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  “I don’t even want to know about Alpha,” Anderson murmured, and C.J. was glad when Anderson’s shoulders relaxed after that and he could hear the even breathing of sleep through the quiet room.

  ANDERSON POPPED him in the cheek with his elbow as he sat up in bed for his horrible, soundless scream, so C.J. ended up going to work with a shiner.

  The worst part was trying to explain to Cassidy how it had happened and enduring her censuring look of pity.

  “God, Cyril, you’ve got no sense at all, do you know that? He’s not a gamma bird. You’re going to have to give him back, you know that, right?”

  “I know he’s not a gamma bird, dammit!” C.J. snapped. “Look, can we just go in and watch his life some more? Because, you know, I can’t get enough of seeing absolute fucking misery, okay? God knows seeing him sit up in bed and scream isn’t enough fun in person that I have to relive it a thousand times via holographic 3D photography!”

  Cassie surprised him then. Without another sharp word, she threw herself into his arms for a sisterly embrace that had none of the awkwardness of their initial cling-together the day before. “You’re going to get hurt, C.J.,” she whispered. “He’s living in your quarters, sleeping in your bed, and you’re seeing him suffer every day. You’re going to want to help him, and he… he might be too damaged to help. Baby, send him to Michelle’s quarters, ship him downside… look at you. You’ve got a black eye, and you don’t look like you’ve slept in three days. Please, Cyril? Please?”

  C.J. shook his head and gave her shoulders a squeeze and then stepped back. “I’ll be fine, Cass,” he said at last, not looking at her. “You know me, I never take things too seriously. We’ll wrap this up, get Julio in here to break down the holo-science, and I’ll ask him if he wants to go stay at Jensen’s clinic for a while. He’ll like it there, and Jensen’s dying to get a crack inside his cranium, I can tell.”

  “Oh, God, C.J., you’re… you’re already attached.”

  C.J. shrugged. “Naw, I’m too superficial to get attached. Ask Jensen. He’ll tell you.”

  Cassie sighed. “Yeah, if he was smart, he’d tell me you broke his heart before he had a chance to break yours.”

  Wince. “That wasn’t quite his version of events.”

  “That’s because for all his so-called brilliance in the field, he never got my little brother like I do. Let’s go in, Cyril. I can’t listen to you lie to yourself anymore, and we need to get a move on.”

  They went in and watched Anderson program Kate. They kept the vids in real time and hit record to send the info to Julio and listened to Kate’s caustic commentary behind them.

  “Really, Anderson? You couldn’t have given me the delicate features of a supermodel and some knowledge of how to give myself a manicure? Jesus, I could have done a better job myself!”

  C.J. was about to make a sarcastic remark, but he looked behind him and saw two things. One was that Kate had perfectly manicured nails with a demure coat of pink glitter paint on them, which was so out of keeping with what he was seeing on the screen as her programming that he realized she must have done that herself—right down to learning how, since all of the holograms were programmed to synthesize human behavior right down to an algorithm that sent them to the bathroom every so many hours. The other was that Bobby was looking at her fondly.

  “If he’d given you all that, I might not have fallen in love with you,” Bobby said simply, and Kate’s disgruntled look eased.

  “Well,” she sniffed, “maybe I can forgive him for that.”

  C.J.’s head hurt with the possibilities of holograms falling in love whether or not they were programmed for it, and he focused on the very young Anderson on the screen with something akin to desperation.

  Kate came into being and then argued with Anderson for every step of Bobby’s programming. Anderson won most of the battles, which made C.J.’s head hurt even more, and then a snippet of conversation caught his attention.

  “Okay, Kate, it says here ‘standard orientation’. What in the hell does that mean?”

  Kate shrugged. “Hells if I know, Anderson. It’s my programming. Everything about me feels standard.”

  “Oh shit,” Cassie muttered next to him, and C.J. cringed.

  He looked behind him and said, “So he programmed all of you to standard orientation?” God, liking men would totally blow if you’d programmed all of your companions to be straight.

  “Not me,” Henry said with a playful eyebrow waggle. “I’m programmed bisexual.”

