Free Desired By The Sacred Alien (Sci-Fi Alien Romance) by Meg Ripley

tawny skin, lighter than Ada’s own shade of mocha. “I wonder if I’ll get to fix complicated things, like you! Or just stuff I already do, like prune space bushes, or something.” Pili seemed so distressed by the latter possibility that Ada laughed and patted her cheek with one hand.
    “It’s not that exciting, really,” she said earnestly. “Once you actually finish learning about all the things that can go wrong, that’s pretty much the last you hear of it. And then you get out there in your ship, spend one minute on the problem, and ten minutes on the return trip. I’d rather be pruning space bushes; at least then I’m sure I’m doing something useful.”
    Pili giggled and touched her palm to Ada’s, and Adofo averted his brown eyes---it was an affectionate gesture between cyborgs fashioned from the same genetic source, or “siblings”, like them. Ada felt a tingling surge of warmth move up her palm and spread through her body to envelope her heart--- love, she thought--- and she tried to control her reaction as the alarming, exhilarating sensation took over… and faded away just as quickly as it came. Like always, it left her partially mechanical heart beating furiously hard and fast, but she focused until she was able to reign it in. Pili took no notice.
    “Good luck,” she said, smiling. “Bring me something cool! See you at lunch?”
    “Yes,” Ada said, and she was comforted to find that her voice sounded normal. She closed her hand and touched her fist to Adofo’s much larger, ivory colored one---a less intimate but still affectionate gesture to the man who was becoming like a brother to her---and when she only felt the cool press of rubberized flesh, she sighed with relief.
    “Good luck,” Adofo said, smiling gently.
    “Thank you,” Ada replied. She wasn’t bothered when he simply turned and started to walk away, slipping his hand into Pili’s as they moved back down the hall; since Pili started dating him two years ago, he’d rarely spoken unless he was first spoken to. This was something that still tended to be true of older cyborgs or cyborgs with traditional caretakers; Ada and Pili’s parental units had both been warm, radical-leaning females who were as close to Pathoborgs one could get before actually turning.
    “I just don’t have it,” Jada would often say. “Pathos have to be born, not 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