Parasite║LGBT+ Romance 🏳️‍🌈

16: Meatware

10:36, Fifthsol 6th M6, 2226

A scratching at the door has me springing up from a crouch and rolling up my shirtsleeves, ready to put my deadly skin to use. The iris scanner beeps. I coil against the cupboard wall like a spring.

The scanner winks green and a woman enters, dark, bony, with a mane of tight curls. Not clad in azalea-pink, nor an automaton, her blue satin shirt is distended by a pregnant belly. She gestures with frantic motions of her hands and her face contorts, panicked yet silent. It's a few moments before I realise that she's using sign language.

My lenses spring into action, recording and cross-referencing the woman's gestures and expressions. It spits out a result: Japanese Sign Language. Seconds later a basic translation of her complex hand and facial gestures materialises in bright pink in my lenses.

"Quickly. Come with me."

With no choice but to trust her, I follow her out of the cupboard, the strange sugary odour of the lab enveloping me again. Isamu Kida, or what's left of him, appears to have been called away to perform some menial task or other. The woman throws me a pale pink pair of trousers and a shirt to wrestle on as dead eyes blink around me, the lab's worker bees seemingly unaware that we're there. 

The woman becomes animated with intricate hand gestures and contortions of her mouth. My lenses stall, and then begin to interpret. "Why did Shiro bring you here?"

My lenses offer example videos of the correct hand and mouth gestures, and I stumble out a clumsily attempt at a reply. "Who are you?"

The woman smiles at me, perhaps pitying my butchering of her language. She replies with fluid motions of her hands, her jaw working silently. "Shiro's sister. Shyla Kida. Shy."

Another piece of the grim puzzle of the Kida family slots into place to create a horrific picture. Isamu Kida had had three children. I realise then that when Shiro had confessed to me during the storm that he'd wanted to say goodbye to his sister, he'd been talking about Shy, not Meg.

Shy's hands fly and my lenses spit out translations in pink. "Are you friends?"

My lenses demonstrate the signs for my reply and I follow along awkwardly, unable to repress a smile. "We're more than friends. He asked Meg to fix a glitch in my meatware."

Shy shakes her head with a solemnity that has my heart plummeting. "He should never have come back here. I'll give you evidence files, then I'll get you out. I'll get Shiro out later."

"Evidence for what? And what's that sweet smell?"

Shy replies, "Sugar. Food for the meatware colonies."

The translation in my lenses must be wrong. Meatware isn't a colony of anything. I repeat the action. "Colonies?"

My lenses repeat Shy's translation: "Colonies."

That can't be right. Meatware is a semiconductor device. It's hardware. It doesn't live in colonies. 

It doesn't live at all.

I sign frantically, stumbling through the gestures. "Meatware doesn't need food. It isn't alive."

Shy micropipettes liquid from a nearby petri dish and pumps a drop onto a microscope slide. "Switch on your lens-link to save these videos of meatware." She slips the drop under the objective lens of a video microscope.

"You can't just scoop meatware out of a petri dish! It's a polymer device system. It's hardware!" My lens-link finds the microscope camera all the same and begins to download a set of PCR files, finally bringing up the video-link of the meatware onto my retinas.