Disclaimer, as before: Red Dwarf, its characters and related insignia, and the whole idea of holoviruses in the first place, belong not to me but to Rob Grant, Doug Naylor, and whoever else is involved. There are a bunch of people with the name Elise Riley, but I don't think they're going to sue me. They'd be deeply disappointed if they tried.
Full Circle 2
"What do you mean, it was made on Red Dwarf?" Lister asked. "Did they have some kind of special holovirus laboratory that no one knew about?"
"No," Holly told him. "Looks like it was an accident." She paused, her pixelized image flickering a bit as her concentration shifted from them to her databanks and back. "It was originally designed as an advanced computer program for compressing data, meant to be used to help transmit larger amounts of information with less time lag, which was one of the biggest problems with interstellar communication."
"What happened?" Lister perched on the edge of a spare couch and rummaged for a cigarette.
"Apparently a corrupted string of code from another program got into it somehow—what they used to call a "worm" in the olden days. The compression program allowed the worm to reproduce itself much faster and spread to more and more computer systems." Holly shuddered. Now that the memory had been pulled up from long-term storage, she could vaguely remember what it had been like; a tiny hot thread of pain burrowing through her vast intellect, eating, growing, dividing, spreading. "They got rid of it by wiping a bunch of drives and tossing all the bits of it out into space, aboard the T-95 we encountered. According to my readings, it's....mutated. It's borderline sentient now."
"Oh, smegging wonderful," said Rimmer morosely, and coughed. "I should've known. A sentient virus."
"How do we get rid of it?" Lister asked, wreathed in smoke, looking positively Delphic. "I mean, we can't do what we did before with Lanstrom's virus, can we?"
"I'm afraid not, sirs," said Kryten, who had been diligently typing away during Holly's explanation. "The software is quite unlike anything I'm familiar with. By the time we bypassed Mr. Rimmer's holographic projection array, it would have found a way back in."
"So that's it, is it?" Rimmer slumped back to the couch and stared at the ceiling miserably. "Nice to've known you, so long, have a nice second death, Rimsy?"
"Shut up, Rimmer," said Lister, mildly, and blew a smoke ring through the expanding center of its predecessor. "Hol, who designed this thing in the first place?" He ignored Rimmer's look of death.
"I'll check," said the computer, and a moment later her face was replaced by a JMC ident card. "Second Communications Officer Elise Riley was in charge of the project and wrote most of the code. Technical Officer Fourth Class Mark Linden was the project coordinator."
"What's the status of their personality discs?" Lister wanted to know. Both Rimmer and Kryten stared at him.
"Linden's disc was damaged but may be playable. Riley's was untouched in the accident."
"Well," said Lister. "What're you waiting for? Bring 'er back and get her to fix Rimmer. We can always wipe her again once we're done."
"What?" Rimmer croaked.
"Look, it's simple." Lister toyed with his locks, absently sucking on one of them when he discovered an untapped reservoir of mango chutney. "Holly can support two holograms at once if we cut down all unnecessary power and don't try to maneuver the ship too fast. Remember when you copied your disc and brought back a duplicate of yourself and you started playing "I'm a bigger smeghead than you" and ended up screaming at each other all night in language I didn't know you knew? No worries."
Rimmer propped himself up on an elbow. "He was a total git. Impossible to get along with. It wasn't my fault."
Lister grinned and refrained from launching into the familiar argument. "Hol?"
Holly's brows plaited themselves. "I suppose it's possible," she said. Kryten was looking disconsolate, but said nothing, and after a moment Holly nodded. "I've rerouted the power to the hologram projection suite. It should work."
"Right," said Lister, and jumped off the couch, cracking his neck. "I'll go down and turn her on," he added, with a grin, nudging Kryten. "Get it? Turn her on."
Rimmer looked up at Kryten with a despairing sigh, as Lister bopped out of the medical unit. "I haven't got a chance," he said.
**
One moment there had been red warning lights on the console in front of her, and then there hadn't been any lights anywhere at all. The world had turned itself off.
Which is why it was extremely odd to find that it had suddenly turned itself back on. She looked around: instead of the banks of consoles and monitors of the Drive room, there was what looked like an endless library of small disc boxes flanking a narrow corridor and a funny-looking control panel.
And a funny-looking individual standing at the control panel.
"What the smeg," began Riley, but he cut her off.
"Officer Elise Riley? Welcome back. You're a hologram."
Riley looked down at herself: same blue Space Corps JMC uniform, same insignia of office. She looked solid enough. Raising a hand to her head, she felt her normal rock-hard bun at the back of her skull, her normal bone structure....and a hard plastic H stuck on her forehead. "Oh, hell," she said. "Who're you?"
The man came forward. He was wearing an amusing collection of leather and rags which wouldn't have looked out of place in the Mad Max movies, and had a stupid leather deerstalker on his head from underneath of which three or four long Rasta locks hung over his shoulders. His face was set in an expression of terminal good-naturedness. "Lister," he said, in a Liverpool accent that could bend spoons, "Dave Lister. It's a long story, but I used to be a technician on the ship before the accident and I survived cos I was in suspended animation. It's been three million years, by the way."
