A Solid Core of Alpha (30 page)

Anderson was curled on his side, and he clasped C.J.’s hand in his as they both panted in the darkness and tried to find words, any words.

“Thank you, C.J.,” Anderson mumbled, obviously exhausted. “Thank you.”

“I love you, Anderson,” C.J. said, wanting that to be between them as well as the sex. But Anderson didn’t say the words back, and C.J. guessed that maybe he wasn’t ready, and that was C.J.’s fault for not waiting.

“Thank you, C.J. Thank you. For the first time in forever, I’m real.”

C.J. was falling, falling, falling asleep. He reached out for a moment and stroked Anderson’s hair. “You’re real,” he whispered. “You’re real to me.”

T
HEY
were both hot and sweaty and covered in the mess that came with sex, even as they fell asleep. C.J. woke up a little later, surprised to find Anderson was wiping him off, his pubic area, his backside, his stomach where he’d come when Anderson had been inside him.

“Let me return the favor,” he mumbled.

“Later,” Anderson murmured back. “Later. I’ll be back. You can do it then.”

“Where’re you going?” C.J. asked, not even able to keep his eyes open.

“Just to get some fruit juice. Shhhh….”

C.J. fell asleep then, God help him. Fell fast asleep. Anderson returned to their bed much later, and C.J. reached around to clasp him around the middle. Anderson whimpered, like the action hurt, but scooted back into C.J.’s embrace the way he’d been doing since the very beginning.

“I love you, C.J.,” he whispered.

“Love you too,” C.J. said back, loving how tightly they fit when there wasn’t anything between them.

Anderson must have fallen asleep then.

An hour later, he woke up in time to scream.

This time, the screams weren’t silent—the raw, keening screech of them blasted around the space station with the force to shatter planets and turn asteroid fields to dust. And they never, never stopped.

Part 3: Anderson

Chapter 15

Two Keystrokes, Three Hits, and One Big Loss

A
NDERSON
almost didn’t follow through on what he had to do because he couldn’t stop looking at C.J.

God, he looked so vulnerable, lying face down, naked, the chocolate and cream color of his skin gleaming lustrous and touchable. His hand was still stretched out from reaching to touch Anderson’s face, and Anderson closed his eyes and relived that tickle down his cheekbone.

Real.

Anderson had read and re-read every scrap of fiction in the archives. He’d started to memorize the things he loved the most before he deleted them to make room for the holodeck, thinking that if he lived, the words would at least live in his mind—what was left of it, anyway. His vocabulary was extensive, encyclopedic, in truth, but in spite of that, he could not find a better word for the feel of C.J.’s flesh against his hands, against his chest and his thighs, surrounding his cock, invading his body. It was all
real
.

It was real in a way that Anderson hadn’t been sure existed, not even after he walked down the plank of the shuttle and was introduced to other people for the first time in ten and a half years.

He could remember Cassie’s warmth and Marshall’s exotic, steady kindness, but those had seemed distant and far away. Nice to imagine, but not necessarily real. A new program, instituted by Bobby and Kate, perhaps? Henry and Risa helped? It was possible. His forebrain knew it was what happened, but his instinct, the one who had lived with his own dreams for nearly as long as he’d lived with his flesh and blood family, was not so sure.

C.J., though. C.J. was like nothing he had imagined. His looks were striking, and then they were seductive. The light green eyes in the dark-skinned face had made Anderson want to look, and look again, and keep on looking. Seeing that cream and chocolate colored skin every morning as C.J. had emerged from the shower had been… wonderful.

But even that might have only been Anderson’s imagination, if it hadn’t been for the touch, the warmth, the
smell
of him, every day, every night, as they’d shared quarters, shared interest, shared
lives
.

Anderson understood C.J.’s concerns in that same distant, untouched way that he understood that Cassie and Marshall weren’t holograms.

Of
course
there were other people to love out there. He’d seen that on board the ship. A guy didn’t just fall for the first person, no matter
how
available, in the same way he hadn’t fallen for Alex or Henry or Peter or… whatever that other guy’s name had been.

