XXI. Becoming Ace
They made their way to the cargo bay in silence, Lister gnawing on one of his locks in thought while Rimmer tried to figure out how to go on. He needed to talk to his alter ego as soon as possible, but it would have looked strange if he'd hung around until the medical was finished. There was, after all, no reason why he would spend any further thought on his alter ego, now that he was perfectly able to continue as Ace – or at least pretending to be.
The Wildfire looked even better than when they had last seen her as they had confronted the Simulant, or maybe that was just because Rimmer's vision was back to normal. She had not been able to reattach the drivepots automatically, of course, but Lister could probably handle that. Otherwise, the self-repair programme had obviously been working on full tilt, nanobots welding tears together, restoring burnt out circuitry and fixing scrapes in the paintjob. When they climbed inside, the cockpit looked almost normal again. The front window was still reconstructing, but the broken screens had been fixed, the debris was gone and, perhaps most importantly, front and rear were firmly connected once more.
Rimmer ran his hand over the pilot chair without sitting down. He could feel the Wildfire's internal aversion of which the AI probably wasn't even aware. It was a necessary subroutine, signifying that the flame had been passed on to a new Ace. Signalling the fact that he was dying.
"So, ye're leavin' again?"
Rimmer looked at Lister, who was standing in the door and obviously feeling even more uncomfortable than he did, by the look on the Scouser's face. "Yes," he answered, in his own voice. And technically, he was. If he was honest, he didn't buy for one second that Lister actually needed him. That smeg he had said about Rimmer keeping him sane and succeeding spectacularly, making him First Officer during his "funeral" – as if Lister of all people had the right to make him an officer! – and about missing him had to have been made up, surely. There really was no way Lister actually had meant that. No, Rimmer had believed such stuff of him once, and he was not going to make that mistake again. Lister had the Cat and Kryten. He would be all right without him. "Look, it's going to be alright, Listy. I survived for ten years, I'll just get back to it."
"D'ye think ye'll come back?"
"Probably not."
Lister nodded, plucking at a loose strand on his jacket.
"It's part of who Ace is, really. We're supposed to go always forward. It's quite a coincidence that two of us stumbled back into this dimension after the original Ace."
"'s alright. Ye don't've t' explain. I know ye're lovin' it, bein' the hero. Ye've changed, man. It suits ye."
Yes, he had become an even more damaged and sad pile of smeg. "Technically, Lister, 'don't' and 'have' don't contract."
"Smeg off, Rimmer!"
Rimmer allowed himself a soft smile as he met Lister's gaze, and the Liverpudlian grinned. "Ye know what? We'll give ye a proper farewell this time. It didn't feel appropriate last time, ye know, what with the funeral, but we'll make it up with a party on the officer's deck. We'll even have proper booze now that we're back on the Dwarf. And Kryten's goin' to whip up a meal. Send ye off in style."
...
Rimmer had gone to the observation dome after Kryten had fixed up his arm. He needed to talk to his alter ego, and he was bound to show up there soon enough. He'd thought that the hologram had wanted the others to believe that the bullet had killed him and allow himself to take over as Ace, but now the smegger had gone and had the bullet removed, pretending everything would be fine. And even the Wildfire was repairing. It would be just typical of Rimmer's luck if Ace decided he wanted to jump and recruit his replacement in another dimension, just so Lister wouldn't have to watch him die. Why would he care, anyway?
Well, Rimmer wasn't going to let him. He was scared of becoming Ace, yes, but he was so scared that it didn't even register anymore. And he had really enjoyed being the hero. Getting rid of those simulants, and three of them at that, single-handedly? Way to go, Arnie J.! Besides, the Wildfire's computer was breath-taking. Sure, she was just a bunch of pixels and algorithms, but, by God, what pixels! Besides, Rimmer couldn't remember anyone treating him with such tenderness and affection before. And then there was the fact that even if he died, he would be brought back as a hologram, and this was not like being an ephemeral ghost like the holograms of the JMC. This was a real body – composed of light, fair enough, but from what he'd heard, basically indestructible and technically, he could live forever. Traversing the universe and saving damsels, seeing things, real battles, real successes. No way would he just let that opportunity slip through his fingers now that he'd had a glimpse of what it was like.
