XIV. The Drawbacks of being a Hologram

Rimmer was terrified. He was also in pain, because something was inhibiting his lightbee, and it was constantly struggling to reassert his body and failing, which had pretty much the same effect as constant stress had in humans. In his current condition, his T-count was spiking, his head pounded and his ears buzzed with the broken hyperlink that would have been his only support in this situation but which did not seem to be able to penetrate the dampening field surrounding a Simulant ship.

It was only a small combat vessel, but that didn't make the situation any less precarious. Combat vessels usually held the most vicious Simulants, because they were the first to be sent into battle. And Simulants certainly delighted in causing pain.

For a split second, he had allowed himself to believe that the transmat beam had come from Red Dwarf. Of course he wasn't such a fool as to hang on to that belief. He'd found himself in another chamber, and this time, there was no question of its purpose. The walls were dark and grim and splattered. And Rimmer didn't take it for a good sign that he was shackled to the wall, even though it meant that he was back to hard light. The fact alone that the Simulants knew that he was a hologram was terrifying – there had been a reason why all Aces had kept that secret so carefully. Because any hard light hologram could be converted to soft light, and as soft light, he could be crushed as easily as any bug. And though he was harder to damage as a hard light hologram, he also could be made to endure quite unimaginable measures of pain without any actual damage. Rimmer had often wondered who had come up with that system since he had become Ace. It seemed singularly stupid to his mind. And he knew that this was not the first time Ace had been in the hands of Simulants, and had been in a room such as this. Susan had taken care to inform him of important things such as this.

The sad thing was it wasn't the first time Rimmer was in this position either. Granted, it hadn't been the simulants but his clones, but it still had been an insanely painful year. And after that, after nothing had actually physically damaged him, they had just locked him away. Locked him away and forgotten about him.

In theory, there was nothing stopping the Simulants from doing the same. They would probably be doing their race a favour if everything the Wildfire had told him was true, and even he had destroyed a few Simulant ships during his career – not in this dimension, obviously. But Rimmer had the feeling that the Simulants wanted to know about the dimension drive and what had become of it. And they knew that the most efficient method of getting information out of someone was to use his own mind against him. Rimmer shivered.

There were some aspects to being a hologram that only struck you after months or even years. Some, Rimmer was sure, had only appeared when he had started to use the lightbee constantly instead of allowing Holly to host him – which had probably been the best decision he had ever made, considering that not a long time after that, they had lost Red Dwarf and he would have been stranded on Starbug if it hadn't been for the light bee. At any rate, some things struck him as more useful than others. For example, he found it slightly disturbing that, when he was soft light, the only actual sensation he felt was whatever touched the surface of the lightbee. Even barriers his programme could recognise, such as floors and walls and certain bits of furniture didn't actually generate any feeling when he touched them or sat on them, because the edges of his body were made of nothing but light. That had changed when he had become hard light, because suddenly the simulated body in and of itself could sense, but it wasn't like the human senses he now barely remembered. Every sensory input had to go through his lightbee, and the mechanical device picked up things a human never would, such as the exact temperature, or the composition of the air or the spectrum of light. It also picked up the passage of time to the precise second, and so Rimmer knew that he had been standing against the wall now for three hours, fourteen minutes and thirty, thirty one, thirty two… seconds. The room had eighteen degrees Celsius, which wasn't exactly cold, but not quite comfortable, either. The air was Earth standard, and the light source in the ceiling had a tendency towards too much red.

Not that any of it mattered, except for the fact that he was growing tired, and his panicked mind had worn itself out. Three hours, fifteen minutes.

Five hours, forty five minutes. Rimmer jerked out of a kind of trance he had probably induced as he tried to while away the monotony by counting seconds – which was not a good sign, because that was precisely what he had done on the clone world, only then he had counted the rotations of a pair of Baoding Balls. His hard light body might be able to withstand more than a human body would, but it was still governed by his mind, and with only a broken, headache-inducing hyperlink, he was beyond exhausted, his legs shaking as he fought to keep himself upright because there really was no choice. Maybe the trance hadn't been so bad.

