A Solid Core of Alpha (22 page)

“Well, see, that just proves my point! I had all those rules, so I got to question them. I got to ask why this and not that, and why couldn’t we change A if it screwed up B—”

“God, you were a pain in the ass!”

“Well yeah, to
you
. But see, that’s the point! Anderson liked the rules, just like you did. He had a daily routine within four sleep cycles. Now I read those letters.
You
read those letters. He was hell with a shit-eating smile and a bucket of worms when he was twelve. But the minute the rules were all gone, what’s the first thing he did?”

Cassie blinked stupidly. “Made the rules.”

C.J. nodded. He hadn’t discussed this with Jensen, but then he didn’t have to. He’d lived with the guy for two years. He’d gone to enough mental health seminars to qualify him for
something
if he ever got out of space engineering.

“He made the rules. He programmed the holograms and made the fucking rules, Cassie. That was it. That was his world. Say you want the sky to be red one day instead of blue. You know you can make it happen, you’ve got the technology, you’ve got the means, and dammit, you fucking want a red sky. Or a pink sky with a velvet ribbon. Or a cat’s eye looking through the sun. And you can
fucking do it
! Would you?”

Cassie turned sad, sober eyes to him. “No,” she whispered. “I wouldn’t fucking do it. I wouldn’t make the sky pink or the sun green. Because that would violate the rules.”

“And what do you call it when you violate the rules and no one gets caught, oh sister mine?”

“Cheating.”

C.J. nodded and poured another dollop into his glass and then one into Cassie’s. “Cheating. And the one thing our boy doesn’t do, is cheat.”

T
HEY
finished off C.J.’s Scorch that day, but that turned out to be a good thing. It seemed that Cassie’s husband had some
much
better liquor inside his stores, and the week they watched as Anderson discovered his own body and
then
the adult-level health and hygiene files, complete with enrichment materials, the two of them did some serious damage to Marshall’s selection.

The trouble, C.J. knew, as he watched that first interrupted session of masturbation, was that he had to go home and
face
Anderson after this.

And not just
face
him, sleep in the same bed, comfort him after his dreams, and… God. That wasn’t even the worst part. C.J. saw so much of him as a young man, even watching him discover his sexuality might have been able to be viewed impersonally, through the eyes of an engineer, if all C.J. did with Anderson was
comfort
him.

But that wasn’t all they did.

They ate dinner together, they watched comedy and romance vids, they talked about their favorite parts. They went shopping, they went out with C.J.’s friends and watched movies from planetside at the station’s small theater. They made plans to go to the hub to visit clubs when Anderson felt more comfortable with more people. The progression from watching the recording of Anderson to dealing with the living, seemingly recovered Anderson—Jesus, it was such a mindfuck.

That first day they had to deal with Anderson’s budding sexuality, C.J. thought he could handle it, and then Bobby walked into the room on the screen, and C.J. said, “Uh-oh,” right when Cassie said, “What?”

As the scene played out, C.J.’s first uncomfortable stirrings of arousal were drowned out by the horrible knowledge that Anderson’s innocence had pretty much condemned him to be on a shuttle full of people not one of whom would make a decent companion. As Bobby left, Anderson’s wistful expression lingered, and behind them, from the holograms who watched quietly with wide eyes, Bobby said, “Oh God. Jesus, I felt so bad.”

C.J. turned to him then and did what his sister probably thought was insane, but he didn’t care. “It’s not your fault,” he said quietly. “It’s not your fault when someone loves you and you don’t love them the same way. It just is. It’s one of the ways we hurt each other without even trying.”

Then he turned around and watched as Anderson proceeded to discover sex, and even without Anderson knowing that there would ever be a C.J. to witness his adolescent gropings, just watching it hurt C.J. without even trying.

God, it hurt to watch him discover sex on his own, to watch him fumble, embarrassed, excited, joyous, and always, at the end, ashamed of his own climax. It hurt to watch him hide it from his friend because he knew Bobby didn’t return his feelings, and to pretend he didn’t see the inevitable romance between the two people he loved the most.

“You know,” Cassie burbled, stoned on some of Marshall’s finest Hermes-Gamma grain-fruit wine, “I never saw that coming. They looked at each other one minute, and the next minute, they were fucking like lemmings, and they were
good
at it.”

