacord from the convenience store's headquarters.

"Mommy was wrong." She inserted the embryo pod into her exposed uterus, "We're not gods..."

The drone swarm reorganized into a giant uterus totem in a mushroom cloud. As Luna's menstrual blood seeps into the totem's cracks, the same sentence suddenly surfaces on the retinas of all the survivors:

"Kneel and buy your savior."

Convenience store vending machines rise from the rubble, and out of the shipping ports roll blood-stained condom packages emblazoned with the New World Constitution:

Article One: All life must be clearly labeled.

Last Article: private production of hope is forbidden

In absolute silence, Luna hears the sound of a baby crying from the ground. She cut open Jax's abdomen and found a map of the radiation zone hidden in her rectum - the end point marking the glass man's nursery she had seen on the monitor.

"Rule number 92." She swallows the remains of Cole's frozen heart and heads toward the cry:

"When a new god is born, kill her midwife."

The countdown to genetic collapse stops at 00:00:01.

Luna knew it was just a paid renewal reminder screen designed by the president of the convenience store. She picked up the baby emerging from the radioactive ashes and noticed the familiar barcode flashing in the child's pupils - her own factory number.

To the sound of a swarm of drones swooping in, the new god kissed the infant's radiation-crystallized forehead. As the first sip of breast milk was injected into the infant's mouth, the entire post-apocalyptic can burst at the same time, green beans and blood forming new genetic chains in the mushroom cloud.

"Mommy..." The baby suddenly spoke, "Your expiration date... It's beautiful..."

Luna smiled. It was the first expression she'd had since becoming a god, the corners of her mouth tearing in a curve that matched the convenience store president's trademark perfectly.