A Solid Core of Alpha Read Online Free Page A

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