Parasite║LGBT+ Romance 🏳️‍🌈

19: Grovelling

24:03, Fifthsol 6th M6, 2226

Jaya pads around Ying's roomy pod, prodding everything with meaty fingers while Ying stands hunched across the room, her lenses seemingly flooded with PCR files and micrographs.

Weaving between sleek furniture in those muted ochre and rust tones popular on Earth, Jaya stops to gawp at a plant. A real plant, bathed in magenta hydroponic lighting as it cascades down one corner of the living area. 

Jaya disguises their awe under a grunt. "If Daiyu hadn't been demoted I bet she'd be able to afford a plant."

I join them to marvel at the creeper, pressing at a thick veiny leaf. Its beauty makes my heart ache. Loving Shiro has shown me a green-and-blue world that I can't unsee, a world beyond the curse of losing my family. My very DNA now yearns for the forests of home, and for Shiro.  Without him every cell in my body feels so tired, like each breath takes monumental grit.

Ying has given us five minutes before she arrests us. When her guards reported five sols ago that the elusive transporter thief had again evaded them she'd been furious. When they'd added that a monster in a doctor's uniform had put them to sleep with the touch of a palm and had absconded with the thief, she'd been absolutely livid. Determined to arrest Shiro and me, she hadn't expected me to turn up in tears on her doorstep sols later with a rogue warden armed with nothing but a broken pulser collimator, a shade pen and a data key full of PCR files.

Pale thing that she is, Ying stands utterly white. Ripples of disgust flit back and forth across her face as she examines horror after horror in her lenses. She blinks away the microscope video footage and returns the data key to Jaya in cupped palms. "Are these things in all of our brains?"

Convinced that Ying detests me too much to believe a word that I say, Jaya has insisted on doing the talking. Their brusque manner and simmering temper isn't helping. "That sample is from the same radiation-resistant nematode worm colony that has been implanted in all Eris-born brains for the past forty years."

Though shaken, Ying doesn't seem in the slightest bit affronted at being fed decades of Isamu Kida's lies about the nature of meatware. I know what Ying is like. She wants her family to join the elite of Eris. She wants her descendants to escape the poverty that she was born into. She's the type who'd keep Megumi Kida's secrets safe to secure a place with Eris's corporate monarchs.

"Can Kida-san install and remove these things at will?"

"No. Kida engineered them to be impervious to all parasite-killing chemicals. Once implanted into a baby's brain, the worms live for around forty years until the host's body's metabolic rate drops too low to support them. Then, the parasite dies."

"Except they aren't parasites," Ying whispers.

"What?"

"They're symbiotes. These nematodes speed up human metabolism to repair radiation damage, but they need us as hosts. Without them we'd get radiation poisoning, and without us they'd die. They're not parasitic to humans. They're symbiotic."

I should have guessed. Too serene after finding out that she's infected with parasites, Ying clearly values the status quo over an uncertain future for Edgers. Whether microchip or worm, in Ying's eyes Kida Biotech's fifty-year experiment on us all is justified in the name of Eris's prosperity.

"Open your fucking eyes, Ying!" Jaya spits, no semblance of courtesy left for the woman they used to refer to as Respected. "Without nematodes we'd just go underground half the time like everyone on Pluto does! All these worms do is let us work twice as hard under radiation. We don't even need to be on the Dwarfs at all. There are other ways to get platinum and cobalt than mining Dwarfs. We could all still be on Earth."