by Amy Lane
Anderson’s sweat chilled against his skin, congealed in his stomach, seeped into the fissures of his soul and froze solid, making the empty places wide and vulnerable. “I’m not you,” he said, but the idea… the thought that it was true. He was a shudder away from throwing up.
And Alpha saw it. “Don’t tell me you haven’t figured it out yet, Anderson. We’re all you! Don’t you get it? Poow widdo baby, locked all away, made up some imaginary friends to play with, and they were all him. What’s the word? Come on, Anderson, you read every scrap of material in the entire fucking ship… don’t tell me there wasn’t a psych manual somewhere on the records. What’s the word?”
“Projection,” Anderson mumbled, remembering the book Alpha was talking about.
“Say it louder!”
“Projection!” Anderson shouted. “And I don’t care if it’s true. It doesn’t matter! You’re evil, and if you’re a part of me, you need to be excised like a filthy, rotten, pus-filled tumor!”
With that, he lunged for the keyboard—two keystrokes—and Alpha couldn’t beat him there, but he could hit Anderson square in the jaw before Anderson pressed the first button.
Anderson’s head snapped back, and Alpha lunged for him. In the past, Anderson had simply stood there, limp, and taken the beating, taken what he thought he’d deserved—but he couldn’t this time. Alpha had tried to link his deletion to everyone else’s. He was truly homicidal, and Anderson couldn’t let his friends, his true friends, the people who had kept him sane and loved him during the long, interminable trip, die because of one lousy, fucked-up program who didn’t know the difference between reality and delusion.
This time, he didn’t stand there. This time, he dodged, eluding Alpha’s hard grip on his shoulder, and whirled away, coming up with a kick to Alpha’s midriff that threw him back, clawing at the console for balance. For a moment, Anderson panicked—oh shit—what if he hit the wrong keys? What if he set the others up for annihilation again? Katy! Bobby! Oh Jesus!
Anderson angled his body so Alpha would be shoved sideways and tackled him, throwing him clear of the console to the end of the shuttle, toward the open ramp.
He flickered out of existence for a moment, and Anderson used the time to hurl himself at the console and review the settings to make sure the others were all right. He made it through one of three screens when Alpha appeared behind him and elbowed him between the shoulder blades. Anderson arched back in pain, and Alpha knotted his hard fist in Anderson’s hair and shoved his head down, bouncing it off of the console while Anderson struggled to find a move that would break him away. Alpha had gotten in three hits now, and there was blood running into Anderson’s eyes, and his right arm was numb from the blow to the back. Alpha’s body had been honed—exercise, the strengthening of electrical pathways, developing muscles according to standard human male ratios, all of it, forging him into a nightmare of granite, muscle, and bone.
“You can’t do it,” Alpha panted as Anderson managed to wriggle away and roll into a crouch. “You can’t kill me and keep them alive. You’re going to have to make a choice!”
Alpha made it to the keyboard, and Anderson couldn’t tell, couldn’t see what he did as Alpha pushed a button, and then two. Fuck… fuck, fuck, fuck. Anderson lunged for him again only to find that this time, Alpha was ready for him.
He dodged to the side just enough to capture Anderson’s shoulders and force him face down into the console, then wrapped his elbow around Anderson’s throat.
“Remember this, Anderson?” Alpha growled. “Like old times. I think you started to come when I did this, you twisted little fuck… maybe you’ll even jizz when you die!”
Anderson heaved himself up, turned his face toward the keyboard he needed, and tried to catch his breath. It wasn’t working. His vision danced in angry darkness, and he could barely see his fingers as they reached for the board. Two keystrokes, he thought dizzily. Two keystrokes and this would be over, and he’d wear C.J. on his skin, and he would be whole, and this would be gone, and two keystrokes. Two keystrokes.
Alpha saw him struggling and laughed. “See, the best thing here is, when you fuck that up and kill us all? You’ll have only yourself to blame!” Alpha’s laughter kept going, ringing like oft-broken keys and maimed cathedral bells, and Anderson’s head became a black cave of echoes. He was losing consciousness. He was dying.
