Full Circle Six
Disclaimer, as before. I own nothing except Riley and this rather hackneyed idea, which, if you have read any of my other fics, especially those featuring Knight Rider, will be immediately familiar.
Lister and the Cat were playing tabletop golf, desultorily, trying to waste time until Holly could give them another update on what the smeg was going on in the holo projection array. The Cat was currently on the fourteenth hole, par four, and was adjusting the little fans to give him a northeasterly breeze on his shot.
"Cat?" said Lister, morosely, staring into his bottle of self-heating sake. He was wearing what passed, with him, for pyjamas: a medium-raggedy Jets shirt and a pair of long-johns bottoms that had seen many better days. The Cat had changed into one of his elaborate golf outfits, this one featuring plus-fours in a livid puce print and a black cashmere sweater embroidered with complicated Art Deco swirls. He looked up and tipped his matching puce cap over one eye.
"Yeah, buddy?"
"What if Rimmer doesn't make it?" Lister asked, not sounding as if he really wanted an answer. The Cat put down his miniature driver and tilted his head, sitting down beside Lister.
"Well," he said after a moment, "it means no more Hammond organ concerts, for a start."
"Ca-aaat," Lister groaned. "Just...try to be serious for once, all right?"
"Okay. Look...we've been through all kinds of crap with goalpost-head, am I right? That time when we got sucked into his mind? Or the time when he was going to be in prison forever and ever cause he killed the whole crew? We always got through. He was always okay."
Lister sighed. "Maybe you're right. I dunno...it just feels different. He seems different."
"What do you mean different?"
"Like...he was thinking more, you know? Not just coming out with a quick answer. Actually thinking about what he was gonna say before he said it."
The Cat frowned. "That's weird, Man. That ain't like him."
"I know. I'm seriously bugging out about this, Cat."
"Well," said the Cat, "let's distract you with some golf, huh? Quiet, okay, I gotta get this shot juuuuust right."
Lister reflected, watching him squint at the teeny-weeny flag across the table, that there was something comforting in the Cat's singleminded pursuit of happiness. Something...normal.
He finished the bottle and selected a nine-iron for his next shot.
**
Holly was monitoring the status of both the holograms, and while she didn't necessarily know exactly what it was she was witnessing, she did know it was smegging weird. Riley's rather belligerent flight through the array had done considerable damage to the visual/spatial projection coding, which was why Rimmer's unconscious form kept flickering in and out of view and occasionally turning a fetching shade of blue. She'd told Riley what needed to be done to fix it, and Riley was rather tiredly knocking together chunks of software from inside the array. Holly didn't want to think about the fact that Riley was doing a better job than she currently could; there had been a time when Holly had known all there was to know about holo projection software, and could have fixed the worm's damage in the blinking of a human eye, but now she was reduced to watching and wondering what the smeg Riley was up to.
She also wondered what had happened to the insides of Rimmer's programming. She'd felt the surge when Riley had inadvertently fallen through Rimmer's personality records, and the strangeness in the circuits which had followed, and hadn't yet quite faded. There wasn't much going on now in Rimmer's mind, beside the echoing memories of pain, and Holly wondered if he was going to come back, after all this, and what he would be like.
**
Riley was so tired she could barely make her mind work, and since she was currently a collection of neuroelectric impulses, this was a bad thing. She'd been so long in the array that it had become something of an instinct to interact with the code sections; she didn't have to think about what she was doing, she just did it. The parts of the array that had been damaged felt wrong, and she was now going just by feel, replacing blocks, drawing out tendrils of energy and patching connections, trying to replace what had been destroyed with what she had to hand. Dimly she was aware that the connections weren't exactly as they had been, but it was easier and quicker to do it this way than to attempt to rewrite the code from outside of the system. She'd patched together much of what the worm had destroyed, but there were some complicated subroutines governing the light projection of the hologramatic image that were giving her trouble. Most of her knew that she shouldn't mess with that which she didn't understand, but she was so damned tired that she didn't care that much anymore. With an effort she began rebuilding the missing blocks of code, fitting things in which looked like they belonged, crosspatching connections by feel. Each change she made affected her, as well, and she could feel the different connections slotting into place. So far none of them had felt terribly wrong.
She hoped that was a good thing.
Hours later, weak and exhausted, Riley asked Holly to extract her from the array, having done all she could, and the computer loaded her back into her light bee. There was a dim dizzy feeling of disorientation, and then she was seeing through projected eyes again, and found herself half-lying on the edge of the counter in the suite. She sat up, too fast, and had to hang on to the edge of the counter so as not to fall over in a heap. Something was kicking her brain, and for the life of her she couldn't figure out what it was.
Never mind, she thought dizzily, and pushed herself to her feet. The hallway came and went in great swooping heaves around her, as it had done on the one memorable and unpleasant time she'd taken someone up on the offer to get her seriously drunk, and she felt her way down toward the habitation decks.
**
"Emergency," said Holly, tonelessly. "There's an emergency going on. It's still going on, and it's still an emergency. Will Dave Lister please hurry to the hologramatic projection suite."