  “Yeah,” Kate said, rolling her eyes. “That’s because Bobby and I programmed all of the potential companions. Anderson didn’t have anything to do with you guys.”

  Cassie shook her head. “I still can’t believe he let the holograms program the holograms. That is some weird bullshit—no offense, Kate, it just is!”

  Bobby shrugged and met eyes with his wife. “You sort of have to keep watching. There was a… well, kind of a progression….”

  Kate blanched. “Uh, yeah. By the way? Don’t expect to see a lot of us after the health and hygiene files are opened, okay? I think I’m too human to hang out here for long after that.”

  Bobby leered. “Oh glory, I’m not!”

  C.J.’s head gave a terrible throb, and he turned his attention resolutely back to the screen. Watch the holo-programming now. Watch it—what, Anderson was fourteen here? They had two years to wade through, two years of spectacular holo-science breakthroughs before the H and H files were opened. Concentrate on that. At this rate, it would take what? A week? He had a week. A week to grow accustomed to the way his body responded to both Anderson and Alpha. A week to reconfigure his attachment to Anderson into something completely platonic. A week to remember that Anderson needed a friend, not a flighty, flaky lover.

  It was a strange situation. He just needed to grow accustomed to it, that was all. Right?

  Yeah. Absolutely. Right.

  Chapter 11

  Health and Hygiene

  C.J. COULD only be grateful that Anderson had spent such an enormous amount of time building his world in little bricks of air and electric current. It gave C.J. and Cass time to recuperate. They watched Bobby come online, funny, irrepressible Bobby, and then watched the dynamic form, Kate giving the orders, the boys grumbling or circumventing but never outright defying.

  “Why don’t you just tell her you’re the boss?” Bobby asked once, and Anderson’s dignified response haunted C.J. for weeks.

  “That would be cheating,” he said, and it became the watchword between the three of them for out-and-out reprogramming someone or something that didn’t agree with any of them.

  “Not cheating” was very important to Anderson.

  “I don’t understand,” Cassie said one afternoon, holding an iced glass of Scorch to her forehead. They avoided the temptation to call too many days short for a medicinal belt of anything strong, but when they did, there was usually a very good reason for it. In this case, they had just seen Anderson’s halting, embarrassed explanation to the hologram they’d programmed as their teacher that everyone in the room was a hologram, and he, Anderson, had created them.

  “What should he have done?” C.J. asked, downing his belt of Scorch. It had been painful, and even worse had been the way he’d wept on Kate, like a little brother might on an older sister, for a good hour after school had ended.

  “Well, Anderson, it’s not like it’s going to change the way they act around you, is it?” Kate had asked practically, and Anderson nodded.

  “Sometimes I wish it would,” he muttered. “I really need some help with this fuel ratio thing, and everyone wants to design amusement parks instead.”

  “God,” Cassie had snarled, making note of the personnel issues and the way Anderson dealt with them and then sending the notes to Julio and Jensen. They had both remarked upon the weirdness of reporting to a top-notch holo-engineer and a top-flight shrink. Cassie said it was just plain odd, but C.J. thought that the overlap ha
d been bound to happen eventually. Julio came in after they left to look at the sections of recording they’d highlighted or the places on the bridge where the programming resided, and to ask the holograms questions. After that first day, both Cassie and C.J., and even Jensen, had agreed that the smaller the audience for Anderson’s personal life on display, the better.

  Cassie and C.J. were it. No one else got to gawk at the boy who had talked to dolls for over eight years.

  Today, Cassie, who used to organize her dolls by hair color, wardrobe specifications, and appropriate matching stuffed animals, was having a hard time understanding how Anderson could have had all that power at his disposal and then refused to use it on the grounds that it was cheating.

  “He should have changed it!” Cassie bemoaned. “It was his world! If it’s your world, you get to set the rules, don’t you? Why wouldn’t he set the rules? I mean… there he was! Mini-God! Why wouldn’t he just take charge?”