Anderson had looked. While C.J. had been watching Anderson’s life for the past ten years, Anderson had been trying, in fits and starts, to imagine what his life would be in the future. He’d smiled at men as he’d gone shopping, attempted to flirt with them, even accepted invitations for coffee at the nearest kiosk. He hadn’t told C.J. about this; these moments seemed… hallucinatory. The men had not seemed real. Their hands on his knee had seemed like electric currents and wind. His polite refusal to see them again or to visit their quarters felt as detached, as impersonal, as a decision not to watch a video he’d seen too often, or, more likely, had no interest in seeing at all.

But not C.J. Coming back to C.J.’s quarters had felt, every day, to be more and more like the shuttle, except better, because in a million years Anderson wouldn’t have put all of those eclectic, harmonizing, rich and lustrous colors together in the same place. C.J.
must
be real, or his home on board the station wouldn’t have felt like such a haven. C.J.’s smile, his big, goofy, don’t-take-anything-seriously smile, had put Anderson at ease on his first day at the station. By the third day, it had started butterflies in Anderson’s stomach. By the thirtieth, watching C.J. smile, knowing that smile was waiting for him in the morning when they woke up side by side or when his physical therapy was over, it became an obsession. A thing he must have.

It was another way Anderson knew he was real.

Watching that smile die in this past month had been another thing for which to hate Alpha. Anderson, who had spoken the math of emotions for the preceding ten years, had worked out the simple equation. If Anderson = C.J. smiling < Alpha = C.J.
not
smiling, then the only way to eliminate the bad half of the equation was to zero out Alpha.

It was really very, very simple.

Planetside, stationside, it didn’t matter. Anderson wanted C.J. He
needed
C.J. in order to feel real and not like a rapidly disintegrating program of data bits directing air currents and electricity into motion. Without C.J., Anderson was a series of ones and zeroes, polarized by magnetic interference, a blank screen. Alpha made C.J. unhappy. It was
Alpha
who had made C.J. not want Anderson for the past two months.
Alpha
who had made C.J. think that Anderson wasn’t well enough, wasn’t emotionally healthy enough, for a relationship to flourish.

Alpha had been created for Anderson in desperation. C.J. simply loved him. There really was no other option.

First, Anderson cleaned up that fine, fit, limp body, marveling that the sweat and the fluids and the detritus of sex remained even when the act was complete. This was something he hadn’t known. It wasn’t often mentioned in the romance books—although “clean up” was mentioned, exactly what was being cleaned was not.

It was more than just the fluids, though. Anderson didn’t feel worthy yet. He didn’t want C.J. to carry his mark, to wear his scent, or to be soiled with his touch—not yet. Not when Anderson was still clinging to the dirty part of his soul.

Anderson had some natural fiber knit pajama bottoms, and he slid those on without putting on any underwear. He thought about going shirtless—hell, he
thought
about going naked—but he hadn’t wandered around naked on his shuttle, and he wasn’t going to wander around naked here. Instead, he put on a knit shirt, one of C.J.’s that hadn’t been cleaned yet, so it
smelled
like him, sweaty and earnest and kind, and went padding down the taupe station corridors in the pleasant hum of the down shift, which was what the station residents called the quiet hours when only the maintenance crew was working. (The entire station, including the hub, pretended to have a three-shift day, in rough approximation to the planet below them. C.J. had explained that the routine and the rhythm made living on the station easier and less of an acclimation than keeping the things fully staffed constantly, and that made the crew more productive.)

So Anderson saw few people in the corridors, and those he did see seemed to think it was perfectly normal for a grown man—and he was now, wasn’t he? Grown? People certainly seemed to treat him as grown—to be padding down the corridor in his pajamas and bare feet. Maybe he needed a drink from one of the few open kiosks. Maybe a midnight snack? Maybe he had quick personal business with a friend who was on shift. It didn’t matter, Anderson thought smugly. What mattered was that no one paid him attention. He was normal. Perfectly normal.

There was a night crew in the bridge of his shuttle—he hadn’t anticipated that. But the lie to the two techs who were making sure the archival footage transfer for the day had been complete came smoothly.

“C.J. had a question for one of the holos,” he told them, reminding himself that the techs were real and might know a lie if they heard one. “I was up, so I thought I’d ask.”

