Parasite║LGBT+ Romance 🏳️‍🌈

15: The Hidden Laboratory

10:13, Fifthsol 6th M6, 2226

I've almost stopped noticing the incessant throbbing in my head, either from hunger or panic. Shiro guides us into ever-smaller lab spaces, as if searching for someone squirrelled away deep underground. Workers bustle around us like automata in pink uniforms, a much softer pink shade than the vivid azalea hue of Kida Biotech's guards and high-ranking scientists. 

I'm so hungry that my nerves are fraying. I wonder if the automata would notice if I were to run my fingers along their bare forearms to scavenge a little energy as they shuffle past. Shivering from four sols of starvation and ever-increasing disquiet I tramp after Shiro. "I thought that we were going to your room."

"I need you to meet someone first. She's too good at hiding."

"Megumi didn't even hug you. She didn't even look at your foot. She—"

"Listen. Meg only wants what's best for me. Unfortunately, her idea of what's best differs from mine. The most important thing is keeping her happy so she'll fix you."

"Fix me?" I halt in my steps just before a lab door, that ill-fitting seedling of rage now thoroughly warmed and watered. "She hasn't even tried to fix you! Why is she letting you limp around with broken meatware? Doesn't she care that you'll turn into..." I point at an automaton muttering through their teeth as they trundle past, "...into that?"

Shiro smiles. "I don't have meatware, Heems."

"What?" Why is he saying that? Shiro is Eris-born. He obviously has meatware. "Of course you have meatware."

"Why do you think I have radiation poisoning? Why do you think you can touch me? I never said I had meatware. You just assumed that."

"But I know you have meatware! You even said..." Thinking back on our conversations, I don't recall having ever discussed meatware with Shiro. The moment that I'd been unable to make a host of him, my parasite brain had jumped to the perfectly reasonable conclusion that my meatware was somehow interfering with his. 

It had never occurred to me that Shiro, or indeed anyone on Eris, might not have meatware, nor that my glitch only works on the implanted. I'd wanted to run away to Pluto; if I had done I'd have starved to death within five sols. "Everybody on Eris gets implanted at birth, so why weren't you?"

"My Dad came from Earth forty years ago to develop meatware, but he never implanted himself, nor his kids, with it. He said that even if Eris babies get implanted with meatware to survive longer here, his kids are official citizens of Earth. He said he'd keep us safe underground and take us back to Earth on his passport when he retired. Then, four years ago, he left us here. Meg thinks that we're Eris's elite because we have a connection to Earth. But we're the same as you Eris people. Abandoned."

"If she doesn't have meatware, why isn't Meg dying of radiation sickness?"

Shiro hobbles into the lab with me and taps at a steel pillar. "Meg has lived for thirty-two years under four metres of recycrete. She's barely ever left this building. Why do you think she never lets me leave? No domes, no sim bars, no hovs, no shuttles. Nothing. We're stuck underground with these braindead workers. Meg's Mum was one of the only three successfully implanted adults during my Dad's first meatware trials forty years ago. When she died, my Dad went back to Earth. Meg thinks that he left to get a new partner."

"Why didn't he take you with him?"

"I don't know. That's when I started running away. At the beginning Meg always found me after a few weeks. But she always underestimated my ability to unlock security systems. I never stayed trapped down here for long. The first times I ran away were just to do silly things like suck shade and meet men who weren't sims. After that I joined smuggling rings to earn money and to learn how to get to Earth illegally. Meg's people always found me. This time I managed to avoid her for almost a year." He gives me a sad smile. "Worth dying of radiation sickness for a little freedom."