When the hologram found him, Rimmer almost jumped out of his skin. He was facing an exact mirror image of himself, down to the shining boots and the old uniform. He'd known the hologram was himself, of course, but Ace's costume and the plethora of hologrammatic uniforms had always set him apart, even without the characteristic H. Not now, though. "Are you ready?", his alter ego asked.
"Ready?"
"To become Ace. The Wildfire will be repaired in a couple of days, but we should make the changeover now, give you a couple of days to get used to the character and confuse the others into thinking you're me. You never know what the Cat can actually smell."
Rimmer was silent for a moment, looking out to the stars. He knew that the hologram was dying, properly and with no way back, but somehow his alter ego seemed more relaxed than he had ever seen him.
"You haven't changed your mind, have you?", the hologram asked.
"No. I thought you had when you let Kryten remove the bullet."
The other looked slightly uncomfortable. "Yes, let's just drop that, shall we? You should come to the Wildfire, get changed and pick the things you would like to take with you. There isn't much space, but you're welcome to any of my stuff. It's not like I'll be needing it."
"I'll take the guns."
"I thought you might."
...
And so they swapped places. The hologrammatic Rimmer had the Wildfire load his lightbee with his alter ego's memories just as she had done with those of the previous Aces, and she made her first backup copy of the new Ace before feeding him as much information as an organic brain could take. After swapping costumes, the deception was perfect.
They went to Ace's send-off party side by side, and no one seemed to notice. With enough physical distance, it was impossible to tell a hard light hologram from a living being, and if the Cat's olfactory senses picked up anything strange, it was drowned out by the confusion he was obviously still feeling about Rimmer being Ace and vice-versa.
It was a fantastic party. Lister had pulled all punches as he had once for Kryten. Dinner was incredible, and after a bit of drink, the music began to sound not entirely bad. Both Rimmers got drunk, but they held back, pretending to be more out of it than they actually were. The hologrammatic body reacted to alcohol differently anyway, and the human Rimmer hadn't had anything to drink since they had poisoned themselves with hooch on Floor 13, so he was extra careful. There was no way they could give up the game, not when it was going so well.
Between them, they could still see that they were different. Nano-Rimmer could be more companionable with Lister because he was more in the habit, having lodged with the last human only recently while holo-Rimmer had been away – besides, no one thought it strange that 'Ace' was a bit more chummy with 'Skipper'. However, the better jokes were between holo-Rimmer and Lister. They had played off each other for what seemed like half a lifetime (and probably was), and in absence of others to prank, their banter had really been all they had had, especially considering the fact that half the time they couldn't even prank each other because Rimmer had been incorporeal. Still, in the general drunken confusion, no one noticed, and no one knew that it was holo-Rimmer who passed out sleeping on the table in his and Lister's quarters because the Cat had occupied his bunk – again – and nano-Rimmer who stumbled down to the bay to sleep inside the Wildfire.
They slept in on the next day. Ace wasn't in any rush, nor were they facing a deadline or a potentially life-threatening situation, other than perhaps a hangover. Lister, as always, recovered rather quickly, and started a jigsaw on the table while the Cat went to clear himself up, Kryten went to clear up the officer's lounge and Rimmer dozed on the bottom bunk. Hologrammatic hangovers were just as weird as being hologrammatically drunk – the feelings were all the same, but some aspects of his thought process remained perfectly clear because they were central to the functioning of a hologram. He could never blitz out completely, and if he needed to, he could get rid of the illusion of being drunk in a second, but he didn't really care to. This was probably the last time he got drunk, he might as well go through all the motions, including the blurry vision, slurred speech, sensitivity to light and noise, queasy feeling and headache. Besides, he was pretending to be alive, anyway.
Nano-Rimmer hadn't shown yet, but the booze had probably hit him a bit harder than his alter ego. He deserved to have a lie in – there wouldn't be much room for things like that once he got really started on dimension jumping.
"Rimmer?"
"Hm?"
"Did ye want t'become Ace?"
"You're kidding, right?"
"Nah, man."
