by T. J. Quinn
Your mate could be on any of a thousand planets or right in your own city. If you are interested, contact us at the internet site below for our submission package. Return your DNA sample with the required fee. All sales are final.
Warning: If your mate is a Narovian feline, physical contact of any kind can bind you for life. Certain other species also have similar effects. We recommend that you contact your match electronically before meeting them in person if you do not wish to be bound to mate for life.
“Hey, Ellie. Did you read this?” Zara Maples asked her friend as she was perusing the latest news on her reading tablet. She and her friend were on lunch break from their jobs at the local clothing factory.
“What?” Ellie was perusing her own tablet as she munched a tuna sandwich.
“About the Narovian Matchmaking service,” Zara said, “Now that Earth joined the Alliance, they are openly offering their services. “If they match you to a Narovian feline, you will be mated for life to your soul mate,” she said. “Other alien races, too, that are biologically compatible.”
“You think that’s better than online dating,” Ellie asked.
“Way better. They guarantee biological compatibility through genetic analysis,” Zara added. “I think I’m going to order the kit. It costs the same as ancestor DNA, and that’s included.”
“Isn’t it kind of expensive?” Ellie asked.
“Yeah, but you only have to do it once,” Zara said, “and it sounds like way better results than online dating. I sure as heck haven’t had much luck finding a husband in this town.”
“It’s not like we have a great career at this place, either,” Ellie said. “I’ve heard that most of those Narovians are pretty rich.”
“There are a thousand worlds in the Alliance, and we’ve never even been out of the country!” Zara reminded her. “How many second dates have you had in the last year?”
“Umm, I don’t know---maybe a couple, no thirds.” She sighed.
“I had one third date, and he got pissed off and took me home when he found out he wasn’t going to get laid. Can you believe that?” Zara muttered. “He was attractive enough, but he wasn’t looking for a serious relationship, and I wasn’t looking for a quick fuck.”
“It’s just not enough,” Ellie said. “They are not even that romantic about it either.”
“It’s not just that. The way we go about finding a mate is so haphazard. Like going out to a nightspot to hear a band, do a little dancing and drinking, hoping to meet someone you can make a life with,” Zara said. “It’s one big gamble.”
“Then if you do find someone to actually marry, you only have one chance in three of staying married,” Ellie remarked. “Those aren’t good odds.”
“It says here that you can apply online and they will send you the kit to collect a DNA sample,” Zara added. “I’m going to do it tonight on my computer. It’s kind of long, and our lunch break is almost over. What do you think?”
“I don’t know if I’m brave enough to go into space to another planet to marry some guy I never met,” Ellie replied. “It could all go horribly wrong. And we probably wouldn’t get matched up with guys on the same planet anyway.”
Just then, two older ladies walked by on their way back to work. They had been working at the same factory for thirty years and were just marking time until they could retire. Both were divorced. One had remarried, but that marriage hadn’t worked either.
Zara’s parents had divorced ten years before. Her father was somewhere in Texas and she hardly ever heard from him, and her mother remarried a decent man and moved to California. Her brother was in the navy, and she hadn’t seen him is a couple years. True love was worth the risk. Wasn’t it?
As Zara watched the two ladies walk from the lunchroom carrying their lunch bags, she decided to take the chance.
“It’s asking, ‘Would you be willing to mate with an enhanced humanoid?’” Zara said, “What does that mean?”
“Let me see if that’s in the glossary of terms,” Ellie said, keying in the entry on her laptop. She and Zara were sitting on the couch in Zara’s tiny apartment each with their own laptop going through the questionnaire. “Okay, it says here they could be genetically and or cybernetically enhanced. ‘See also cyborg.’”
“You mean like the Borg on Star Trek?” Zara asked, sounding horrified.
“I don’t think so,” Ellie said, “it’s probably more like bionics, like when Darth Vader cut off Luke Skywalker’s hand on Star Wars. He got a bionic one. He didn’t look creepy or anything like those borg.”
“Okay, I guess I will say ‘yes.’ They will send a video of whoever you are matched with for you to decide whether you want to contact him,” Zara said. “I just can’t sit around waiting for that fairy tale romance to happen. I’m already twenty-five years old. I don’t want to end up like Florence and Carmen.”
“Twenty-five is young,” Ellie said. “Some women don’t even start their families until they are almost forty.”
“Well, I don’t want to wait that long. I don’t want to wait till I’m forty. I feel like have been in a holding pattern for the last three years,” Zara said. “I want to design clothes, not sew collars on pajamas.”
“How is marrying some alien cyborg or whatever going to help with that?”
“I don’t know that it will, but maybe I will have someone to love me who I can love, and I can design clothes for our kids,” Zara replied. “I’m not going to find that here. They won’t even look at my nightwear designs at work.”
Zara went back to answering the questions on her laptop until she finished the whole application and submitted it. “There, I’m doing it. Let’s see what happens.