For a moment, he almost let it happen. God. It would be so easy. No painful questions. No answers that might linger like the taste of poison. Just sleep. Just sleep, unbroken by screams.
He struggled for another breath, maybe his last, and smelled it. He’d bragged to Alpha about the smell of come because it was crude, and base, and it made the things that he and Alpha had done in their marriage bed profane, as they should be, but that wasn’t how he felt about the musk that filled him with that last jagged breath.
It was comfort—a warm body in the night, a smile when his stomach felt like lead, dinner and fruit juice in an apartment scented by Chips’s sharp floral feathers.
All that, and the carnal reality of flesh that laid itself open for Anderson to feast upon—and whispered soft words at the climax of the meal.
That was the smell of C.J.’s come on Anderson’s skin. That was worth another breath.
Anderson heaved himself up one more time, loosened Alpha’s grip for just a moment, and focused his eyes the best he could, reaching with his fingers. It came down to two keystrokes to live. Two keystrokes. There were no other people on the ship. Just him and the memory of C.J. on his skin.
Two keystrokes.
One. Two.
The pressure on his windpipe disappeared just as his vision went black.
THE readout on the corner of the vid screen said that he’d been in the shuttle for less than twenty minutes. It seemed unreal at its most hideously hilarious that his entire adult life should boil down to less than twenty minutes, but there it was.
He picked himself up and looked around the shuttle hopefully.
“Bobby? Kate?” he rasped. His throat was still recovering, and he coughed. “Henry? Risa?”
There was no answer.
None.
Gradually, the awareness seeped into him that, for the first time in eight and a half years, he was truly alone.
He refused to believe it at first—stumbled to the fresher, used the mirror and some actual towels placed there by the staff to clean the blood off his face. The shirt was unsalvageable, so he turned it inside out before toweling himself off and putting it back on. The sounds of him running the water, running the fresher, the small sonic wand from the newly added first aid kit over the cut on his head—all of those things rattled in the shuttle like a pebble in a rocket-fuel drum—and even the echoes sounded ashamed.
He didn’t want to think about it. He’d chosen himself. He had friends, and at the last, he’d chosen himself. Alpha was right about him. All of it. He was a coward, a murdering coward, and every bruise, every break, every hit, and every rape had been something he’d earned.
Oh God, what would C.J. think? C.J. loved them—he’d told Anderson that frequently. They were good friends, good people. They were Anderson’s family. Anderson had just killed his family.
C.J. would know that. Why would C.J. want to touch him ever again?
Anderson slid inside the apartment and went to the bathroom again, this time using some of the shower credits for himself. He used the soap he’d given C.J. and tried not to cry as he ran the washcloth over his bruised body. He hadn’t said, “I love you.” C.J. had said it, and Anderson had felt… soiled. Too dirty. He would have profaned the words.
He needed to say them.
He needed to say them before C.J. knew what Anderson had done and took the words back.
Because C.J. couldn’t possibly love a coward and a murderer, a thief of love and sex, and a man who would sacrifice his family for his own survival, could he?
For a moment, Anderson saw their faces in front of his e
yes—Kate, strong-boned, dark-haired, blue-eyed. Bobby, brown hair, sparkling eyes, irrepressible grin. Henry, all sarcasm and analytical humor behind his spectacles, and gentle, funny, kind little Risa.
For a moment, he almost didn’t make it to the bed. God. What he’d lost. Oh Jesus… what he’d fucking lost….
He swallowed and forced himself to move. He threw his dirty clothes into the hamper and pulled on some more bottoms and a T-shirt, and then slid into bed.
C.J. wrapped a strong arm around Anderson’s middle, reminding Anderson of the fact that he was bruised all over, but Anderson slid into his embrace anyway. In the morning, C.J. would hate him. In the morning, he would have to face up to what he had done.
“I love you,” Anderson murmured, his voice thick with grief.
“I love you too,” C.J. said back.
