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just like Anderson’s father, but much younger, and very, very attractive—and he made all of that dry information that Anderson had read fun and relevant, and he was so very good at applying all of the technical sciences into ways a person could program a holodeck that nobody had ever thought of.
    Anderson liked him immensely.
    One day—because Anderson had programmed the holodeck to have the same twenty-four hour night and day cycle that had been present on the artificially spun colony—Anderson was staying late after class. Bobby had already left, since he and Kate were scheduled to fix dinner that night, even if Anderson was the only one eating real food, and Anderson was trying to access some files he’d discovered in the shuttle’s education program that had been mysteriously locked.
    “Whatcha up to, Anderson?” Mr. Kay smiled, and those grooves popped out on his cheeks, and Anderson blinked hard, like he’d programmed the park program with a sun that was too bright and it was bothering his eyes.
    “Why are there locked files, Mr. Kay?” Anderson asked. They were alone. There weren’t any other students there, not even the troublesome ones. Maybe Mr. Kay would trust him enough to tell him.
    The teacher grinned a little and rolled his eyes. “Those are the health and hygiene files, Anderson. You’ll gain access to those when you turn sixteen.”
    Anderson gnawed on his lip. He’d been hoping for some sort of science file or star chart that might help him cut his stay in hyperspace a little shorter—but still. Health and hygiene? Why would that be age-classified information? “How will the shuttle know I’m sixteen?”
    “It scanned your ID when you came aboard. If someone over sixteen wanted to access those files, then I could help instruct you on them, but otherwise….” Mr. Kay shrugged, and Anderson gnawed his lip.
    “Can Kate access them?” he asked, still hoping that maybe the star data had been misfiled. He was absolutely mortified by the look Mr. Kay sent him.
    “No, Anderson. And I can’t access them until you can. Do you need to make me say why?”
    Anderson bit his lip and shook his head. No. No—it had been a while, months, probably, since one of his friends or Mr. Kay had needed to remind him that they weren’t real. He’d stopped thinking about them as programs or holograms. He’d simply begun living his life with certain proscribed rules in order to interact with the people he loved. It was like… like having to put on a wet suit if he ever wanted to be friends with someone from Hydra-Six. Just a requirement, that was all.
    Mr. Kay had smiled kindly then and put his hand on Anderson’s shoulder and given it a squeeze. It was a simple interaction of electrical and air currents, that was all—it was how all touch on the holodeck worked.
    It should not have caused such a startling physical reaction in Anderson, that was for darned sure.
    His stomach tingled, and then his groin began to ache and swell, even as his face flushed. He kept his eyes and his unhappy smile on Mr. Kay’s face and tried very hard not to look to see if his penis was as tight against his shuttle-issue coveralls as it felt.
    Mr. Kay wasn’t fooled for an instant. “Is anything wrong, Anderson? You look very uncomfortable.”
    Anderson swallowed and shook his head. “No, sir. I think I should probably go out and exercise. My biorhythms are probably just out of whack because I’ve been working on this.”
    Mr. Kay smiled kindly and squeezed his shoulder again—Anderson ignored the vicious throb in his penis when this happened—and told him to go play.
    Anderson did.
    The holodeck was planned to segue seamlessly—when Anderson walked out of the classroom, he walked onto the campus, which was designed much as the one on the colony had been. He had made plans, and there were probably unexplored nooks and crannies on the campus that he hadn’t seen yet, but he didn’t go to any of them. Instead, he