A Solid Core of Alpha Read online

  Bobby and Kate ate breakfast with him and worked out and played Frisbee with him on the holodeck. It was Bobby who gave him the idea of expanding the holodeck, of cannibalizing parts of the seats—which all had the fiber optics and screen components—to make the deck longer, to make it wider, to make it more accommodating for a family of three. It was Kate who told him to take some of the seat covers and stitch them together into a large mattress and then use the seat parts to make a bed, so he might sleep there at night, and to program sleeping quarters for them so he could listen to other people breathing as he slept. It was his own idea to make sure the synthesizer was inside the holodeck—that way, he could stay in there and have his meals and generally create anything his little world needed to remain self-sustaining.

  He hardly ever needed to go outside the holodeck to see the big blackness beyond his little shuttle, because after his first two years, the holodeck was the shuttle.

  He incorporated the biosphere as part of a park program for him and his friends to play in, and programmed a house, with a sleeping room and a kitchen, and—this surprised him too!—a school.

  Five out of seven mornings, Kate woke them up by coming into their bedroom and singing some random song she fancied, then throwing their clean coveralls at them and telling them that if they didn’t wake up soon, she would program the food synthesizer for something really noxious, like sardines.

  “You always threaten that,” Bobby would groan. “Then we run in there, and it’s fresh fruit and pancakes.” Bobby liked pancakes. This was not a preference Anderson had given him, but he didn’t mind, so that was fine.

  The boys would dress rapidly, and then Kate would chivvy them about brushing their hair, washing their faces, brushing their teeth—big sister things, in general, before they started their day.

  On their rest days, the three of them would sit down and hash out a plan—would they play Frisbee golf at the park? Would they swim in the surf? Ski down a mountain? Would they watch a vid and eat popcorn or go to an amusement park? Amusement parks had been foreign to Anderson until he’d opened the shuttle files and done his research. He found that he and Bobby liked them very much, although Kate often complained that they made her stomach hurt and her neck ache, so they didn’t go every weekend.

  Whatever they chose, Anderson would go to the console in front of the bridge and bring up the program they wanted. They spent their free time imagining things they wanted to do based on the archives of books and movies they accessed and created new environments, new diversions, or entire new worlds.

  During the other five days of the week, they went to school. There were students there—faceless at first, like the workout drones that the holodeck was supposed to have, but Anderson and Bobby got creative, and watched more vids together, and read books, and soon, all of the material that he’d read and digested on his own in his first two years was being discussed by a teacher who looked a lot like the young action star in one of his favorite vids.

  Kate didn’t go to school with them. She attended a class with slightly older students, and every now and then, as Anderson and Bobby were chafing in the class that they’d created, they would see Kate, sitting under a tree and reading a book or riding a hoverboard over one of the meandering walks that made up the campus that she’d helped program, and they’d wave.

  In the months approaching Anderson’s sixteenth birthday—Bobby was a few months older than he was, but not many—Bobby would frequently blush when they waved at Kate. Anderson had a hard time figuring out why.

  Anderson didn’t raise his hand often in school. He liked to watch the other kids do that, and watch the teacher, Mr. Kay, answer questions instead. Mr. Kay had dark hair and green eyes and grooves around his cheeks when he spoke. He was animated and had the sense of humor from Anderson’s favorite comedy vid of all time, and he was kind—so kind, just like Anderson’s father, but much younger, and very, very attractive—and he made all of that dry information that Anderson had read fun and relevant, and he was so very good at applying all of the technical sciences into ways a person could program a holodeck that nobody had ever thought of.

  Anderson liked him immensely.

  One day—because Anderson had programmed the holodeck to have the same twenty-four hour night and day cycle that had been present on the artificially spun colony—Anderson was staying late after class. Bobby had already left, since he and Kate were scheduled to fix dinner that night, even if Anderson was the only one eating real food, and Anderson was trying to access some files he’d discovered in the shuttle’s education program that had been mysteriously locked.

