A Solid Core of Alpha (7 page)

And that, Anderson thought now, as Bobby and Kate clung to him and whispered words of love and healing, was what had happened to him and Alpha. It was the reason why, when they arrived at the dorms under a passable facsimile of a fading twilight, he disentangled himself from happy Bobby and maternal Kate and strode to his own quarters, well aware that this night could be the night on which Alpha snapped, forgot what was real, and finally killed the man he claimed to love.

 

 

T
HINGS
had been good when Aaron “Alpha” first showed up in Mr. Kay’s classroom. Bobby and Kate had both done their “research” into the romance novels and the vids and all of the wonders opened up by the health and hygiene files that had so intrigued and titillated them in those first giddy days after Anderson’s sixteenth birthday.

Aaron seemed to have studied the playbook, and Anderson, so very, very lonely by that time, was happy enough to run the game to the exact mark on the field.

Alpha had started out simply talking, both to Anderson and Bobby. He’d cracked jokes, praised their work (which didn’t do anything for either of them initially, since they sort of felt like they were cheating—after all, they’d accessed all the material that went into the curriculum anyway), and sat down and ate lunch with them.

His first pass had been a touch on the back of Anderson’s hand, a very deliberate brush with his thumb. Anderson had walked home with Bobby that day practically ebullient, translucent with anticipation, with arousal.

Their first kiss had been at sunset, and Alpha had touched his face, softly, and then framed it in his long, confident hands before pulling him in and ever so gently brushing their lips together. Anderson had opened his mouth, allowed Alpha in, and the kiss had gone on until the last light of the sun had turned to darkness.

Making love had been tender, exploratory, filled with laughter and excitement. Alpha’s skin was flawless, and his high-cheekboned, patrician features were intense when he touched Anderson with his smooth, dry hands. There had been a moment, more than one, actually, when Anderson had thought,
His skin is too perfect. His kisses are just right. He’s exactly what I want. He’s not real.
He’d kept those thoughts very carefully hidden, deep in the center, surrounded by his flesh, and continued the dance of seduction and surrender until the end.

And in the end, he’d been so grateful, so goddamned grateful, that it had been another touch to bring him to completion, and not his own hand, that he had been content.

That contentment had lasted for a year, maybe more.

In that year, though, a number of developments came to light.

The first was the fuel consumption. They were consuming too much. It should have been a simple matter of physics—Anderson’s lone body instead of the thirty bodies that were expected to be there. But Anderson had amplified the power use of nearly every fiber optic and electronic device on the ship when he’d converted the entire shuttle into a flying holodeck. If the ship was going to stay in space long enough to get them all to another space station, they needed to cut power to programs they didn’t need.

That was the year that Bobby, Anderson, Henry, and Risa graduated from school, and that Alpha lost his job as a teacher’s aide.

Anderson and Alpha had been lovers by then, and Alpha had been the one who’d insisted that the school program took too much fuel. Anderson had retorted that if they were going to close down the school, they would have to cancel the programs for Mr. Kay and the other students who had kept Anderson and Bobby company for nearly four years, in effect, killing people he had created.

Alpha had insisted, without mercy and without remorse.

Anderson had refused at the beginning, and the argument had escalated.

“I can’t! Don’t you see, Aaron, they’re my friends!”

“They’re programs! We’re talking about our survival here, Anderson!”

“They’re more than programs! Dammit, don’t you understand? They think and feel and talk. They’re more than just data I put into the ship by now. They’re real!”

Aaron’s crack across Anderson’s cheek slammed Anderson against the wall of his quarters, and he was still seeing spots when Aaron held Anderson’s face roughly in his hands. “Did that feel real?” he growled, and Anderson was so shocked that all he could do was nod and feel helpless.

“Then I’m the one you have to worry about. Now you cancel the programs you need to cancel in order to get this piece of crap to safety, do you hear?”

