Amber Light

An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight...The truly wise person is colour-blind. - Albert Schweitzer

To anyone watching David Lister as he stood and leant lazily against the glass of the observation dome on top of the Red Dwarf, he would have seemed a carefree sort of chap. His eyes, though sad, were twinkling with a doubtless optimism: everything would turn out all right if he only tried or if he trusted luck. And yet life for him had been continuously hard.

He was abandoned as a baby in a box under a pool table in the Aigburth Arms Pub, Liverpool, England on planet Earth; the council estate of the galaxy. His adoptive parents, Mr and Mrs Wilmot died when he was young and he flitted from mindless job to mindless job before stumbling across the Red Dwarf. No qualifications were needed for the lower ranking positions and it docked at Earth during its journey. Lister had currently been living on Mimas stealing taxis and giving lifts to shady characters. It was how he met Rimmer.

He boarded the ship but quickly found out that it would be another three years before he got back to Earth. Lister was almost destroyed by this news. Then he met Kristine Kochanski and his life found meaning. She wasn't beautiful, but she was smart and pretty and she had a bright, infectious smile and he fell in love immediately. When they broke up, he crumbled.

But he blindingly convinced himself they would get back together, even when he saw her with her ex-boyfriend Tom at the bar. Even now he clung to this conviction. Three million years after she had died and flying through space inconceivably far away from Earth, he was sure he would be married to her and living in Fiji on Earth some day with their future twin sons, Jim and Bexley by the time he was 30, give or take a few years.

But deep down he knew it was impossible. He would not live the three million year journey back. A parallel universe would not hold the Earth and Kochanski he knew. If they found they could go back in time, it would be to a different timeline and he would never go into the future to come back so that was impossible. His head hurt if he tried to think about, and so he carried on in his blissful ignorance.

Rimmer was the only one who ever reminded him there was nothing to go back to. That if Earth still existed, it was probably a garbage planet full of rotting nappies, dead pet hamsters and Jim Davidson records. Rimmer kept Lister from going insane by bringing him crashing back to reality. From truly believing in his wild dreams.

"That's why Holly brought him back as a hologram in the other timeline," Lister said out aloud to himself. His pessimism balanced with Lister's optimism and created a comfortable realism. He supposed that was why, despite their huge character differences, they were friends. And why, though they hated each other, they...

"Mr Lister, sir? Mr Rimmer seems to be feeling better. He's rearranging his 20th century telegraph pole files." Lister's train of thought was derailed and he waved Kryten away so he could get back on track, and so Kryten left obediently.

"Wait! Kryten?"

"Sir?"

"Should I tell him?"

"Probably not, sir." Lister's mouth twisted sideways and he chewed his bottom lip thoughtfully.

Kryten was right but Lister knew there was one very important difference between their timelines that would eventually drag its way into the open. If he was in Rimmer's place, would he want to know? Most definitely not.

It didn't bother him now, of course not. That would be stupid. But if the elderly future echo of himself he saw lying on his bunk had told him what he now knew, he'd have probably killed himself.

Or Rimmer.