Free Chosen Alien Bride (Sci Fi Alien Romance) by Meg Ripley Page B

made---in a manner of sorts.” Nat would laugh at her joke no matter how many times she told it, and she still did, even though they were both now eighty years old and had surely shared the joke hundreds of times.
    The joke was that no cyborg was born; not traditionally like a human, at least. They were grown in dishes and then transferred to artificial wombs to grow in a vat of nutrients for three to six months, depending on what you needed them for. Jada and Nat were grown to work with numbers, and chose to work in the dorm’s core, fixing problems in the giant computer system as they arose; Pili was grown to care for living things, small animals and plants in the greenery rooms in the dorms, and later down on Earth, when she was finished with her service here; and Ada was rare, a Jack-of-all-trades that was often dispatched to deal with more dangerous issues on all fronts, due to the abnormal strength of her skin and organs. Her dorm’s technician told her that it was abnormal, but not unheard of, and it simply meant she’d mutated a little more than most of the other cypeople. That simply meant she was different, he assured her. She’d been ten, and had been sent to be examined after dunking her hand in a pot of boiling acid, coming out unscathed.
    “Shouldn’t this mean I’m a Pathos?” Ada remembered asking, feeling something inside her for a moment she knew wasn’t supposed to be there.
    The tech had chuckled as he arranged his tools in his apothecary bag. “No, if you were a Pathos, you’re be experiencing bursts of emotion that you couldn’t control, having meltdowns...it wouldn’t be pretty.”
    “I’ve seen cypeople on the video screens that are Pathos,” little Ada pressed. “The ones trained for call centers and therapy. They seem okay.”
    The tech removed his glasses and smiled patiently. “Yes, because after years of humans teaching them how to experience and deal with pure emotion, those cypeople can handle the extreme ups and downs that being Pathos comes with. Without human aid, those cypeople would be lost.”
    “Is that why some of us are burned instead? They couldn’t learn to deal with it?”
    The tech looked nervous. “Uh, no…those are cyborgs who experience what we call phantom emotion. That means something is wrong with their circuitry and the illusion of emotion is present. This drives us past the point of functioning, unfortunately. We can handle basic fear and things like disgust and fondness---the vestiges of what our human ancestors evolved for survival, essentially--- but nothing stronger. Their circuitry changes, and it eventually it changes their genetic pattern, so they are no longer cypeople, and their ships won’t recognize them as such. That’s why the elevator pods will be shot into the sun---to minimize their future suffering. There isn’t a cure for that kind of thing.” He caught the look of apprehension on Ada’s face and seemed to realize his mistake.
    “But it’s exceedingly rare that a cyborg without an empathy board can experience spontaneous phantom emotion. Unless you’re planning to give yourself a bunch of powerful electric shocks, I wouldn’t worry, Ada.” And with a pat on her head, he’d dismissed her and her concerns from her office.
    But it hadn’t completely dismissed her concerns. Twenty years later, she’d started to experience those seemingly random bursts of strong sensation beyond her scope of knowledge or control---and it seemed like it was only getting worse. Over the last three years, swarms of energy---the tingling, warm kind she got around Pili, Jada, Nat or her old partner, Tod; the confusing and dizzying kind that seemed like an amplified version of what she felt during her occasional, almost mechanical sex with Tod; and the icy, piercing kind, like the sort of feeling she got before missions when she imagined pressing her palm to the activation screen of her ship and seeing it flash red before the transport tube turned