A Solid Core of Alpha (2 page)

But that was his spare time. Anderson had been an active boy—he’d had school, family duties, soccer, and jai alai. He could only listen to music or read books for so long without direction, and after a couple of days of watching comedy vids, he found his way to the holodeck.

At first, he only used the holodeck to exercise. The deck was programmed to call up humanoid forms made of air pressure and electrical currents to act as sparring buddies, spotters, and competitors. At first, Anderson simply looked past the energy-created drones and used them as their function indicated. Like most of the children at the mining colony, he was accustomed to using holograms in a purely utilitarian way.

It didn’t take him long, though, to start talking to them.

That scared him at first, but what really frightened him was that one day, after a one-on-one squash game that he was quite proudly winning, he started making up a response back.

That evening, after sitting quietly through the course of school work that was in the computer system for his grade, he requested a book on elementary hologram programming and read it until the computer in his small corner of the shuttle pinged that it was rest time. Even after that, he pulled out a cover from the stockpiles of fabric and clothes stored within the seats themselves and a small rechargeable light and read the book after the lights aboard the shuttle had dimmed. He did not stop to think too hard about the fact that none of these precautions were necessary, because no adult would protest that he was staying up past his bedtime. Anderson liked routine—the computer said it was time to sleep, which meant that in order to stay up, he needed to quietly violate the rules. There was no
abandoning
the rules. It had to be a
violation
. And he had to have that clear to himself, as well as to the deadened hum of machinery that surrounded him.

The next day, he started programming elementary features on his hologram.

The day after that, he stayed up reading a book about sketching so he could sketch better features to use in the holo-program.

The day after that, he tried melding features from faces on the computer logs with the hologram’s, as well as his own rudimentary sketch work.

And so on.

By the time he’d been on the shuttle for a year, he had the holograms programmed to start talking back.

For a moment—a mere moment—he’d thought about making them look like his mom and his dad and his sisters, but he couldn’t. He tried—he started with Mel and had programmed her long blonde braid and was working on her intense vulpine features when he left the holodeck to use the bathroom and came back and thought, for a moment, that it was really her.

He’d had to stop programming and had spent the next six hours watching his favorite comedy vids and trying to stop the tears.

He decided to program new people from scratch after that. Heaven knew he’d watched enough vids and read enough books, so he could imagine himself a peer group. He started with an older girl—like Mel, but different, with short-cropped dark hair and a permanent scowl. Mel had often been laughing, and this girl was decidedly not like Mel. He went on to a boy like Bren, the boy in his grade at school who used to bring him special wraps for his electronic stylus, the kind that made it look all holiday and pretty. He’d learned his lesson, though, and this boy looked nothing like Bren, who’d had vaguely colored sandy hair and light-gray eyes. This boy had dark sandy hair and dark brown eyes that were wide set and perfectly symmetrical, as opposed to Bren’s, which had been charmingly uneven. Bren’s left eye had also had a tendency to wander, and Anderson made sure that the hologram’s eyes would stay front and center at all times.

At first, he was not satisfied with the results. There was something… artificial, something too perfect about their faces.

He spent a couple of days trying to give them random freckles or fractal-generated lines in their hands and at the corners of their eyes, but the more he tried to generate randomness, the more they looked like older people and not people his age.

He finally went with programming less in the way of appearance and more in the way of texture. He even experimented with scent and managed a vaguely human, organic burst of airflow to pass over their skin when they were on the holodeck with him. He realized after interacting with them for a day or two and discussing the modifications he was making that the less-is-more approach actually worked. One blink, and he was talking to a hologram. In another blink, he was talking to a friend.

He stopped there for a while. These two people, Kate and Bobby, made him happy. They played games and bickered over movies and discussed books. He gave their programs access to everything he himself had accessed and then gave them personal characteristics that were
not
his own.

He liked order, so he made Bobby a slob and Kate the sort of organic personality that could function in chaos.

He liked jai alai, so he programmed Bobby to like baseball so they could trade off teaching each other sports they didn’t know. Kate preferred Frisbee golf and basketball and would often argue or mother Bobby and Anderson into playing the things she liked.

Of course Anderson could always backtalk to her or change her programming—but he didn’t. He gave her characteristics that he thought would benefit him and contrast with his own. To change those tendencies when they didn’t please him naturally seemed like cheating. He and Melody had argued all the time, but at the end of the day, she had kissed him on the forehead and said, “I love you, Squirt,” and then, when his mom or dad came in, he wouldn’t feel like ratting her out for the mean stuff she said sometimes.

He had to concede, there in the silent hum of an empty shuttle, that he said mean stuff too. Very often, he said it first.

So he programmed his friends to be different, in the same way his sisters had been different and his mother and father had been different from each other. And then he stuck to that—he would not change them, no matter how bad the argument, because that would be cheating.

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
his
choice.