AN: This story takes place in the sixth series, during the course of "Rimmerworld."
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Disclaimer: None of these characters are mine, and I'm not making any money from this, so please don't sue me.
The First Five Hundred Years
On the good days, Rimmer thought about the people he used to know who didn't look exactly like him. There had been some; if he concentrated hard, he could almost see their outlines, although their faces had disappeared from memory several hundred years ago. They had been somewhere together and…how had he lost them? That, too, had gone from Rimmer's memory, lost in the stretched-out eternal sameness of days that felt like years and then turned into years. But he had been the one to lose them; he remembered that much.
Rimmer wasn't meant for this. He had never been prepared for hardship, let alone extended periods of time in a jail cell by himself. From somewhere in the recesses of his mind, he heard himself say, "You can't leave me alone…I'll go peculiar!" Sometimes Rimmer suspected he already had done.
Not that anyone was around to care whether he was peculiar or not. It had taken a hundred years or so for Rimmer to realize that nobody was paying particular attention to what he did in prison. Eventually, he suspected they had forgotten he was there. His clones, after all, were real human beings, and thus mortal, whereas he would never die. It gave a new meaning to the phrase "life in prison."
He had stopped caring what he did and whether it looked crazy. Sometimes he had conversations with himself, trying to remember where he had lived before he'd come to this planet. At first, the conversations had been comforting to him, but as time passed, the details had begun to fade, and he had repeated them to himself so many times that they no longer seemed real.
Sometimes he imagined he was having conversations with his old cohorts, even speaking as them so that his voice wouldn't be the only one echoing in the prison. But as Rimmer's memories faded, so did the others' voices, and although he could still pretend to talk to them, he could no longer pretend anyone besides him was answering.
On the bad days, Rimmer doubted that his friends and his previous life were real. He could have made them up to keep himself sane, to keep the hope of rescue in front of him so he wouldn't crack. That explained why he couldn't remember their faces or their names; they were figments of his imagination, and they weren't coming for him. Nobody was coming for him.
Sometimes Rimmer got angry and screamed at his nonexistent friends, berating them for not rescuing him. Some friends they were. How could they be so hugely incompetent? But anger always faded into sadness and loneliness. It was his fault, after all—he had done something to make them go away. Where were his friends and why hadn't they found him yet? Had they stopped looking, or weren't they looking at all? Were they there? Was anyone?
On days like that, Rimmer usually wound up lying on the floor of his cell, curled up in a ball. Sometimes he cried.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. "Please find me. Please."
THE END