'You once told me that I had a self-destructive streak, but that's not the reason I drink. It's because I don't want to be normal. I like having a messy time. I don't want to cane it every night – just once a fortnight. I want to feel what it's like to be young again.'

Deep space was like a hall of mirrors: everyone they seemed to meet around here was always.. themselves, or some version or combination of themselves, or projected mind reading hallucinations or even physical manifestations turning their psyches inside out. Dave Lister had had enough of having his psyche turned inside out. And it was always man-made, some obscure wave of bio-nano-mechanoid technology but never with the reassuring humanness of humanity. There was a companionship about the quiet burrings and even irritations of the onboard life support gizmos but tiresome intruders were always breaking in.

'That's as maybe sir but today is our only window to go salvaging on that moon-crashed ancient pod we found, while Mr Cat keeps his tenuous olfactory grip on the dwarf's vapour trail.'

Last night was the anniversary of them vanquishing the Polymorph and the Curry Monster. Lister had drunk rather a lot more than the rest of the crew who politely declined to notice. Now Lister could feel fragments and shards of emotions and insights he'd had the previous night but none of it seemed to stack up. Just this feeling that his life just was these hypnotically repeating contingent riffs, everything Red Dwarf, JMC. Everything stamped and logged into this alienating beauracracy that had nothing to do with him, to do with anything. Anything real.

'Just how ancient is this ancient moon-crashed pod?'

'Miss Kochanski seems to think it was piloted by skutters.'

'Skutters? No wonder it crashed.'

Just then Kristine Kochanski walked in in her figure hugging grey cotton ship-issue pyjamas. 'Morning, boys. Is Cat up? We should be in range of that ancient skutter pod by now.'

'What makes you think it was piloted by skutters anyway?'

'It crashed.'

Cat moon-walked into the room and did a twirl. 'Wooow... I feel good I knew I would, express-yourself, shmoa..'

'Cat, how come you never get a hang-over?'

'Are you hung-over?' asked Kristine.

'I'm not hung-over exactly.'

'You mean you're still drunk. Are you sure you should come? Walk in a straight line and touch your nose...'

'Krissy, I appreciate your concern but I think I can handle my alcohol. We didn't defeat the vindaloo beast with yoga, y'know.'

'Yes but you were young then.'

'Ouch.'

'Sorry. Look let's be fair and do things by the the Space Corp book. We all take a breathalyser test and whoever passes goes with Kryten.'

cCO

'Did he really have to plug the breathalyser in there?' asked Krissie.

'It doesn't mean anything, it's just where he plugs things in. Have a triple fried egg chutney chilli sauce sarni. Are you sure? I didn't use my nob as a spatula or something'

'God everyone's so lewd.'

'Sorry. Don't blame Kryten though, he's asexual.'

'Well he seems pretty excited about Cat saying he could smell a human female in stasis on the pod.'

'Yeah, that is weird.'

The vid-screen crackled into life. 'The psi-scan confirms Mr Cat's olfactory intuition sir - there's a stasis pod on board and it seems to contain a sexy hotty...'

'A what?'

'A fitty, sir, a total babe.'

'Kryten stop talking like that it's... squicky. It's like reading some fanfic of your favourite show and one of the characters is acting totally out of character.'

'But it's you and Mr Cat who are out of character, sir, I'm just trying to gee you up. The two of you used to get so excited at the prospect of meeting females. I'm just trying to get a reaction.'

'This is really exciting, but it could be exciting for all different reasons: whoever's in that pod could be our saviour or our friend or Rimmer's brother or any number of possibilities... Why don't you wake them up?'

'It's just a case of finding it, sir, the ship is rather... untidy.'

Lister slumped into the meeting room where Kochanski sat skimming a psych manual.

'Did you know your friend Rimmer had Cotard's?'

'I thought it was just the way he walked.' Kochanski blanked him. 'OK, what's Cotard's?'

'It's a rare mental illness that makes the subject..'

'Walk funny.'

'C'mon Lister, Cat and Kryten are taking ages – I want to have a proper conversation with you. And you only seem to get real when you're talking about Rimmer.'

Lister sighed and plopped into a chair. 'I had another dream about him last night.'

In the dregs of the evening's festivities, Kryten had got into some ridiculous argument with Kochanski about underwear that was of great amusement to Cat but Lister began to tune out and half fall asleep into this heavy, deep-space drunken trance. He was staring at this Red Dwarf logo sewn into a blanket. A logo is supposed to collect things together and make things neat but this logo disturbed him. Just the contingency of it – just this one random mining ship had become the whole of the human world. The WA in the word DWARF cleaved together so tightly in a way the verticality of the RF couldn't afford leaving it slightly stranded and the logo suddenly looked gappy and unbalanced. He'd never noticed this before, but he was sure he'd never be able to unsee it now.