The DNA kit came the next day, and Zara followed the instructions to the letter and sent it back the following day. They would email her with the results. First, she would get the genealogical information within a couple weeks. Finding her a mate could take up to a year. It could even fail, but her DNA profile would remain active until they either found her mate or she found her own.
Zara was sure she would get a match. She just had to be patient. Not until four months passed did she start to feel discouraged. At six months, she began to think about looking in a major city for a design related job where she might actually be taken seriously after she proved herself.
By then it was winter, and the thought of moving was daunting. She had emailed dozens of resumes and applied for numerous positions, but that was not any more successful than finding her alien mate.
Then, one day at lunch while she was checking email on her tablet at work she spotted an email from the Narovian Matchmaking Service with the subject: ‘Mate Found.’ Zara’s fingers were shaking as she touched the screen to open the email. Right there at the top, in the center, was a gorgeous golden-skinned man with a sculpted body and platinum hair.
He had been a warrior for the Alliance before he retired and settled on a sparsely populated, predominantly agricultural world. Oddly enough, he owned horses and raised some kind of large bird for meat, eggs, and exotic feathers on a desert farm complex. He lived in an underground home with all modern technology. They compared the area of that world to Arizona or the Australian Outback.
There were several pictures of him with his name Korjh Benjegt. He was 6’5”, a full foot taller than her, and a cyborg. It was the only way they could repair his war injuries. He was born human originally from Narova. But a cyborg.
But he was so handsome, with beautiful blue eyes, and he seemed to be looking right at her in his headshot. His full mouth looked so kissable. The thought of kissing him with those strong arms wrapped around her stirred something inside her.
There was a short video where he introduced himself in his own language with subtitles like a foreign movie. He had a pleasant voice and used his hands when he spoke.
“Hello. My name is Korjh(Kor zh) Benjegt. I will tell you up front that I’m a cyborg because I want no misunderstandings. I used to be
a warrior and was injured in a battle we were fighting. I was repaired with cybernetic enhancements, but I assure you my mind and my heart are human. I am seeking a mate who will accept me as I am. My cybernetic enhancements are fully integrated with my biological parts. I look and function as a human male.
“If you choose to accept me as your mate, I will add English to my cybernetics and pay for your passage to Modonne. It would take three months to get here.
“Zara, I will do my best to make a good life for us, if you decide to come be my mate,” he said.
Zara had made a similar video when she sent her application. The way he looked into the recorder made her believe that he had seen her video before he made this one. The last thing he said was in English.
His voice was smooth and sensual and made her body send her signals she hadn’t felt in a long time. As long as she had waited for the match and the drudgery of her job, of her life, Zara felt compelled to accept his offer.
CHAPTER TWO
Korjh Benjegt had been waiting over two years when he got the message on his tablet about his match from a Class Four planet called Earth. He had heard of it but he’d only been through that sector on the way to a warfront. He had been fighting Drayids on the far side of the Alliance where they were trying to encroach on another colony. He’d also known of their attack on Earth as they were about to be recognized by the Alliance.
The Drayids were an insectoid race that had no use for humanoids except as a delicacy. There were humanoid worlds within their empire, but each made a specific contribution to the Drayid Empire, or they were strategically located. They only devoured humanoids from worlds they conquered outside their own territory.
After he had been nearly killed and rebuilt into a cyborg, he had begun to think that killing bugs was all that was left for him. Then the Drayids retreated from Alliance space and stopped invading worlds near the border. He could have stayed with the Defense Force, but after twenty years, he was battle weary. He wanted an ordinary life and a family like the one that raised him that the Drayids killed just before he finished his education.
He was always going to be a farmer and go to one of the new colonies to build his own farm. But after the Drayids killed his family, he joined the Defense Force to kill them---to avenge his family. No matter how many he slaughtered, it didn’t lessen the pain, but it saved a lot of other families from being lost. That helped.
In his twenty years as a warrior for the Alliance, he had killed his share of bugs before and after they’d made him a cyborg to save his life. After twenty years, he decided to take his pension and bonuses and buy a farm on some colonial world. He’d thought he wanted to live his life in solitude and forget about being a warrior.
He had brought his horses as embryos from a livestock service based on Narova. They had been imported from Earth a few hundred years before he was born, and genetically enhanced over the years. Then there were the tikas a large ancient reptilian creature with vestigial wings. They ran about fifty pounds and laid their eggs on the ground. They kind of looked like dragons but weren’t particularly intelligent.
Korjh had set up a force field around a dozen or so acres to keep the creatures contained and predators out. The rest of the land was in crops and hay watered from one of two artesian wells on his extensive property.
He hadn’t thought about having a female to keep him company until a few years after he had settled on Modonne and built his farm from the desert. That’s when the families started arriving from overpopulated or war-torn worlds in the inner sectors. Females and children, pregnant women, made him yearn for one of his own. Korjh couldn’t exactly remember how many years it had been since he’d actually fucked a real live woman.
