Gasp.
Gasp.
Gasp.
Kochanski wasn't exactly sleeping. Actually, it was closer to the truth to say that she wasn't sleeping at all. Oh, sure, her eyes were closed and her breathing was even, but her mind was racing along at a million miles a second. She was so exhausted that she could not sleep. Her mind refused to shut down.
She hated that.
She wanted to open her eyes, but they were so heavy and fatigued that they wouldn't cooperate. The darkness of her quarters wasn't absolute, and the haze of the "night time" lights bleeding into the room from under the crack in the door wasn't as dim as it should be.
She really, really hated that.
She realized that she was becoming violent. Her temper, already barely held in check, was beginning to become more and more apparent. Within the last three weeks, she caught herself again and again letting her temper get the better of her. She'd promised herself that she wasn't going to be... like that again. She'd learned her lessons well. Mostly.
The thing that the school psychologists had failed to disclose to her parents was that Cyber School had a tendency to, ahem, give young ladies and gentlemen raging psychotic tendencies.
In other words, upon leaving Cyber School, Kochanski had gone off the rails.
She recalled the night in the ducts with the Cat, Kryten and Lister, oh so long ago. She'd been coy, explaining cutely about the rails being here and her being there and ha ha so adorable.
It was closer to the truth to say that the rails were in Greenwich and she was in Sydney.
There was shock, of course. And horrors. Horrors unimaginable. For twelve years, she'd been completely immersed in her own perfect fantasy. It wasn't that she didn't know what was going on in the real world, but rather that she chose to ignore it completely, just like the rest of her school chums.
The first time she'd seen a homeless person, she'd had screaming hysterics.
It wasn't just the unpleasantness of the world, either. She'd been incredibly shocked upon learning that not all men were sweet, shy and romantically inclined. Her first real relationship out of school had been... fine.
Just fine.
She expected every day to be fireworks and blazing arguments, flashing eyes and sore bottoms. What she got was... boring. Beyond boring. He adored her, and he bored her.
It wasn't just the end of childhood, it was the end of the world, almost literally. She got caught breaking back into the school one night, trying to plug herself back in. The school didn't even press charges, as it turned out this was a common occurrence.
This was the catalyst for her rail jumping.
The years between schooling and joining the Space Corps had been a blur. If she concentrated, she could remember certain instances of those intervening six years. She was almost positive nothing illegal had been done... Well, nothing life threatening... Well, nothing that threatened the lives of others... Well...
It was bad enough losing six years of your life. What made that six years even worse was the nagging suspicion in the back of her head that someday, someone in a dark, ill-fitting suit was going to tap her on the shoulder and present an invoice for the missing chunk. Gangsters and cyber-punks had their own system of checks and balances, wholly separate from the rest of polite society. And Kochanski suspected that she was in for a bit of balancing from these people.
Cyber-punks had their own style, a perfect mixture of Bohemian fug and silicone shine. Their clothing was perfect, their hygiene less than stellar. They had access to the top-of-the line in computers, but rarely access to showers. Endless cups of coffee pounded in dark internet cafes, drunk by people who could still program in FORTRAN if they felt like being silly. Getting a MicroAppleSun computer to run LOGLAN was the height of code-monkey pretension. Forget Linux, these guys were old-old-old school.
They were also heavily into Nigerian Bank Spam. Spam had to come from somewhere. It came from the brains and fingers of Kochanski and her ilk.
Not to mention the fact that most of them were involved in the development of Better Than Life.
Drugs? Of course there were drugs. Hash being the fall back, the old stand by, the treasured friend. But in their more manic phases, they would smoke, snort or shoot anything that didn't shoot back. Freebees, dingers, Buckyballs. Crack, smack, and whack. At one point Kochanski had even been in the same room with an open bag of Bliss. She hadn't gone closer than 15 feet away from it and had still gotten high.
Close calls like this made up the entirety of her life.
She'd joined the Corps to get off Earth in a hurry. Cleaning up her act, actually brushing her hair and shaving her armpits, and presenting the face that she'd perfected in Cyber-School. They'd taken her on in the capacity of Associate Astronavigator, and she had swiftly proven that she had a head for numbers and an uncanny sense of direction. Her promotion was swift and quiet.
Then, disaster in the form of David Lister and a cat.
