Disclaimer, as before: je n'ai pas les droits legales de Red Dwarf.
Full Circle Four
The Cat slid backwards into the Drive room, balancing a balloon-glass of milk on his fingertips. He'd changed out of his canary-yellow moire suit and was now wearing a military-styled logan cloak over a perfectly-cut navy-blue tunic, matching trousers, and thigh-high suede boots. The effect was somewhat schizophrenic and put one in mind of a Napoleonic officer who'd suddenly developed an urge to go clubbing in the East Village. "Don't tell anyone," he hissed to Lister, who was reading a magazine, "but I smell a stranger aboard. I say we hide until it shows itself, and then cream the sucker."
"Calm down, Cat," Lister murmured, turning the mag sideways and allowing the centerfold to unfold itself, "it's just Riley. The new hologram."
"What new hologram?" demanded the Cat, putting down his drink, his brows arching elegantly. "Do not be telling me that we have another double goalpost-head situation on our hands. I don't have the wardrobe to counteract twice the bri-nylon badness."
Lister looked up, with some regret. "Naw, man, the new hologram's a comm officer we brought back to try and fix Rimmer. She's with him now." He didn't inform the Cat that Riley was in fact wearing Rimmer's uniform. He wanted to see that particular feline expression of horror for himself.
"She?" repeated the Cat. "She as in female? As in soft and squishy?"
"Calm down, man. She's a hologram. You can't do anything to her." Even if she let you, Lister added mentally. "'Sides, she's not your type."
The Cat nodded knowingly. "She's ugly, huh?"
"Not really." Lister removed his boots from the console and stretched. "She's just...not your type."
The Cat folded his arms and thought about this, tapping a fingernail against one of his gleaming eyeteeth. "I don't think I'm getting you, Buddy," he said after a while. "She's female, but she's not my type?"
"Oh, forget it," said Lister. "Hol, any news on Rimmer's condition?"
"He's stable," said the computer, her face blooming into existence on one of the Drive room screens, "but he's not well. We need to extract all the bits of the code from his program."
"Well?" Lister asked, folding his arms. "How do we do that?"
"Not sure." Holly paused. "I've computed the likelihood that we can remove the virus from his program without wiping him as well, and it's either one in 2502.2 or one in 250.22. I'm not sure where the decimal point ought to be."
"You're the smegging computer," said Lister, "compute."
"I'd like to see you try it," snapped Holly. "Kryten's on screen three. He wants to talk to you."
Lister sighed. "Put him through." Beside him, the Cat drained his glass and polished the seat of one of the Drive chairs carefully with a handkerchief before planting his tailored posterior on it. Kryten's angular face replaced Holly on the screens.
"What is it, Kryte?" Lister asked.
"Mr. Lister, sir," said Kryten. "I believe we need to discuss the question of where Miss Riley will be residing during her stay here."
"What?" Lister frowned.
"Well, she is a Second Communications Officer," said Kryten, "in addition to being of the female persuasion. It would hardly be suitable for her to be sharing quarters with you or Mr. Rimmer, or Mr. Cat." Kryten's voice held an unmistakable note of disapproval; Lister wondered whether it was directed at the concept of a holo-female sharing rooms with them, or the concept of a holo-female at all.
"Kryten," he said wearily, "I don't think anybody gives a smeg where she sleeps. She's only here to fix Rimmer. It's not like she's taking over command of the ship."
"She can share my quarters," grinned the Cat.
"I'll take that suggestion into consideration," said Kryten, deadpan. "Meanwhile, Mr. Lister, when shall I serve dinner?"
Lister sighed, checked his watch. "I dunno, soon? Holly, when are we going to know if we can get the virus out of Rimmer?"
"That depends on Riley. Whenever she gets out of there and starts doing some work, you can ask her yourselves."
The Cat thumped the console. "Is he gonna die or not? I need to know so I can plan my outfits. I got this really nice black silk suit with astrakhan facings and carved onyx buttons, it's just been waiting for a funeral, or maybe a goth theme party. Or it could work as one stylin' vampire costume. You think this Riley chick digs vampires?"
Lister shot him a look. "Kryten," he said, "why don't you get dinner ready in the officers' club. I'll be there in ten minutes."
"Certainly, sir," said the mechanoid, and clicked off the transmission. The Cat looked at Lister, wounded.
"It's a good suit, Buddy," he said. "You don't know what you're missing."
**
Lister knocked on the hatchway to their sleeping quarters, absently playing with the badges on his leather jacket. After a moment the door hissed aside and Riley stepped out, a few tendrils of pale hair escaping from her chignon. "Well?" he asked.
She shook her head. "He's not getting any worse, but he's in lousy shape. I'll need total access to the holographic projection array mainframe."
Lister nodded. "C'mon," he said. "Let's get Holly to splice you in."
**
Back in the darkened quarters, Rimmer stared wide-eyed into the darkness and clutched the hologramatic blankets closer. He'd touched her. He'd been touched. How long had it been...?
She wasn't pretty. Not pretty like Janine, his brother's wife. God, Janine had been lovely, long brown hair, high cheekbones, the legs of a model. Riley, on the other hand, was a bit on the short side, and her face was pointier than what was considered beautiful. Her eyes weren't the cerulean blue of his dream women, but a mixture of green and grey; her lips were ordinary pinkish lip-colour, not the brilliant cherry-red he vaguely thought women's lips should be; he couldn't really form an opinion of her hair, as it'd been pulled tightly back into a knot at the back of her skull. Nor had she been wearing a revealing PVC outfit, as most of his dream women had been, or holding a whip: somehow it hadn't seemed strange to see his own dark-green uniform curving around her body, complete with rank-pips on the collar and white steel comm badge. It had seemed....right.