He had still been a warrior on some pleasure station. It had been okay. He’d gotten off with her and got her off as well, but there was no emotional connection. It was a warm body to hold instead of holding his cock in his own hand. So far there were only two kinds of females on Modonne, attached or pleasure workers. The few who had been unattached preferred to steer clear of a former cyborg warrior.
He had cybernetic enhancements and replacement parts, his legs, and his eyes, augmented hearing, computer implant, a metallic skeleton and military grade medical nanites. But his brain was human; he had learned to submerge his emotions as a warrior. He could quickly kill with his bare hands, but those days were gone.
Cybernetically enhanced humanoids were classified by their species of origin, not by their enhancements. The few women he’d tried dating, avoided him as soon as they learned what he really was. Cyborg seemed to be synonymous with killing machine. But he was more than that.
Korjh had human feelings, a human heart. He remembered being a child with parents who loved him. Now that he had given up his warrior ways, he wanted a female and children of his own like the family who raised him.
For about a year before he was released from the military, maybe more, Korjh had felt like he needed to get away someplace where he could be alone and regroup, find some peace in his soul. Modonne sounded like that place to him. Wide open spaces without another settler for miles.
Building his home and his barns had taken most of his time when he first got there. The nurturing tanks for the frozen horse embryos had taken awhile to set up. First, he had to set up the giant windmills and solar collectors to power the sytems of his farm and home.
That was just the start. Korjh worked from sunrise to sunset, losing track of months at a time, building his farm and his underground home. He drilled the artesian wells he needed to water is animals and crops, making his barns and equine nurtury. The nurtury was in the barn that would house his horses. There was a separate barn for tikas hatchery.
With all that work behind him, and robotic machinery doing most of the work, Korjh found he yearned for something more. So, he made an application to the Narovian Interstellar Matchmaking Service. After he made his submission to the matchmaking service, he checked his emails a couple times a day or more.
Day after day month after month passed and no word. By the second year, he was lucky if he checked once a week. When he finally checked while looking up a shipment he was waiting for, he discovered the message from the matchmaking service was over two weeks old.
He read the application before he really looked at her picture. Zara was young, fifteen years younger than he, but that didn’t matter now with the nanites in his bloodstream his aging progress was slowed way down. He was in good shape for a man her age and didn’t look much over twenty-five thanks to his nanites.
After all the waiting, the matchmaking service had found a mate. With his enhancements, it took him only seconds to review the data and assimilate it.
She had said ‘yes’ to the question of accepting a cyborg mate. Then he went back to look at her pictures and her video. Zara wasn’t classically beautiful, but she had beautiful blue eyes, a pretty face with soft looking lips, and thick brown hair that fell almost to her shoulders in a simple straight style. Her figure was just shy of voluptuous, curvy enough to make a man yearn to feel her beneath him.
Even though he didn’t understand the words, he liked the sound of her voice and the hopeful look in her eyes as she seemed to speak directly to him and only him. She was the one he wanted, the one that made his cock stir to life as he thought of the ways he could make her squirm and moan, make her come for him.
All she had to do is accept the next step to allow the matchmaking service to give him direct contact information via the internet on Earth. There wouldn’t be real-time chat, but they could exchange video email.
Hello Zara,
I am happy to receive your reply. You are very beautiful, and I would be proud to be your mate if you decide to be mine. I have never been to your world, but I am very fond of the horses that come from your world. After I left military service, I settled on a colony called Modonne. A good part of it is desert plains, so I was able to acquire a great deal of land.
While I was building my
farm, I was too busy to be lonely. But now that I have everything working and a beautiful underground home, I wish to have a mate. Modonne is almost as big as your Earth but sparsely settled. The nearest town is an hour flit in my aircar. Most of the time your only company would be me.
Some neighbors also have mates, females who could become friends. They are nice people.
My home is fully automated, and we have similar home entertainments as you have on Earth. Your profile says that you like art and are educated as a clothing designer. We could get the materials you need to pursue that interest.
You will also be able to keep in touch with your friends and family the same way we are communicating.
Please tell me what you think and ask me anything you want to know about Modonne and about me. I have been living here five years alone, and now I am ready to share my life with a female. I hope that might be you.
Korjh
CHAPTER THREE
Hi Korjh,
Your offer is very tempting. You seem really charming, and I am attracted to you. I understand how and why you became a cyborg. We have many war veterans who have come back from war missing body parts due to injuries. I’m sure they would be happy to have cybernetic replacements. Perhaps the Alliance will share that technology with us so they can benefit.
The videos you sent of your farm remind me of the Australian Outback here on Earth. I’ve never been there, but I think I might like the rural life if I have a husband (mate) to share it with.
I always wondered what it would be like to go to other worlds outside our star system. Until the Alliance announced their presence, I never thought there would be a chance to travel to other planets within my lifetime. But they have always suspected extraterrestrials have been coming here for millennia.