Kochanski had fallen for the Scouser because he reminded her of all her friends back home. She never told him this, because she figured that he wouldn't want to be compared to the pert and pretty cyber-punks. Tim the catering officer had been... a diversionary tactic, and she'd been somewhat nonplussed that Lister let her go so easily. The thing with the cat was icing on the cake of their non-communication. She'd taken the beast, tried to disintegrate it, and then decided that she'd wait a bit. Use it as a sort of a opening gambit in getting him to talk to her again. "Sorry, I couldn't do it, do you want her back? Oh, and me? I come with the cat, you see." Ingenious. But a week went by, and then two, and then three, and she couldn't bring herself to face him. He'd avoided her entirely. The first feelings of resentment stirred in her, and she held a wholly irrational grudge against him for it.
Then she'd been caught with the damn thing before she could follow through.
She was about to give into the captain's demands and hand over the cat, when she got a bit of a shock. A particularly juicy piece of gossip started making the rounds. George MacIntire, flight coordinator and third officer, had not died of natural causes, as previously suspected. He'd gotten into some serious debt, and had been... balanced. By a man Kochanski knew all too well. She'd known him immediately from the descriptions that were circulating on the Dwarf. "Thug," as she knew him from her days in the cyber-cafe, had once laid a beefy hand on her shoulder and told her he... liked her. He told her, in no uncertain terms, that she would like him back. This scared her silly. Her random disappearance was sure to have annoyed him. So the choice facing her; hand over the cat, or go into stasis... She'd smiled secretly to herself and went into the booth gladly. In stasis, nobody can flatten your fingers with a lobster mallet.
Kochanski had been quite amused to discover that her counterpart in this universe, dead three million years and not reanimated by the nanos for some reason, was something of a goody-good. She did a bit of digging on this universe's Dwarf, and discovered that her other self had an exemplary record of perfect behavior. But Dave never compared her to "his" Kristine. Even after all the times she compared him to "her" Dave.
Interesting. Why hadn't Dave drawn the obvious parallel? Could it be that perhaps he didn't realize the differences?
Or could it be because he did realize it? And kept his mouth shut?
Kochanski did not like where this line of thought was taking her at all. She pushed that topic away, and found her thoughts turning to Hippolyta and Rimmer. Not that that topic was any better, but, seeing as it was their fault that she was stranded along with them, it was a common topic.
Something had happened to them, she knew it. Something had finally snapped. The whole dromedary, straw, and breaking thing had occurred. And, knowing what she did about both of them, there were going to be some serious angst fits coming up very soon, flitting about as if they owned the place.
Drifting in and out of consciousness, Kochanski felt something sharp and hot pull at the bridge of her nose. She instinctually batted at it with a finger, but that did not ease the itch.
Something was very wrong. Very, very wrong. To her utter amazement, she knew that it had something to do with Rimmer. Something bigger than usual was wrong with Rimmer.
He wasn't there. Or, rather, he was there, but was drifting. He was losing his way.
Kochanski didn't exactly know what was going on, at this point. Convinced she was dreaming, she reached out and laid a steadying hand on Rimmer's shoulder. He stopped drifting and turned into her, clutching at her like a baby monkey. Kochanski didn't flinch, but continued guiding him back to where he needed to be.
Gasp.
Gasp.
Ga-- Sigh.
And now, finally completely asleep, Kochanski rolled over and hugged Lister tightly to her.
Hippolyta didn't know whether to be angry, ashamed, embarrassed, humiliated, or what. Any combination of the four at this point would have worked out just fine. Embarrassment made her angry, and anger made her work harder so she'd never be embarrassed again.
But she wasn't any of these things. She was just... sad.
She found herself really missing Rimmer. Missing his habits, his postures, his kisses. But, of course, she'd just gotten concrete proof that he was in no way capable of having an adult relationship. A small, nagging suspicion in the back of her head told her that she was incapable of that as well. This she ignored. She wasn't one for introspection. If there was a problem, you hit things until the problem stopped. Easy enough.
She discovered that the male form she was currently wearing gave her a very different reaction to sadness than when she was a woman. As a woman, she would cry, and eat lots of junk food, and curl up in a little ball and hide under a pile of blankets. As a man, she found that she wanted to do the same things, only this time she wanted to eat curries instead of chocolate. And watch American football.
These desires did nothing to improve her mood.
Once in the cockpit of the 'Bug, Hippolyta didn't say much to The Cat or Kryten. But Kryten, as per usual, was quite keen on chattering away.
"Miss Hippolyta, could you please explain what is going on? My memory circuits are not supplying the necessary information for me. I find myself more confused than a Valley Girl in a university physics class."
