In a large, airy, clean classroom on Earth looking out at a city and the mountains around it, a young Alex was surrounded by a dozen human children. A little girl had her ear pressed against his chest, listening wide-eyed.

“Wow!” she gasped. “You don’t have a heartbeat! It’s just whirring!”

“What’s a heartbeat?” asked Alex.

“You’ve never heard a heartbeat?” the girl stared at him in awe and disbelief.

Alex shook his head. The girl stepped back.

“You can listen to mine if you want,” she offered.

Alex reached out and touched her chest with his hand. The clear thump-thump of her beating heart resonated through the sensors in his palm, the data coming in clear enough to feel the shape of the organ as it flexed with every beat.

“He listens with his hands?” asked one of the children, tugging at another’s shoulder.

“Uh... I guess?” his friend shrugged.

“Why does your heart do that?” asked Alex.

“It keeps me alive,” replied the girl.

Alex removed his hand and looked at it, squeezing his clawed fingers in an attempt to mimic the pattern of the heartbeat. As he was lost in his thoughts, the girl tapped his hair crystals which produced a dull thump.

“Did you feel that?” she smiled.

“Nuh-uh,” he shook his head.

“So, you’re really from Mars?”

“Yah.”

“Are all the other kids there like you?”

“I know there are kids like you there too, but all the ones I know are like me. I haven’t been around a lot of people. This is my first time meeting so many.”

“Well, welcome to Earth! Wanna play with us at recess?”

“Yeah, tell us about Mars!” demanded another child.

“Is it sunny like here?” asked yet another.

“I heard Mars was cold! How cold is it? Does it get windy?” jumped in one more classmate as the little kids swarmed the small cyborg.

...

In the enormous panoramic window of the flying space city’s observation deck, the bright, white light of a warp bubble shuddered and began to widen. It broke up into countless points of light radiating out in all directions. The points closer to the middle turned blue while those around the edges took on a spectrum of reddish hues as they continued to spread out.

They finished separating and began to glow white, red, blue, and yellow in no particular pattern as a tropical world with large island chains and oceans seemingly inflated out of nothingness and slid under the space city. Orbiting craft appeared as small, slowly moving dots. Two moons were visible in the distance, the lights on their surfaces indicating large and very active bases.

The space city settled into a comfortable orbit around the lush, green and purple, watery planet. Several more craft like it also orbited at higher altitudes, all surrounded by entire swarms of destroyers. A steady hum of spaceplane and destroyer traffic made it obvious that this is a busy, thriving planet.

Steve and Christine looked out at the new destination with awe. Izzy, Dot, Alex, and Leo stood next to them along with a small swarm of other humans and cyborgs who came to watch the space city emerge from its warp bubble.

“That’s... beautiful,” said Steve. “It looks like a picture from my textbooks when we were learning about the hunt for perfect, habitable planets.”

“Well, that’s exactly what Paliuli is,” agreed Izzy. “It’s tropical pole to pole with deep oceans, but not too deep, and you should feel pretty comfortable on the surface because it’s almost exactly the same mass as your world.”

“You really lucked out when it came to picking a home base,” nodded Christine.

“Hah!” scowled Dot, baring a fang. “Luck had nothing to do with it. We found it, we put up the FOBs on the moons, so we get to keep it. Anyone who wants to take it is gonna get Ragnarocked.”

Christine helplessly looked around in search of an explanation.

“Ragnarocks are what we call our 16 core quantum singularity bombs,” clarified Izzy. “A handful of them are enough to redo the Permian Extinction on Earth.”

Steve and Christine exchanged horrified glances.

“Oh, they’re perfectly safe when they’re not armed,” smiled Izzy. “You’re standing on a few hundred of them right now.”

The humans’ horror intensified.

“Uh... so... when’s the shuttle going down to the planet again?” anxiously asked Steve.

...

A sprawling spaceport emblazoned with the large seal of the 13th Fleet sat on the coast, connected by a network of roads and metro tunnels to a crescent-shaped city of sleek, colorful spires. The city itself was wrapped around an extinct volcano at the end of a mountain range. A spaceplane carefully came in for its final approach just as another lined up for takeoff on an extremely long, wide runway.

It gently touched down and began to taxi to a terminal, much like a commercial airliner. As the jetway connected to the airlock, Steve and Christine expected to exit into something much like a loading bay but were pleasantly surprised by a comfortable lounge that led into a large area filled with a steady hum of humans and cyborgs, both civilian and military, moving between similar lounges and entire simulated streets of shops on the inside the vast, sleek building complex.

