Full Circle 3
Disclaimer as before: I don't own nothin 'cept Elise Riley, and I know I don't own that name. Lawsuits will result in a great deal of disappointment.
Riley slid behind one of the consoles and called up the original data for her code. Behind her, Lister sucked on one of his locks and managed to put forth an air of looking over her shoulder despite being across the room.
"What the smeg?" she muttered, looking at the lines of code. "This is insane. This reads like AI code, not like compression software. Holly, can you show me the hologramatic projection array program?"
Holly, who was particularly proud of her blonde locks and hadn't liked the jab at her hairstyle, let alone the inference that she'd gone computer senile over the past three million years, was busy removing the simulated pins that held Riley's simulated hair in its neat knot. "Oh," she said, "right. Hang on a mo." The huge screens above the medicomp unit lit up with scrolling characters, green on black, looking not unlike the visual representation of a complicated AR program made famous by a 21st century film series. Riley swiped hair out of her face absently and began typing again, her gaze flicking from the big screens to the console monitor and back.
"I think I can see what happened here," she muttered, almost to herself. "It's changing, though...it's like it's aware of what I'm doing..."
"What does that mean?" Lister wanted to know.
"Well, you said it was affecting the other hologram," said Riley. "Why isn't it affecting me? And if it's changing itself it may be doing interesting and new things to...Rimmer, you said his name was." She tucked the hair behind her ear again irritably.
Holly exchanged a glance with Lister. "It's not affecting you," said the computer, working this out, "because your disk was recorded using a slightly different program than Rimmer's was. You joined the crew after he did, and the personality recording software had been upgraded. You're version 2.1, he's version 1.9."
"Poor Rimmer, man," said Lister, smoking a cigarette Riley thought he probably shouldn't have had in the medical unit, "he's being obsoleted to death." There was a hint of a grin in his voice, but Riley didn't turn around to look.
"Brilliant," she said, sourly, still typing fast. "One of you might wanna go see what it's doing to him now. The corruption's spread further."
Lister hopped off the chair. "I'll go." He didn't particularly want to be around when the communications officer realized that Holly had replaced her blue JMC uniform jacket with a T-shirt that read "Copacabana Hawaiian Cocktail Bar Dancer-Do Not Tip."
**
Lister hurried down the corridor to their sleeping quarters. He kind of liked Riley, despite the fact that she was as far from his type as it was possible to be: dark-blonde, with a sharp pointed face, not much patience, and not much of a noticeable sense of humour. He had to admit that perhaps he didn't know all the aspects of her personality yet, but it would be one smeg of a laugh watching her and Rimmer interact.
He ducked under the hatchway. It was dark in the sleeping quarters, and he felt his way to Rimmer's pink student lamp and flicked it on.
There was a moan which might have been a curse. "Turn it off, you goit," Rimmer rasped from the shadows of the bottom bunk. "I may be going blind but I haven't got there yet..." He lost the sentence in a spasm of coughing. Lister raised an eyebrow and peered into the shadows, making out the form of Rimmer curled under the covers with his hands over his eyes.
Lister flicked the light off again. "I was gonna ask how you were feeling," he said, "but on second thought I don't think I will." The darkness began to fade as his eyes grew adjusted to the gloom. He could make out the "This Is The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Death" plaque above Rimmer's bed.
"Just go away, Lister," Rimmer croaked. "I don't particularly feel like having witnesses at death number two, okay?"
"You're not gonna die," said Lister, a second before realizing the incongruity of this statement. "Again, I mean. We got someone working on it."
"Oh good. I'm just filled with confidence at the thought of an expert handpicked by you trying to save me."
"Rimmer, man, you never change, do you? You're a complete and total smeghead." Lister pulled up a chair by the bunk. "You ever realize why you didn't have any friends?"
"That's right, Listy," Rimmer croaked. "Put me down when I'm smegging dying."
Lister ignored this. "The reason you didn't have any friends," he continued, "well-besides your 'casual clothes'-is that you have the social graces of an iguana." He paused, thinking. "A brain-damaged iguana."
"Oh, that's rich. This coming from someone who thinks the epitome of sartorial elegance is having at least two of the buttons on his trouser fly still in place." Rimmer coughed again, curling up. "I'm not taking charm-school lessons from Dave 'I can do things with my bodily orifices that no one's hitherto thought of, for a good reason' Lister."
"You remember that one time you were telling me how I was a triple fried-egg chilli chutney sandwich, Rimmer?" Lister asked. "Well...you were drunk, but you were missing the point, man. All my ingredients may be wrong, but at least I don't shove people away when they're tryin' to help. That may be why I'm not such a complete and utter gimboid."
"I do not do that. Are you saying I do that? You've got your head up your behind again, Lister."
"You ever listen to a word you say?" Lister paused. "Oh, wait, you did, didn't you. Only your response was generally 'shut up you dead git.'"