Anderson wanted to talk more—he did—and say all the things C.J. deserved to hear, while C.J. would still want to hear them. But Anderson was exhausted, and his brain was shutting down. In the morning, this moment would all be over. In the morning, C.J. would be gone.
His brain switched off then. His own screams woke him up, but he didn’t know where they came from.
Part 4: C.J.
Chapter 16
A Pebble in a Tin Can
“LITTLE brother?” Cassie must have let herself into C.J.’s house without knocking. C.J. hadn’t known she was back planetside, and that was the only reason he looked up. Most of his concentration was focused on the mock-up of Anderson’s hologram console that he’d installed in his planetside home about four weeks after the planet-to-station shuttle had landed.
C.J., Anderson, and Cassidy had been inside. Anderson had been so sedated they’d had to monitor his breathing. It was the only way to keep him from exhausting himself with screams.
On the trip over, Julio had sent them a postmortem from the shuttle’s bridge—and only as they analyzed the data, and saw the lengths Alpha had gone to eliminate all of the holograms from the shuttle’s programs, had they realized how grimly apt that particular expression had been.
Kate, Bobby, Henry, Risa—the memories, the programs, the complete list of qualities and experiences that made them people—had all been wiped clean in two keystrokes: Anderson’s ultimate price for setting himself free of Alpha.
They had watched the video feed in Jensen’s office, and then C.J. had thrown up in a trashcan, and they had watched it again. Neither Jensen nor Cassidy said a damned thing in censure, bless them both; they had simply slung their arms around his shoulders and helped get him water and then fetched him tissues as he’d come completely fucking unglued.
For two days, he and Anderson had been sedated, side by side, in adjoining beds in Jensen’s most gorgeous, peaceful room, where there were background sounds of bubbling brooks and crooning gamma birds, a subtle, enriched rainbow of colors on an ivory background, and fresh air coming in from fragrant gardens that Jensen himself supervised because he’d always maintained that a healthy heart started with a healthy home.
In two days, C.J. had been ready to go outside and get some real air and sunshine. Anderson was still screaming to the point of sedation every time they allowed him to wake up. C.J. and Cassidy had spent two weeks being pampered and attended to and counseled and soothed by Jensen and Molly and their well-trained staff. And yes, Cassidy had flowers in her room every damned day. But after two weeks, Cassidy had gone back to the station to tie up loose ends. C.J. had stayed planetside to be with Anderson, and Anderson… Anderson continued to scare the hell out of them all.
It had taken Anderson a week to snap out of that first phase of violent reaction, and even then, Jensen had been forced to let him scream for hours until he’d exhausted himself enough to fall asleep on his own. He’d awakened dizzy, disoriented, and still convinced he was on the ship. The way he’d called for Kate and Bobby had about broken everybody’s hearts.
The only person who elicited even the smallest response from him was C.J. For C.J., Anderson would smile. For C.J., he’d make an effort to put his surroundings in context. For C.J., Anderson would humor them all and pretend that the ship had docked and he wasn’t floating around in a portable world, involved in a program his dreams had forged without his permission.
C.J. would walk into his room, or through the grounds, and Anderson would turn his head, track C.J. with his eyes, and actually talk. His words were halting and his voice rusty, because, as Jensen or Molly or any of the other staff members would tell them, Anderson only ever spoke in complete sentences to C.J.
“You’re real,” he would say serenely. He was always serene—after the screaming, it was his only emotion. “I know you, at least, are real.”
“Excellent,” C.J. complained bitterly to Jensen after a short visit in which that was the only thing Anderson had said. “I’m real. The problem is, he doesn’t think he is.”
Jensen had sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I told you, this is going to take some time.”
“He’s not responding,” C.J. said disconsolately. “He’s… he’s… there hasn’t been any change in weeks.”