As they exited the spaceport through a covered bridge leading to a clean, minimalistic metro platform, a cool ocean breeze touched their faces. Their luggage, which followed them from the plane stopped as they waited for their trains. For the first time in their lives, they were outside in nothing more than their civilian clothing, just like Alex and Dot who were standing next to them, looking at the glyphs indicating the current train positions on a rail map.

Steve fidgeted awkwardly and finally let out a breath before quickly and cautiously taking another one.

“Steve, you know you can breathe normally, the atmosphere is very similar to Earth’s and you’re at sea level,” laughed Alex.

“I know, but it’s creeping me out to stand on a planet without a spacesuit,” replied Steve. “Aren’t there germs or something like that in the air?”

“They evolved billions of years ago using completely different sugars and amino acids. You’re an alien here, they want nothing to do with you.”

“Yeah, but what if they evolve to attack my lungs or, I don’t know, eat my appendix?”

“You’re probably safe for the next few million years or so. After that, I promise we’ll figure something out.”

“I’m sorry, I’m getting the heebie-jeebies too,” chimed in Christine. “This cannot be safe, can it?”

Dot’s and Alex’s eyes flashed as they glance at each other.

“Humans...” they sighed in unison via their AI links.

“Steve, Christine, just take a deep breath...” started Dot but quickly noticed their terrified expressions in response. “On second thought, don’t so that. Just think of it as being on an even bigger space station, ok? A few million people live in the city behind us. They’re all fine and you’ll be too.”

A train approached the quartet and stopped. Its doors opened with a welcoming, soft chime. Steve checked the map and the writing on the train’s display.

“Okay Christine, that’s us,” he said.

“We’ll send you a message when we’re done and can show you around, ok?” offered Dot.

“Yeah, okay,” agreed Christine.

She followed Steve and their self-driving luggage into the train. As the doors slid closed and the train started pulling away from the platform in the direction from which it arrived, she waved goodbye to the cyborgs.

“Think they’ll be fine?” asked Dot.

“It’s gonna take them a while to adjust. Let’s just be patient,” shrugged Alex.

“So, you going to see your little gizmo?”

“Mhmm. The POC should be done and ready for a test drive.”

Dot held out her fist. Alex gently bumped it with his.

...

The maglev train smoothly flew into the city. Outside the window, tidy, well-organized building clusters zoomed by along with plentiful purple and green alien vegetation resembling palms and succulent plants. Steve and Christine sat side by side in wide, comfortable seats.

“I did a little snooping of my own last night,” said Steve.

“What kind of snooping?” Christine’s eyes quickly lit up with curiosity.

“Going through the official records for our hosts. Since we now have military credentials, I decided to see what I could learn.”

“So, what did you find?”

“It’s what I didn’t find that’s the interesting part. Izzy, Jason, and Jake were all there, bios with all their transcripts, assignments, and awards. Mai, Dot, Alex, Leo, Sergio, or Alice? Nothing. It’s like they don’t exist.”

“Hmm. Does that mean Leo, Sergio, and Alice are prototypes too?”

“That’s the logical assumption. If a cyborg is heavily modified, they cease to exist on paper. But why is the real question. If it was illegal to upgrade them, why was Mai fighting with a registered 10th Fleet commander? It doesn’t quite add up, does it?”

“Not at all. Did you try looking through archived caches?”

“Pfft. Of course. I had to dig deep, but there were scraps of Dot’s profile and one shred of Alex’s. He wasn’t lying to you when he said that he was a doctor. He’s a military variant, but he was in the system as a medical researcher with an MD certification at the point the info was archived.”

“And somehow he went from that to having tentacles, fighting aliens, and being a legal ghost along with a bunch of others. That means Earth’s fleets have unregistered, overpowered cyborgs as special operators, and that’s a little scary. When you erase a person from official records, you have a free hand to do pretty much anything.”

“I agree with you there. But why does this arrangement exist, and do the cyborgs actually have a say in becoming pipe hitters? If those humanoid things that attacked you on Psi Cygnus are what Dot hinted they are, the answer to the second question may be a lot murkier than I’d like it to be.”

He turned away with a deep, concerned sigh and crossed his arms. The city continued to whiz by in the window as the train cars reached a switching station and separated on their own, shuttling passengers towards their destinations in three new mini-trains.

...