"Yeah, Blondie, what the hell is going on?" This last was The Cat, who still insisted on calling her Blondie, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Hippolyta took a deep breath and turned away from the mining schematics. She counted to ten under her breath in German, and then said, "I don't really know. The watch is gone, Rimmer's unconscious, I'm still in Lister's body, and we're mining water for our system. That's as far as I go, I get off at the next stop." She turned back to her work, logging the gallons of water being processed.
Kryten, who was always quick on the uptake, recognized the severely depressed mood Hippolyta was in. It was so far out of character for her, he found himself momentarily shocked. When he accessed his data banks for information as to how to handle this new development, he shuffled the Heimlich maneuver to the bottom of the list, as a precautionary measure. Why that was weighted so heavily he would never know...
"Cat, could you please excuse us for a moment?"
"You mean I don't have to work? About time you recognized my needs, Plastic Man." In a flash of maroon silk, The Cat streaked out of the cockpit. When Hollister didn't even turn to throw insults at his back, Kryten realized that she was worse off than he suspected.
"Miss Hollister?" Kryten took the chair opposite hers and looked at her with mechanoid concern. "Are you feeling quite well?"
In answer, her eyes still on her screen, Hippolyta raised one brown hand and waved it in Kryten's face. "No, I'm still in Lister's body. Any other stupid questions?"
Kryten was not swayed by this. "You've been in Mr. Lister's body for almost three weeks now. Yet you've never been as, ahem, 'down in the mouth,' as you are right now. What's the matter, Miss Hollister?"
"Kryten, give it a rest, ok? You don't give a flying rabbit crap about me or my problems. You don't like women. We know this. Just leave me alone."
"I beg to differ, Miss Hippolyta. I do give a flying rabbit crap. Those bunnies can float and shit all they want and I'll still care!"
Hippolyta blinked and stared incredulously at the mechanoid. "What?"
"You just said. Flying rabbit crap. I've never encountered a flying rabbit who deliberately voided its bowels overhead in the past, but I'm always open to new experiences."
"Kryten. Go away. I'm fine."
"No you're not."
"Yes I am."
"No, quite clearly you're not."
"Yes, I am."
"No, you're..."
"IF YOU SAY 'NO YOU'RE NOT' ONE MORE TIME I WILL PERSONALLY SOLDER YOUR MOUTH SHUT AND SHOVE YOUR HEAD UP YOUR RECTAL CAVITY!"
Ah, that did it. Having Hollister in a temper was much more par for the course than having her in a funk. "Miss Hollister, please..." began Kryten, only to be cut off with her standing up and leaning across the console at him, her hands clutching at the edge like a vulture.
"Please. What. Kryten?"
"Please tell me what happened. How did you suddenly reappear back on the ship?"
Hollister visibly relaxed. "That I couldn't tell you, Kryten. I was on the G.E.L.F. ship, then I was running with Rimmer somewhere, and then I was back here, sans watch and consciousness."
This was news to Kryten. "Running? Running where? And toward what?"
Hollister blinked. "Dunnow. It was... blurry. Grey. Like clouds, or a huge field of cotton." She paused for a moment, trying to marshall her thoughts, screwing her lips up in concentration. When she continued, she sounded almost frightened. "Like there was nowhere to run to, but we had to run. There was a woman... she was doing something to Rimmer. He was in pain. I fought her, but couldn't... Like some sort of nightmare..." She trailed off, staring down at her hands.
Kryten processed all of this, and remembered how his programming had gone absolutely haywire when he'd been transported back onto the 'Bug himself. If it had befuddled his hardware, then the human brain was sure to come out of that sort of thing much worse of it. Hippolyta was apparently suffering from wounds that went deeper than the flesh. And they had apparently scabbed over faster than he would have liked, since she was having such a hard time remembering what had happened. Kryten made a mental note to ask Rimmer when he awoke.
"Interesting," said Kryten, turning to the console. "Access query: telepathy, instances in humans, from early 20th century to late 25th. Execute." Kryten thanked his lucky stars that all Starbugs had the Encyclopedia Ionia encoded to their hardware. There was a subtle whirr, and the screen filled with text. "Ah, excellent." He turned to Hippolyta. "What was the name of the individual who took the watch from you, Miss Hollister?"
Hippolyta bit her lower lip and rolled her eyes up to the left, trying to remember. "Bai. I think," she amended. She also had no idea where the mechanoid was going with this.