Rimmer sat up, his eyes dilated black with pain, glittering in the dimness. Lister noticed vaguely that his H was also glittering, as if it were somehow enhanced more than usual. "Shut up, Lister. Just...shut...up, all right? I'm not in the mood for this."
Lister sighed. Just a bit further.... "You're never in the mood, man. You've always got something better to do than sit down and actually think about why you're so smegging miserable. It's never your fault, is it, Rimmer?"
"Of course it's not my fault! I-" Rimmer's cough cut him off again, the sound harsh and painful, deep in his chest; when the fit passed, he didn't say anything for a long moment, and when he did, it made Lister grin in the darkness. "I hate you, you know," he rasped, wearily. "Stop being so smegging right all the time."
Lister sat back, not saying anything immediately, waiting for the implications to sink into his bunkmate's mind. After a while Rimmer lay back again, lacing his fingers behind his head, and sighed. "Well?" he asked. "Aren't you going to say I told you so?"
"Nah," Lister drawled. "Feel better for saying it?"
"Not much." Rimmer regarded the underside of the top bunk. "What's going on with your expert?"
"She seemed to be getting right into it," Lister said. "Only I think she got up Holly's nose. When I left Holly was doing amusing things to her uniform."
"What's she like?" Rimmer coughed, all the pique gone from his tone, replaced with a bone-weariness that made Lister feel tired just hearing it.
Lister shrugged. "She's a version 2.1 hologram, man. Not affected by the virus."
"Figures." Again, there was no vitriol in the hologram's voice; just a sort of self-denigrating lack of surprise. "Why don't you just wipe me and have done with it?"
"You want me to answer that?" Lister asked.
Rimmer rolled over and looked at him. "Yeah, I think I do."
"Because without you, who would the Cat have to call 'Grand Canyon Nostrils'?"
"Ah," said Rimmer, thoughtfully. "Well, then."
"Yeah," said Lister. The silence became slightly more comfortable.
**
"I think I've located the source," said Riley, still typing. Her hair was now in a snarl of elflocks mostly tucked behind her ears, and Holly had run out of amusing T-shirt slogans to simulate, so that she was now wearing a pink sequined tube top two sizes too small. "It looks like it got in via a minor coding error, and then had three million years to work its way inside. If I can stop it reproducing itself we might have a chance." She kept typing, the lines of code scrolling jerkily down the monitors all around the medical unit. To Holly's chagrin, much of the code was completely incomprehensible; the computer had a nasty feeling that once she would have been able to understand exactly what was going on, a lot faster than Riley, but three million years of entropy had taken its toll on her neural circuits. She could just about figure out what Riley meant about the software having been corrupted and then reproducing parts of the code over and over to create a completely new program, but beyond that it was all Esperanto to her.
"Got you," said Riley, and pushed her chair away from the keyboard. "Put in a block to stop it reproducing itself."
"So that's it?" Holly asked. "You're done?"
"Not quite." The communications officer stretched hugely, rubbing at the back of her neck. She either hadn't noticed the pink spangly tube top or didn't care, which piqued Holly slightly; all those sequins were jolly hard to simulate. "I've stopped it getting worse," she continued. "But I can't reverse the damage it's already done without some complicated reprogramming. I think maybe I'd better see your hologram."
Holly quickly replaced the tube top with Riley's normal uniform jacket. She looked down at herself, grinned, and turned to face the computer. "Come on," she said. "You can do better than this."
Holly squinted briefly; there was a loud "pop" and Riley was standing in a nurse's uniform four sizes too small. She snorted. "A little more tasteful, please."
This time Holly put her in a scaled-down version of the uniform Rimmer normally wore: green bri-nylon tunic, dark-green side striped trousers, polished boots. Riley nodded. "The hair?"
Holly sighed and replaced the mess she'd made with Riley's neat knot of hair. "Anything else? Perhaps you'd like a martini while I'm at it, or a nose job?"
"Not a bad idea," Riley mused, "but perhaps not right now. What's the number again?"
Holly gave her the number of the sleeping quarters Lister shared with Rimmer. She turned on her heel and headed out, musing that if she'd actually had time to think hard about any of the things she was doing, she'd probably just have had hysterics. Not only was she dead, and had been dead for three million years, she was now attempting to fix the source code for a program she had written three million years before in order to save the "life" of another dead person she'd never even met. It was the sort of thing she occasionally experienced in dreams after having drunk too much.
Red Dwarf had undergone some amusing changes since everyone had died, Riley mused, as she hurried down the corridors. The walls that had been Ocean Grey were now Military Grey-or was it the other way around? Riley could never remember-and someone had carefully removed all the Esperanto translations from the wall signs.
Here it was. She knocked on the hatchway door, and after a moment it hissed aside to reveal Lister. The room was dark; in fact, the only light was from the floor-edge emergency exit lights and the tip of Lister's cigarette. Riley had a sudden urge for a cig herself, and wondered if Holly could simulate a nicotine rush.
"Ullo," said Lister. "How's it going?"
"I think I've stopped things getting any worse," she said. He nodded and moved aside.
