Holly watched the two humans. They were arguing again. Arnold Rimmer and Davis Lister were always arguing. He hoped they would stop soon, because it wasn't really very entertaining; they didn't let him join in.

Currently, they were bickering about Lister's robot goldfish. Holly wasn't entirely sure what Rimmer's objection to the fish was, but he didn't care. As the saying went, robot fish were robot fish were robot fish… or something along those lines. The point was, it was daft to argue over something like this.

He decided to distract them.

"Hey dudes. What's happening?"

"Not now, Hol." snapped Lister, his eyes focussed on Rimmer.

"Oh, you don't want to know about the life form then." He hid his image for a moment, knowing they would call him back.

"Life form? Holly?" Lister had turned to face the screen in their room.

"Aliens!" exclaimed Rimmer.

"I dunno what it is." Holly lied. It would be one of the cat people, they very very rarely actually come up onto the main decks, as in once in a few millennia, but once upon a time they had had a city in the lower levels.

"Not aliens?" asked Rimmer, looking slightly disappointed.

"Dunno. I just have something on the heat scanner."

"Can you tell us anything about it, Hol?"

"Just one thing: It's not human."

Lister's face adopted a serious frown. He nodded his head.

"We'll grab a couple of bazookoids and head down."

"We?" Rimmer looked faint. He clearly did not agree with this plan.

"Come on, Rimmer." Lister turned and left, not acknowledging his bunkmate.

"It won't kill me, will it Holly?"

"I couldn't say for sure, Arnold." Rimmer paled even further, sinking onto his bunk.

"I might stay here."

"If you stay here and Lister dies you'll be alone forever." Holly pointed out. "Go help him"

Rimmer nodded; he sucked in a deep breath and looked at the screen. "What if I die?"

"I doubt you will." The cats weren't interested in killing things. Maybe their ancestors had had an interest in mice, but Red Dwarf didn't have anything more challenging than space weevil scuttling around the decks.

Rimmer stood up, straightened his uniform and hurried out to catch up with Lister. Holly shimmied his attention off the screen and watched the two men through the cameras installed throughout the ship.

There were no cameras in the bowels of the ship. He had heat sensors and he used to be able to send the scutters to look around, but he couldn't actually see anything down there.

Holly rather hoped they didn't die in those lower decks, he wouldn't be able to do anything about it.

They emerged with a cat; not the kind of feline that curled up in your lap and dug its claws into your skin to get comfortable, but a cat person. He didn't seem to have evolved much since the last time Holly had seen one. Cats had always been fashion obsessed. They had always been more interested in nice clothes and mating than in doing anything.

It was fortunate they had evolved on Red Dwarf, he supposed. If they had been anywhere else, they would have had to invent things like washing machines and irons for themselves.

The Cat was currently trying to explain that he didn't have a name. Lister was clearly struggling with the idea. He argued that society didn't work without names; that relationships needed names to have any success.

The Cat scoffed at this idea. He replied that cat relationships rarely lasted more than three minutes.

Holly waited until they entered their quarters before making his pixelated face appear on the screen. Rimmer was the only one to acknowledge him, which he did as he trailed into the room with a wan smile.

As Lister continued to question the Cat about everything he could think of, from how they had built their city, to his parents, to their religion, Holly watched Rimmer curl up on his bunk and turn his back to the rest of the room. Holly assumed Rimmer was worrying about being left alone again; when Rimmer's personality had been scanned into the computer at the beginning of his time on Red Dwarf, the man had had a great deal of fear of being entirely alone.

It was a reasonable fear; Rimmer was not what most people considered a pleasant man and now that the human race had mostly kicked the bucket, leaving just two splashes of water on the floor of the universe, then Rimmer didn't have much chance for companionship.

And those odds had just taken a dive now that Lister had found someone else to talk to.

Holly supposed he could make a hologram to keep Rimmer happy if Lister did end up spending all his time with the Cat down in the city. The man did not like to touch people very much anyway, so that wouldn't be a problem for him.

Sadly, Holly didn't have anyone in his databanks that Rimmer might get along with, unless he was going to make a second Arnold Rimmer to go along with the first.

"Jump here, jump back, oh ah! Waahhhh!" sang the Cat.

Holly watched silently. His job was now to look after the two remaining humans. He had to determine whether or not the Cat was actually any good for either of them. He knew he couldn't cut the oxygen supply off for the Cat when he was on a different floor to the others; Lister would miss him.

On the other hand, Rimmer really did not. Rimmer was filled with jealousy as he had lost all of Lister's attention. If he removed the Cat from the equation, then Lister would surely have to return his attention to the first engineer. But Lister would be furious.

It was a right smegger of a problem, and Holly just didn't know what to do.

He didn't worry about it for long though. His attention was pulled rapidly away when he finally paid attention to the alarm that was buzzing at him.

They were about to hit the light barrier; in less than 0.002 seconds, in fact.

That did not make any sense.

Okay, it was true that a vessel the size of Red Dwarf should cruise comfortably at 200, 000 miles an hour; and, yes, it was true that Holly had forgotten to stop accelerating over the past three million years.

It was also true that Red Dwarf was now travelling at 669, 555, 000 miles an hour, which was just 45, 000 miles an hour below the speed of light. Holly programmed the computer to slow down. He wasn't sure this would help, because slowing down when you were going so fast just meant that you weren't speeding up quite as quickly.

The problem was… The light barrier counts as the ultimate speed limit. Nothing can go faster than light. Holly wasn't sure what would happen exactly.

Various theorists had assumed that at the speed of light, your atoms would drift apart and come to rest in different points along your flight path. Other theorists had claimed you would occupy every point in the universe simultaneously. Other theorists had believed your would pass through space into time. Some pessimistic buggers had said you would hit a solid wall of light and be crushed to death.

Still, whatever was going to happen would happen now. If Holly had had actual eye lids, rather than pixelated eyes that were actually linked up to cameras, then he would have squeezed them shut.

Oh dear…