Rimmer tried to call out for the Wildfire again, but all he got for his trouble was a rising volume of the white noise and a piercing ache somewhere behind his eyes. Still, now that he had snapped out of it, he couldn't easily go back into the trance. His lightbee was running on battery now, which was worrisome. When he'd first heard that the battery life of the lightbee was something around two days when fully charged, he'd thought he would never exhaust that power. That had been the days, of course, when he hardly ever even left Red Dwarf. And when Kryten had gotten them stranded in the backwards universe, he had panicked for a moment, until he remembered that all the lightbee needed to recharge was solar energy – plenty of that, even on backwards Earth. And so, as long as he stayed connected to a mainframe or outside in the light of a sun, he was perfectly fine. Things got more difficult when he was inside, in deep space, and alone. Like he was right now. Oh, and yes, another lovely advantage of being a hologram: he could tell exactly when his battery was going to run out, which was in five hours and two minutes, because the broken hyperlink and the fact that hard light was forced upon him, even though the lightbee tried to conserve energy because of the corrosion that was progressing through its systems anyway, were draining insane amounts of power. And he wasn't even moving.

Rimmer figured it might be a better idea to start counting down – because if the Simulants didn't show up soon, he would be nothing more than a drained and battered lightbee on the floor of their prison cell.

Half an hour. Rimmer wondered vaguely what had become of Lister, or any of the others. His alter ego obviously hadn't come up with a plan yet, which wasn't entirely a surprise. After all, he himself had done the best to convince him that Simulants were dangerous to meddle with. Frankly, if the Wildfire had been capable of flight, he would have expected her to take him and run. She might not like it, but her directive to help Ace and to keep the legacy going was certainly stronger than any personal attachment she might have formed to him – and, regarding that, she really needed someone to check her circuitry, because forming an attachment to Arnold J. Rimmer was certainly the first sign of computer senility. After all, Holly was the prime example.

Then again, the Wildfire was grounded, and she had obviously not yet come up with a way to penetrate the Simulants' dampening field to reassert the hyperlink and give him a boost of power or the moral support he would have welcomed just as much.

Or maybe they had just decided to abandon him if it meant getting away from the Simulants, but Rimmer didn't particularly care to entertain that idea. They had come for him on the psi-moon, which had been a pleasant surprise, though he had never been certain whether they had come because of him or just so they could get off the planet, because he frankly had not believed a word they had said afterwards. Still, these were Simulants, and the best advice really was to run and hide. If he hadn't had an obligation as Ace, he would certainly never have started facing down the Simulants in the first place. He wondered, not for the first time, how much the Simulants actually knew.

He had discovered that Simulants or their equivalent in several dimensions had begun experimenting with dimensionally transcendental technology, though he was fairly certain that none of them had developed anything as sophisticated as the Wildfire. Still, if humans could do it, so could they, and his recent experience had certainly shown what damage they could do, even if the weapon had essentially hitched a piggy-back ride on the Wildfire's journey through dimensions. Maybe they had come far enough to make conversation across dimensions possible, or maybe they had been able to send individuals. How else would Ace be famous – or infamous, depending on your perspective – in so many dimensions when all he ever did was travel forward?

Twenty minutes. Rimmer really, really didn't want to die, even though he was at the moment, anyway. He had always supposed it would be inevitable if he became Ace, because no one could live like that and survive for very long – not even the original Ace, quite evidently. But he had somehow always entertained the notion that he would die a hero's death. Anything bettered a radiation leak that had been his own fault. And even when he had realised that he was stranded on Red Dwarf he had felt a kind of peace with the idea that he would die in his home dimension with the only people he really knew and the only people who knew him, better than he sometimes wanted them to. He really didn't want to blip out in twenty minutes and be crushed under the boot of a Simulant like some annoying worm.

"Ace Rimmer."

Rimmer was startled out of his musings, the movement jarring painfully at his arms which had been blessedly numb before and renewing the tremors in his legs. It took a whole five minutes of his power. He still forced himself upright.

The Simulants – or rather, a Simulant, had finally decided to graze him with his presence, and when Rimmer looked into the face dotted with bits and pieces of machinery, he nearly jumped out of his simulated skin. It was the spitting image of the face he had seen just before he had destroyed the ship that had gotten him into this mess in the first place – the Simulant he had once spared and who had therefore killed ten trillion people.