Read Online A Solid Core of Alpha by Amy Lane - Free Book Online

most of the computer memory, including the entertainment and personnel archives, long before the fuel ran out.
    Those archives were the story of Anderson’s mining colony. Of his family. Of the books, songs, poetry, hell, even the vids—drama, comedy, musical, romance—and, ohmigod, the all-important health and hygiene files, all of it , the collective history, intelligence, and personality of the place Anderson had come from.
    And he was going to have to just flush it away in order to keep the holodeck running?
    Bobby was the one who had come up with a solution, a way of keeping those things by exposing them to the holodeck archives themselves. A picture in the holodeck used up so much less space than the RAM in the ship’s archives, and playing the songs and all of the videos while they were sleeping didn’t impinge on anyone’s consciousness at all.
    At first, Kate had worried about the noise keeping them up, and that was when Alpha had discovered the thing that caused the second fight.
    “We’re all programmed to sleep through the night?”
    Anderson had been surprised. “Yeah, I’d almost forgotten about that.” Things between them had mended in the past month, as they’d spent their energies fixing one problem and their creativity fixing another. Alpha was always happier when he had something to do, something purposeful. When he was happier, he was the young man from Anderson’s dreams again, and things were peaceful in their small community. (Even their home had been made smaller by the elimination of the school. Their entire house, which had been a good-sized dorm complex, now consisted of three bedrooms and a common room, and Alpha had been subtly campaigning to put the other two couples into one room. Anderson had coldly vetoed that one. He didn’t want his privacy violated any more than he imagined anyone else did, but that didn’t stop Alpha from keeping up the argument.)
    “Forgotten it? Why did you do it?”
    Anderson flushed then. This was a secret thing. This was a thing he’d told no one, not even Bobby. Especially not Alpha.
    “I was afraid the random behavior algorithms would disrupt my own sleep patterns,” he said calmly. He was called upon to prevaricate so very rarely that he wasn’t sure if he could do it right. Alpha seemed to be mollified, though, so he let the matter drop. Anderson walked out of their room then, and into Bobby’s, and simply put his finger over his lips for a moment while he leaned against Bobby’s wall and trembled. That had been a near thing. A terrible thing.
    Bobby looked at him hard for a moment, but Anderson shook his head. Neither of them mentioned the moment again, and Alpha never asked, especially when the math revealed that a significant amount of energy was saved by keeping everybody asleep unless they were needed at the bridge.
    Neither Anderson nor Bobby mentioned the fact that Anderson was now afraid of his lover to the point that he’d rather run away than risk Alpha’s anger. Neither of them mentioned the fact that they were both sure the disagreement would have come to blows. They were an isolated few people on a small ship, alone in the vastness of space. Some things simply had to be endured. For the next four and a half years, that’s exactly what they did.
    Endure they did. Even as Kate sent out the all-important hail to the space station, the six of them were still engaged in the painstaking task of calling up data on their tablets and then showing it to the holo-recorders plainly before deleting it. Every deletion felt like a betrayal. Every betrayal made Anderson hate himself a little bit more and made Alpha a little bit angrier.
    The first month after they started the deletion found two more bruises marking Anderson’s face.
    They hadn’t even had to ration the organic matter that the synthesizer used yet. The day Anderson had started throwing paper-based colony manifests into the synthesizer in order to make food, Alpha had split