These sort of obsessive observations about minutia were new to Lister who'd always had a rough and ready attitude to things. He excelled at robotics and mechanics because he appreciated the principle of things needing to work just enough, knowing that a perfectionist attitude can make people spend their entire time preparing a revision timetable without leaving enough time to revise for example. Like Rimmer would. And then he was there again, sans-H, in Ace's outfit but his hair short and slightly scruffy, always the same in these dreams.

Rimmer took him on a tour of the diesel decks back on Red Dwarf, inspecting the engine casings and pointing out the various incarnations of the Red Dwarf logo. The original with the mountains, the blocky bold version with the WA kerned too tightly and the serif version but with the same diagonal ellipses, the Ds highlighted in red. Rimmer's attitude made a lot more sense than Lister's when you're stranded in deep space. He mediated the tedium of deep space for Lister, made it human. Without him the air-con and artificial gravity hummed uncaringly. The stars just... were.

It was almost as if since Rimmer left Lister had got the real Rimmer for the first time. He wasn't just a counterpoint to his working-classness and popularity and all the things that kept his fragile ego together. Like a neat logo. But since Rimmer had gone his ego was gappy and badly type-set in a way that you didn't notice at first but once you did notice it you couldn't unnotice. Kochanski had noticed. Rimmer had always been jealous of Lister's easy going heterosexuality, but what need was there for it without Rimmer's jealousy fanning his ego? Kochanski was a no-go and he wasn't feigning disinterest about the stasis-woman for her sake. Now he knew what all that pining for Kochanski was really about. Just then the vid-screen fizzled on.

'Yo, what's happening Krytes?'

'Thank silicon heaven. The communication channels on this ship are so rusty. I've been trying to get through for ages. I can't find Mr Cat, sir.' Lister shot a look at Kochanski which meant 'This was your idea.'

'What about the stasis pod, did you find it?'

'Sorry I think that was a red herring, sir. Before I lost the Cat he led me to a fridge freezer and a cache of perfume.'

'What was in the freezer?'

'White wine and chocolate.'

'What about the psi-scan readings?' asked Kochanski.

'The psi-scan's on the blink. It's deleted all it's applications except for a stop-watch and snakes.'

'How could you lose Cat?' asked Kochanski getting stressed.

'Miss – our Cat isn't like your Cat, he's elusive. And I don't think this is a good time to go laying the finger of blame when it was very much your idea that he should come with me.'

'He's got a point.' Lister said quietly and quickly.

'Look, just get the smegging Cat and come back ok? You've just wasted everyone's time as usual.'

'Ok, i'll bring him back ASAP. No time to haul the wine and chocolate.'

'Listen you rubber muppet. Get the Cat and the chocolate and the wine and get back in the Bug, alright?'

'No wonder Mr Cat thought he could smell a frozen woman in the vicinity.'

Now she was giving him evils. 'You-' she began and then the vidscreen fizzled out again '-smeg-head,' she finished.

cCO

'I'm a journalist.'

'What kind of journalist?'

'Well I started as a music journalist.'

'What kind of music?'

'Punk music, but I hate punk.'

'What do you like?

'Black music.'

'What like black metal and smeg like that?'

'No, you know like black music, soul and funk. I'd have to write about all this white indie music and just want to get back home and dance around to the Isley Brothers or something.'

'I don't really like soul and funk but I never heard of this black/white music thing. I'm into Rasta Billy Skank.'

'Cool, I like reggae too.' Lister always fancied himself as a gifted musician and even if he was from her distant future didn't want to ask what reggae was and appear ignorant about the 21st century music scene.

'How did you end up here?' he asked instead.

'I was fired from the Daily Mail.'

'What the smeg?'

'Sorry I've got stasis lag. They said this would happen.'

'Who are they?'

'The scientists behind the project. They wanted to test out a brand new piece of technology called a stasis field – it sort of freezes time in a discreet area of space allowing humans to travel longer distances and explore the universe. A psychological survey found me to be the ideal person suited to interstellar travel. I have a rare personality disorder which means I'm a true solipsist and just don't need people.'

'Oh, right. Tarra, then,' said Lister suddenly making like he was getting up to go. 'Kkkkhhh, just playing with you,' he said breaking into a wide dimply grin and sitting back down again. But then his face dropped when he noticed Julie Burchill was just staring passively ahead. A chill ran down his spine. The first human he'd met from his own dimension in 3 million years and she seemed to be so... inhuman.

'Have you got any booze?' Okay, maybe they could be friends after all.

'Ah, we polished it all off last night.'

'So you drink then, not a true Rasta. Here we are, the last two human beings alive and I thought we were both Zionists.'

'Zion-what?'

'Never-mind. What do you drink?'

