CHAPTER 6: Separation
"Welcome back," Lister said, smiling.
"Where am I?" Her eyes slipped around the large, circular room. Then she noticed Rimmer, who had turned away from the wall and was watching her silently. Her eyes widened. "Rimmer? I thought… you were…" She paused, confused. "Aren't we on Red Dwarf anymore?"
"No," Lister shook his head. "You're on a ship called Coronis, we're docked inside a space station. Some kind of scientific research facility." He glanced at Kryten. "Actually we don't know a whole lot more than you. We just sort of stumbled across the place." He smiled apologetically and shared a brief, embarrassed glance with Rimmer.
Miranda stared at the Hologram Projection Unit. In the glow of the computer readouts, her eyes glowed a bright, incandescent green, and they were troubled. Realizing he should explain, Lister hastily continued.
"Ah… we found this working Holo Unit and…" He trailed off vaguely. "Well… with you not being here and all… that we could bring you back. Seeing as this one's working," he frowned at his awkward explanation, and then shrugged.
A gentle, heartfelt smile touched Miranda's face. "Thank you."
An emotional silence fell over the group. Rimmer stared hard at Lister. If we have to turn her off again, he thought, it's going to break her heart. Lister read the thought in his eyes and looked away guiltily. "We don't know how long you can… you know. But we're gonna have a look around. See if we can find a way to take you with us."
Still smiling, she nodded, and looked again at Rimmer. He took a deep breath, realizing it would be appropriate to say something, and said dully, "Welcome back," for a lack of anything better.
"Yeah, we missed you," the Cat said, grinning.
The smile faded from her face, but she looked genuinely touched. "Really?"
Kryten fidgeted awkwardly. "Of course we did, ma'am."
There was another long, awkward pause. Miranda suddenly became very interested in her shoes. Kryten stood stiffly, twiddling his fingers together. Eventually he cleared his throat and said, "Well we have a lot of the facility yet to explore, sirs-" he glanced quickly at Miranda "-and ma'am. Shouldn't we make a start?"
"Good. Yes. Let's make a start," Rimmer said in a stilted voice, and walked out the door.
The five of them crowded around the schematic of the station which was pinned to the wall. It showed a cross-section of the level they were on, with the rooms labelled and their current position highlighted in red. Kryten scanned the tiny labels, reading them.
"Molecular biology. Genetics. Nanotechnology. These are all labs on this level. This facility must have been used for some kind of genetics research."
Lister traced his finger across the tablet and paused on something. "Look at this. There's a symbol here marked 'Cloning Lab'." Eyebrows raised, he looked searchingly at Kryten. "It's on the level below us."
Kryten blinked as if realizing something. "Of course. Nanotechnology. They must have been developing new ways of combining molecular cloning with nanotechnology to create a kind of advanced cloning process. That or these labs were just a way of advancing their research, exploring different methods to achieve the same goal."
"Are you talking about human cloning?" Rimmer asked, looking from Kryten to Lister like an avid spectator at a tennis match.
"We've got to see these labs," Lister said excitedly, cradling his space helmet under one arm. "Do you know what this could mean? The people here… if they were the last humans… they must have been trying to clone themselves to stop the human race from dying!"
There was a heavy pause as this sunk in. Rimmer looked off into the distance, frowning.
Miranda looked curiously at Lister. "Where did they all go?"
The others stared at her in anguished silence. Finally Lister said, "We haven't found anyone alive yet. We think they're all dead."
Miranda's heart sunk into her stomach. She turned away, shocked. Lister found his voice again. "We have to see what's down there."
Kryten hesitated. "You go ahead, sir. I'd like to see if I can locate the main computer and try to figure out what happened here."
"What, you mean like black box recordings, security surveillance, that sort of thing?"
"Exactly."
Lister nodded. "Alright, we'll keep in contact with the headsets," he said, adjusting a small microphone pinned to the neck of his spacesuit If you see anything weird…" he trailed off. Kryten nodded, understanding him, and walked away down the corridor in the direction they had previously arrived from.
Lister glanced at the map again. "Ok, we're here now, so we need to go…" He glanced towards a branching corridor, and pointed. "That way."
Kryten slowly made his way through the seemingly endless sprawl of wide, grey corridors, found a maintenance shaft (the elevators were all non-operational), and began to climb. Below him he could hear the hollow rush of air and an electrical whirring. Steam spewed from a ventilation shaft about halfway down. The shaft was small and cylindrical, and the grey, curved walls were covered with access panels and hanging wires. Eventually he made it to the top and had to force his way through another locked door at the top.
He was now in the upper levels of the station, and approaching the central hub of the complex. Everything up here was more impressive. Surveillance cameras dotted the wide, shiny corridors, peeking down at him with blank robotic eyes. Computer readouts covered an entire wall of a large, circular room, with banks of computers running down the central aisles, their chairs now all empty and abandoned. Their screens would randomly flicker, or fill with rows of garbled green text, emitting a series of scrambled bleeps. The sounds combined to make an eerie clamour that followed Kryten through the walls as he walked deeper into the command centre.
