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  Anderson understood C.J.’s concerns in that same distant, untouched way that he understood that Cassie and Marshall weren’t holograms.

  Of course there were other people to love out there. He’d seen that on board the ship. A guy didn’t just fall for the first person, no matter how available, in the same way he hadn’t fallen for Alex or Henry or Peter or… whatever that other guy’s name had been.

  Anderson had looked. While C.J. had been watching Anderson’s life for the past ten years, Anderson had been trying, in fits and starts, to imagine what his life would be in the future. He’d smiled at men as he’d gone shopping, attempted to flirt with them, even accepted invitations for coffee at the nearest kiosk. He hadn’t told C.J. about this; these moments seemed… hallucinatory. The men had not seemed real. Their hands on his knee had seemed like electric currents and wind. His polite refusal to see them again or to visit their quarters felt as detached, as impersonal, as a decision not to watch a video he’d seen too often, or, more likely, had no interest in seeing at all.

  But not C.J. Coming back to C.J.’s quarters had felt, every day, to be more and more like the shuttle, except better, because in a million years Anderson wouldn’t have put all of those eclectic, harmonizing, rich and lustrous colors together in the same place. C.J. must be real, or his home on board the station wouldn’t have felt like such a haven. C.J.’s smile, his big, goofy, don’t-take-anything-seriously smile, had put Anderson at ease on his first day at the station. By the third day, it had started butterflies in Anderson’s stomach. By the thirtieth, watching C.J. smile, knowing that smile was waiting for him in the morning when they woke up side by side or when his physical therapy was over, it became an obsession. A thing he must have.

  It was another way Anderson knew he was real.

  Watching that smile die in this past month had been another thing for which to hate Alpha. Anderson, who had spoken the math of emotions for the preceding ten years, had worked out the simple equation. If Anderson = C.J. smiling < Alpha = C.J. not smiling, then the only way to eliminate the bad half of the equation was to zero out Alpha.

  It was really very, very simple.

  Planetside, stationside, it didn’t matter. Anderson wanted C.J. He needed C.J. in order to feel real and not like a rapidly disintegrating program of data bits directing air currents and electricity into motion. Without C.J., Anderson was a series of ones and zeroes, polarized by magnetic interference, a blank screen. Alpha made C.J. unhappy. It was Alpha who had made C.J. not want Anderson for the past two months. Alpha who had made C.J. think that Anderson wasn’t well enough, wasn’t emotionally healthy enough, for a relationship to flourish.

  Alpha had been created for Anderson in desperation. C.J. simply loved him. There really was no other option.

  First, Anderson cleaned up that fine, fit, limp body, marveling that the sweat and the fluids and the detritus of sex remained even when the act was complete. This was something he hadn’t known. It wasn’t often mentioned in the romance books—although “clean up” was mentioned, exactly what was being cleaned was not.

  It was more than just the fluids, though. Anderson didn’t feel worthy yet. He didn’t want C.J. to carry his mark, to wear his scent, or to be soiled with his touch—not yet. Not when Anderson was still clinging to the dirty part of his soul.

  Anderson had some natural fiber knit pajama bottoms, and he slid those on without putting on any underwear. He thought about going shirtless—hell, he thought about going naked—but he hadn’t wandered around naked on his shuttle, and he wasn’t going to wander around naked here. Instead, he put on a knit shirt, one of C.J.’s that hadn’t been cleaned yet, so it smelled like him, sweaty and earnest and kind, and went padding down the taupe station corridors in the pleasant hum of the down shift, which was what the station residents called the quiet hours when only the maintenance crew was working. (The entire station, including the hub, pretended to have a three-shift day, in rough approximation to the planet below them. C.J. had explained that the routine and the rhythm made living on the station easier and less of an acclimation than keeping the things fully staffed constantly, and that made the crew more productive.)

  So Anderson saw few people in the corridors, and those he did see seemed to think it was perfectly normal for a grown man—and he was now, wasn’t he? Grown? People certainly seemed to treat him as grown—to be padding down the corridor in his pajamas and bare feet. Maybe he needed a drink from one of the few open kiosks. Maybe a midnight snack? Maybe he had quick personal business with a friend who was on shift. It didn’t matter, Anderson thought smugly. What mattered was that no one paid him attention. He was normal. Perfectly normal.

