Digital Heartbeats — Ash Gray

Determined to liberate her wife from cryostasis, Zune heads to Arcana 7, the human settlement that supposedly has a cure for Zoe's illness. While she is away, Xian makes friends with Super, a giant Megatron who believes the meaning of life is what each individual chooses to make it. Whlie Xian is off debating philosphy with robots, Zune crosses paths with a wicked cyborg raider, who wants her Eternity chip and will stop at nothing to get it. Don't miss the third installment of this lebsian science fiction series! --Zune was worried. Since finding Zoe 2, the sudden cold, hard reality had hit her that Xian was a pure human, which meant she did not have cybernetics . . .which meant she would live a very brief life and then she would die.   In the days before the war, humans had lived well to five hundred years and beyond. Now humans could barely make it to twenty before they were killed by a destruction unit, and those that made it to old age only saw their sixties before they perished due to lack of clean water and proper nutrition. Those in the settlements lived the longest, naturally.  --Zune didn't answer. Xian looked up and went still: Zune's blue eyes were looking down at her, glinting with hunger in the soft, blue light of the heat lamp. Xian's heart skipped a beat. Plenty of women had desired her, but only Zune had ever looked at her with such hard longing. She supposed it had been a long time since Zoe. Perhaps the cyborg had needs after all.   --Xian remembered not understanding, watching in a sort of sad confusion, wondering why her parents were going into the earth. When she asked, Xy had lifted her onto her hip and told her that their parents were sleeping and would never wake. They're sleeping, Xian. Lay off me with the q-questions, Xy had said, tears in her eyes. They're sleeping . . .  --What do you want with her? Zune demanded.  Her Eternity chip, obviously, you zoinkhead. The ancients didn't build their soldiers to think, just take orders, apparently, said the woman derisively. I want my bio processes to stop so I can live forever. Only trouble is, an Eternity chip can only be found on a pre-war cyborg, and now I've got two of them standing in front of me. She pulled a laser sword from her hip with a flourish and a red beam extended from it. Lucky me.