'Lager.' Burchill was starting to like Lister. He had an easy going working class masculinity to him that she hadn't come across on Earth for a while. She had lied about being a solipsist because she had an overactive imagination and this is what the scientists running the project had really deemed to cut her out for space-travel.

'There's a stash of booze back in my pod, there may even be some lager. In the meantime...' She offered Lister a hip-flask of whisky.

Lister reeled from the booze, it being the first decent quality drink he'd had in a few million years. Burchill felt fortified from her stasis lag.

'You're a clever educated type then, answer me this...' Lister began.

'I wouldn't say I was that educated for a journalist actually. I left school after GCSEs...'

'Get out of town! Working class hero, you me both...'

'Why what have you achieved then?'

'Me? Well I've... stop inquisitioning me... smegging journos..' Then suddenly 'I'm the last human being a-... oh.'

'Sorry did I kind of take that away from you?' she said evilly. Lister was attracted to Burchill in a way that was totally different from Kochanksi. She was... special, different somehow. Peacefully separate from the madness of this infinite Mobius strip of alternative selves and time paradoxes. She didn't know what Red Dwarf was. She thought 'smeg' was a type of fridge freezer. This Lister found attractive. He felt stirring in his joy department and wondered if it showed through the flimsy fabric of his boiler suit. He wasn't hung-over exactly.

'What was your question anyway I am very clever and wise if not educated being as you say a working class hero, although again you can speak for myself,' she said with her voice that Lister thought sounded like Wurtzel Gummage experiencing relative time dilation in an amazingly compressed space.

'What's Cotard's?'

'Cotard's is a mental disorder that makes you think that you're dead. Why do you ask?'

'Krissie, the girl who stormed out earlier, said my friend,' he paused, amazed at his use of the word, 'had Cotard's. But the weird thing is... my friend was actually dead.'

'Well you know what they say,' said Burchill, just running with the weirdness of it 'just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.'

Burchill was just riffing but Lister became intense. 'Smeg, you're right you know. I've never seen it that way before exactly that Rimmer was so deeply disturbed because his actually physical situation is a kind of embodiment of an extreme form of mental illness.'

'But that's true of you too right? This whole last human shtick. It's like you're a solipsist but you're right, no-one else does exist. You spend all your time talking to computers and holograms and vending machines... Wait what about Krissie? I know she's your ex but she's still human right?'

'Well, when I said she's my ex it's actually a bit more complex than that. She's from another dimension... so she's the last human in her dimension and that's where she's trying to get back to, along with a hologrammatic version of me with a reconstructed heart, a limited edition gold Kryten and a version of Cat who apparently doesn't get lost so easily.'

'I don't have a clue what you're fucking talking about.'

'Talking to you... I feel like I'm back on Earth again... I feel like I don't know what I'm talking about either...'

'The thing I find most unbelievable is that your friend is called 'Rimmer'.'

'I know that is pretty funny,' he said with a smirk.

'Were you in love with Rimmer?' she asked suddenly.

'In love? I'm not gay!' Burchill thought his protestation sweet. Again despite being from the future, Lister reminded Burchill of a dying breed of heteronormative working class blokes that she missed. Maybe he clung onto all this Northern slobby identity all the more because of the extremity of his situation. It reminded Burchill of a British TV sci-fi sit-com from her own era: the whole thing was a kind of satire of Thatcherism, set in the far future where your kitchen appliances get into an argument with you like a Philip K DIck book, but people are still obsessed with the minutiae of really specific, British class war – to sort of foreground how we're so not a classless society.

'I never said you were gay. I'm not gay and I had a relationship with a woman.' This seemed to flummox Lister a little.

'Yeah, but you're a woman, women are all a bit... you know...' Burchill was amazed. Lister's sexual politics were like something from the 80's. Maybe that's what he meant by the Lister with the reconstructed heart. That his girlfriend from another dimension was in love with some metrosexual Lister and he was in love with this dead mentally ill guy who'd left to be some kind of pandimensional superhero. Or that's what she surmised. She was like Kryten, she'd gone into journalism mode. Maybe she'd slipped into some alternative dimension where the PC liberal intelligentsia she goaded and loathed and got dough from hadn't taken over.

cCO

Lister and Rimmer were embracing and staring into one another's eyes. Lister slowly unbuttoned Rimmer's tunic and as he did so revealed empty space inside. Horrified, he found himself looking up into Rimmer's neck and just as he realised that it was also empty it collapsed like putty, the metallic fabric of his uniform crumpled in on itself and his face melted over the green shiny heap. A stunned Lister reached down and pinched the bridge of Rimmer's H. As he lifted it, Rimmer's face stringily followed it before snapping back to the pile on the ground like he was plucking an olive reluctant to separate itself from mozzarella pizza. 'So H means Hollow... Hollowgram,' he said and placed the H firmly on his forehead.