Anderson didn’t mention the first bruise, and after a moment of supreme unhappiness, neither did Kate or Bobby. They’d been trying to get him to cancel the school program for a week, and they were just so grateful to hear his final decision that they’d been eager to work on it with a clear heart. The work had taken all six of them—Henry, Risa, Bobby, Kate, Anderson, and Alpha, over a month, because they’d been cataloguing and documenting all of the collected data and personal archives, and that was when the second development had been discovered.

All of the holodeck interactions had been recorded, and there was no way to eliminate this function. It would, quite simply, render the entire holodeck inoperative. The problem was that the shuttle only had so much computer memory, and the holodeck archives would consume most of the computer memory, including the entertainment and personnel archives, long before the fuel ran out.

Those archives were the story of Anderson’s mining colony. Of his family. Of the books, songs, poetry, hell, even the vids—drama, comedy, musical, romance—and, ohmigod, the all-important health and hygiene files,
all of it
, the collective history, intelligence, and personality of the place Anderson had come from.

And he was going to have to just flush it away in order to keep the holodeck running?

Bobby was the one who had come up with a solution, a way of keeping those things by exposing them to the holodeck archives themselves. A picture in the holodeck used up so much less space than the RAM in the ship’s archives, and playing the songs and all of the videos while they were sleeping didn’t impinge on anyone’s consciousness at all.

At first, Kate had worried about the noise keeping them up, and that was when Alpha had discovered the thing that caused the second fight.

“We’re all programmed to sleep through the night?”

Anderson had been surprised. “Yeah, I’d almost forgotten about that.” Things between them had mended in the past month, as they’d spent their energies fixing one problem and their creativity fixing another. Alpha was always happier when he had something to do, something purposeful. When he was happier, he was the young man from Anderson’s dreams again, and things were peaceful in their small community. (Even their home had been made smaller by the elimination of the school. Their entire house, which had been a good-sized dorm complex, now consisted of three bedrooms and a common room, and Alpha had been subtly campaigning to put the other two couples into one room. Anderson had coldly vetoed that one. He didn’t want his privacy violated any more than he imagined anyone else did, but that didn’t stop Alpha from keeping up the argument.)

“Forgotten it? Why did you do it?”

Anderson flushed then. This was a secret thing. This was a thing he’d told no one, not even Bobby. Especially not Alpha.

“I was afraid the random behavior algorithms would disrupt my own sleep patterns,” he said calmly. He was called upon to prevaricate so very rarely that he wasn’t sure if he could do it right. Alpha seemed to be mollified, though, so he let the matter drop. Anderson walked out of their room then, and into Bobby’s, and simply put his finger over his lips for a moment while he leaned against Bobby’s wall and trembled. That had been a near thing. A terrible thing.

Bobby looked at him hard for a moment, but Anderson shook his head. Neither of them mentioned the moment again, and Alpha never asked, especially when the math revealed that a significant amount of energy was saved by keeping everybody asleep unless they were needed at the bridge.

Neither Anderson nor Bobby mentioned the fact that Anderson was now afraid of his lover to the point that he’d rather run away than risk Alpha’s anger. Neither of them mentioned the fact that they were both sure the disagreement would have come to blows. They were an isolated few people on a small ship, alone in the vastness of space. Some things simply had to be endured.
For the next four and a half years, that’s exactly what they did.

Endure they did. Even as Kate sent out the all-important hail to the space station, the six of them were still engaged in the painstaking task of calling up data on their tablets and then showing it to the holo-recorders plainly before deleting it. Every deletion felt like a betrayal. Every betrayal made Anderson hate himself a little bit more and made Alpha a little bit angrier.

The first month after they started the deletion found two more bruises marking Anderson’s face.

They hadn’t even had to ration the organic matter that the synthesizer used yet. The day Anderson had started throwing paper-based colony manifests into the synthesizer in order to make food, Alpha had split his lip in an argument about whether keeping the name of every last man, woman, and child on the colony was a sacred trust.

Anderson’s lip and nose had been pouring blood, and still, he’d insisted that it was. Alpha knocked his head against the wall and then stalked out, but Anderson remained convinced that one was a win.