“Not responding” was putting it mildly. He may have reacted to C.J.—he looked up, he smiled vacantly, and he spoke in small sentences—but that was it. There was an absence to everything he did that could not be blamed on sedation. His movements were slow and interrupted, too slow to be jerky, too uncoordinated to be natural, and getting his eyes to focus on a human face was damned near impossible unless that human was C.J. It was like his entire being was focused elsewhere. Anderson had checked out, and the pretty shell he left was set on housekeeping protocols. I’m sorry, the real Anderson isn’t here right now. I was told to make you comfortable during your conversation with the human book cover in his place.
Jensen nodded unhappily, and they both looked to where Molly was taking Anderson’s vitals a little way off. “Not responding” loomed large in the silence, and C.J. was surprised and comforted when Jensen reached from behind C.J. for a kind, platonic hug. Molly looked up from taking Anderson’s vitals in the spring sunshine of the northern continent and smiled gently. She said something quietly to Anderson, who didn’t even nod in acknowledgement, and then walked over to C.J. and hugged him from the other side. C.J. would remember that, his front pressed against Molly, Jensen at his back, simply giving him solid human contact as he’d put down some of his pain on their shoulders, and think that he couldn’t have asked for better friends.
But neither of them made up for Anderson.
In a visit shortly after that hug, Anderson had looked up as C.J. approached and not smiled. “Have you spoken to them?” he asked, sounding like a twelve-year-old. “Have you? They aren’t mad at me, are they? I set it up so they wouldn’t be deleted. They know that, don’t they?”
C.J. nodded. “Of course they kne—know that, Anderson. They know how important they w—are.”
Behind Anderson, Jensen stood up and glared. C.J. glared back.
Anderson smiled a little and relaxed. “Good. When we’re done visiting planetside, can we go back to the station, C.J.? I like it here, I do, but I miss Chips.”
C.J. had smiled, maybe for the first time in weeks. “He misses you. Marshall says he’s biting anyone else who tries to feed him. That’s the first time that’s ever happened.”
Oh hells—that sunbeam smile. One day, Anderson was going to aim it at C.J., and C.J.’s heart would simply cease beating, impaled by that glossy, wide-eyed, everything’s-gonna-be-fine grin.
“I’m ready to go back whenever you are,” Anderson said guilelessly, and Jensen’s pained grimace didn’t tell C.J. anything he didn’t know already. C.J.’s leave and his regular month off were going to be long gone before Anderson could even face the final thing he’d done to survive—and forgive himself for it like everyone else had, including the people he’d left behind.
But C.J. couldn’t leave him behind.
“Well, Anderson, let’s wait until my man here give
s you the thumbs-up, okay?”
To his credit, Jensen didn’t even try to make a dirty joke of it. He just shook his head silently, concern burning in his eyes.
They spent a half an hour talking about the various flocks of gamma birds—Chips may have been lavender, but the others came in every shade of refracted light—that roamed the grounds. There were also cats whose ancestors had been brought over in cryogenic suspension in the first colony ships. Jensen actually hired people to clean up after them and feed them and keep them healthy so the residents could have the therapy of holding a creature that asked nothing more from life than to be scratched on the ass on demand. It was said that humans used to be allergic to the animals—Jensen had done a dissertation on how, if that were true, then learning to conquer a physical illness in order to enable a closer relationship with any creature whatsoever was proof that man had the seeds of healing in his own soul.
Anderson had been adopted by one of the facility animals, a giant ginger ex-Tom who kneaded his lap unmercifully as he sat—moderately sedated—in a lounge chair in the shade.
“I’ve been trying to figure out a name for him,” Anderson said, chucking the animal under the chin. “It’s hard. It seems that all the names I’ve ever liked are the names of someone I’ve killed.”
C.J. caught his breath then and wondered at the rush of adrenaline in his own veins. A tiny admission—a huge sliver of hope. “How about Conrad Jackson,” C.J. said grandly, and Anderson looked at him, more animation in his face now than C.J. had seen in nearly three weeks.
“Really?”
“Yeah!” C.J. grinned. “See, my dad’s name is Christopher James, my mom’s is Catherine Jennifer. So when we were born, they gave Cass and I the same initials.”
Anderson started laughing. “Cee, Jay!” he giggled, and C.J. nodded.
