The smell of domesticated blood floated in the air at Christie's. Ethan's fingers brushed over the exhibit list, stopping at Lot 319 - the fake Starry Night - where someone had written in invisible ink in the estimate column, Your mother's blood glows in paint.
"Five million first!" The auctioneer's small wooden gavel startled the dust, and the smoke from Nathan Vanderlinde's cigar wove a spiderweb through the VIP gallery. Ethan stood in the shadows of the last row, his cheap suit hiding the quantum chip implanted in his back, and the data flowing under his skin was converting the frequency of the bidders' pupil constrictions into financial leverage.
The scent of Luna's perfume suddenly spilled out of the vents. She sat beside the Russian oligarch in a holographic veil, the bandages flashing across the slit in her skirt making Ethan's stomach twitch-the blood still seeping from the gunshot wound on the Brooklyn Bridge three days ago. As the oligarch's hand brushed her thigh, she held up her number plate, "Seven million." The voice was sweet as a sugar cube coated in arsenic.
The sound of electricity exploded deep in her cochlea, and Ethan's retinal projection suddenly surfaced with nanoscale scans: embedded in the cobalt-blue swirls of that fake Starry Night were three hundred vibrating ledger chips. Each chip was the size of a red blood cell, recording the complete path of the Vanderlinde family's money laundering through art.
"Twelve million dollars!" Nathan finally raised his card, the heel of his crocodile leather shoe crushing the sleeping pills on the carpet-the prescription pills his mistress had stolen from Ethan's clinic last night. Ethan laughed softly downcast, his cell phone screen reflecting the twitching corners of the auctioneer's eyes: the former Sotheby's executive's son's gambling debts were being repaid in progress live on the dark web.
The holographic projection suddenly warps into a Bitcoin symbol, and the microtransmitter Ethan implanted in his carotid artery goes to work. The auction room resounds with the sound of rising and falling vomit as the brushstrokes of The Stars disintegrate into financial statements in ultraviolet light - those elegant knots of the throat are now spasming and spitting out caviar and lies.
"It's time for the game to escalate." Ethan whispered into the cufflink microphone. The auction table suddenly collapsed as Van Gogh's nebula crashed down at Nathan's feet, splattering paint burning honeycomb holes in his tailored suit pants. As people screamed and pushed, Luna's high heel stepped precisely on one of the splattered fragments of canvas, and a miniature scanner popped out of the heel's indentation.
The moment the riot police rushed in, Ethan intercepted the freight manager in the fire escape. The man who had tried to flee to Buenos Aires was now pleading with Botox-injected facial muscles, "Nathan has three more containers at Chelsea Piers..." Before the words were out of his mouth, the choke mark on his neck burst open - the nanobomb implanted under the skin had been remotely activated.
"Clearance complete." A mechanical female voice came from the headset. Ethan stepped over the still-convulsing body and wiped his fingertips across the blood stain on the wall: pH 7.4, containing benzodiazepine metabolites-exactly the same as the sample he'd extracted from Luna's bathroom drain.
Surveillance footage from Warehouse Nine at Chelsea Piers began to play across his irises. Three containers bearing the Vanderlinde family crest were oozing blood, and the temperature of the cargo tanks indicated minus eighteen degrees-perfectly suited to the standards of human organ transportation. When he cracked the electronic lock, the alarm sounded the same frequency as Luna's wedding ring.
"You never learn to knock." Luna's voice floated out of the freezing fog. She was wrapped in the mink coat of a Russian oligarch at auction, her eyelashes caked with ice crystals like a diamond crown. Behind her, in the container, hundreds of embryo culture pods are arranged in a Dow Jones curve, each labeled with a crypto-coin wallet address.
Ethan's breath condensed into a blockchain graphic in the air, "This is the family's new industry?" The toe of his shoe kicks into one of the pods, and the moment the liquid nitrogen tube bursts open, the iris data of frozen embryos is projected across the bulkhead - all possessing his facial features.
Luna suddenly laughed, her laughter shattering the ice prisms overhead, "Mothers are willing to pay ten times their annual salary for good genes." She ripped open her mink coat, the surgical scars on her abdomen fresh as a first-bloom rose, "Like this order from the Portuguese Countess, naming Green Eyes and the Wolf of Wall Street for their crisis management skills..."
The gunshot came faster than the heartbeat. Bullets grazed between Ethan's ears, shattering the control panel of some embryonic pod. Nathan stepped out of the shadows holding up a smoking Colt Python, the barrel engraved with the Vanderlinde family motto: Blood is thicker than water, but gold is thicker.
"Dear little mouse," Nathan picked Ethan's chin with the muzzle of his gun, "Why do you think those containers made it through customs?" His gold cufflinks suddenly cracked open to reveal miniature syringes, "Thanks to the biological samples your wife provided."
The alarms for the frozen embryos suddenly mingled, and the temperature of the warehouse began to climb extremely rapidly. Luna's figure retreating toward the security exit was elongated by the emergency lights, streaming across the floor in a snake-shedding shadow. The moment Nathan pulled the trigger, the barcode under Ethan's collarbone suddenly projected a holographic shield - the bullet ricocheted off the main cryo-system console.
Liquid nitrogen pours like a galaxy, and Nathan's scream freezes in his throat. Ethan crawls through the ice fog toward the control terminal, beads of blood from his gaping back wound spelling out Margaret Tech's counter-acquisition code on the keypad. As the last character was typed in, the encrypted video of Nathan's mistress suddenly played on all the electronic screens on Wall Street-except that her moans were being replaced in real time by the AI with SEC whistleblower calls.
"How do you like this gift?" Ethan stomped on Nathan's platinum wedding ring with Luna's birthday engraved on the inside of the band, "By the way, the accountant you arranged for in the Cayman Islands..." He kicks open some sort of embryonic pod, revealing the dark web page that's live below, "... It's now generating five hundred NFTs per minute for reporting you."
The fire sprinkler heads suddenly activated, and diluted blood pooled into a pink stream at Ethan's feet. He bent down to pick up the mink coat Luna had left behind, and felt the pregnancy test stick in his inside pocket - a smiley face drawn next to the positive result, the ink perfectly matching the pieces of her torn marriage certificate.
As Ethan initiates the anti-takeover process, all the lampposts on the New York Stock Exchange suddenly go out. For 90 seconds of darkness as the backup generator kicked in, all traders heard the blockchain-generated voice of Margaret: "Now, let's redefine currency." Those 90 seconds of panic selling coincided with a drop in the Vanderlinde family stock to Ethan's pre-determined takeover price.