Who Needs Love When You're Reborn?

Chapter 4 Dark Pool Liquidity

The bronze bull statue at the Chicago Futures Exchange was doused in red paint, its gore-like hue streaming along the bull’s muscular contours into the drain. Jason wrapped his coffee cup in the Wall Street Journal, its front page soft with rain as his wanted poster photo blurred. On the surveillance footage, he appeared like a ghost crawling out of hell: a drenched hoodie clinging to his back, a smoking server in hand as he navigated through an explosion’s aftermath, and his boot prints on the granite floor left bloody imprints bearing Bitcoin symbols.

“The FBI’s offering a hundred thousand dollars,” a homeless man rasped from behind a dumpster, half his face exposed and his toothless grin reeking of decay, “enough to buy me twenty more lives.”

Jason lobbed his remaining turkey sandwich over and turned, merging into a shadow steeped in the scent of tobacco and old currency. A Swiss banker in an Armani three-piece suit was busy counting gold bars, the ticking of his mechanical watch as precise as the Nasdaq clock. “The Goldman guys are very interested in your neural synapse mapping,” the banker said in a clipped German accent that meshed like interlocking gears, “of course, after your autopsy report is done.”

The encrypted USB drive burned in Jason’s hand. The underground pawnshop his grandfather had run sixty years ago had transformed into a black-market sanctuary for algorithm traffickers. In an old-fashioned safe mounted on the wall, the original code of the Bitcoin genesis block lay dormant beside a yellowed note that read, “Beware the snow of December 13”—the very date his past life succumbed to stomach cancer.

In an abandoned church in northern Wisconsin, mining rigs hummed like doomsday psalms. Vivian tore off her bloodstained bandages, crushed fluoxetine tablets, and scattered them into the basin of holy water. The blue glow from a screen crawled up the barcode tattoo on her back—a mark sharing the same lineage as the one on Holly’s eye, though the numeric prefix read “GS-2035” instead of “MS-2024.”

“How many rollbacks have we done?” Holly’s voice echoed from the confessional, where she was assembling an electromagnetic pulse gun on Bible pages.

“The seventh time,” Vivian replied as she plunged a morphine syringe into her elbow vein. “Every time Goldman Sachs initiates a time harvest, my hippocampus loses 5% of its memory.” She kicked aside a syringe at her feet. “Remember the last time you sold me out to Morgan’s human farm?”

The Vietnamese girl raised her laser scope to calibrate. “So this time I’ll cut off your tracking chip—a fair trade,” she said, then abruptly pivoted her gun toward the stained glass window. “But it seems our guest doesn’t understand the etiquette of appointments.”

Under the assault of a sonic weapon, the bulletproof glass exploded into a diamond-like hail. Jason’s drone swarm smashed through the rose window and dove down; their belly-mounted flamethrowers scorched the ground, leaving a charred equation: Σ(dark pool trading volume) = time-jump cost.

“He cracked our liquidity algorithm!” Vivian shouted as she flung a tactical dagger to down the lead drone, a chip emblazoned with the J.P. Morgan logo fluttering among the debris.

Holly connected the electromagnetic gun to the church’s power grid, and the Tesla coil howled under the dome, “I bet you’ve staked your right arm on that Lehman bond ownership?”

“Call,” Vivian replied, biting open the safety pin of a hand grenade. “And add in the sss stocks you’ve stashed in your Harley’s gas tank.”

The Nasdaq bell rang through the torrential rain. Jason injected adrenaline into his thigh while on the surveillance screens, hedge fund titans toasted the collapse of CampusDeal’s stock. They had no idea that a worm virus had been implanted in the trading system, converting every sell order into a Bitcoin buy order—the real slaughter set to begin in three minutes.

His phone vibrated. An unknown number sent the church’s coordinates with a note: “Exchange the USB for her life,” along with a photo of Greg bound to a mining rig, his forehead scrawled with “Leverage 400%.”

“It’s a trap!” Greg roared as he smashed the control panel, blood dripping between his fingers onto the keyboard. “Those two crazy women have definitely teamed up!”

“They’re bidding against each other,” Jason replied, wiping blood froth from his mouth. “Time travelers’ neural synapse maps fetch thirty million on the dark web—and I’ve got two copies.” He glanced at the surveillance camera on the bronze bull and suddenly realized that the red graffiti was chemical phosphorescent paint—someone was marking bodies.

The moment the pickup rammed through the oak door of the church, a hellish scene erupted: Holly was suspended by chains in front of a crucifix, while Vivian’s shotgun butt pressed against her temple. The Vietnamese girl’s biker jacket was drenched in blood, yet she laughed like a victor, “Being late will kill your operator, kid.”

“Enough for me to hack the Federal Reserve,” Jason declared as he raised the USB drive; a holographic projection unfurled in the air, displaying the key matrix of 2009’s quantitative easing. “If you want it…” he continued, deliberately letting the alarm blare throughout the church, “exchange it using the nano-bomb codes embedded in your spines.”

Gunshots rattled the dust. Vivian suddenly redirected her gun and shattered her own left hand; the pain caused her irises to shimmer with streaming blue data. “Is that enough sincerity?” she challenged. She tore open her collar to reveal a burn mark between her collarbones, GS-2035 flickering in the alarm’s red glow. “Every time Goldman Sachs time-jumps, they inject memory cleanser into my bone marrow, and you…” She suddenly grabbed Holly’s throat, “this Morgan b***h has the genetic samples of twelve embryos inside her!”

The Vietnamese girl, coughing up blood, lifted her blouse to reveal writhing abdominal scars like a swarm of centipedes. “They use my womb to cultivate genius traders, Jason. Guess whose DNA is in the thirteenth embryo?”

The dome collapsed with a roar. Mercenaries clad in tactical armor descended by rope; the leader removed his helmet to reveal a mechanical cyber-eye—he was Jason at sixty-eight, with nano-repair worms writhing under the skin of his left cheek, and a tablet in his hand displaying “December 13 Countdown: 71:59:59.”

“Welcome to the Reaper Summit,” the older Jason rasped like a friction of rusty bearings. “Now, let’s vote: which experimental subject’s brain should be dismantled first? Option A…” He kicked aside his younger self kneeling on the ground, “Present-day Jason’s amygdala, which preserves the Bitcoin key memory. Option B…” The gun barrel pressed against Vivian’s nape, “the hippocampus of Goldman’s seventh experimental subject, which hides the dark pool trading algorithm.”

Suddenly, the steel cable tightened. Holly seized the moment and hurled an electromagnetic pulse grenade, plunging the church into darkness. In the green glow of night vision, Jason saw three versions of himself simultaneously raise their guns—past, present, and future crosshairs interlocking in the void, with a ballistic calculation equation suspended in the smoke:

Time anchor collapse probability = Σ(capital density) / c²

As the first bullet spiraled through and pierced a page of the Bible, Jason finally understood the meaning of his grandfather’s note—this snow wasn’t a weather warning, but white noise concealing a global stock market circuit breaker.