“Of course they were good at it,” C.J. mumbled, for once the drunker of the two of them. “They’d just ingested enough porn for forty people. They were like a walking repository for sexual positions and know-how. Are,” he corrected at the last. “
Are
a walking repository for sex.”

That last had to be added. Bobby and Kate might have stayed out of the room for that part, but they must have been listening to it, because after Cassie left for the day, C.J. stuck his head inside the little house construct—which had remained up permanently since the ship had docked—in order to tell them that he and Cassie were logging out early, and he could hear the sounds of passionate, happy sex going on from what he presumed to be their room. His eyes had grown wide, and he’d been almost amused out of his funk for a moment when suddenly the door to Anderson’s room swung open, and there stood Alpha.

He was naked and had his erect member in his fist.

It was as large as C.J. had imagined, as long and as thick, with a truly monstrously sized head, and C.J. was, for once in his life, speechless.

Alpha had eyed him with lazy, hooded contempt and proceeded to spit on his hand very deliberately and then lower it to that gigantic cock and stroke, slowly. C.J. watched him with his own erection struggling gamely inside his undershorts.

Alpha leaned back against the doorframe of the bedroom then, and while the front door of the house closed quietly behind C.J., continued to stroke his uncircumcised cock, the foreskin making wet, blatantly carnal sounds as it slipped sloppily around the crown.

“I know this turns you on,” Alpha hissed, and C.J. grunted, hating himself at the same time he
really
wanted to relieve himself, and Alpha grinned at him in triumph. With a few rough strokes and a solid pinch of his nipple, Alpha came, his semen erupting in a fractured arc to splatter on the floorboards.

The sound was enough to snap C.J. out of whatever spell had been holding him. “Lots of things turn me on,” he said quietly. “I know which ones are bad for me.”

He’d gotten
way
drunker than Cassie that day—the last time they did that for a while—but by now, they’d stopped explaining to each other why.

Hell, she knew.

Five days later, they watched as Kate and Bobby started programming companions. The first one had made C.J. and Cassie laugh themselves silly, and while Kate and Bobby had apologized—both to C.J. and Cassie in their time and to Anderson on the image they were watching—the second attempt hadn’t been much better. The third companion attempt had to be canceled before the true importance of what Anderson had to do with the misfires really hit the two of them.

“How could you guys screw that up so bad?” Cassie asked Bobby and Kate, and they both blushed. Cassie had long since stopped treating them like artificial people, but that meant they were in a position to be victimized by her customary bluntness.

“Hey,” Kate protested, “Peter was
not
our fault. He was handsome, according to our data of what Anderson preferred, he was serious, he was smart. In fact, he was very close to Henry here, except Henry has a sense of humor, and….” Kate blushed. “And we gave Henry some of my qualities as well.”

Cassie looked seriously intrigued. “So was Henry the first attempt you made with your personality traits?”

Kate and Bobby nodded. “It was stupid—we were looking at things from a strictly male-female perspective. It didn’t even occur to us that Anderson would find the qualities he’d put into a female attractive in a male.”

Cassie laughed hard, her shoulders shaking, her breath coming short, and Bobby and Kate cringed. “Really? That’s one of the most sexist things I’ve ever heard!”

“Well, deprogram me!” Bobby snapped. “I was sixteen!”

Cassie sobered and became instantly contrite. “I’m sorry. I do forget how young you all were.” C.J. felt her glance at him while he brooded at the screen in front of him. Anderson had just walked into the room and mumbled dully that Peter would have to be cancelled the next day. Kate and Bobby seemed to take it in stride, but Anderson….

Anderson was near tears.

C.J. looked up at Kate, Bobby, Henry, and Risa. “Was he like this with all of them?” he asked quietly.

Henry shrugged. “Well, they only made one more prototype. That was me. He liked me for a friend, so I got to stay.”

C.J. shook his head. “I mean, you know, the school, the students, the teacher, it all had to go. Did doing that bother him as much then as cancelling the prototypes is bothering him now?”