"Three million years," said Riley.
"Yep. I'd shake your hand, but, you know." He grinned. "Sorry to just yank you back into existence, and that, but we've got a problem we need your help with."
"Wait," said Riley, shaking her head. "Hang about. I need to get some of this straight, okay? I'm dead. I've been dead for three million years."
"Yeah," said Lister.
"Who else is on the ship?"
"Holly, of course," said Lister, "Kryten, who's a mechanoid, Cat, who sort of evolved from my cat, and Rimmer. Who's a hologram like you."
"Don't take this wrong," said Riley, "but what the smeg do you want me for? I'm a Communications Officer. I mean, you got a frequency you need tuned, I'm your girl. Translating from any of five different languages into any other of five different languages, c'est moi. Want a lecture on the development of the sub-ether comnet, right here. But I mean..." She trailed off, hands spread.
Lister's grin turned into a determined expression. "Come on," he said. "I'll show you."
**
"It won't work," said Rimmer. "Of course it won't work. Nothing ever works for me."
"Aaah, don't start that again, man," said the Cat, who had mooched in shortly after Lister had gone to reactivate the communications officer, and who looked as if he was regretting it. "You sound like a scratched CD, Grand Canyon Nostrils. 'My life sucks. My life sucks. My life sucks.'"
"Actually it's my death that's sucking," said Rimmer, staring moodily at the ceiling. "Death number one. We have yet to see how death number two will go, but I'm laying money on it that it'll be slow and painful and undignified."
The Cat tilted his head. "No argument here," he said. "Slow, painful and undignified's about your style."
"You're really not helping," said Rimmer, absently.
"Why not look on the bright side?" the Cat suggested. "You won't have to bunk with Monkey-man any more."
"You make a valid point."
"That's cause I'm so clever," the Cat said smugly, and got up. "Well, all this talking's made me hungry. I'm off to find some food."
"How many times a day do you eat?" asked Rimmer, still regarding the ceiling as if it had personally insulted him.
"Who keeps count?" The Cat danced out of the medical bay, leaving Rimmer alone with the ceiling. He shivered miserably and curled up on his side, his mind settling immediately back into its normal pastime of rerunning his most painfully embarrassing failures. There was the greyish blur of his childhood, mostly seen through clumps of various sorts of filth into which his brothers and classmates had chucked him; there was the stomach-churningly awful day he realized he could never in a million years make it into the Academy, and had tried to rationalize his decision to join the Dwarf as a vending-machine repairman by re-reading the story of Lord Nelson; there were the thirteen consecutive attempts to pass the astronavigation attempt, and the equal number of times he'd ended up in the medical bay after each abortive struggle to remember any of the things he'd studied; there was, of course, gazpacho soup.
I suppose I won't care much, once I'm deactivated, he thought to himself, bathing once more in the brilliant toe-curling agony of the gazpacho soup incident. If that's the silver lining in this particular cloud, it's true that there is a God, and that he hates me.
Rimmer slithered off the medical bay's couch, wrapping the blankets around his shivering shoulders, and stumbled off in the direction of the sleeping quarters. Maybe his own bed would be warmer, or the room might stop doing a pavane in G minor. Maybe they'd leave him alone and let him sleep.
Riley followed Lister through the corridors of the ship, her eyes wide and almost colourless in the dim light. She'd never realized how loud the air-conditioning lifeplant was—in the absence of rubber bootsoles squeaking, crewmembers talking, Holly's voice making announcements over the tannoy, and the endless chirrup of personal communicators, the roaring of the lifeplant seemed deafening. They passed sector after sector of deserted living quarters, passing the science labs and the cryostorage facility, and made their way to the medical unit. Riley blinked in the sudden whiteness.
"Good God," she said. "Weren't you male before, Holly?"
"It's a long story," said Lister, staring at an empty couch with a frown. "Hol, where's he got to?"
"He's back in the sleeping quarters. Buggered off shortly before you got back." The computer's digital face turned to examine Riley, who stood her ground. "'Ere," said Holly, "I remember you. You're that officer who got passed over for promotion after that to-do with the Captain's personal communicator."
Riley sighed. "What? It was an honest mistake. And why are you suddenly a blonde with a Mary Quant fringe?"
"I fell in love, if you must know," said Holly, "and decided to change my face to Hilly's face."
Riley's smile got a bit more brittle, and she turned to Lister. "How long have I been out, did you say? Three million years? Holly's been alone in space for three million years?"
"Well, three million and a bit," said Lister. "C'mon, we've got to get started."
"Get started doing what?"
"Uh," said Lister, "there's no good way to say this, but we need you to fix one of our crew who's got a holovirus that apparently evolved from your invention."
Riley stared. "My invention? You mean the compression software?"
"Yeah," said Holly. "Apparently it's mutated itself into something new and improved. It's draining the energy from our resident hologram."
"Oh," said Riley. There didn't seem to be anything else to say.