A Solid Core of Alpha (3 page)

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.

I
N
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!
)

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!

“Thank you,” he said, still bemused. “Now tell me about the files. Will they help us find a closer outpost?”

Their faces fell. “No,” Kate said softly. “We’re sorry, Anderson. They’re not about how to change direction in hyperspace or where you would travel. They’re about human anatomy and reproduction.” She brightened again. “You would not
believe
what your body can do!”

Anderson thought he might have figured some of it out on his own, but as it turned out, he’d barely touched the tip of the cloth-covered penis.

Chapter 2

Introducing…

T
HEY
did not engage the school program that day but instead gathered around Anderson’s tablet and the various vid-screens and pored over the new information.

A lot of it was diagrammed, and Anderson did a lot of squinting at words like “glans” and “vesicles” and thought detachedly about what happened when he stroked himself in the privacy of his own room.

“Hey, Anderson,” Bobby said excitedly, about the time Anderson had found the placement of the prostate and was tracing the gland on the screen with his fingers, wondering what practical purpose a bundle of erogenous nerves would have so deeply buried in the rectal orifice. It wasn’t particularly easy for a man (because the nerves were only present in males) to access those nerves on his own.

“What did you find?” Anderson looked up, and what was playing on the personal vid screen Bobby held up made his mouth go dry.

“Oh,” he said softly. “That’s what sex looks like.”

He’d known the basics. Even before the files were released, he’d understood that people took off their clothes and that girls had a vagina and a uterus meant for procreation.

Much like the prostate, he hadn’t understood why the erogenous areas would be placed so deep in the body. He hadn’t realized that males had a tab that was meant to fill every slot.

“Why is she putting her mouth on it?” Kate asked, and it wasn’t Anderson’s imagination. Her voice was breathy and soft when normally it was analytical and matter-of-fact.

Bobby tilted his head and looked speculatively at her. “I think… I think it would feel rather nice, don’t you, Anderson?”

Anderson thought of Bobby’s mouth on his penis, and his entire body flushed hot and cold, and, sure enough, his groin grew full and ached fiercely. “I think it would feel
outstanding
,” he muttered hoarsely. “If you two could, uhm, excuse me for a moment?”

He’d read a list of words for what he was about to do—words he’d actually heard in the schoolyard but whose definitions he hadn’t known the specifics of.

Whacking off, beating off, spanking the monkey, varnishing the pole, smacking the salami, jerking the chain, yanking the snake, lubing the lizard, tickling the pickle, choking the chicken,
etc., etc., etc.

Now that he’d spent a couple of months “waxing his rocket,” he knew how long it would take and how quickly he could clean up and be back with his friends, talking about this new and interesting influx of information.

He was in his bed, his cock (that was a new word, courtesy of the new information) in his fist, when Bobby and Kate violated their programming and did something that real friends might do instead.

Or maybe just
Anderson’s
friends.

They violated the rule of standard deviation and intruded. They were quiet—he was barely aware that they were there, watching, as his pre-come (another good word to have) spurted over his fist. This time, because they were stealthy, he ignored them, continued to stroke, continued to squeeze, became lost in the sensation, and, when the fabulous, amazing, tremendous pressure built up, allowed himself to groan out loud as he came. (And he
loved
what that word had come to mean. Came, came, came, coming, come!
Auuugghhhhhh… God… Come!
)