“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.