Jason flew across a large, gloomy, open arena, bouncing off the floor before landing with a thud and rolling to a stop on his back. A capacitor sword fell next to him with a clank like a useless stick while another stabbed into the floor. From the gloom, Mai’s armed tentacles pulsed and oscillated with waves of plasma streaming along their magnetic fields.

“Again!” she growled.

With a grunt, Jason jumped up, grabbing his swords, lit up with an orange aura as his pupils and face markings ignited in the same color, and warped out towards Mai. Two streaks of light, one red and one orange, rapidly slammed into each other and bounced across the room.

Jason slid to a stop, using his swords to slow down.

“Pathetic!” seethed Mai.

She warped in, tentacles ablaze. In a fluid, effortless motion, she whipped Jason into a wall with unnecessary force. The cyborg left an imprint, raising a cloud of dust. As the cloud settled, he fell to his knees.

“Move, move, move! This is combat, not a game!” yelled Mai.

Jason jumped up and tried to swing one of his swords, but Mai’s tentacle warped in almost instantly to block it. She delivered a devastating punch to his stomach with her right, immediately followed by an elbow to his chest, then a swift palm strike to his chin supported by two of her tentacles. Jason collapsed in a heap.

“What the hell are you doing?” Mai was growing increasingly livid. “No real opponent is going to let you take breaks to catch your breath.”

Jason looked up at her, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. He slowly forced himself to get up.

“I’m going to keep going like that until you tap out!” Mai hissed.

“Fuck you. I’m not giving you the satisfaction,” Jason spat.

Mai’s face lit up with a chilling, malicious smile.

“Good. Finally got some real fight in you, huh?” she chuckled.

A small bolt of electricity flashed between the tips of two of her tentacles. Jason growled and warped out to attack her.

Above them, behind a thick transparent shield, Milburn quietly observed the fighting cyborgs with his arms crossed, below. A lab tech approached him from behind with a polite cough.

“Dr. Milburn, do you think she may be pushing him too hard?” he asked. “He’s not a full prototype. If she keeps going like that, she’ll kill him.”

“Let her work out her frustrations,” replied Milburn. “He knows he can stop this anytime, he’s just too stubborn to give up and too obedient to complete the upgrade.”

“But Doctor, didn’t Earth say he needs to remain intact?”

“Yes, yes, I know, I know,” the scientist waived him away. “I was at the same meeting. Don’t worry, I won’t actually let her kill the guy. But I’m certainly not going to stop her from toughening him up for their next mission.”

A loud blast suddenly rocked the entire gym.

“Ooh, Mai is in an especially foul mood today,” purred Milburn. “How Volkov dealt with her, I’ll never understand. On second thought, maybe I would, but I don’t think Jason will get the same kind of post-sparring treatment.”

He ominously chuckled as he continued to watch the one-sided fight from his perch illuminated by flashes of red and orange light.

...

On a sprawling base at the edge of the city, Alex and a human technician peered into an open Dragon Egg. It seemed a little bizarre to inspect weapons in an environment that looked like a postcard from a resort, but the humans did like the fresh air and the soothing sound of the ocean lapping at the nearby beach.

“Yup, it fits,” said the Technician. “Barely, but within safe limits.”

“Well, as they say in rocket science, close enough,” nodded Alex. “It’ll just have to be the only thing in the Egg.”

“I still can’t believe it actually worked. Of all the crazy shit you had us build...”

He made a few swipes on his tablet.

“You know, we have a pool going on which one of your projects is gonna blow up on its first try,” he mused. “Gonna be a lot of gnashing of teeth tonight.”

“Well, if someone corners me in a dark alley later, I’ll know why,” replied Alex.

“Yah, I don’t think you’ll need to worry about that,” scoffed the Technician. “Losing 50 astros in an office pool is easy to explain. Dragging your detached lower half through the door? Not so much.”

He signed a form with his stylus and briefly glanced at the cyborg.

“All right, we’ll get it shipped out before you leave. No problem.”

He walked off, nose buried in his tablet. As Alex thought about heading back to the city, his mind let him know that Leo was trying to contact him.

“Tag, you’re it!” echoed in his brain.

“Can’t. Working,” he wordlessly replied.

Leo replied with a mental flash chicken emoji.

“How old are you?” asked Alex.

“Same age as you, peep-squeak. You’re just too chicken to play because I’ll beat you.”

“When have you ever beaten me?”

“Hey, today might be the day. All of us are playing.”

“Fine, you’re on,” Alex accepted.