When they reached the point of deleting their least favorite videos (but the ones Anderson was sure his mother would have liked) Alpha was greeting Anderson at the door by throwing him on the bed, yanking his pants down, and taking him forcefully, sometimes painfully, and never by asking for his consent.

About the time they reached the archives for the colonists themselves, Alpha’s hands made their first circle around Anderson’s throat during sex. That had been nearly a year before they found the space station at the Hermes-Eight system.

And now, after a day of celebration and a joyful use of the much-hoarded energy reserves, Anderson was afraid to walk into his sleep quarters with the man who had been built to love him.

But the fear had never stopped him before.

He walked into their small house—they’d put it close to the biosphere in the holo-design, so it had been like they’d grown up and taken jobs, instead of like they’d been forced into a smaller bubble of reality—and then into his and Alpha’s room.

The room itself was… it was pretty. He kept a picture of his family there on his old school tablet, in spite of Alpha’s protests, and looked at them every day and said their names. His mother, Caitlin, with the fine blonde hair and brown eyes and a smile that seemed to stretch her narrow face. His father, James, who had Anderson’s fair hair, brown eyes, and a slyer, more grave smile, but a fond look as he gazed at his children.

The tablet held more than just the picture, but the picture itself was special. It had been taken the day Anderson had turned twelve. He was smiling in real, honest-to-God sunshine, and Melody was trying to shove cake down his face. Baby Mandy had two fists full of cake and frosting and was coming to plaster it on Anderson’s pants, and Jen was stomping her foot and yelling at everyone to act their age. Their parents were laughing at their antics. A family friend had taken the picture, and when Anderson had found it in the archives, he had sacrificed a day’s worth of power for the food synthesizer to call it up in the highest number of pixels. There was grass beneath their feet, and the sun on their faces, and glee and joy and love….

None of them had known how wonderful that moment had been, but Anderson knew now.

He’d painted the walls of this room gold, like sunshine, and made the carpet a deep green. There was a big window next to the same bed he’d made out of cannibalized ship parts, because nothing went to waste, and the window looked out on the biosphere park, so the view was pretty. There was sun during the day, of course, and grass, just like the colors in the room. Anderson wondered if he was getting the colors right—would he even remember real sun and grass anymore if he saw them? The cover on the queen-sized cot was real, taken from the stores, so it was a grim, all-purpose gray. He folded the cover at the bottom of the black-vinyl-covered cot and focused on the pictures on the walls instead.

He had a few pictures left—some more of his family, one of Bren that he’d found in the archives as well, and a picture of all of them, Anderson, Kate, Bobby, Henry, Risa, and Alpha that had been taken at the beginning, when they were all playing at love and the health and hygiene files had been the best game ever invented.

Alpha was sitting in a chair by their small workstation table, studying figures from a tablet, as Anderson walked in, and a folk-singer from his colony that Anderson had particularly adored began to sing over the intercom for the nightly recording session.

“You spent energy making a hail out into space today,” Alpha remarked without looking up. “And you’re late. Care to explain?”

Anderson swallowed. “We made it, Alpha,” he said hesitantly. “We made it. There’s a space station three days out. Real people. Energy stores. A planet below it, with Terran level gravity. A home.”

Alpha’s eyes—a cold gray, ever since that first black eye—glanced up once and then looked down. “You’re deluding yourself. This is home. False hope will kill you, Anderson. We’ve discussed this.”

Anderson swallowed. This was true, too, and as with so many other things, Anderson knew Alpha was right. But, as with so many other things, he knew that he was right too. “The sensors show it, plain as day. And it’s in the shuttle’s records and star charts, three different mentions. This is where the shuttle was programmed to go ten years ago, Alpha. This is it. We’ve reached our destination.”

Alpha nodded. He’d cropped his fashionably blown hair shortly after that first black eye, and it was now military short. Anderson had always wondered at the psychological implications of that, but he hadn’t wanted to ask. “Well then,” he said briskly, “what are you waiting for? Go cancel the holo-program.”

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