Savior with Expiration Date

The first screaming speculator was having spinal fluid sucked out of his spine by a live cupper when Luna rang the bell with a trading hammer made of rib bones.

"Bid: 120 decibels per milliliter of misery reached." She stepped on the throne converted from a dental office chair, "Current general market trend - anal temperature futures plummeting, amputation options bullish."

The line of survivors beyond the bulletproof glass had snaked to the edge of Radiation Lake. The man in seventh place in line suddenly convulses and falls to the ground, the pain chip implanted in the back of his neck begins to overload, and a convenience store sale advertisement floats across his skin, "Today's special! Trade three severed fingers for painkillers and get the second one for half price!"

Rule #87: all traded items must be produced on-site.

"I want to pawn Nightmare!" Maya, the teenage girl, ripped the data port at her temple, "Last night I dreamed that the president of the convenience store was eating my appendix..."

Luna's pupils constricted behind the night vision device. She recognizes the brain-computer interface model - a Chicago black market "sentence converter" that offers a real-life sentence for each painful memory. When Maya's neural currents plugged into the trading desk, the holographic projection exploded into a blood spray: not a nightmare at all, but a video of the convenience store's headquarters performing three hundred uterine punctures on her using virtual reality.

"Pain index 92, rating A," the exchange dome dangled a mechanical arm that hoisted Maya onto the automated operating table, "suggested collateral: left ovary."

Luna smelled caramel popcorn as the laser knife sliced through the young girl's lower abdomen. It was the scented glands implanted in Maya's body, a sign from headquarters for superior sex slaves. She suddenly hit the pause button and the scalpel hovered 0.3 millimeters from the fallopian tube.

"Additional chips." She poured radioactive dust into Maya's brain-computer interface, "I want the genetic code of the embryo from your last abortion."

The lighting throughout the Exchange suddenly turned red.Maya's cervical dilator erupted into sparks, projecting a string of DNA sequences into the air-exactly the original code of Luna's clone. It turned out that this repeatedly battered body was the original bioprinter at Convenience Store HQ.

"Pain value-added service activated." Luna licked the blood rust from the deal hammer, "Let's see what your pain can hatch..."

The scalpel slammed down.Maya's screams pushed human limits in frequency, shattering three pain meters. The moment her ovaries were ripped out, her belly cracked open with fluorescent lines, surfacing a map of the convenience store's global locations. Each coordinate was oozing black liquid, converging into a holographic projection of the president.

"My good girl," the father's fingers penetrated Luna's gas mask, "you're torturing her with the exact same force you kicked me in the womb back in the day."

The floor tiles of the trading floor begin to tumble.Luna stomps the third tile and the incubation tanks soaking 49 of her brother's heads rise from the ground. She shoves Maya's ovaries into the mouth of Cole's head, and the cranium suddenly sings the Convenience Store Store song as the eye sockets shoot lasers that burn new rules in the walls:

Rule 88: 20% pain tax on all reproductive acts

The riot erupts at the tenth second.

A man fitted with mechanical prosthetics slams into the bulletproof glass, a miniature nuclear reactor embedded in his chest - the same client who traded his testicles for fuel last week.Luna activates the sonic weapon, and inch by inch the man's skin peels away, revealing the barcode tattooed on his back: 0804, her date of birth.

"Pain is hard currency!" The man hissed as he detonated the bomb, "Just like when your mom gave birth to you..."

The moment the shockwave toppled the roof of the Exchange, Luna saw the radioactive clouds crack open at the seams. Swarms of drones swam down like metal sperm, airdropped containers smashed out of craters, and instead of food, three thousand self-service pain-collecting machines rolled out of them. Each machine's coin slot was in the shape of a cunt expander, and the display flashed red:

"Upload your pain and download survival hours."

Maya suddenly breaks free of her restraints. Fluorescent tentacles protrude from her abdominal wound and curl around Luna's ankle to inject some kind of fluid. The excruciating pain distorted her vision, and Luna saw in a hallucination that she was curled up in an incubation tank, and outside the tank on the operating table wasn't an instrument, it was her mother's body disassembled into parts.

"Surprise?" Maya's voice turned into Jax's accent, "You're nothing more than what we 3D printed out of your mom's uterus..."

The profanity is interrupted by the boom of a shotgun as Luna blasts Maya's kneecaps, patching her screams into the exchange broadcast system. As the sonic frequency resonates with the drone, the nearest cargo container bursts open, pouring out what turns out to be cryopreserved baby embryos-each with her face.

"Rule number 89!" She hissed into the microphone as she stomped on Maya's throat, "Effective immediately, the pain index is tied to reproductive rights!"

The clones suddenly opened their eyes.

The first clone crawled out of the cargo container with her umbilical cord automatically plugged into the pain collector. Each of her cries sent the Exchange's electronic screens skyrocketing, and when the index breached the tipping point, the pain chips in all the survivors overloaded at the same time. People jerked and danced like puppets on strings, spelling out the convenience store's new slogan in self-inflicted motions:

"Your pain, our dessert."

Luna retreats into the chamber in the middle of a blood feast. As she rips open Maya's scalp, a miniature projector on her cerebral cortex begins to play top-secret footage: the mother, eight months pregnant, is immobilized on an assembly line as the president's father injects Luna's embryonic cells into each can of green beans.

"Happy birthday, my little futures." The father raises his champagne to the camera, "Remember, you've been down from the time you were a fertilized egg."

The mirrors in the chamber suddenly burst. Countless clones crawled out of the frames, holding trading cards ground from their ribcages, the faces of which bore the price tag for each traumatic moment in Luna's life:

Painful first period: 30 cans of beef

Cole's first night: 150 liters of semen

Jax's betrayal: mortgaging three ovaries

As Luna tears up all the cards, the ground suddenly collapses. She plummets to the bottom of the freezer and falls onto a mountain of expired birth control pills. Interspersed among the green pills are love letters from her mother to the president, each written in menstrual blood with the same sentence:

"Our daughter will be the perfect commodity."

The sound of a baby's laughter comes from the ventilation ducts.

Luna crawls five hundred meters to the sound and discovers a new rule in the wall of the tube smeared with meconium. She licks off the dirt to taste the pheromone flavor, and three-dimensional text automatically emerges on her retina:

Rule 90: When you stare at pain, the convenience store is staring at you

The exchange suddenly falls into dead silence.

As Luna climbs back to the surface, all the clones are kneeling to worship a holographic idol dropped by a drone. It was a figment woven from the data of each of her menstrual bleeds, with constantly updating numbers flashing on her abdomen - the real-time pain totals for all of humanity.

"Time for the offer." The idol emitted a fatherly voice, "Today your life's net worth..."

The dome screen exploded with blood red numbers:

-∞

To the maniacal laughter of the survivors, Luna stabs the trading hammer into her uterus. All the numbers suddenly reverse as blood spurts onto the electronic screen. She raises the hammer, which is attached to the shattered flesh, and announces the latest rule to the clones:

"From now on, my pain is the general market index."

Outside the exchange, the radioactive rain pours down again.