As those of you who have seen the feature-length episode 'Back to Earth' would be aware, the situation at the end of Series VIII and the beginning of 'Back to Earth' are dramatically different. All we know is that the new episodes are set 'Nine Years Later'. So what's happened in that time in between?
This fic is set a year before 'Back to Earth' and therefore contains spoilers for those episodes.
This is a bit of a big project for me, but I've finally bowed to demand (you lot wore me down!)
Dedicated to Psychobikerjunkiewhore, Raging-Rambo-2006, BitterKnitter, Kedi, Max Evelyn, and all of the other lovely people who have given me such wonderful reviews over the years. You guys rock.
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In this farewell,
There's no blood,
There's no alibi.
- Linkin Park, What I've Done
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Lister had been thinking that things were just about getting back to normal on Red Dwarf.
Well, as normal as you can get when you're stuck on a ship five miles long and three miles wide, you're three million years into deep space, and the only people you have for company are a nanobotically-resurrected version of your dead bunkmate, a sanitation mechanoid that's missing his sanity chip, a creature who'd evolved from the ship's cat, and a once all-knowing computer who now had trouble counting to ten.
The resurrected crew had deserted Red Dwarf when the virus had attacked eight years earlier, leaving the Dwarfers alone with the remaining one-hundred inmates of the Tank; those too sick, too deranged, or too dangerous to be saved. Within hours of the crew abandoning ship, the metal-corroding virus had spread from Talia's escape pod in the landing bay to the water tank above Floor 13. The resulting flood had drowned them all before the others had a chance to bring the antidote back from the mirror universe.
The Remembrance Garden had been constructed in one of the observation pods on Red Dwarf's port side to remember those that they'd lost, more out of a continuing sense of human dignity and respect that still remained three million years after the human race became extinct.
And then she'd died.
And Lister's world had fallen apart.
Kryten had seen it all. Kochanski had been heading out on a space walk to continue their three-month project to repair the solar panels. The airlock had de-pressurised ninety seconds early and the doors opened, dragging her helplessly into deep space.
They'd never found the body.
The picture of her pinball smile had been added to the others in the garden, where Lister now sat alone. The orchids he'd picked from the ship's botanical gardens lay silently by her photograph.
"Hey you," he smiled sadly to her beaming smile.
The hum of the ship's engine echoed through the glass dome, the eternal starlight twinkling.
In the eighteen months since her death, Lister had visited the grave once a week, or whenever the grief got a bit too much in the empty loneliness of deep space. He carefully wiped off an invisible layer of dust from the glass frame and sighed, unable to think of what to say.
"Still stuck out here," he laughed quietly, devoid of mirth. He frowned to mask the unshed tears that quivered in his eyes as he wiped her frame once more. "Still miss you."
Rimmer's photograph sat nestled amongst the others. Still believing the original Rimmer to be dead after being killed by the knight in the AR machine, Kryten had added his image to the collection of faces at the gravestone. At first, Lister had found this unsettling. After all, he knew that his Rimmer had left to become Ace long ago, even before Kris had joined them.
But as the weeks turned into months, and the months turned into years, Lister's distant hope that Rimmer would somehow make it back to them had spluttered and died. It had been almost ten years since he'd left to become Ace and Lister had a horrible feeling that something had happened to him. He'd found recently that rather than just remembering and missing him, he'd begun to grieve for him.
Lister picked up his photograph and sighed. The man had been the living epitome of annoying. His obsession with rank, precision and order that refused to back down even in a new world devoid of bureaucracy had baffled Lister for many years. Yet it was only when Rimmer had gone that he'd realised how much he missed it.
The door whistled behind him, sliding open with a distant hiss. Lister didn't even need to turn around to see who it was. The painfully familiar silhouette reflected hazily in the buffed gravestone, hovering over the words – 'To those we've lost'. The original Rimmer may be gone but his image still remained.
"Lister?"
Lister's shoulders tensed visibly. Even the tone of his voice haunted him.
"Not now man, ok?"
