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.

I flinch at the images before me. 

"This video is wrong. The video-link is connected to the wrong microscope. Or my lenses must be malfunctioning."

I screw my eyes shut, disconnecting and reconnecting my lens-link to the camera.

Again, I recoil at what I see. My flesh starts to crawl. "This isn't meatware."

I look desperately at Shy. She must have made a mistake. She flicks her wrists and splays her lips, her gestures translated in my lenses in bright pink: meatware.

"Bionic implants aren't... alive." How can meatware be these?

I blink at them. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Crawling and slithering in an aqueous substrate. 

They coil and churn the water around them, rising and sinking in and out of focus on my retinas, as if they're burrowing in my eyeballs.

Thousands upon thousands of tiny worms.

I disconnect the microscope link and blink away slithering phantoms, revulsion turning my innards. "What are they?"

"Meatware is a nematode worm colony."

"Nematodes can't live in human brains! Maybe on Earth they can live in intestines, but..." 

"These radiation-resistant nematodes are implanted into the brain of everyone on Eris, except me, Shiro and Meg. The colony optimises your metabolic processes to protect your body from radiation."

Hot acid rises up my gullet. I slap a hand over my mouth.

Meatware is a parasite. 

Everyone on Eris is a host.

I grab at my head, nausea almost sending me keeling over the bench. "All this time I thought that Isamu Kida was a bionics genius. But meatware was never a bionic implant. Isamu Kida became rich on nematodes." 

Shy's hands quiver as she signs. "The microscope images and PCR files will convince the governors to end meatware. I need to get my baby out of here."

"This doesn't make sense! My meatware glitch makes my skin into an ATP channel. I drain energy from anyone with meatware when I touch them. How can that happen if my meatware is a colony of parasitic worms?"

Shy's hands work with furious speed. "My father designed radiation-resistant nematodes, but they can still spontaneously mutate. Random mutations happen within all organisms. A single nematode implanted in you must have done just that, and somehow it ended up being more resilient than the others and spread its mutated genetic material across your whole colony. I'm sorry, but there's no cure."

"Meg knew that she couldn't fix me. How can you fix a glitch in a fucking worm colony?" That childhood veil of grief shrouds me again. My eyes swim with tears and ghostly worms. 

There had never been a cure for me.

"My father engineered the colony to be resistant to every worm treatment. The only thing that can kill the original meatware colony is the worker colony."

"The worker colony?"

"Meg keeps this second nematode colony to turn those she doesn't trust, or those who are in the wrong place at the wrong time, into mindless workers. My partner, Zichen, was the most senior bionics specialist in the lab. He begged Meg not to continue developing the worker colony five years ago. When he saw what Meg did to our Dad he kept quiet, afraid for my sake. When I got pregnant Zichen planned for us to escape, but Meg turned him into... I don't want to leave him, but..."

I don't need my lenses to translate Shy's next gesture. She runs a hand over her belly. What would Megumi Kida do with a baby to experiment on?

A smouldering ember rekindles in my heart. Rage. Rage at Meg. Rage at Isamu Kida. Eris could have been a normal Dwarf, full of careful workers respecting the harsh reality of radiation. Instead, we're all hosts to parasites. 

But there's no time to avenge myself, my parents, my sister. I condense my decades of fury into burning skin. I'll become monstrous for the automata I must rescue: Daiyu, Zichen, and the other mindless suffering souls here. Even Isamu Kida, though he doesn't deserve it.

"I'll make sure that the governors get you all to safety. And those above ground too. So many Eris citizens suddenly have malfunctioning meatware. I'm a doctor and I've seen more and more radiation sickness over the past months."

"How old were the patients you treated?"

I can't recall a single patient's age at first, but as medical records appear and dissolve in front of my eyes, a pattern emerges. "They were all in their late thirties, early forties."

"Meatware has a lifetime of around forty years. Meg realised it a year ago as the first implanted babies reached that age. Recently we've had a lot of workers arriving in the labs. These nematodes can't seem to live in human brains beyond around forty years old."

"Meg needs to tell the governors before they trial meatware on Pluto! She can't turn everyone on the Edge into a worker when they reach forty!" Unfathomable, unbelievable things have been hidden from the people of Eris, but I had never expected the very nature of meatware to be a lie.

Shy signs with shaking hands. "I don't know what Meg's planned beyond these deals to sell meatware to Pluto, Haumea and Makemake. She has huge personal wealth. I suppose that she'll go into hiding on Earth, like she said our Dad had."

"Does she have a passport?"

"Of course. My Dad arranged passports for Meg and I when we were born."

"Did he arrange Shiro a passport?"

"Shiro was unplanned. Our Dad didn't... warm to him."

The ember of rage is now a blistering fire, a mass of white-hot snakes' tongues devouring my parasite heart. If I get out of this building, I'm going to destroy the Kida empire, brick by brick.

"If Shiro hadn't run away he could have helped me to control Meg. He doesn't know what she's like. If he'd been here he'd—"

Shy leaps across the room with a yelp, as if a horrifying realisation has hit her. 

"Come on!"

She twists and turns through labs and corridors, agile for a pregnant lady. I follow her into the largest lab in the underground complex, where she bursts into a curtained-off chamber split into six narrow booths lined with a stretcher each. The chamber is empty save a single booth on which a patient is curled up under a pink bedsheet. 

Long legs poke out from the sheet's frayed edge. One ankle is black and swollen.

"Shiro!" I race to him. "Are you OK? Did the guards hurt you?"

He blinks up at me as I clutch at bedsheets, determined to haul him off the stretcher. 

Shy pulls at my shirt-back, dragging me away from Shiro with a force that sends me toppling against the wall of the booth.

She signs frantically, "Don't touch him!"

I stumble up, reaching for Shiro again."Let's go, Shiro!"

He stares back at me with dead glazed eyes.

"Shiro?"

He gazes at me, then mutters a word under his breath. "Smile."

"Shiro." A torrent of sobs erupts from my wrecked heart. "She hasn't. Please tell me that she hasn't." 

Shy cradles Shiro and begins to wail like a wounded animal, pulling locks of his hair away to reveal a shaven square of scalp with a weeping incision hacked into it.

"Smile," mutters Shiro, reaching for me.

With seemingly inhuman strength, Shy drags me screaming through the lab, Shiro's repeated calls of "Smile" echoing in my ears. 

We stumble along, but I want to stay with Shiro. Even if I can't touch him anymore, I want to die with my love by my side. My beautiful Shiro, who is now host to a colony of parasitic worms, his brilliant mind now food for nematodes, as is mine.

I have no idea how Shy shoves me along dizzying corridors, my feet slipping as I slide in and out of consciousness. Loving Shiro had made me forget momentarily that I'm a parasite, and that I'm cursed to never be loved because of it. Shiro dared to love me, and now he's been subjected to the worst of fates. 

If only I'd known the true nature of Eris, that parasites can be hosts too.