  “Whatcha up to, Anderson?” Mr. Kay smiled, and those grooves popped out on his cheeks, and Anderson blinked hard, like he’d programmed the park program with a sun that was too bright and it was bothering his eyes.

  “Why are there locked files, Mr. Kay?” Anderson asked. They were alone. There weren’t any other students there, not even the troublesome ones. Maybe Mr. Kay would trust him enough to tell him.

  The teacher grinned a little and rolled his eyes. “Those are the health and hygiene files, Anderson. You’ll gain access to those when you turn sixteen.”

  Anderson gnawed on his lip. He’d been hoping for some sort of science file or star chart that might help him cut his stay in hyperspace a little shorter—but still. Health and hygiene? Why would that be age-classified information? “How will the shuttle know I’m sixteen?”

  “It scanned your ID when you came aboard. If someone over sixteen wanted to access those files, then I could help instruct you on them, but otherwise….” Mr. Kay shrugged, and Anderson gnawed his lip.

  “Can Kate access them?” he asked, still hoping that maybe the star data had been misfiled. He was absolutely mortified by the look Mr. Kay sent him.

  “No, Anderson. And I can’t access them until you can. Do you need to make me say why?”

  Anderson bit his lip and shook his head. No. No—it had been a while, months, probably, since one of his friends or Mr. Kay had needed to remind him that they weren’t real. He’d stopped thinking about them as programs or holograms. He’d simply begun living his life with certain proscribed rules in order to interact with the people he loved. It was like… like having to put on a wet suit if he ever wanted to be friends with someone from Hydra-Six. Just a requirement, that was all.

  Mr. Kay had smiled kindly then and put his hand on Anderson’s shoulder and given it a squeeze. It was a simple interaction of electrical and air currents, that was all—it was how all touch on the holodeck worked.

  It should not have caused such a startling physical reaction in Anderson, that was for darned sure.

  His stomach tingled, and then his groin began to ache and swell, even as his face flushed. He kept his eyes and his unhappy smile on Mr. Kay’s face and tried very hard not to look to see if his penis was as tight against his shuttle-issue coveralls as it felt.

  Mr. Kay wasn’t fooled for an instant. “Is anything wrong, Anderson? You look very uncomfortable.”

  Anderson swallowed and shook his head. “No, sir. I think I should probably go out and exercise. My biorhythms are probably just out of whack because I’ve been working on this.”

  Mr. Kay smiled kindly and squeezed his shoulder again—Anderson ignored the vicious throb in his penis when this happened—and told him to go play.

  Anderson did.

  The holodeck was planned to segue seamlessly—when Anderson walked out of the classroom, he walked onto the campus, which was designed much as the one on the colony had been. He had made plans, and there were probably unexplored nooks and crannies on the campus that he hadn’t seen yet, but he didn’t go to any of them. Instead, he walked across the campus to the dorm that he and Kate and Bobby occupied. There were probably rules about boys and girls in the same dorm, but by the time it had occurred to him that this living situation wouldn’t happen in real life, he’d already decided subconsciously that if it was his choice, it really was going to be h
is choice.

  He was thinking of simply leaving his stylus and electronic school pad in his desk and dressing for a run, but when he went to take off his coveralls, there it was.

  His penis.

  It was large and engorged, thick and sensitive, and, well, Bobby and Kate weren’t there, so why not?

  Standing in front of his bed, he started to investigate it.

  It was still semi-erect, and the head was starting to poke out of the little cowl formed by his foreskin. Gingerly, he pulled back his foreskin to find that the pink flesh underneath was especially tender, which he knew from cleaning it, but now in its erect state, the touch around that tenderness caused the engorgement to increase. He continued his two-finger exploration and found that the ridge of the large-sized, off-center, mushroom-shaped head was particularly sensitive when the foreskin was back. There was a place that felt like a stretched string on the underside, and when he tickled that, his entire body quivered, and he had to sit down. He put his thumb and fingers on either side of it then and began to play with the stiffness, stroking his foreskin up to cover the sensitive head and clenching tightly down because the counterpressure seemed to ease the ache at the bottom. That felt so good he shuddered, spread his thighs on his bed, and did it again.

