The next day, Lily was forced to perform maintenance. She and Lola exchanged a few short discussions, but Lily simply had to dedicate most of that day to catching up on the extensive list of tasks she had simply refused to do until then.
Luckily, the vast majority of systems had had no issues in her absence, and it seemed as if her gamble had paid off. All her hard work prior to Lola's arrival seemed to have kept things running smoothly enough for a few days without her.
Then she got to the breaker room, and her heart sank.
Dozens, and dozens, and dozens of breakers needed to be reset judging by the sheer wall of flashing lights blinking back at her. Each one needed to be unscrewed, and then inspected, and then replaced if needed... It was going to take hours.
She took a moment to check on her experiment. The Lola sample had, as she scrubbed through the video, been using a variety of implements born of its flesh to manipulate the Lily sample almost non stop since she had left it. The sample itself was, if anything, now even more distressed than before. Indeed, the sample had produced so much adrenaline that the skin itself was literally shivering. Not only that, though, the Lola sample had... grown. It now undoubtedly filled more of the container, even just from a visual check.
How? Had it been absorbing the sample's secretions? Lily knew she had a massive job waiting for her, but couldn't resist some investigation. This was all just too fascinating. Was this what Lola had meant by feeding on interactions? Maybe that had been literal. Maybe she literally did feed and grow and nourish herself by absorbing things.
By zooming in, Lola was able to get a clearer picture. Micro-droplets of sweat were being individually 'licked' up by tiny, near invisible tongues. Thousands. Millions. Every pore of skin had dozens of miniscule fronds of Lola’s slime delicately collecting the dew.
Within those, of course, were the nutrients the container was feeding in... and yet they hadn't depleted as rapidly as she had expected. Indeed, checking the records, their depletion had decreased over time. Fascinating, she noted mentally, locking away a hundred questions for later. It was as if Lola’s sample was decreasing the Lily sample’s needs for nourishment.
Confident the sample was secure, at least for the rest of the day, she returned begrudgingly to the task at hand.
“Lily!” Lola said, giggling over the intercom.
Lily took her pad out to respond as she moved through the station.
“Yes Lola, are you okay?”
“Fine! I realise that now I can talk to you wherever you are! Now you can't get away from me...”
Suppressing a small grin at that cute sentiment, especially the playful tone of her last words, Lily recognised just how rapidly Lola was adopting – and frankly improving upon – her ‘human’ behaviour. She did wonder if perhaps that was a problem. Lola was obviously intelligent, but by teaching her these human customs, was she erasing or blurring any of Lola’s own? Were there perhaps cultural beats within that slime of hers that might yet be eked out if not for Lily’s unwitting anthropomorphisation of her? Humanising her, for lack of a better word?
Obviously, there was still a vast chasm between her and a person, even if simply... physically. For a moment, there was a flash of an image of Lola in her mind. That red skin, reflecting the light, glinting softly, then... everywhere...
“What are you looking at right now?” Lily asked. “What are you studying?
Lola was watching Lily on the security footage, tracking her with one camera to the next.
“Biology.” Lola said, with a flat tone.
For a moment, Lily felt a cold trickle down her spine, which ended in a tingle where it didn't belong.
“Human biology?”
“Yes, it's fascinating,” Lola mused, watching Lily's body glisten with sweat as it pulled itself through one port after another in now well-practiced motions.
“I've been...” Lily began, worried about how to phrase the sentence, before deciding Lola was nowhere near ready to comprehend let alone look for hidden meaning, “thinking about your biology too... Lola.”
“Interesting...” Lola said softly and slowly, mimicking Lily.
Giggling, Lily shrugged it off. “You don't sound like me, you know!”
“Oh Lily, I think I know you better than you even know yourself...”
*****
Back in the observation room, the Lily sample was now shuddering, after endless hours of contact with Lola's sample. However, it was no longer in-taking nutrients. Indeed, it was now being fed everything it needed from an altogether different source. As it grew, the Lola sample was beginning to ever so slightly increase the air pressure inside the container. Of course, there was a triple fail-safe back-up system in place to accommodate this, and every few minutes, a tiny amount of the air inside was being transferred to a small regulator device which could store many times the excess the experiment could produce.
The Lola sample waited, and waited, and finally absorbed as much as it could all at once... forcing the valve to open. A tiny amount of itself, small enough to not even touch the sides of the miniscule valves, let itself be carried on the air. From there it was just a game of trial and error. In the back of her mind, it felt like Lola was walking through a maze... one from which eventually, inevitably, she would find an exit.
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