"Thank you. A female, I assume?" At Hippolyta's nod, he turned back to the console. "Access query: Cross reference previous search with human female, name Bai. Execute." Another whirr, and the screen filled with text again, some of which was blinking red and white. Hyperlinks to pictures within the system. Hippolyta couldn't read it. It was too small from where she was sitting. Kryten then touched the screen, one of the hyperlinks, and pulled up a picture.
"Is this the woman you and Rimmer were chasing?"
Hippolyta gasped, because there on the screen in front of her was the hated face of Bai. Bai looked like she was about 35 or so in that picture, and she was standing in front of some numbers that were painted on the wall. A mug shot. Under the picture was a small text splash, bulleted and bolded at certain points.
"Tell me what you know about telepathy, Miss Hollister."
Hippolyta looked confused. "Telepathy? It's impossible. It's strictly in the realm of bad serial sci-fi."
"Not precisely, no. There were numerous experiments with telepathy back in the twenty-first century. Then they stopped. Look."
Kryten stood, and allowed Hippolyta to take his seat. Ignoring this breach of usual operating procedure, Hippolyta rounded the console and sat down, peering at the screen. She kept her glance averted from the face, however, because she felt the overwhelming desire to reach through the screen and knock her teeth out.
"Bai Liang-Wu. Age: 36. Height: 4 feet, 11 inches. (149.86 cm) Weight: 92 pounds. (41.7 kg) Last known location: Tianjin, China." Standard arrest information.
Then it got weird.
"Known abilities: Telepathy, telekenisis, illusory projection. Considered extremely dangerous. Do not approach under any circumstances."
Digesting this new information, Hippolyta turned to Kryten. "She's a mind reader? That's impossible..." Then she remembered what Rimmer had said to her in the medi-bay. I'll give you a pass, what with all the swapping and telepathic nonsense going on... She'd thought he was being sarcastic and cute. She realized now that he'd been dead serious. Telepathy? Jesus.
"No, it's sadly rather possible indeed." Kryten took Rimmer's usual chair at the station directly across from his own. "In the late 21st century, there was some sort of technological disaster, involving something that, for lack of a better metaphore, 'switched on' all the telepathic abilities in some humans. I'd have to dig some more, but I think Bai was one of those people."
"Kryten, it's three million years later. She should be dead."
"So should you," pointed out Kryten, unkindly. Hippolyta pursed her lips in annoyance at him, but couldn't remain annoyed for long. Her gaze kept going back to the word "telepathy" on the screen.
The notion of somebody rummaging about in her head made her very, very uncomfortable. She'd had so many secrets in her life that the threat of having them laid bare gave her the cold chills. For instance, there was the way that she had felt about Rimmer when they'd first gotten together... She shoved that thought quickly out of her head, just in case there was indeed some malevolent eavesdropper lurking about.
"Kryten, are you seriously telling me that this woman from thirty thousand millenia ago is responsible for stealing that watch? Why? What for?"
"That, I do not know," answered the mechanoid. "This Bai has quite a criminal history behind her. She could just be a common thief."
"No," answered Hippolyta immediately. "She was... triumphant. It wasn't just a trinket to her. It had meaning, somehow." Hippolyta read further into the dossier, looking for some clue.
Bai, aka The Jade Dragon, aka North Wind Sister, aka Queenie (self-inflicted nickname). After becoming infected with the telepath virus, used her new abilities to steal many valuable items from the Chinese state. Upon her discovery by the American authorities in Detroit... Hippolyta started. This Bai had spent time in her home town! ...Bai convinced them that she was a different person entirely and escaped. She was arrested in Milton Keynes six months after the Detroit incident. She allowed herself to be taken, she claimed. This picture, taken at a local precinct, is the only existing shot of her. Later, her arresting officer, the prison matron and processing officers were all discovered dead, and she was gone. Cause of death was never determined, but all four victims were discovered after autopsy to have lost considerable brain mass. After this incident, she was not seen again. She is presumed dead, but there is no date of death on record. Hippolyta shuddered. Bai wasn't just a thief. Oh, no.
"Miss Hollister, what did you find?" Wordlessly, she stood aside and allowed Kryten to read over what she just had.
If mechanoids could go pale, Kryten would have been as white as a sheet, if the look on his face was anything to go by. "Yes, well. Perhaps she wants the watch to switch to somebody else's body. She's three million years old. How she lived this long, I haven't a clue. But she must be beyond needing a Zimmer Frame at this point. A fresh, new body..."
"Then why didn't she just take mine when she had the chance? Or Kochanski's? Or Rimmer's, if she's not being picky about sex? Or Lister's, if she's not being picky at all?"
"Perhaps she's a stupid telepath?"