  There was a night crew in the bridge of his shuttle—he hadn’t anticipated that. But the lie to the two techs who were making sure the archival footage transfer for the day had been complete came smoothly.

  “C.J. had a question for one of the holos,” he told them, reminding himself that the techs were real and might know a lie if they heard one. “I was up, so I thought I’d ask.”

  They two women shrugged, and Anderson’s uneasy look was completely genuine. “Uhm, it’s sort of a private question?” he hedged, and he almost felt guilty at how readily the two women smiled sympathetically and nodded. Did he look as though he’d just had a night of debauchery? For the first time in his life, Anderson was in a position where other people did not expect to know about his sex life. It was disconcerting, at the very least—and a sudden, jarring confirmation that other people were real.

  It didn’t matter. They were gone.

  Cautiously, Kate, Bobby, Henry, and Risa advanced onto the bridge from the house. When they saw the night techs were gone, they surrounded him, talking, laughing, and hugging him excitedly.

  Anderson hugged them back.

  He’d been on the bridge before since they’d docked, many times, in fact. But this was the first time he went with the new consciousness of what was real and what was not.

  He was semi-surprised to find that his friends were real.

  “You smell like cinnamon,” he said to Kate, and she blushed to the roots of her hair, which was long enough now to put in a ponytail.

  “We’ve been going through the archives and resources here at the station,” she said shyly, looking at Bobby, who grinned. “They have scents for rooms and people that they didn’t have at the mining colony. We’ve, uhm, been busy.”

  Bobby waggled his eyebrows, and she giggled—hard, practical Kate actually giggled, and Anderson felt something in his chest loosen. They were real. They were growing, learning, improving upon what he’d given them. Within their context, they were real.

  Good. Good. He knew he was crazy, but he wasn’t entirely crazy. He had created real people.

  He had also created a monster.

  “How’s Alpha?” he asked into the chatter, and there was sudden silence.

  “Worse than ever,” Henry said, because he was the friend who would say the things no one wanted to hear. “He… well, none of the crew has seen, but then, I think C.J. and Cassie are the only ones who know how bad things were.” He shrugged. “He leaves us alone, but… they don’t know it, but he’s been watching over their shoulder when they’ve viewed the tapes.”

  “Ick,” Risa said succinctly, and then looked sorry she’d spoken.

  Anderson smiled softly at her, his lips quirked and crooked, and she quirked her lips back. He’d been surprised, at first, that the blunt-spoken, boisterous Henry had picked, of all the students in their class, the gentle, awkward Risa, but over the years, Anderson had come to love her. She didn’t speak much, but what she did say was often funny and to the point. Her self-consciousness was often, Anderson thought, because she was processing more than other people—she was filtering what she thought she should say from all of the data she wanted to spew.

  In this case, “ick” was a singularly appropriate word.

  “I’m sorry C.J. had to see that,” he told them, becaus
e they loved him and he could.

  “It hurt….” Bobby’s eyes darted to Kate. “It hurt us all, but, Anderson, I don’t think C.J. is going to be the same. I mean… whatever you two are to each other, could you be careful with him? Could you, maybe… I know. Just don’t be too… just take things slow. He hurts.”

  Anderson’s stomach congealed. C.J. was hurt. Anderson blamed Alpha. Anderson was going to have to take care of that.

  “Guys,” he said hesitantly, “uh… I may have to go.”

  There was a chorus of consternation, and Anderson felt it, a terrible ache of loss from the hole they would leave when he was gone from them.

  “C.J. and I are going planetside for a while,” he said. “We’re….” Something broke in his chest, something that might never be repaired. It was like a guy-line in a spiderweb, and he felt the rest of the web tighten, adjust, grow weak with the bad tension, from that one break.

  “We’re going,” he said again, wondering why it was so hard to breathe. “But… there’s something I’ve got to do first.” He turned and walked to the bridge console and called up two programs. The others looked over his shoulder and gasped.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Kate asked hesitantly. “I mean… Anderson….”