"Why would I want to become a git in a tinfoil suit and get myself shot?"
"Oh, I don't know. I thought ye were enjoying flying an' gettin' rid of those simulants."
"Well, it's not going to happen, is it?"
"Come on, ye're not curious?"
Rimmer sighed, breathing out slowly. This felt natural. Not prancing around the universe pretending to be someone he wasn't. "Not one bit, Lister."
Lister was grinning towards the ceiling. "So ye'd rather be stuck with me, yeah?"
"Smeg off."
...
Rimmer woke up with the fuzzy feeling of alcohol buzzing in his veins and a slight headache pulsing behind his eyes, and for a moment, he had no idea where he was. Then, with a contend sigh, he relaxed back onto the Wildfire's mattress. It was just perfect. Rimmer had always liked the ship issue mattresses of Red Dwarf; they were just as they should be – orderly, simple and militarily hard. But the Wildfire's bed felt as though it had been made just for him, which it probably had, or at least a previous Ace had adapted it that way. Rimmer had no desire to sleep somewhere else ever again.
"Susan?"
"Good morning, Ace."
Oh, that felt glorious. Finally, finally someone referred to him with his chosen nickname and did not mean it as mockery. "You do have a bathroom, don't you?"
"Of course, Ace. And I can also provide breakfast." With that, she disappeared, and soft tunes of Reggie Wilson drifted through the speakers.
Rimmer stretched, enjoying the absence of Lister's snoring or creaking bedsprings, or the constant rumbling of engines that had been so deafeningly loud on Floor 13. "Marvellous."
The Wildfire was ready to fly within a week. No one had expected it to go quite that fast, and Rimmer-to-become-Ace was feeling increasingly nervous, but he was trying not to let it show. On the one hand, he couldn't, because that would give away the whole pretence, because why should he be nervous after spending ten years as Ace, and on the other hand, there was no way he would let the other Rimmer see. He had always been competitive, and most of all when it came to competing with himself. It didn't matter if he started to have doubts whether he could do this, there was no smegging way he would crawl to his alter ego and admit that he wanted to chicken out especially since he was enjoying having the Wildfire to himself. No obnoxious brothers, no annoying crewmates, no Lister to breathe down his neck. Just a drop-dead-gorgeous computer and the open sky ahead. It was Heaven.
The two Rimmers took the Wildfire on a spin to test her out when she claimed to be ready. Rimmer felt immediately at home with the controls, even though they were quite demanding and put a strain on his recently broken arm. There wasn't much he had to worry about, but it was the first time he was flying his own spaceship, or any spaceship, and the hologram had insisted on showing him the ropes. He had a point, really; from what Rimmer had gathered from the stories the Wildfire had told him, he could run into a situation where he might need to fly the ship immediately after his first jump. The only way they could do this, of course, was to pretend that 'Ace' wanted to try the Wildfire out to make sure she was really safe to fly and Rimmer coming along grudgingly because 'Ace' insisted and 'he' had, after all, admitted he liked flying with Lister present just a few days ago. Rimmer had to hand it to his hologrammatic counterpart – he was an excellent actor.
"It's a skill you acquire on the field," the hologram had said when Rimmer had quizzed him on it, and they had left it at that. They didn't really talk much, anymore. The hologram showed Rimmer what he needed to know, but mostly he just avoided him, because Rimmer was doing his best to be Ace, and it was getting visibly on the former Ace's pecks – which was ironic, in a way, but neither Rimmer cared to examine that issue too closely. The other members of the Red Dwarf posse didn't seem to notice that anything strange was going on, and so they kept mostly apart.
The hologram remained very quiet during their test run, but Rimmer was enjoying himself immensely. He had the suspicion that being a passenger in a one man vessel wasn't exactly the most comfortable situation to be in, and perhaps the fact that he was dying was getting to his alter ego. Rimmer couldn't have cared less as he steered back into the Red Dwarf bay and managed a picture perfect landing.
Lister was waiting for them. "Well?"
"All good to go, Skipper!"
If Lister's smile was a bit shaky and the other Rimmer shouldered past them without so much as a glance or a word, no one said anything about it. And on the next day, Rimmer left.