A Solid Core of Alpha (12 page)

“That is a bird that is native to Hermes-Eight-Gamma. The original colonists had zero imagination, so they just called him a gamma bird, but I call him Chips.” C.J. walked up to the cage and pulled out a cracker he’d pocketed just for this reason. “Right, Chips? Did you miss me?”

“
C.J. stop fucking around!
” Chips squawked, and C.J.’s eyes narrowed.

“Can we say, ‘Cassie shut your trap’, Chips? Can we? Let’s practice that now, so you can say it when I catch up on my leave. ‘Cassie shut your trap’, okay?” He fed the squat little gamma bird pieces of cracker through the cage bars, careful of the bird’s thick, curved beak. Chips had been molting two weeks ago, but that all seemed to be done with, and his long, curling feathers in all shades of purple were growing back in nicely.

“
C.J. stop fucking around!
” Chips squawked again, and C.J. sighed.

“Man, I don’t know what I’m going to do to get her back for that, but it’s going to be something dire. Bitch. I hope she gets hives!”

“Stop it!” Anderson snapped, and C.J. turned to him in surprise.

“Hey, man, I didn’t mean it. Cassie and I go back and forth—older sisters, you know!”

“Stop being mean,” Anderson insisted. “Don’t say mean things. Don’t say them, not to your family. Don’t ever say them, because they’re there, in your head, forever. Don’t say them!” His shoulders hunched as his face crumpled, and his chin was tight in that way that C.J. realized indicated a true level of emotional upset.

C.J. dropped the last of the cracker in the bird’s cage and held up his hands. “Okay, I swear. I won’t say mean things about my….” He paused to edit all epithets like meddling, pompous, irritating, bitchy, and moody. “Beloved older sister. I promise. No being mean. I swear.”

Anderson nodded his head like he could live with that, and then his entire body was overtaken by a single, jaw-cracking yawn.

C.J. said, “Wait here!” Then he disappeared into his room and came back with some yellow sleep shorts and a green T-shirt, all in soft cotton and not the scratchy synth of the coveralls. “Here, go ahead and change, and I’ll show you how to call up the vids. Once I get you settled, I’ve got to go help Cass, but you can watch any vid you want and then fall asleep whenever.”

Anderson nodded and then gestured shyly to the room. “Can I go in there to change?”

C.J. blinked. It was… it was such a maiden girl thing to do—certainly not the reaction of a young man who’d been living in space for ten years. Those sorts of inhibitions tended to die quickly when you were thrust into a small space with a lot of people. But then, C.J. had to concede in the same thought, holo-figures could disappear into their own rooms at will, couldn’t they?

“Knock yourself out,” he said lightly. “I’m going to set up the vids.”

While Anderson was in the other room, C.J. gave Cassie a quick call to verify that the damned monitor feeds were in both rooms and then turned on the vid screen that took up much of the wall between the living room and the bedroom.

Anderson came in and lit up appreciatively. “It’s so big.” He blinked his eyes. “I guess I could have made mine that big. God, I’m so stupid. I spent ten years watching vids from my school tablet propped up on a table. Jesus, no wonder Alpha—” He stopped talking abruptly.

“It’s probably just as well,” C.J. said smoothly, pretending the mysterious Alpha had never been mentioned. “You were running pretty low on fuel when you got here. And man, no one’s said anything about it, because we didn’t want to make you self-conscious, but we’re all pretty damned impressed, you know? You got here, and you’re not stark raving bugshit. Anderson, that is one hell of an accomplishment, you’ve got to know that!”

Anderson gave him an inscrutable look. “It’s nice that you think so,” he said faintly. He seemed to fall into the couch then, boneless, like a cat exhausted by the weight of its fur and the world at large. “I think the gravity is higher here on the station,” he said in explanation, and C.J. nodded.

“Yeah, we try to keep it as close to Hermes-Eight-Prime as we possibly can. I think your little shuttle probably had a much lower setting. We’ll have to check it, and then we can get you a workout regimen to help acclimate you. You’re going to be conking out for a while, there’s no two ways about it.”

Anderson looked at him unhappily. “Are you sure I can’t go back to my shuttle?” He crossed his arms in front of him, and the T-shirt wrapped around his body, pulling low at the neck. The bruises that had so affected Cassie were there, faded now with the ultrasonic mending Cassie had given him, but still very distinct fingerprints wrapping around the soft flesh of Anderson’s throat.