He crossed through a large open area which was lit by pools of light from the few working light sources, and passed through a set of double glass doors which had jammed halfway open. The glass on both panels had been blown out and lay scattered across the floor. Kryten entered the darkened control room.
The room, like most of the architecture on the station, was smooth and circular. Large windows curved around the far wall, opening out onto a black expanse that was dotted with stars and debris from the wreckage. The central computer sat in the centre of the room, a large and complicated-looking dark grey structure, its sides covered in numerous screens, all now either dead or flicking out meaningless rows of jumbled data. Set into a deep recess in the front of the machine was a large monitor and keyboard.
Navigating by the dim light of the few working monitors, Kryten edged his way over to the keyboard, gave it a few experimental taps, and then went to work trying to repair it.
"Are those people?"
"Oh my god…" Rimmer said in a dazed voice, and took a hesitant step into the cavernous, darkened room.
"In-smeggin'-credible," Lister said, following up his own question. His eyes slipped around the enormous room, his brain barely comprehending what he was seeing. "I don't believe it."
They were in the cloning labs. The room was the size of a warehouse, and sitting in rows along its length were strange cylindrical machines, each attached to two pods lying on their backs like operating tables. Thick pipes connected the pods to the central machines, making them resemble weird flowers, the pods their petals. The machines gave off a fluorescent green light that bathed the immediate area in a spotlight, leaving the rest of the room in shadow. Inside the pods, Lister could make out human forms, their skin unnaturally white and hairless, wearing loose-fitting white hospital gowns. Several of the pods that Lister could see were empty. The machines here had clearly been victim to the same power disruption that had affected the rest of the station. One of the pods was slightly open, and some sort of greenish mist was seeping from it. Lister looked at it and shivered.
He had a strong feeling that none of the people in those pods were alive.
"Creepy," the Cat said softly, as he wandered further into the room, past the first pods. He approached the green mist, looking at it curiously.
"Cat, be careful," Lister warned.
The Cat swiped his hand through the mist and sniffed it. "It smells pretty bad."
"Stay away from it," Rimmer snapped. "Nobody – touch – anything."
Ignoring him, Cat walked around the side of the machine and peered through the glass lid of the pod. He tapped it lightly with his fist.
Rimmer glared at him. "Didn't I say not to touch anything? Am I invisible? Can anyone hear me?" He stalked over to the Cat. "We don't know what that stuff is. It could be some kind of poisonous gas."
"So what are you so concerned for?" The Cat snapped back. "It ain't gonna affect you, is it?"
"No, it won't. Thank you for reminding me." Rimmer said bitterly. His voice was strained and nervous.
Lister quietly approached one of the pods and peered in. He immediately flinched, and shrunk back from it with revulsion, letting out a soft cry of disgust. Miranda trotted up to him, about to look into the pod, but he threw out a hand to stop her.
"Don't. It's not pretty. I think the cloning pods malfunctioned and killed everyone inside them when the power started acting weird." Miranda slowly stepped back, staring at the pod with a kind of mingled curiosity and dread.
"This technology is incredible," Rimmer mumbled, gazing around the huge room.
"Yeah. And look at all the good it did 'em." Lister turned downheartedly away. He had lost all hope of finding anyone alive here. He really was the last human in the universe. Completely alone.
"So what really happened here?" The Cat asked quietly.
"I guess we'll never know. Not unless Kryten has any luck with the computer, which- judging by the state the rest of the place is in- is not very likely." Rimmer crossed his arms and began to wander down the rows of pods. Lister noticed a long glass wall on one side of the room and assumed it must be some kind of control room for the cloning bay. He walked over to it, with Miranda silently following.
"I still can't believe I'm here," he said, looking through the darkened glass window into the room beyond. "The last hope for humankind was this place... they built it to try to... cheat evolution." He glanced despondently at the girl, whose dark eyes watched him in silence and sympathy. He slowly shook his head. "All this time I thought I was alone, but I wasn't. There were other people here. Living here. Now I guess I really am alone. I'm the last." He breathed out deeply, watched his breath fog on the glass, and then thought of something that had been on his mind for a while. "Miranda. You never explained what your ship... the Poseidon, was doing 3 million light years into deep space."
Miranda shook her head. "I guess I never got a chance to explain before. We were on a routine mission. About six months in we passed through some kind of... disturbance. No-one really knew what it was, but the computer said it was a time hole. We found out that we'd jumped into the future. And... then we realized we could never go home. Not long after that we crashed." She looked away into the dark glass, avoiding his eyes.
"Well. What are the odds? Out of all the gin-joints in all the towns in all the universes you jumped into mine."
She laughed softly. "Something like that."
They shared a smile, and then Lister turned back to the window and examined the room beyond more closely. To his left was a glass door.
"Looks like a control room. If there's some records or files in there, we might be able to find out how these pods work."
"Why do you want to do that?"
He threw her an unsettled glance. "So we can figure out what went wrong."
A/N: Soooooooooooo sorry for the long wait between updates. Anyone who's still reading- you're totallyawesome in my book. Really. Stick with me, I promise to update more :):)