A few minutes later Lister skidded around the corner and found an interesting tableau laid out for his observation: Riley, still wearing a green Rimmer uniform which was now ripped and torn, the tunic half-open and sweat-stained, showing more of the comm officer than he had hitherto viewed, was lying curled on the floor of the corridor just outside the holo projection suite. Her hair had come undone and was spread out in a puddle of pale-gold on the floor tiles; her eyes were closed. She was breathing shallowly. Instinctively, Lister reached out for her shoulder, before remembering he wasn't going to be able to touch her—and this preconception was so strong that it wasn't until he felt the thin bones of her arm shift under his touch that he realized he was touching her.
He jerked his hand back as if she'd burned him. "Hol?" he said, in a strengthless voice. "Hol, what the livid smeg is going on here?"
"Not sure," said the computer after a moment. "But it seems that Riley did something to the projection array when she was repairing the damage which has resulted in....I suppose you'd call it hardlight."
Lister shook his head wonderingly and bent over further, lifting her from the floor. She sagged bonelessly in his arms. "Can you scan her?" he asked. "Is she all right?"
Holly narrowed her pixelated eyes in concentration. "Sheer exhaustion. She'll be fine."
"What..." Lister stopped, and started again. "What's happened to Rimmer?"
"Not sure. I think...I think he's got the same thing."
"You mean he's...got a physical body now? Like her?"
"I think so."
Lister stared down at Riley, who was still doing an excellent imitation of a CPR dummy. "Well," he said after a moment. "Shit."
**
Some time later, he, Kryten and the Cat were staring at computer readouts in the Science Room. Everything they were looking at told them the same, inconceivable story. Somehow Riley's half-arsed repair job on the computer code had caused—possibly with the help of the virus—a complete alteration in the way the lightbees projected their images, and the way they interfaced with physical/spatial objects. Somehow, Riley—and Rimmer, who was likewise unconscious—had physical bodies. They could touch, they could feel, they could affect their environment. They were no longer light-ghosts.
"Wow," said the Cat. "Does this mean he's not gonna be trying to steal our bodies anymore?"
"I should certainly hope not," said Kryten, who still hadn't got over his guilt-loop from the last time he'd let Rimmer convince him that the other two crew members had definitely freely offered him the use of their bodies, no worries, it was all above-board. "I don't quite understand the technology myself, but it seems that Miss Riley has managed to give Mr. Rimmer what he's always wanted."
Lister looked at him, considered making a number of remarks, and figured it was too easy. "Yeah," he said, "well, now what are we gonna do? What's she gonna do?"
"If I was her," said the Cat, "get some highlights and start wearing a little eyeliner, y'know, just to bring out the colour of her eyes a bit. I have some tips I could give her on what colours she ought to be wearing with her complexion."
Lister fought back a horrible mental picture. "I bet you do, Cat. What I meant was, is she gonna want to be switched back off again, or is she gonna stay here?"
"I believe that is up to her, Mr. Lister," said Kryten sourly, not in love with the prospect of Riley taking up permanent residence on the Dwarf.
"What is?" said another voice from the doorway. They all turned to see Rimmer, green tunic gleaming dimly in the monitors' glow, leaning against the hatchframe. There was no question about it: he was leaning. He could touch. He did have a physical form.
"Uh, nothing, man," said Lister. "How you feeling?"
Rimmer came forward into the Science Room proper, and they all stared at him. With the new hardlight projection system, he looked pretty much as he always had, with the addition of a shadow; however, his constant look of petty misery had been replaced with one of barely disguised wonder. Lister noticed that he was running his fingers over the edges of the consoles, as if trying to convince himself he really could touch them.
"Great," he said, almost sounding surprised. "I feel...great. What's going on? I can...I can touch things! I can feel things! I stubbed my toe getting out of the bunk and it felt better than anything I can remember feeling!"
"You're strange," said the Cat, looking down his nose at Rimmer.
"Don't you get it? It was real, real pain! I could actually feel it! It was real!"
"Yeah," said Lister, looking around for something strong to drink. "Listen, man. It seems like Riley kind of did this by accident when she was trying to repair your programming."
Rimmer looked up from the keyboard he was caressing, looking oddly young and uncertain of himself. "Really?"
"Yes," cut in Holly, "this is one of those things we can put in the "sheer dumb luck" file."
"I thought I was dreaming," said Rimmer absently. "I thought it was a dream. And I still do, although I've been pinching myself for a while." He held out a wrist spotted with little bruises.
"It's real all right, man," said Lister, wondering where the smeg he'd gone wrong to be stuck in a situation like this. He didn't remember running over any angelic small children or beating old ladies over the head with walking sticks. Maybe karma just hated him. "Listen...maybe it should be you who talks to Riley, finds out what she wants to do."
"What do you mean?"
"Well...she doesn't really belong here, man." Lister listened to himself, thinking how much of a git he sounded. Who was he to say where anyone belonged, marooned on a ship three million years away from Earth?
Rimmer narrowed his eyes. "All right," he said after a moment. "Where is she?"
"We put her in one of the unused officers' quarters on our deck," said Lister. "She's gonna be out for a while."
"What? Is she all right?"
"Hol says she'll be fine." Lister gave him an unrealistic grin.
"Right," said Rimmer, and was gone, his footsteps echoing down the hall. Lister couldn't help wondering how much of a favour Riley had really done them, after all.
tbc