  “The second one I like,” Bobby said, reaching for the button for the two keystrokes. Anderson smacked his hand away. “Man, let me do that, and ignore the first part, okay?”

  Anderson shook his head. “He needs to know why.”

  “He should know why!” Henry half laughed in shock. “He’s a fuckheaded asshole fucker….”

  “You said ‘fuck’ twice, sweetheart,” Risa said shyly, and Henry grimaced.

  “Okay, there is no word bad enough for him,” Henry muttered, and Risa nodded in agreement. She could see that.

  “This is dangerous,” Bobby said starkly. “Anderson—in a year, maybe, but not now!”

  In a year? C.J. was young, he had friends, he had a life. Why would C.J. wait a year for Anderson to be free, for him to be whole and well and happy?

  “I don’t want to wait a year,” Anderson mumbled, and then, “Shit!”

  “What?” Kate asked worriedly, and then looked over his shoulder. “Oh… oh shit. Anderson!”

  Anderson’s hands shook, and he had to blink his eyes two or three times. Oh God. What if he hadn’t checked that?

  “Kate, double-check what I entered there. Bobby, you too. Jesus, how did that happen?”

  “He did it,” Kate muttered. “This has Alpha’s signature all the hell over it. There. There, that’s right. Bobby, come make sure this is right.”

  Bobby looked at what Anderson had entered and then looked at what had been there first. “Oh, double-fuck us all!”

  “What?” Henry asked. “Can the kids who don’t program know this one too?”

  Anderson, Kate, and Bobby all looked at him with tense expressions. “He was trying to kill us,” Kate muttered, and then quietly said, “He may have succeeded.”

  Anderson looked at her, that tension cranking up a notch. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I can’t be sure he didn’t tie this action together on a deeper level, Anderson. He had it set so that if you turned off his program, you deleted all of us—”

  “Deleted!” squealed Risa, and Kate looked at her apologetically.

  “Yeah, deleted. Any action that would render Alpha inactive would have completely erased us all, even our memory in the holodeck, now that it’s been accessed and recorded as data.”

  The fruity drink Anderson had downed before he’d jumped into the dance mob threatened to come up. It was a near thing, and his throat burned with the force of it. “I shouldn’t do this,” he said after a moment, his head suddenly hurting and his hands freezing in their own clammy sweat.

  “Yes, you should,” Kate hissed, and Bobby looked at her with indignation.

  “But Kate! You just said—”

  “I don’t care!” She seized Bobby’s hand in her own and held it to her face. “I mean I do—do you think I’d want to give up sentience, give up this moment here, holding your hand? I know what you smell like, Bobby. I know that Risa is going to say something to me to make me laugh when we go inside, and I know that you and Henry are going to call up those horrible videos that the station has that make me wish we were still stuck with the same old shit. I know that we’re just holograms, baby, but I feel real. Do you think I want to die?”

  “You don’t have to,” Anderson said weakly. “You were right. This was a bad idea.”

  “No, you were right,” Kate said, all fierceness, and Anderson saw Bobby squeeze her hand and then raise it to his lips in a time-honored gesture of solidarity and love. “You need him out of your life, Anderson. If that means the rest of us have to go—”

  “I can’t….” There were spots dancing in front of his eyes. “If there’s even a little bit of uncertainty—”

  “You fucking coward!”

  The roar was unmistakable, and they all turned from the bridge console to the unlikely construct of the front door of their little one-story home, sitting right behind the seat units of the bridge. Alpha was standing there, bare-chested, panting, his once lean, handsome face ripped back in a primal snarl.

  “Guys, he’s not safe,” Anderson muttered. He’d written them like people, and it had never been discussed, but Alpha could kill them the same way he could kill Anderson. Once, he’d bruised Risa’s wrist by grabbing her too tightly to move her out of his way. The bruise had lasted on her skin as it had on Anderson’s. Anderson did not even question that Alpha could snap poor Risa’s neck with one crack of his hard, thick hands.