“Worse,” Risa said softly. They all looked at her, and she shrugged defensively. “We all saw it. We’re not holograms to him, sir.” She, of all of them, had the worst problem calling C.J. and Cassidy by their first names. “They’re not. They’re people. He wasn’t a scientist cancelling a program. He was a….” Risa trailed off and wiped her cheeks, but C.J. didn’t need her to finish.

“Yeah,” he said softly. “I know what he was.”

They watched Kate and Bobby program Henry next, and this time, it was their dialogue that needed to be sent down to Jensen and Julio.

“Okay, we need him to look like that one vid guy, the one from the m/m porn vid,” Kate was muttering.

On the deck of the ship, Henry looked at her, surprised.

“Is
that
where I got my looks?” he asked, faintly appalled.

Kate didn’t even blush. “Hell yes. That vid
totally
turned Anderson on. Look at the split screen!” They all automatically looked to what was going on in the other parts of the ship at that time, and sure enough, there was Anderson, naked on his cot with his knees in the air and his cock in his hand.

C.J. gave a strangled laugh and wondered if he had enough water in his shower account to take another hot shower that night. Now that Anderson was sleeping in the same bed, it was his one safe place to one-off.

“What’s his personality going to be like?” Bobby asked, and Kate sighed.

“Well, he needs a sense of humor, because Peter was a complete tool. Nice job thinking he needed someone serious like himself, dickhead.”

Bobby shrugged. “Well, he’s been awfully quiet lately.”

In the other part of the ship, Anderson was biting his palm and screaming as he came, and C.J. heard Cassie snicker next to him. He was too hard and too heartsore to think it was quite that funny.

“Yeah, but he had a major crush on you because he liked the way you play. We need someone like that. Someone with your dumbass sense of humor, and a little bit of seriousness, you know, so Anderson knows he’s got a partner to be serious with.”

“We’ll need glasses,” Bobby said with confidence. “They always make someone look serious.”

“Thanks a lot, dickhead,” Henry said in disgust. “I couldn’t even program laser surgery because Anderson thought that would be cheating.”

Cassie and C.J. met eyes, and both of them suppressed a groan. God. They’d promised each other no more drinking after the last time. They’d keep that down to once a week, otherwise they’d both need a treatment program during their down-planet break, but
jeez!
The idea of the different pieces of Anderson’s identity arguing with each other about their programming was… was baffling. Baffling and difficult and… horrible.

Glumly, C.J. wished he’d stayed with Jensen long enough to get the big psych degree alongside him, just so he could help Anderson now.

Anderson—God,
Anderson.
Anderson, whose life they were watching and who was, even as C.J. and Cass wrapped it up that day, waiting in “their” quarters and feeding the gamma bird. Today, he was wearing a new outfit with a skin-tight white bodysuit and a thin-collared, bright green shirt belted over it. Whoever he had been as a child, he certainly enjoyed wearing bright, exciting things now.

“Hey, C.J., tough day?”

C.J. laughed helplessly. Anderson knew C.J. was reviewing recorded segments of his life. C.J. had been honest with him about it but hadn’t told him how hard it was to watch, how horrible it was to see Anderson finding more and more ingenious ways to hide his terrible, chest-crushing loneliness from even himself.

So Anderson knew what C.J. was doing, but he didn’t really
know
. At least, C.J. thought he didn’t, until Anderson looked up from giving Chips a piece of Hermes-Eight hybrid-grain flatbread and said, “So, have you gotten to the health and hygiene file yet?”

C.J.’s entire body flushed hot. “About five days ago. We, uhm, had to slow down because you and your friends were doing a lot of programming right there.”

Anderson sent him that flirty, predatory look again, the one he had when he was thinking about C.J. sexually and wanted C.J. to know. Today, after watching Anderson pleasure himself for the umpteenth time, it actually made C.J. sweat. “So you’ve been watching me masturbate like it’s a new sport and I’m going for a gold medal?”

C.J. laughed a little and rubbed his hand over his tight, flattened gold curls. “It’s an old sport, little man, but yeah, you were trying to set a record.”

Anderson’s look intensified, and he smiled a one-sided, evil little imp of a smile. “Yeah, well, you keep using shower credits and you might have me beat.”

C.J. put his face in his hands and groaned. “God… Anderson… you weren’t supposed to know….”