"I'll give you two some privacy. Nice outfit," he told her, with a grin. "Suits you."
Riley raised an eyebrow, not entirely sure if he was taking the smeg, and slipped past him into the dimness of the sleeping quarters. Her eyes adjusted slowly to the darkness; after a while she could make out a figure huddled on the lower bunk, a hologramatic H symbol gleaming dully on his forehead.
She sat down, wondering what exactly she was doing. What was she going to say? 'Er, hello, I've been brought back from the dead to possibly stop a program I once wrote from destroying you utterly, only I don't know if I can, it's nice to meet you?'
"So you're the expert," said the hologram on the bunk. His voice was strained, with a hint of upper-class Io in the vowels, utterly weary. "What an introduction to the afterlife."
"You're Rimmer," said Riley, stupidly. "Why is that name familiar?"
"My brothers," he said, tiredly. "All three of them, Space Corps superstars. John the captain; Frank the first officer; Howard the test pilot."
Riley thought. Yeah, there'd been all that to-do about John Rimmer, when she'd still been in the Academy: youngest Captain in the history of the Corps, the poster-boy for space exploration. "Was he the one who looked a bit like an Action Man doll?"
Rimmer chuckled dryly; it made him cough. "They all did. Golden boys, all three of them."
"And you?"
"Arnold Judas Rimmer," said Rimmer, in the darkness; "second technician, beverage service, maintenance and repair. I was the bloke who cleaned the gunk out of the chicken-soup machine nozzles. Also famous for buggering up the repairs on the drive plate and causing the instantaneous flash-frying of everyone aboard Red Dwarf save Lister and his pregnant cat."
Riley stared into the shadows; all she could really make out was the occasional gleam of the H on his forehead. "You," she said. "You were responsible for that?"
"Yes, ma'am," said Rimmer, and sketched a salute. "I am personally responsible for your death."
Riley sat still for a long time before reaching out and flicking on the main chamber illumination.
He winced away from the light, squeezing his eyes shut. She didn't move, letting her eyes adjust to the sudden brilliance, staring at him.
She supposed it made sense, on a ship with a crew numbering in the thousands, that she'd never met him before. She would have remembered him. It was probably impossible to forget those nostrils, even if you tried.
He was tall, as far as she could tell, but currently curled in a miserable knot, and rangy rather than slender. His hair was uncompromisingly brown, without gold lights or glints of red, and carefully combed into the most unattractive style possible above a face that was all sharp, mistrustful angles and points. His nose featured wide, flaring nostrils that put Riley vaguely in mind of the air intakes on a swoop bike. Taken separately, none of his features were particularly prepossessing, but there was something about his face that Riley found strangely compelling, even though he was roughly the colour of cottage cheese and sheened with sweat.
He took his hands away, slowly, and looked at her with bright, dilated hazel eyes. "Well?" he asked. "Aren't you going to tell me what a smeghead I am?"
"I don't think it's necessary," said Riley, slowly. "Why were you reactivated?"
Some unidentifiable emotion flickered in the depths of Rimmer's eyes. "To keep Lister sane," he told her, rasping a bit. "Not one of Holly's more inspired decisions. I found out that it was because he and I had shared more conversations than any other crew member on the manifest, most of which consisted of 'you're a total gimboid'."
Riley rubbed at the H on her forehead. "Are you saying you were brought back from the dead to keep someone company whom you never liked and who never liked you, and you had to do this while all the time being reminded that it was you who had killed the entire crew in the first place?"
"That's about the size of it." Rimmer coughed, coughed again, turning away from her and burying his face in the crook of his elbow as the fit shook him. Without thinking, Riley reached out and put a hand on his shoulder to steady him.
He jerked away from her, then went very still, his coughing forgotten. Very slowly he turned back, his face frozen in an expression of such profound and terrible hope that it made Riley go cold all over.
"You can touch me," he rasped. "You can..."
"Of course I can touch you," said Riley. "I'm a hologram too." She tapped her H.
"You don't understand," Rimmer breathed. "I haven't....touched anyone in three million years....hell, longer than that."
Riley blinked, understanding in a rush, and something she totally didn't understand made her reach out slowly for his hand. He stared at her, eyes wide, and held up his right hand, palm out, fingers spread. Riley's hand met his, palm to palm, and even she could feel the weird tingle of electricity as their lightbees exchanged spatial information.
"Oh, God," he muttered, head bowed. Riley could feel the unnatural heat of his hologramatic fever, the way he was shaking, and sighed to herself. A moment later he started coughing again, painfully, and without thinking about it at all she put an arm around him and let him lean against her. He clung to her like a limpet, clearly not thinking about what he was doing, and she let him; she could hardly imagine what it had been like, alone with a mechanoid and a living human and Holly-especially Holly-and some sort of catlike organism, unable to touch anyone or be touched, a ghost made of light.
His coughing eased slowly, but she made no move to push him away; his head rested on her shoulder, and after a while her hand crept up to stroke his hair.