  “Anderson!” Kate hissed, and Anderson put both hands on her shoulders and shoved. She felt warm under his hands, and he didn’t question the air-current-electricity velocity-humidity matrix that it took to make her feel like that. She was simply his friend, and she could be putting her life in jeopardy—they all could, just by staying there.

  “Get out!” he ordered, his face assuming that remembered seat of command. “I’ll take care of him, and I won’t let him hurt you guys.”

  “Anderson, you have a life now!” Bobby snapped. “Don’t give it up for us!”

  “You’re my friends!” he told them as Alpha sneered at them all. “Now go!” He managed to touch hands with them as they left, even Risa’s frightened, rabbity little touch and Henry’s brief, pragmatic clasp. They all glared at Alpha, and then, to his surprise, shoved past him, even Risa, although her shoulder barely came up to his ribcage. He made to shove at her—his hand came up, and Anderson snapped, “Don’t you want to talk first, Alpha?”

  As he spoke, his finger was over the computer symbol that would delete his savior, his lover, his nemesis, from the ship’s memory, from the holodeck, from existence, forever.

  “Christ, no!” Alpha sneered. “God, Anderson, are you going to kill us all like a man or talk us to death?!”

  “Not everyone,” Anderson said with more confidence than he felt. Oh God. His friends. His family. The little pieces of himself, the best ones, the kindest ones, the parts with the self-sacrifice and the tenderness—he couldn’t let them go, not even to rid himself of Alpha. Feverishly, he checked his programming directions again. Two keystrokes. That was all it should take.

  “Not so sure, are you, Anderson?” Alpha taunted, walking closer. Physically, Alpha could venture onto the bridge—otherwise, C.J.’s sister wouldn’t have been at risk. But mentally… Anderson had ordered him to stay away. He’d threatened to keep him away with programming—“cheating,” as he called it, but he’d meant it. Alpha was volatile—what if he’d decided to eliminate the other programs while they were in transit? What if he’d decided to kill the entire holodeck? Anderson had exacted a promise—and Kate and Bobby had assured him that this was one programming requirement that would hold—that Alpha would only go on the bridge in an emergency.

  Apparently, watching Anderson be comforted by C.J.
that first night back in port had counted as an emergency.

  So did goading Anderson to murder.

  “Look at you!” Alpha taunted. “So afraid of making the wrong decision you can’t even save your own goddamned skin! I don’t know what sort of future you have here. You’ll never be anything but a scared goddamned rabbit. No wonder you don’t want to kill me. I’m the only option you’ve got!”

  “Bullshit!” Anderson snapped, seeing red. He stepped away from the hologram console, away from the two keystrokes that would rid him of Alpha for the rest of his life.

  “Yeah? You’ve got somewhere else to be, Anderson? If you had someone else, you’d be there!”

  Anderson shuddered, feeling C.J.’s warmth and kindness, his terrifying passion, sliding off of Anderson’s skin like oil from water. “I was there,” he whispered. He swallowed, feeling braver. “Can you smell, Alpha? I never asked.”

  Alpha’s expression hardened. “Going there, Anderson? You haven’t sunk to the ‘you’re not real’ argument yet. I thought you were above that.”

  Anderson shook his head and crossed his arms in front of him, trying to hold C.J.’s words around his shoulders like a cloak. “I’m not asking if you’re real, Aaron—I’m asking if you can smell. Whoever you are, whatever you are, do you detect scent?”

  Those eyes—they were like ice-chips. They had been meant to be pretty, winsome gray, but not now. “Yes,” came the wooden answer. “This hologram can smell. Why?”

  Anderson walked up to him, thinking, I am not afraid tonight. I have known what real is. He is not real. “Can you smell him?” Anderson asked, standing on his tiptoes so that the hollow of his neck was exposed, and a man, a real man, could smell sex and sweat from the warmth of a lover’s skin. “Can you? I had his cock in my mouth, and he came. That’s his come down my chin. Can you smell him?”

  Alpha’s eyes were closed in something like pain. Good. “Something like” very nearly was. “Good for you. You got laid. Feel good, Anderson? Are you proud of yourself, you little slut? I bet you begged for it. Did you beg for it, the way you used to? I bet you couldn’t wait to spread your ass and beg.”