Suddenly the image changed into the chiselled bad looks of Kryten's face. 'Kryten?' She abandoned the dream recorder where she'd been guiltily watching Lister's dreams again and ran into the cockpit.

'It's all right Kryten, I'll do the talking for once,' said Cat 'Hello Humans, you're all together at last. What is it with you humans? Nothing exists except humans. You think you're mad because your cat and your toaster have got lives of their own and are talking to you just like people. But you're not mad – you're stupid, just like it says in the Cat bible. We are people, Cat lives matter. You ever heard of FGM? Feline Genital Mutilation, went on for centuries. You know I'm better at piloting than any of you but how come I've internalised your own set of standards so we're always on a human agenda. Well I've had enough. We fixed the ship and we're going to find my people. The arc of Cats, the chosen, persecuted, stylish people I belong to...'

'Oh my God,' said Burchill. 'Let me come with you, let me share in your pain and persecution and strangeness and superiority.' She was putting her spacesuit on as she spoke and ran for the air-lock.

The communication channel fizzed and crackled out leaving Lister and Kochanski staring at each other.

'They're dumping us?'

'Smeg. First Rimmer. Now Cat and Kryten have abandoned me. You abandoned me – then you got filed in the wrong dimension and you're trying to abandon me again. I'll even abandon myself one day. It's my destiny. Otherwise I wouldn't be here.'

Kochanski programmed the bug to track the pod. 'This is my fault. I'm being a Rimmer. Sticking to rules that just can't work in the extremities of the situation we're in. You can't afford to be tight in a situation like this, you have to stay loose to stay together.'

'Let's stop beating ourselves up. Ok, let's beat ourselves up a little. I don't think enough about this human privilege thing. I always thought I was a cool guy who treated everyone equally and always has time for people but... am I just being a smugly superior human all the time who just doesn't get it? I've turned into what I always hated – a cryptofascist git. You know, when I was back in Liverpool when I was younger, I used to get so wound up about social injustice. I had a band, I had... slogans. But you get burnt out, you start coming up with some personal dream.'

'Fiji.'

'Fiji. I wanted to run away to Fiji with my Kochanski. And where did it lead? Desperate to get away from any responsibility I ended up bringing an entire people into existence – I am their God.'

'It's a difficult thing to discuss isn't it? My Cat and I used to have weekly consciousness raising sessions to try and understand the whole human-cat problem. We made a lot of ground but sometimes when you try a little too hard to understand someone different than you, you can end up treading on their toes instead of walking in their shoes.'

'I thought our Cat was happy, kind of in his own world I guess. Burchill, the journalist, told me something interesting. She said she was selected for deep space travel because she's so solipsistic. Look at us all – I mean me and Rimmer, Kryten and Cat, we're all kind of solipsistic in a way. Kryten was on his own on a crashed space-ship when we found him, living out a peaceful routine of domestic duties and his favourite soap opera but no-one there, no one to actually serve. It's like deep space has selected us.'

'OK that's bullsmeg, you broke Kryten's programming, you helped Rimmer become a hero. You must have known it would make you lonely, but you helped him fake his own death and staged his own funeral so he could become his destiny.'

'How did you know that?' Kochanski blushed when she realised hacking Lister's dream recorder account meant she had to stay aware of what she was supposed to know about Lister. 'Jeez I was even drunker than I thought last night.'

'You're always reaching out to people and trying to help... '

'But what about Cat, I didn't encourage him to find his destiny.'

'Maybe you did. Maybe he's found it.'

Lister was shocked. Everyone was flying the nest. What was he going to do? Everybody's left, Dave. He didn't even have Holly, he missed Holly. He cried into his leather fingerless gloves. For the first time, Lister reminded her of her Lister. She instinctively moved to comfort him when she noticed a blip on the scanner. It was a spacebike. Kryten and Cat were returning to the bug on a crude spacebike. The airlock hissed open...

'Cat, you came back! What happened?'

'I just had to get away from that Burchill woman. She's crazy. She's obsessed with the plight of us Cat's...'

'But I thought you were too?'

'I was...'

'We found some early prototypes of positive viruses in the pod,' explained Kryten. 'One had been sequenced out of of Burchill's DNA – the Opinion Virus. It can turn the mellowest soul into a raging polemicist, happy to turn the world on its head at the cost of anything in the way. People are generally more susceptible to it in their youth.'

'It wore off,' said Cat. 'But the monkey girl it never wears off of, she thinks she's a Cat, she's obsessed with Cat culture, she's out there now still trying to find the arc!'

cCO

[the 1st paragraph of the first chapter was said by Julie Burchill when she was interviewed by Toby Young for the Spectator]