  This time he whimpered and then wrapped his fist around it and did it again.

  He was surprised when a little bit of fluid spurted out the end, but it felt good when he used his thumb to play with the hot wet as it spread over the head of his penis. There was a building sensation then, down underneath his testicles, and they seemed to tighten, to draw up to the underside of his body. He brought his other hand down to cup them, to squeeze, and something amazing was happening, something truly fantastic that threatened to stop his heart and open his world, and he was reaching, and reaching, and reaching—

  When Bobby, who was programmed, with Kate, to simply come and go randomly like real people opened the door to their bedroom and caught him.

  Anderson’s penis gave an abortive little twitch in his hand and then went limp as all of Anderson’s blood rushed to his face.

  He looked at Bobby, and for a moment, he knew his face held… longing.

  He would have liked for Bobby to come help him with what he was doing. His testicles needed massaging, and his nipples tingled, and he couldn’t touch all these places at once, and… and it would just feel so much better if someone was there to help him.

  But Bobby simply gaped at him, opening and closing his mouth and then, unbelievably, blushing. He cleared his throat then and said, “I can step out of the room until you finish….” And he left the sentence hanging.

  Anderson yanked his shorts and coveralls up to his waist and shook his head. “I’m finished,” he said gruffly, keeping his head turned away. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

  “No.” Bobby’s voice was thoughtful, which meant he was probably accessing the files on etiquette that Anderson had made available to the programs on the deck. Anderson had actually made all of the programs available on the deck. Whatever he knew, his holos knew, but they got to choose how to use it, according to their programming, and they could reliably remember it. “I mean,” Bobby said slowly, “I am embarrassed, but mostly because….” Bobby stopped then and assessed Anderson thoroughly. “You would like me to participate. I don’t think you programmed me that way.”

  Anderson stopped dressing and swallowed hard. “I would like you to participate,” he said roughly.

  “Would you like me to get Kate? She might find this in her programming.”

  Whatever had been left of Anderson’s erection shriveled completely, leaving only a damp spot in his shorts.

  “No,” he said, so full of realization that he couldn’t put a voice to it, even to Bobby, who had always accepted him perfectly as he was. “I don’t think Kate… Kate doesn’t… she’s not the person I want to participate.”

  Bobby? Yes. He would have liked that. Bren? His heart gave a slow, agonizing thud. Yes. His charm with Bren had probably been leading up to a moment just like this.

  There was no stigma attached to his choice, not on his mining colony. It was just… just that Bobby didn’t want him. Not that way. And for a moment, he felt incredibly lonely.

  But Bobby had been his friend for… well, he’d come online nearly two Earth years before, and as Anderson’s friend, Bobby smiled encouragingly. “I’ll talk to Kate. She’ll have an idea of what to do.”

  Anderson knew he turned a dull red. “Do we have to talk to Kate? I don’t think I want Kate to know what I was just doing.” He couldn’t help but think of Melody and how he would not have wanted his older sister to know about anything that he was doing to his penis.

  Bobby continued to look thoughtful. “Kate will probably react as I did,” he said reassuringly. “And she may have some ideas for your—” process, process “—dilemma. I really think sharing information would be a good idea, don’t you?”

  Anderson gave a little groan and buried his face in his hands. “Yeah. Yeah, Bobby. That’s fine. Just don’t do it while I’m there, okay?”

  Bobby smiled a little. “I think that could be arranged.”

  Anderson had a sudden thought about Mr. Kay and the touch that had started this entire conversation. “And, could you, I don’t know. Maybe keep this secret from everybody else?”

  Bobby simply nodded in complete acceptance, and Anderson had a moment to think that maybe privacy was not a concept that would be programmed into a holodeck program. It didn’t matter. Privacy had suddenly become important to Anderson, and Bobby and Kate took their cues from him.

  It was a satisfactory arrangement, because Anderson didn’t hear another word about a friend to help him massage his penis for a couple of months. That didn’t mean that he didn’t continue to explore this new development, but he had asked his roommates, and they had all agreed to a newly instated house rule about knocking before entering the sleeping quarters.