“Yeah,” C.J. said, pretending like his own jaw wasn’t tight and he wasn’t feeling the urge to just cuddle the guy like a teddy bear and not a tough, surviving adult. “I think you managed to stay alive and sane for ten years. We need to make sure there’s nothing left in there that can hurt you.”

Anderson nodded, and C.J. moved forward and pressed the remote control for the vid screen into his hand. “There’s games under this file, and comedy vids here. My favorite,” he said as he flipped through a couple of titles, “is this one,
Privateer’s Dream
. You’ll like it.”

“Is there kissing?” Anderson asked, his voice sleepy even as C.J. neared the door.

“Only a little, at the end. A girl and a boy.”

“Good,” Anderson murmured. “I like it when it ends happy.”

“It doesn’t have to be a girl and a boy to end happy,” C.J. objected, and Anderson turned a half-lidded, dreamy smile toward him.

“I know,” he said. “I like two boys or two girls at the end too. As long as it ends with a kiss.”

C.J. grinned at him, but Anderson had already pushed play, and C.J. watched as he rested his arm on the arm of the couch and then rested his cheek on his arm. He’d be out in a couple of minutes, C.J. hoped as he hit the vacuum close of the door, and nothing could hurt him again.

Chapter 7

Pain of Re-entry

C
ASSIE
and Marshall were already there, starting on the retrieval of ship’s memory. They looked up when C.J. clattered up the shuttle ramp and then looked warningly at the four people who were milling restlessly behind the bridge, watching as they fiddled with the dials.

“You’re sure he’s okay?” asked one of the women.

C.J. looked at her critically. She had a face that was all flat planes and sharp angles and a little furrow between her dark eyebrows. Her hair was cut in one of those styles that looked best when the girl had just gotten out of bed, and she was wearing….

C.J. blinked, even as Cassie answered the woman carefully. She was wearing a pair of the coveralls that Anderson had been wearing as he walked off the shuttle.

“Kate, I promise you, we fed him and gave him some sleeping clothes, and he’s probably on my brother’s couch, watching movies right now.”

Kate looked up as C.J. crossed the threshold. “Was it a comedy vid?” she asked with a faint smile, and C.J. nodded, looking at Cassie with wide eyes.

“It was my favorite,” he said, glaring when Cassie ignored him completely. “Actually,
Cassidy
, if you want Kate here to calm down, why don’t you call up the feed on the monitor. That way, the hol—uh, Anderson’s friends won’t worry while he’s sleeping.”

“We’re holograms,” Kate snapped. “Don’t worry. We’re aware. But you’re pumping energy through our matrix, and now we’re all restless with nowhere to go.”

C.J. blinked and looked around. The bridge mashed up against the front door of what looked like the bottom half of a two-story yellow house. “Uh, why don’t you go home?” he asked, looking at the cheerful white door.

“Because we want to make sure he’s okay!” said the brown-haired young man next to Kate. He had a dimple and a wide, friendly smile and cherry-apple cheeks. “Look, we’re computer programs. We get it. But could you just….” Bobby paused and looked at the small screen that Cassidy had just pulled up. “Oh. There he is. Thank you.”

“No problem,” C.J. said politely. “Right, Cass.”

Cassidy grimaced and practically growled at him from the side of her mouth. “Absolutely, C.J. You’re welcome, Bobby.”

Bobby looked at the back of Cassidy’s head as she worked the controls of the shuttle’s memory banks, and he raised his eyebrows. “She’s a little uptight, isn’t she?” he asked, and Marshall retorted, “She’s also my wife!” with a hint of exasperation.

C.J. winked at him, and Bobby grinned brightly and then sobered. “Well, she’s being rude to
my
wife, and I’d appreciate it if she could at least answer our questions. You don’t spend eight and a half years with someone without wondering where the hell they are when they’re gone!”

Marshall nodded, looking a little surprised, and said, “Cassie, I know you don’t want to admit it, but….”

Cassie dropped her forehead into her hand. “Yeah, yeah. But if you tell anyone about this, I’m never going to forgive either of you.” She sighed and turned around. “Kate, I’m sorry I was rude. I know
you’re
used to interfacing with Anderson in a very different way, but I didn’t really expect company when I sat down to this routine task.”