Hippolyta shot Kryten a look. "Not funny."
"Sorry. Levity mode cancel."
Hippolyta leaned against the bulkhead, one arm across her stomach, chin resting in the other's cupped hand. This was baffling. She was a Security Officer, for smeg's sake. She was supposed to be able to solve this sort of puzzle. Then it hit her.
Her brain had been trained to this sort of task. Lister's was trained to guzzling lager and lusting after Kochanski. This brain, no matter the personality inhabiting it, wasn't used to logic puzzles and putting together small clues to form a satisfying whole.
"Damn his eyes," she breathed.
"Beg your pardon?"
"Nothing, Kryten. Just moaning about Lister's stunted mental capacities."
"Ah, is it Morale Night again?"
She cocked an eyebrow at that. "What?"
"Never mind," he answered. He turned back to the screen and continued reading. "Presumed to have been scanned with the WeKnowYourStuff adware..." Kryten paused, and looked startled. "Adware? Surely not..."
"What?
"This is saying that the technological disaster I mentioned earlier was caused by adware on the first internet protocols. If that's true, then there must have been many, many more telepaths." His fingers flew across the keyboard, not bothering to do a vocal search of the database. After a long few moments, he sat back, apparently stunned. "Snap my motherboard..." he breathed.
"What? And, I warn you Kryten, you make me say 'what' one more time and I'll remove your brain and replace it with a bowl of spaghetti."
"There were, approximately, five hundred thousand victims of this pop-up plague. All died or went insane within a period of three weeks. Those that went insane were rounded up and executed by the American government."
Hippolyta went cold. "That's... that's murder..." Sure, they were telepaths, but they were still people.
"It gets better. This same software was later used to develop total immersion video games, including Better Than Life." Kryten pulled up yet another page of data, all about the deadly game. The addicts of this game were far too numerous, and its subsequent banning...
Something tugged at Hippolyta's subconscious and she said, "Wait, pull up that list of BTL developers again." Kryten did so. Not even knowing what she was looking for, Hippolyta ran her eyes down the list.
The name, which she had registers but not consciously recognized, hit her like a ton of bricks when she read it again.
"Holy shit. Kryten?"
"I see it too."
"That's impossible."
"We should..."
"Yeah."
They stared at the name for a moment longer, then ran in a complete panic out of the cockpit. They were going to go talk to one of the developers right now. They just hoped she was still awake.
"I'm trying to sleep!" Kochanski stood wedged half-in half-out of the door to her quarters, her rumpled, brown hair standing out in a crazy tangle against the cream white of the bulkhead. Only her head, neck and one shoulder was visible. The rest of her was hidden away behind the door. Hippolyta knew that move. That was the move that said, I'm naked behind this door so don't even think about opening it further.
"Get dressed, Kochanski, we have to talk."
"I haven't slept in almost 40 hours, Hollister. Piss off."
"You were involved in the development of Better Than Life, weren't you?"
Kochanski's eyes widened, and her head disappeared from the crack, and she slammed the door behind her.
That was surprising. Hippolyta and Kryten glanced sideways at each other. Then Hippolyta started hammering on the door. This was a potentially life and death situation, and Kochanski was playing ostrich. "Open up, Kochanski! You know something about this Bai bitch we're facing and you need to spill! Open up! Open..." The door swung open, and Hippolyta accidentally knocked on Lister's face.
They both jumped back, Lister cussing and rubbing at his forehead. Hippolyta covered her embarrassment by saying, "I still hate what you've done with my hair, Lister. Where's Kochanski?"
"She ran into the bathroom," said Lister. "What was that you said about Better Than Life?"
"Kochanski helped develop it."
Lister's reaction was not one that Hippolyta was expecting. Instead of blinking in confusion, asking "She what now?" and gibbering in shock, Lister shrugged slightly and said, "Yeah, so?"
"You knew?"
"Yeah, she told me a couple years back when we were back on Floor 13. No big deal, she said she did graphics design."
Hippolyta and Kryten shared yet another sideways glance. "Mister Lister, Better Than Life is a terrible drug! Worse than heroin, Bliss and methamphetamenes combined! And you just shrug off the fact that Miss Kochanski was involved in its development?"
"Kryten, she didn't know!" Lister looked angry now. "She started off as a graphic designer, her work got picked up by the company, and the next thing she knew her backgrounds were being used to brainwash people. She didn't know!"
"And she told you this?"
"Yes!" He whirled on Hippolyta now. "I don't appreciate what you're incinerating here, Hollister!"