  C.J. sighed and thought about Anderson shooting him those predatory, playful looks, terrified that C.J. wouldn’t respond. “Don’t you get it?” he said after another swallow of Scorch. “Don’t you get it? It was his world. Think about it, Cass. When you were twelve years old, you reported a teacher for not giving enough homework!”

  “I liked my boundaries!” Cassie hiccupped. God, she was a funny drunk. Watching Anderson grow up in psychotropic wonderland may have been bloody damned hard on both of them, but seeing Cass as moderately human was an unexpected benny on the side.

  “I know you did.” C.J. smiled. “You liked them so much, you had to make them my boundaries.”

  “You needed boundaries, Cyril!” Cassie said, pointing her finger past her liquor glass. “If you hadn’t had boundaries, you would have fucking lost your little baby mind!”

  “Yeah,” C.J. agreed. “Yes, I would have. I would have lost my little baby mind. But not Anderson.”

  Cassie took a hard swallow and drained the glass before she dumped it all over herself. “Whaddya mean?”

  C.J. sighed. “I mean, when you’re twelve years old, everyone’s telling you what to do. There’re all sorts of fucking rules. Get up, go to sleep, study this, study that, don’t talk to strangers, don’t stare at the sun, you can’t work off-world until you’re twenty-three—”

  “Didn’t stop you from running away from home and hiding aboard a shuttle when you were sixteen!” Cassie accused, and C.J. flinched.

  “Well, see, that just proves my point! I had all those rules, so I got to question them. I got to ask why this and not that, and why couldn’t we change A if it screwed up B—”

  “God, you were a pain in the ass!”

  “Well yeah, to you. But see, that’s the point! Anderson liked the rules, just like you did. He had a daily routine within four sleep cycles. Now I read those letters. You read those letters. He was hell with a shit-eating smile and a bucket of worms when he was twelve. But the minute the rules were all gone, what’s the first thing he did?”

  Cassie blinked stupidly. “Made the rules.”

  C.J. nodded. He hadn’t discussed this with Jensen, but then he didn’t have to. He’d lived with the guy for two years. He’d gone to enough mental health seminars to qualify him for something if he ever got out of space engineering.

  “He made the rules. He programmed the holograms and made the fucking rules, Cassie. That was it. That was his world. Say you want the sky to be red one day instead of blue. You know you can make it happen, you’ve got the technology, you’ve got the means, and dammit, you fucking want a red sky. Or a pink sky with a velvet ribbon. Or a cat’s eye looking through the sun. And you can fucking do it! Would you?”

  Cassie turned sad, sober eyes to him. “No,” she whispered. “I wouldn’t fucking do it. I wouldn’t make the sky pink or the sun green. Because that would violate the rules.”

  “And what do you call it when you violate the rules and no one gets caught, oh sister mine?”

  “Cheating.”

  C.J. nodded and poured another dollop into his glass and then one into Cassie’s. “Cheating. And the one thing our boy doesn’t do, is cheat.”

  THEY FINISHED off C.J.’s Scorch that day, but that turned out to be a good thing. It seemed that Cassie’s husband had some much better liquor inside his stores, and the week they watched as Anderson discovered his own body and then the adult-level health and hygiene files, complete with enrichment materials, the two of them did some serious damage to Marshall’s selection.

  The trouble, C.J. knew, as he watched that first interrupted session of masturbation, was that he had to go home and face Anderson after this.

  And not just face him, sleep in the same bed, comfort him after his dreams, and… God. That wasn’t even the worst part. C.J. saw so much of him as a young man, even watching him discover his sexuality might have been able to be viewed impersonally, through the eyes of an engineer, if all C.J. did with Anderson was comfort him.

  But that wasn’t all they did.

  They ate dinner together, they watched comedy and romance vids, they talked about their favorite parts. They went shopping, they went out with C.J.’s friends and watched movies from planetside at the station’s small theater. They made plans to go to the hub to visit clubs when Anderson felt more comfortable with more people. The progression from watching the recording of Anderson to dealing with the living, seemingly recovered Anderson—Jesus, it was such a mindfuck.

