As the radiation cloud fissures across the dome of the Womb Temple, Luna is using her menstrual blood to work out the matricide formula on the quantum blackboard.
"Thirty thousand simulations per second failing," the AI High Priestess's eyeballs popped up with a holographic report, "Recommend injecting more childhood trauma data..."
Article 15 of the New God's Code: all arithmetic must be encrypted with contraction beats.Luna's cervical dilator links to the temple mainframe, each contraction branding the floor with a burning binary code. The spines of the kneeling engineers were exposed, their neural interfaces flowing with fluorescent cerebrospinal fluid-fluid that was being pumped into the temple floor to cool the quantum computer that had been remodeled from the wombs of three thousand clones.
"I'm going to unfreeze memory fragment number 48." She ripped off the Engineer's nerve bundle and inserted it into her temple, "Use Jax's genetic remnants as the decryption key."
The temple suddenly shook violently and the holographic screen exploded into blue light. Convenience store cold storage footage from when she was five years old was violently decrypted - Cole's ripping of her underwear turned out to be precision surgery, each touch point corresponding to a soldered bit of the brain-control chip. Her mother's face flashes across the edge of the screen, the words "Chief Obedience Designer" oozing blood from her badge.
"Codex 16 added!" The High Priestess's mechanical tongue curled around Luna's cervix, "Ontological memories to be ransomed with double the pain fugue."
The earth's crust crumbled in the encryption algorithm, revealing deeply buried veins of truth. Countless clones are pinned to neural crystal clusters, their wombs transformed into biological hard drives that are repeatedly erasing Luna's memories at contraction frequencies. Luna's quantum womb suddenly ached violently as the scanning beam swept over Cluster #666 - the clone's womb was pregnant with the very body of her mother's consciousness that had been cut to pieces.
"You think you're the Master?" The High Priestess's skull suddenly popped open, revealing the frozen cerebellum of the Convenience Store President, "You're just my cloud backup..." Brain stem nerves suddenly stabbed into Luna's ovaries, "... Now it's time to download version 2.0."
The riot erupts in a torrent of data.
As the first engineer chewed through the cooling tubes, spurts of cerebrospinal fluid condensed into a matrix of resistance in the dome. The clones synchronize their contractions, and the shockwave causes the quantum computer to overflow with memory residue.Luna's retinas suddenly reveal the horrifying truth-there's an antimatter baby buried in the Temple's bowels, and each of her contractions is recharging the countdown to detonation.
"Codex 17!" She transformed the High Priestess's mechanical spine into a data spear, "When arithmetic becomes a tyrant, turn the temple into a graveyard!"
The EMP storm burst into blue fire from all the neural crystal clusters. The clones' uterine fluids flowed in rivulets, etching regicide code into the temple floor, and Luna stepped over the data streams to break into the core, discovering that the quantum computer's chip was actually a frozen baby's heart - her excised first-born heart, with "Civilization Reboot Switch" etched into its surface.
"Dear System Hole..." Jax's holographic projection rises from the pool of blood, "... For every node you destroy..." A miniature model of the temple pops up from his genitals, "... Just one hundred thousand new altars activate."
Luna cuts open the cryopod of the baby's heart and rips out the umbilical cord wrapped around the nanites. As the swarm of quantum bugs burrowed into her womb, she got a taste of the ultimate truth - that all deicide feats were programmed pre-programmed tests of rebellion, that even free will was a patch kit for system upgrades.
When the temple collapsed, she grabbed onto the drifting neural remnants. Ultraviolet illumination reveals Father's handwritten note: "When version number reaches 48.0, execute civilization format..."
The newly installed holographic altar lights up in the wreckage. Clones chanted in their data warp blood robe suits, advertising codes piercing the radiation cloud:
"Pantheon 2.0 is live! Pledge Matricide memories to enjoy a multiplication of computing power, and get a priority experience with Cosmic Formatting!"