“She’s still trying to keep us at a distance,” said one of the other holograms. This one had a broad face, a square jaw, and blue eyes. And glasses.

“How do you know?” whispered the tiny, pale blonde girl next to him. C.J. had hardly noticed her when he walked in. She was so small that her coveralls had needed to be extra stitched, and they bunched awkwardly around her waist and at her cuffs. C.J. had no sooner had that thought than the entire scenario of holograms staying up late nights to size their holographic clothing based on real clothing sizes laid itself out before him, and he looked at Anderson’s “people” with dawning awe.

“She used the word ‘interface’,” said the young man next to the blonde girl. “If she’d said ‘talk’, she would have been thinking of us as human.”

Cassie grimaced. “Look, guys, I hate to break this to you—”

“We know!” Kate said, standing in front of the little blonde girl and her… husband? They were holding hands. “Look, we know what we are to
you
, okay? What you don’t seem to realize is what we have been to
Anderson
.” Kate gestured to the screen, where Anderson stretched out on C.J.’s couch with his head on his arm, his eyes closed as the colors of the vid flashed across his face. Very faintly, they could hear the sound of the movie he was watching.

“You see that? That’s the first time he’s closed his eyes somewhere
not
on this ship in ten years, eight months, six days, and….” She paused, like she was doing math. “Eight and a half hours.”

“Wait,” C.J. said, holding up his hands. “You just said you’ve only known him for eight and a half years!”

“He was twelve when he was thrown on the ship,” Bobby snapped protectively. “What, did you think he just jumped into the ship and learned advanced holo-science in the first day?”

C.J. pinched the bridge of his nose. “He spent two years in the ship alone, learning holo-science so he could program you?”

Next to him, he could hear Cassie swear. “Oh, Jesus. Poor Anderson. What was he like when you came online?”

Bobby looked at Kate. “I don’t know. Kate was the first one of us online. By the time I came along, he was a very young version of who you saw get off the ship.” Bobby’s voice sank a little, and Kate grabbed his hand and kissed it. “He smiled more. He laughed a lot. He liked creating amusement parks on the holodeck.”

C.J. relaxed a little. “That boy is still there,” he said, thinking about the search for fruit and the perfect comedy vid. “Kate, do you have any idea why you were first?”

Kate shook her head. “I know….” She frowned. “It’s probably in holodeck records, but I had a prototype. He canceled her—”

“He did what?” Bobby asked, surprised.

“Yeah, I know,” Kate said, still thinking. “He canceled her.”

“Why is that strange?” Cassie asked, but C.J., watching the little family look at each other, read each other’s cues, simply interact like true people, began to have an inkling.

“He didn’t like cancelling programs, or changing us, either,” the young man with the glasses said. “Uh, I’m Henry, and you would be…?” He extended his hand meaningfully, and C.J. smiled, getting the hint.

“I’m C.J.,” he said, extending his hand. “And if they haven’t introduced themselves as humans, this is Cassie—”

“We’ve met her,” Kate said dryly. “She was a lot nicer when we were piloting the big scary shuttle.”

Cassie grimaced. “I’m sorry,” she said, sounding sincere. “I… I’m trained to work with people and to think of holograms as simply extensions of their programmers. I’ve…
we’ve
never had holograms that moved independently of their programming.”

“Well, we’re programmed to move independently,” whispered the tiny blonde girl resentfully, and Henry looked at her fondly and took her hand to his lips.

“Yes, we are, sweetheart,” he said softly. He looked at all of them. “This is Risa. She’s my wife.”

C.J. blinked. “Man, we’re going to have to get Julio in here to talk to you,” he said, almost overwhelmed by the number of improvements Anderson had made on what they knew as the basic hologram program. Holograms were good sparring partners, opponents in chess or video games, or even role-playing games, as long as their settings were on low-impact. They were not, as a rule, conversationalists or friends or… family.

“Wait,” Marshall was saying. “Why wouldn’t he cancel you or reprogram you?”

“Well, he had to cancel a lot of us when we started doing the power drain calculations,” Kate said practically. “But that….”

Her hand and Bobby’s were so tightly intertwined that her knuckles were white. C.J. noted that detail again and tried not to boggle—they were saying important stuff about Anderson.

“That was hard for him,” Bobby finished. “He felt guilty. I think he would have rather… uh….”

“Canceled himself,” Henry said quietly. “He would have rather canceled himself than canceled more of us than he already did.”