  That first day they had to deal with Anderson’s budding sexuality, C.J. thought he could handle it, and then Bobby walked into the room on the screen, and C.J. said, “Uh-oh,” right when Cassie said, “What?”

  As the scene played out, C.J.’s first uncomfortable stirrings of arousal were drowned out by the horrible knowledge that Anderson’s innocence had pretty much condemned him to be on a shuttle full of people not one of whom would make a decent companion. As Bobby left, Anderson’s wistful expression lingered, and behind them, from the holograms who watched quietly with wide eyes, Bobby said, “Oh God. Jesus, I felt so bad.”

  C.J. turned to him then and did what his sister probably thought was insane, but he didn’t care. “It’s not your fault,” he said quietly. “It’s not your fault when someone loves you and you don’t love them the same way. It just is. It’s one of the ways we hurt each other without even trying.”

  Then he turned around and watched as Anderson proceeded to discover sex, and even without Anderson knowing that there would ever be a C.J. to witness his adolescent gropings, just watching it hurt C.J. without even trying.

  God, it hurt to watch him discover sex on his own, to watch him fumble, embarrassed, excited, joyous, and always, at the end, ashamed of his own climax. It hurt to watch him hide it from his friend because he knew Bobby didn’t return his feelings, and to pretend he didn’t see the inevitable romance between the two people he loved the most.

  “You know,” Cassie burbled, stoned on some of Marshall’s finest Hermes-Gamma grain-fruit wine, “I never saw that coming. They looked at each other one minute, and the next minute, they were fucking like lemmings, and they were good at it.”

  “Of course they were good at it,” C.J. mumbled, for once the drunker of the two of them. “They’d just ingested enough porn for forty people. They were like a walking repository for sexual positions and know-how. Are,” he corrected at the last. “Are a walking repository for sex.”

  That last had to be added. Bobby and Kate might have stayed out of the room for that part, but they must have been listening to it, because after Cassie left for the day, C.J. stuck his head inside the little house construct—which had remained up permanently since the ship had docked—in order to tell them that he and Cassie were logging out early, and he could hear the sounds of passionate, happy sex going on from what he presumed to be their room. His eyes had grown wide, and he’d been almost amused out of his funk for a moment when suddenly the door to Anderson’s room swung open, and there stood Alpha.

  He was naked and had hi
s erect member in his fist.

  It was as large as C.J. had imagined, as long and as thick, with a truly monstrously sized head, and C.J. was, for once in his life, speechless.

  Alpha had eyed him with lazy, hooded contempt and proceeded to spit on his hand very deliberately and then lower it to that gigantic cock and stroke, slowly. C.J. watched him with his own erection struggling gamely inside his undershorts.

  Alpha leaned back against the doorframe of the bedroom then, and while the front door of the house closed quietly behind C.J., continued to stroke his uncircumcised cock, the foreskin making wet, blatantly carnal sounds as it slipped sloppily around the crown.

  “I know this turns you on,” Alpha hissed, and C.J. grunted, hating himself at the same time he really wanted to relieve himself, and Alpha grinned at him in triumph. With a few rough strokes and a solid pinch of his nipple, Alpha came, his semen erupting in a fractured arc to splatter on the floorboards.

  The sound was enough to snap C.J. out of whatever spell had been holding him. “Lots of things turn me on,” he said quietly. “I know which ones are bad for me.”

  He’d gotten way drunker than Cassie that day—the last time they did that for a while—but by now, they’d stopped explaining to each other why.

  Hell, she knew.

  Five days later, they watched as Kate and Bobby started programming companions. The first one had made C.J. and Cassie laugh themselves silly, and while Kate and Bobby had apologized—both to C.J. and Cassie in their time and to Anderson on the image they were watching—the second attempt hadn’t been much better. The third companion attempt had to be canceled before the true importance of what Anderson had to do with the misfires really hit the two of them.

  “How could you guys screw that up so bad?” Cassie asked Bobby and Kate, and they both blushed. Cassie had long since stopped treating them like artificial people, but that meant they were in a position to be victimized by her customary bluntness.