Savior with Expiration Date

Luna was scanning the miner boss's testicles with a money detector as the roar of the miner shook off the moldy spots on the ceiling.

"This Antminer S19 can fry an egg..." The man lifted his scalded belly to reveal the copper tubing implanted under the skin to dissipate heat, "It's not too much of a stretch for me to trade it for canned corn, is it?"

Rule #107: All computing power must be converted to calories, and Luna's laser thermometer reveals that the surface temperature of the miners' "burning altar" is 89°C, with three dehydrated corpses embedded in a melted faux leather couch - "voluntary offerings of coolant," as they call it.

"What kind of coins are you guys mining?" She kicked at the reddening pile of graphics cards, smelling burnt pubic hair.

The boss miner suddenly ripped off his eye patch to reveal a blockchain map in his mechanical prosthetic eye, "End times coins! Each one corresponds to a living person in the radiation zone..." His tongue licked over the human oil on the graphics card, "... Automatically transferred to my wallet when the heart stops beating."

The deal was struck at peak arithmetic.

As the miners knelt in worship of the feverish miners, Luna's monitor screen caught streams of eerie data - what the machines were really calculating were the brainwave frequencies of the missing employees from the convenience store's headquarters. The oldest data packet dates showed that the headquarters had begun baking human brains with the miners as early as 72 hours before the acid rain fell.

"Rule 108 addendum." She inserted a virus into the mining pool code, "1 gram of brain tissue per megawatt of heat."

The miners roared and lifted the heated floor tiles to reveal the lurid contraption in the basement: five hundred corpses converted into bio-miners, duodenums wrapped around fiber optic cables, and rotting finger bones mechanically tapping on keyboards. The display flickered with the very images of Luna's childhood-surveillance footage of her frostbitten thighs in a convenience store cooler, now being cast into the NFT digital collection.

"Didn't expect that, did you?" The Boss ripped out the corpse's sciatic nerve and plugged it into the USB port, "Every decibel you cry out is redeemable..."

The shotgun blasted the second half of his sentence.

As Luna's heel crushes the mechanical prosthetic eye, the chip explodes into a holographic projection: these miners are "human boilers" sent from the convenience store's headquarters to burn not electricity, but the dopamine production of kidnapped civilians. Even deadlier was the data from mining pool #47 - which was converting Luna's menstrual cycle into hash values.

"Number 109." She shoved the remains of the boss into the miner's cooling vents, "All illegal arithmetic needs to be repaid with spinal cord."

The moment the corpse oil dripped, the entire mine began to resonate. Five hundred corpses opened their eyes at the same time, their burned vocal cords vibrating out convenience store jingles. Fiber optic tentacles protruded from their anuses and stabbed into the spines of the miners present to extract cerebrospinal fluid.

Luna enters the self-destruct code at the console when she realizes her biometrics have long since been entered into the administrator system. The identity verification screen popped up with a smiling photo of her mother before she was dismembered, with a small line of text scrolling under her eyes:

"Good daughter, the mining pool shares have been transferred to your womb account."

As the blast of air toppled the roof, she saw burning graphics cards forming Bitcoin symbols in the air. The ashes of miners were shaped into QR codes by the shockwave and floated down to be scanned and displayed on bulletproof glass:

"You have subscribed to the 'Luna Pain Memory Mining Pool', real-time earnings: 3 pots/sec."