Full Circle Five
Again, I own not la petite rouge bateau d'etoiles, nor the people on it, save Riley.
(AN: I'm writing this in my own apartment, sitting on my own couch and watching my own telly. This exhilaration may be why this chapter sucks arse.)
Bury me above the
clouds, all the way from here
Take away the things I need
Take away my fear
Hide me in a hollow sound
Happy ever more,
Everything I had to give gave out long before
Fix me now, I
wish you would..fix me now
Bring me back to life
Fix me now
Kiss me blind, somebody should
Fix me now
From hollow into light
-Garbage
Riley let herself float, spreading her cybernetic being along the channels of the holo projection array, feeling the flickering almost-shocks of energy passing down circuits, the bone-shaking hum of electricity going about its business. The orange C. elegans of the virus was curled comfortably around a chunk of programming ahead of her, not moving. It was bigger than she'd thought, now she was close to it. There was no differentiation between segments: it was a long, glowing, orange slice of poisonous light.
I have to distract it, she thought again. Have to get it out of the delicate bits of Rimmer's program and make it go somewhere else...somewhere where it can be deleted, without destroying him. Or me. Or the array.
She nudged forward a little, and the virus-worm twitched and nosed its form out from the subroutine it was embracing. All around her the green pulses of light grew more rapid, with the change in energy drain; she felt it inside herself, a thrill of fear borne not of somatic sensation but of shifts in her own electronic existence. It was one of the strangest things she'd ever experienced, and one of the most unpleasant.
Off to one side she could make out a darker green set of light-points which part of her recognized as an old dormant routine describing the projection of version 1.8 holograms. That's it. That's where I have to take it. We don't have any v 1.8 holos on board: it's redundant.
She didn't think about the fact that "we" consisted of one live human, one feline lifeform, one mechanoid, and currently two dead people.
The virus nosed out further, and Riley went cold all over with fear. The worst part of the whole situation was the fact that she was responsible for this thing's existence in the first place; this was her fault, indirectly. She couldn't quite get the image of Rimmer's face out of her mind.
She slid sideways, behind subroutines designed to reduce the likelihood of officers with false teeth attempting oral sex in zero gravity, and watched as the virus followed her round a corner. Wondering vaguely how one went about taunting a piece of code, she slipped around a corner and back again, watching the thing tracing her movements. It followed, blindly, like a thing navigating by scent. The fear was palpable now, like a thin layer of plastic draped around her body, getting tighter as she moved.
What the hell am I doing here?
And more than that...how am I going to get out of this?
She moved forward a little, into the sick orange glow of the worm, and suddenly the world was a much different place. The black void with its green lights receded, flickering away into nothing but blackness: there was no spatial differentiation between up, down, left, right, front or back. She floated in nothingness, too startled even to be afraid, and suddenly her thoughts were no longer her own.
FLASH
...the pale lemon-coloured skies of Io in summer, and the desperate helpless pain of not understanding why they were doing this to him...not understanding why the belt-beatings, why the cruel tricks with jam and ants, why the toilet-face-washings, why the desperate wretched loneliness among so many of his own people...
FLASH
...the misery of the realization that, barring mindmerge technology, he would never in a million years pass the Academy entrance exam, while Frank, John and Howard rose inexorably up the ranks, bright, squarejawed stars of the Space Corps firmament: the utter, salt-bitter wretchedness of that knowledge that he would never be anything like as good as his brothers, and that his parents knew this, and were disgusted...
FLASH
...little shards of memory here and there, enjoying the pure satisfaction of filling in his revision timetables with brilliant and saturated colour, keeping the hue perfectly within the lines, enjoying the fact that he could do this, and do it better than...well.....anyone he knew: the revision was of course the important thing, but the loveliness of the timetables almost made up for the fact that he knew, deep down, that he'd end up embarrassing himself and waking up on a stretcher on his way to the medical bay, again, at the end of it all..
FLASH
...the realization that he was dead, and that his death, along with the deaths of the entire crew, was his own stupid fault, as his entire life had been; and the quickly-following contention that it couldn't possibly all be his fault, that it was because he'd had a wretched life and no breaks and.....
...and yeah, it was his fault, but he didn't have to admit that to anyone, let alone Lister...a man whom he'd always disliked, ever since a certain disguised taxi-ride on Mimas..a man toward whom he held no respect whatsoever, yet whose mental health he had been resurrected to preserve, with no thoughts of his own...a man whose easy-going, what-the-hell attitude to life he had always envied, despite his firmly-held belief that Lister was a complete smeghead whose only function in life was to skew the crew-manifest psych assessment southwards in order to employ more than one on-board shrink...
FLASH
...and the subsequent revelation, kept to himself, that the reason he loathed Lister so much was that he really truly did envy him and his ability to deal with life without giving in to the pointless cruelty of existence...and his own inability to explain this to Lister, and his lack of desire to do so...
FLASH
...and the sudden awareness that he could touch others like him, the walking dead, ghosts made of light: the astonishingly beautiful feeling of feeling....of someone else's hair slipping down his face like rain, of warm fingers against his own, someone holding him...no one had ever done that, not after they knew what he'd done, knew what a total utter waste of space he was; no one had ever let him rest against her shoulder, no one had ever stroked his hair and just let him be there with her, without either waiting for her mates to jump out from behind the screen and shriek with shrill laughter; no one had ever just let him be, before, without wanting anything in return...