Still standing in the light of the doorway, Rimmer watched as Lister bowed his head, rubbing his face with his sleeve surreptitiously. He could almost pick out the shimmering of the odd silver hair that tangled in with his dark curls. Time had certainly moved swiftly on. The pair were now pushing forty.
His look of concern slowly retreated into contempt when he noticed whose picture Lister was holding. Rimmer caught a glimpse of his own face, staring back at him unseeing. He found it creepy seeing his picture next to a gravestone. But it was a deeper, more saddening feeling that after all these years of being stuck in deep space together, Lister still couldn't let go of his supposed 'original' self and turn to see him instead.
"Lister, it's important," he pressed. "Holly says –"
"Rimmer," Lister snapped back, "I said 'not now'."
Rimmer's nostrils flared. He hadn't even bothered to look at him. Wordlessly, he spun on his heels and left the garden, the doors hissing shut behind him.
Holly's cameras tracked him as he stormed down the corridor towards the Express Lift. As Rimmer stabbed the call button a little too forcefully, Holly projected himself onto the screen by the lift doors.
"Arnold, did you tell Dave about the - ?"
Rimmer sighed angrily as his forehead rested against the cool metal of the lift's doorway. He pressed the button once again.
"Holly, I don't have an answer-machine service as well as acting as your personal bloody messenger."
Holly sighed. His signal couldn't reach the Remembrance Garden so he'd asked Rimmer to go and fetch Lister. Clearly a big mistake. Judging by Rimmer's foul mood, they'd probably bickered. Again.
"I'll pop up to explain the situation to Kryten, that'll take three minutes. Then I'll round up Cat, that'll take two minutes. And then I'll grab Dave, that'll take five minutes. I'd calculate that we should all rendezvous in the Drive Room in –" Holly's eyes glazed over for a moment. "Fourteen minutes?"
Rimmer's finger stabbed repeatedly at the call button. If he spent any more time conversing with a computer senile mainframe who couldn't count correctly, he'd hurl himself out of a smegging airlock.
The lift arrived and Rimmer strode in, his face like thunder. He pressed for the Cargo Bay.
"Erm, Arnold. The Drive Room is up from this level - "
"I'm not going, Holly," he shot back. "Clearly I'm surplus to requirement on this bloody ship." Rimmer pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. "I need to go and clear my head for a while," he mumbled, as the lift doors closed.
Holly performed an internal sweep of Red Dwarf and located the mechanoid in Lister's sleeping quarters. His image dissolved from the corridor and reappeared in place of the mirror.
"Kryten, mate – "
"Ah, Holly," Kryten beamed happily as he carefully ironed some crisp, pristine sheets. "Perfect timing." He patted two piles of bedding sheets, one striped, one spotted. "It's time for Mr Lister's annual bedding change, and I'd appreciate some input as to the pattern selection."
"Kryten, there's something a little more pressing than your – " he blinked. "Well, pressing. I'm afraid we might have a problem."
Kryten's head jerked up to face the screen, panic etched on his plastic features.
"Oh my goodness! We're out of fabric softener, aren't we?"
"No, Kryten, our stocks of fabric conditioner are perfectly fine." Holly sighed. At this rate, he wouldn't be able to stick to his carefully calculated timetable.
"Windolene?"
"What? No, Kryten, we're fine for Windolene."
"Shake n' Vac?"
"Smegging hell, yes, we're fine for – " Holly paused. "Actually, hang on. No, I think we're down to our last one actually." He shook his disembodied head as if to free himself from the strange, cyclic conversation that sounded like something out of the Twilight Zone. "No, it's something more important than that. Remember the crew's ships that were following us?"
Kryten knew all too well. Although his Guilt Chip almost melted initially, the others had found it hilarious to leave the entire crew trailing Red Dwarf in a strange formation of Starbugs and Blue Midgets, especially in revenge for having been imprisoned in the Tank for over a year. Mr Rimmer had claimed that he could 'see no ships', so Kryten eventually reasoned that his eyes must be faulty. Over the last eight years, the odd ship had dropped off the radar but the majority of them still persisted.
"What's wrong?"
"What's wrong," Holly explained evenly, "is that none of them are out there anymore. They've gone."