They two women shrugged, and Anderson’s uneasy look was completely genuine. “Uhm, it’s sort of a private question?” he hedged, and he almost felt guilty at how readily the two women smiled sympathetically and nodded. Did he look as though he’d just had a night of debauchery? For the first time in his life, Anderson was in a position where other people did not expect to know about his sex life. It was disconcerting, at the very least—and a sudden, jarring confirmation that other people were real.

It didn’t matter. They were gone.

Cautiously, Kate, Bobby, Henry, and Risa advanced onto the bridge from the house. When they saw the night techs were gone, they surrounded him, talking, laughing, and hugging him excitedly.

Anderson hugged them back.

He’d been on the bridge before since they’d docked, many times, in fact. But this was the first time he went with the new consciousness of what was real and what was not.

He was semi-surprised to find that his friends were real.

“You smell like cinnamon,” he said to Kate, and she blushed to the roots of her hair, which was long enough now to put in a ponytail.

“We’ve been going through the archives and resources here at the station,” she said shyly, looking at Bobby, who grinned. “They have scents for rooms and people that they didn’t have at the mining colony. We’ve, uhm, been busy.”

Bobby waggled his eyebrows, and she giggled—hard, practical Kate actually
giggled
, and Anderson felt something in his chest loosen. They were real. They were growing, learning, improving upon what he’d given them. Within their context, they
were
real.

Good. Good. He knew he was crazy, but he wasn’t entirely crazy. He had created real people.

He had also created a monster.

“How’s Alpha?” he asked into the chatter, and there was sudden silence.

“Worse than ever,” Henry said, because he was the friend who would say the things no one wanted to hear. “He… well, none of the crew has seen, but then, I think C.J. and Cassie are the only ones who know how bad things were.” He shrugged. “He leaves us alone, but… they don’t know it, but he’s been watching over their shoulder when they’ve viewed the tapes.”

“Ick,” Risa said succinctly, and then looked sorry she’d spoken.

Anderson smiled softly at her, his lips quirked and crooked, and she quirked her lips back. He’d been surprised, at first, that the blunt-spoken, boisterous Henry had picked, of all the students in their class, the gentle, awkward Risa, but over the years, Anderson had come to love her. She didn’t speak much, but what she did say was often funny and to the point. Her self-consciousness was often, Anderson thought, because she was processing more than other people—she was filtering what she thought she should say from all of the data she
wanted
to spew.

In this case, “ick” was a singularly appropriate word.

“I’m sorry C.J. had to see that,” he told them, because they loved him and he could.

“It hurt….” Bobby’s eyes darted to Kate. “It hurt us all, but, Anderson, I don’t think C.J. is going to be the same. I mean… whatever you two are to each other, could you be careful with him? Could you, maybe… I know. Just don’t be too… just take things slow. He hurts.”

Anderson’s stomach congealed. C.J. was hurt. Anderson blamed Alpha. Anderson was going to have to take care of that.

“Guys,” he said hesitantly, “uh… I may have to go.”

There was a chorus of consternation, and Anderson felt it, a terrible ache of loss from the hole they would leave when he was gone from them.

“C.J. and I are going planetside for a while,” he said. “We’re….” Something broke in his chest, something that might never be repaired. It was like a guy-line in a spiderweb, and he felt the rest of the web tighten, adjust, grow weak with the bad tension, from that one break.

“We’re going,” he said again, wondering why it was so hard to breathe. “But… there’s something I’ve got to do first.” He turned and walked to the bridge console and called up two programs. The others looked over his shoulder and gasped.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Kate asked hesitantly. “I mean… Anderson….”

“The second one I like,” Bobby said, reaching for the button for the two keystrokes. Anderson smacked his hand away. “Man, let me do that, and ignore the first part, okay?”

Anderson shook his head. “He needs to know why.”

“He should
know
why!” Henry half laughed in shock. “He’s a fuckheaded asshole fucker….”

“You said ‘fuck’ twice, sweetheart,” Risa said shyly, and Henry grimaced.

“Okay, there is no word bad enough for him,” Henry muttered, and Risa nodded in agreement. She could see that.