Sumana

Midnight on Cedar Commons was warm and windy, and it wasn’t far to the garage where the two Tata Devout hovercars were parked. Becky skirted the edge of the concrete city-dock. After three months on Cedar Commons, Becky was sick of trees, but she’d have the rest of her life to appreciate concrete. Drizzling light through the oak branches were the bright planetary rings, and three of the moons that kept the ring system stable. Becky was a city girl, raised on Earth, and this combination of the familiar and the otherworldly was infuriatingly romantic. A picture similar to this had been on Trellis’s site, and below it had been a very promising bullet point saying

• 5-month placements with sexually compatible partners
  

But Trellis On-Site Security was a rre brand, and to its sentient resources department, sex was a perk offered to the humanoid employees. They did not understand that although she and Hiroko had checked the same box on a form, Becky was not sexually compatible with the femmiest, most obnoxious lesbian in the universe.

Becky’s sneakers pressed acorns into the dirt all the way to the garage. Goddamn Hiroko with her manicure machine and her Bible thumping and her pretentious jazz and her repetitive Navy stories. Becky entertained herself with a little fantasy about the fallen ring fragment she was about to discover, and the lanky satellite repairwoman who would drop out of orbit and ring Becky’s doorbell once they called it in.