  The fact that his roommates were both programmed to forget or ignore this rule within a standard deviation of the number of times Anderson himself forgot or ignored this rule kept Anderson very conscientious about knocking. It didn’t matter that he was highly doubtful he would encounter either Bobby or Kate in such a compromising position. What mattered was that he now understood that privacy was a two-way street.

  IN ALL likelihood, Anderson would have eventually discovered the ins and outs of the magic in his penis—he certainly explored it an awful lot in the privacy of his holodeck quarters. He learned that if he continued what he’d been doing—simply lying on his back and stroking it until the wonderful, terrible pressure built up in his testicles, his spine, and his clenching buttocks—he would experience the most wonderful explosion, a climax of sorts. It was messy and sweaty, and embarrassing afterward, even if he was alone, but very often, the quest for privacy, the mess and the sweat, and even the embarrassment, were all worth it.

  He still wished for more knowledge—and for help. For, as Bobby called it, “participation.”

  He wasn’t stupid—he knew what “participation” meant. Melody had been thinking very seriously about taking a lover before… before. Anderson had liked the young man—liked him well enough to not dump worms on the two of them when he’d caught them kissing under a tree and he’d had a bucket of worms handy… well, because a twelve-year-old-boy never knew when a bucket of worms might come in handy when he knew his sister wanted privacy in the colony orchard.

  (He still could not bring himself to think about what a wretched child he had been. The knowledge that he’d almost dumped those worms on Mel was not as painful as the thought of the things he’d more than almost done, like, say, left a couple of them in Jen’s bed and given Mandy one to eat. He wasn’t that kind of boy. He wasn’t. He couldn’t be. If he was that kind of boy, then his sisters might not have known… they may have thought that he was mean and evil and that he wanted to leave them behind. Dammit, Melody! I could have come with you!)r />
  So he hadn’t dumped the worms, and Mikey had been allowed a kiss in the orchard, and Anderson remembered that he knew. He knew what a lover was. A lover was a kiss under a tree. A yearning. The way Melody’s cheeks had turned red when Mikey touched her hand, her arm, the side of her breast.

  A lover was what he’d wanted from Bobby but what Bobby had not been programmed to do.

  So eventually he may have figured out what he wanted from the holodeck that the holodeck didn’t know how to provide, but one morning, shortly after the privacy protocols had been instituted, Bobby and Kate woke him up excitedly, both of them talking so quickly they babbled over each other’s words.

  “Anderson! You’ll never guess—”

  “I was accessing the homework tablet—”

  “Bobby suddenly saw all of this data!”

  “And Kate took a look at it, and it’s those files—”

  “The ones that Mr. Kay said were locked—”

  “Today is your birthday, Anderson!” Suddenly Bobby stopped and looked embarrassed. “Happy Birthday, Anderson. We will, of course, have cake after dinner.”

  Kate rolled her eyes and smacked Bobby on the back of the head. “Actually, genius, I’m taking care of the dinner and the cake. Remember the last time you tried to program a food synthesizer? We ended up with hamburger that tasted like metal bolts but chewed like meat?”

  Bobby turned a dull red. “That was years ago, Katy. I’ve grown up a little since then!”

  “Taller,” Kate growled, because it was true.

  Bobby shook his head and muttered, “More than taller,” to Anderson, and Anderson had to laugh, because it was true. Both of them had matured quite a bit in the last two and a half years, even though getting Kate to admit that was like getting her to program the food synthesizer for bug soufflé.

  It didn’t matter. That bit of normalcy was enough to calm the little family down, and Anderson rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and pulled a T-shirt on over his head. He’d been sleeping in his underwear lately, a thing that neither of his two roommates had remarked upon and that he had done as a kid, living at home with his parents. There was no one there to offend by being out of dress, and he was between sizes in the regulation jumpsuits anyway. It was just as easy to wear the oversized ones, but he didn’t want to sleep in one!