He lay back against the pillows, shivering. It had been so bloody long since he'd felt another hand touch his, let alone felt someone's arms around him, someone holding him close, despite the fact that he was second technician A. J. Rimmer, B.Sc, S.Sc, utter and complete failure. She hadn't known him, of course. She hadn't known what a total smeghead he was. That was why she'd allowed him to bury his face in her shoulder and cling to her. It was the only explanation.
Rimmer sighed. He could still feel her hand absently stroking his hair; it was as if something had gone wrong in his sensory retrieval/replay program and he was experiencing a replay loop. For some reason the pain seemed to have gone away for a little while, when she'd been there; now that she was gone, it was coming back. He hurt all over, as if he'd been cross-country skiing. The worst of the pain was centered in his chest, roughly where the lightbee hung; it felt like iron bands around his ribcage, gently being riveted tighter and tighter. His head hurt too, but not as badly, and his fever was doing a happy little hallucinogenic dance in his mind.
At least, he thought vaguely, I've been touched again. I've touched someone again. Images from the rest of the day trickled back into his mind: Lister goading him into admitting he was right, the strange companionable silence that had followed; the darkness into which Riley had entered, the calm with which she'd taken his assertion that he'd pretty much killed her and the rest of the crew through his incompetence....
Suddenly Rimmer didn't really want it to be over. He sat up again, coughing, wrapping his arms around his knees. It was funny how you didn't really see things clearly until they were being taken away from you.
He really didn't want to die again. He'd given up, before. That was before he'd felt someone else's fingers touching his own. Before he'd even considered the possibility that he could interact with people again.
He buried his face in his knees, hoping against hope that they'd be able to fix him.
**
The Cat, who'd swapped his Napoleonic outfit for a red PVC tuxedo with matching cane and top hat, sauntered into the officers' club and took a seat at the table. Lister was already there, watching as Kryten set dishes out and swept off silver covers to reveal his latest culinary tour de force. Lister couldn't really remember when they'd started doing formal dinner, but it seemed to make the mechanoid happy, and it gave the Cat another reason to change. All for the best.
"So when are we gonna get to see this woman goalpost-head?" the Cat demanded, tweaking the crease in his shiny red pants back to perfect straightness and regarding Lister expectantly. "My nipples are tingling again."
"Spare me," said Lister, spearing a shami kebab with his fork and biting the end off it. "She's still busy trying to get the virus out of Rimmer's program."
"I did invite her to join us, sirs," said Kryten, hovering beside Lister with a tray of poppadoms. "She said she was a hologram, if I recalled, and she didn't need to eat, and she was busy. I must say, Mr. Lister, sir, she doesn't have the most elegant manners I've ever encountered."
"She's had a lot thrown at her," Lister pointed out. "I mean, being brought back from the dead and being asked to fix a program she wrote three million years ago because it's screwing with the program of some dead guy she never even met before, man, it's gotta be hard."
"Hmf," said Kryten, and added, changing the subject, "is the fish to your liking, sir?"
The Cat looked up from his entrée aquarium, reeling in a squiggling Betta splendens. "I'm gonna eat you, little fishie," he chanted, waving the fish at Kryten, who nodded happily, satisfied. Lister sighed, returning his wandering attention to the food, trying not to think about how supremely weird his life was. Better than living in a luggage locker on Mimas, he reflected, vaguely enjoying the sensation of massive amounts of capsaicin attacking his taste buds. But a lot stranger.
**
Riley's lightbee sat dark and still on the countertop in the computer vault, not currently in use. The device, about an inch long and shaped like two tiny metal cones placed end to end, with the tips facing out, normally hovered on a self-generated antigrav field, projecting the visual image of the second comm officer; now, since she was currently a collection of electrical impulses flickering through the massive arrays of the hologramatic projection database, she didn't need it. If she managed to achieve what she was trying to do, Holly would unsplice her data stream from the main computers and reload her into the bee. If she didn't, there wouldn't be much point for her continued existence in any form, as she would have failed at the task for which they'd brought her back.
It was jolly strange being a bodiless electrical impulse, she reflected, as she traveled through the data conduits. Her mind was processing the input as best it could, and providing her with a sort of visual representation of where she was: it looked like a big black empty space, with green glowing points of light here and there. If she concentrated, she could steer herself towards these points of light, and she had found that it was possible to move them about from place to place. Holly had explained briefly what she would have to do, but it was still difficult to get used to.
The points of light were elements of software, as far as she could make out, and manipulating them altered the coding directly, which was a lot faster and easier than trying to rewrite the code manually from the desktop interface. She nudged aside a few blocks on the security programs, and slipped into the main hologramatic projection array.
Ah, this was more like it. Now the points of light were much more frequent and closer together, and in the darkness ahead she could just make out a line of orange light that most certainly should not have been there. That's it, she thought to herself. That's the virus. I've stopped it reproducing itself, but I have to get it out of here entirely.
She let herself slide forward, past chunks of code limiting the spatial movement of projected holograms, through an interesting little subroutine which prevented holograms from reporting for duty in ginger toupees, and watched the virus move. It was like nothing so much as a long poison-orange nematode, stretching and wriggling its way through the maze of light. In its wake she could see that the programming it touched was damaged, the green light dimmed and faded with the energy it was sucking out of the array—and out of Rimmer.
Riley wondered vaguely what she was going to do when she got to it. She had no weapons, no real way to damage or destroy the thing. She would just have to find a way to confuse it.
How do you confuse a mindless rogue computer program?
Oh, smeg.
...to be continued.