  In supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model, the observed particles
come in fermion-boson pairs necessary for the realization of supersymmetry
(SUSY). In spite of the expected abundance of super-partners for all the known
particles, not a single supersymmetric pair has been reported to date. Although
a hypothetical SUSY breaking mechanism, operating at high energy inaccessible
to current experiments cannot be ruled out, this reduces SUSY's predictive
power and it is unclear whether SUSY, in its standard form, can help reducing
the remaining puzzles of the standard model (SM). Here we argue that SUSY can
be realized in a different way, connecting spacetime and internal bosonic
symmetries, combining bosonic gauge fields and fermionic matter particles in a
single gauge field, a Lie superalgebra-valued connection. In this
unconventional representation, states do not come in SUSY pairs, avoiding the
doubling of particles and fields and SUSY is not a fully off-shell invariance
of the action. The resulting systems are remarkably simple, closely resembling
a standard quantum field theory and SUSY still emerges as a contingent symmetry
that depends on the features of the vacuum/ground state. We illustrate the
general construction with two examples: i) A 2+1 dimensional system based on
the $osp(2,2|2)$ superalgebra, including Lorentz and $u(1)$ generators that
describes graphene; ii) A supersymmetric extension of 3+1 conformal gravity
with an $SU(2,2|2)$ connection that describes a gauge theory with an emergent
chiral symmetry breaking, coupled to gravity. The extensions to higher odd and
even dimensions, as well as the extensions to accommodate more general internal
symmetries are also outlined.