FLASH
...and now a sudden desire to continue to exist,stronger than the basic knee-jerk reaction to threats: the desire to exist and to possibly begin to enjoy existence....
There was a moment of spatial uncertainty: Riley hung in the blackness, not entirely sure who she was or why she was there, and then some of her wandering synapses reconnected, and she realized whose personality array she'd just slid through without intending to. The low pain of energy being drained away had been a lot worse while she'd been flickering through Rimmer's memories; now, outside the program the worm was affecting, she felt reasonably strong again. Her mind was still reeling from the raw and helpless imagery she'd just been dragged through; the urgency of fixing the situation had suddenly been upgraded from yellow ochre (important) to vermilion (really smegging important). She slid out from behind a collection of subroutines and found herself face to face with the worm.
It had a face, actually. Or something that looked like it might have been a face: two darker spots in the poisonous orange lights
(deadlights)
that made up its head: paler orange glowed in the dark pits, like the pupils of unpleasant eyes. Riley shuddered, but hung firm in the blackness, and faced it.
"Hullo," she said, aware that if it was intelligent, as it seemed likely, it wasn't going to understand her unless she communicated via binary data-stream, "I made you. I'm going to unmake you now."
The virus-worm reared back, regarding her with those pinpoint eyes, and then surged forward. Riley jerked aside, panic flooding her, and slipped down a corridor between data storage arrays. She was dimly aware that the darkened v 1.8 section of the holo array was off to her left, and tried to steer towards it, fear making her responses immediate and sharp, her mind feeling like iced shards of glass tinkling in a vacuum.
Holly! she hissed, soundlessly. Holly, are you tracking me?
There was a pause, and the computer came back to her, the voice buzzing in her mind. I'm tracking you, all right. What are you playing at?
I'm trying to lead it out of the array—She ducked as the worm's blunt head thrust itself down a hollow between two stacks of programming, and threw herself to one side, rolling and coming up again, keeping in motion. Direct me—I can hardly tell where I'm going in here... Holly's voice sharpened a little, lost the bantering tone. Left. Bear left round the corner and keep going as far as you can.
Easier said than done. She zigged again, forcing herself to hurry, unable to shake the mental image of running despite her current lack of a body, feeling it getting closer. The long, whippy end of its tail smashed into a stack of subroutines as it followed her round the corner, and she was dimly aware that something was wrong, now, in her databanks: something had changed. Can't let it do too much of that or we'll be quadriplegic dead people...
**
Rimmer jerked awake, choking, not sure what had woken him: he had a curiously unpleasant feeling of being...invaded, as though something was running around inside him and occasionally bouncing off the walls. After a moment he remembered what it had been that had made him feel like this before: the polymorph, as it slithered through his personality array, chewing on whatever it found particularly toothsome...
He curled up, arms wrapped around himself, letting out a gasp as whatever-it-was got in a particularly good hit, and buried his face in the pillows so as not to cry out. This has to be it. Has to be. I can't bear much more...
**
She could see the dormant subsector ahead in the blackness and forced herself to put on another burst of speed, desperate, hurtling down corridors between long-obsolete code strings, a particle and a wavelength at once. Behind her the virus-worm thrashed its way through the array, destroying chunks of code with careless flicks of its tail, as if it knew it wasn't going to get her and was settling for as much destruction as it could achieve.
The demarcation between the dormant subsector and the active part of the array was as thin as the edge of a shadow. Riley flung herself into the old programming, aware of a strange sourceless feeling of decay, and flattened herself against a corner as the virus-worm thundered by. With her last bit of strength she dove back out into the living sector of the holo projection array, and shrieked Now, Holly! Do it now!
There was a silent, boneshaking vibration, and a flash of sickly orange light, and then there was simply nothing left of the old subsector, or the thing inside it. Riley slumped against a damaged stack of code and stared at it, or at least at where it'd used to be.
Outside, in the real world, Rimmer's body arched in spasm, his hands curled into fists, as he let out a shriek. By the time Lister, the Cat and Kryten appeared in the hatchway, heads poking around the door in a vertical line reminiscent of bad twentieth-century comic acts, the seizure had passed, and he lay completely still, the colour of good bond paper, one arm hanging off the bunk with a boneless relaxation that frightened Lister quite a bit.
"What's the matter with him?" he demanded of Kryten, who bent over the hologram and shrugged, shoulderplates clanking. "Is he...?"
Kryten refrained from pointing out that Rimmer was already dead, and had been for over three million years now. He sent a tight-beam transmission to Holly, demanding updates, and his plastic eyes widened.
"What is it, man?" Lister asked.
"It seems, Mr. Lister, sir, that your expert was successful in removing the virus from Mr. Rimmer's program." Kryten looked down at the unconscious Rimmer again. "The virus has been deleted from the ship. However, certain parts of the hologramatic projection array were damaged in the effort to contain the virus and will need to be repaired and reprogrammed."
"What's all that mean?" demanded the Cat, who looked as if he'd have liked to poke Rimmer with a stick, if this had been possible. "Is goalpost-head here dead or what? I told you guys, I need to know, so I can plan my suits."
"Cat?" Lister asked.
"Yeah, buddy?"
"Shut up."
to be continued.