"Insinuating?"
"Yeah, that too!"
"So if she was a background graphics gal, why is her name listed under code monkey?"
"What? Where? Where did you find that?" Now the confusion came out. Hippolyta felt slightly gratified.
"They found it in the Encyclopedia Ionia, I'll be willing to bet," came Kochanski's voice from the bathroom. She emerged a moment later, wearing a pair of grey sweatpants and an oversized black teeshirt. She crossed the room and stood in front of Hippolyta, looking like she was facing a judge in a court of law whose authority she didn't recognize. "Well done, Nancy Drew. So are you going to turn me in? Oh, wait, you can't, we're three million years in the wrong direction from any juristictions."
Hippolyta blinked. "I don't want to turn you in, Kochanski. I don't give a smeg. What you did in your own private time before you joined the JMC is your business."
It was Kochanski's turn to blink. "I broke the law. And you don't care?"
"Wrong, Kochanski. You didn't break the law. Your counterpart in this universe did. And she's not here."
Kochanski's mouth dropped. "You're... oh my God, you're right."
"Thought I'd forget that important detail? Ever wonder why the nanobots didn't resurrect your counterpart here?"
"Occasionally."
"Wait, hold on, I'm lost," interrupted Lister. "Krissy came from another dimension, yeah. But what's this about her..." Then his eyes widened. "Holy smeg, you're right. If the nanos did the job they were supposed to, we would have ended up with two Kristines. But we didn't."
"Right. Still don't know why. But that's not the point. The point is, no matter what universe, it seems Kochanski was instrumental in getting Better Than Life out to the consumer public. How?"
Kochanski leaned her upper thighs against a nearby table and closed her eyes. "I was a cyber-punk. I had... some friends. My schooling in an entirely virtual setting made me a perfect guinea pig for their little game. I helped them beta-test it. And, believe me, when I did, I never had a single problem getting out."
"But did you write any code, Kochanski?"
"Not a single line."
"Damn!"
"Krissy... you were a Game-Head?" Lister sounded like he was about to start screaming blue murder. Hippolyta couldn't blame him one bit. When somebody you know is a self-confessed former drug addict, and has kept it hidden for thirteen years...
Kochanski gave a soft look to her lover. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you, Dave. It was a long time ago! I was 18, just out of high school, and dumber than a brick. I'm so sorry."
"You lied to me, Kris. You said you were a background graphics designer. You said you'd never played."
"Dave..."
"Hey, touching and angsty as this may be," said Hippolyta, "we're up to our armpits in smegging bad times and don't have the luxury of pounding out personal relationship problems at the moment, ok?"
"Look, just because you and Rimmer are having issues..." began Lister, but he stopped. He stopped because the look on Hippolyta's face told him that if he didn't stop, he'd wind up as a red smear across the deck. But, amazingly, she didn't start screaming, didn't start lashing out and hitting whoever she could reach.
"Yes, we're having problems. In fact, we're not seeing each other any more. He left me. Rimmer is in a hell of his own devising at the moment, and that's where I want him left. Clear?"
There was a moment of silence, before Kryten spoke up softly. "Miss Hollister, let's let them get back to sleep..."
"Wait, Kryten. One more thing. Kochanski, the telepathic adware. How much of that code was used in BTL?"
"How did you...? My God, the encyclopedia must have been updated a lot while we were out of circulation. That tidbit wasn't ever discovered when we were... younger."
"How much of the code was used, Kochanski?"
"Every smegging line."
Hippolyta rocked back on her heels, staring in shock at the brunette. "So when Bai said it wasn't me she was after... And when she had us trapped in Rimmer's mind... Kochanski, she tried to posess you, too, didn't she?"
"Is that what that was?" mused Kochanski, rubbing her at her eyes. "I thought I'd eaten some bad food or something..." Her nonchalant tone betrayed her fear from that moment.
"But she couldn't," breathed Hippolya, looking down at the floor, chewing on a fingernail, a habit of Lister's that she'd inherited. "Why couldn't she...? Why? Oh, damn it, Lister, why'd you have to be so stupid? I can't concentrate with this brain of yours!"
"Hey, steady on!" exclaimed Lister, who'd moved back to the bunk and was sitting with his head in his hands.
"It's right on the tip of my tongue... Damn damn damn smegging DAMN!" She thrust a finger in Lister's direction and said, "You! You did this to us! You use my brain and figure this out! Think, you asshole!"
Lister looked shocked, then perplexed. "So there's software that makes you telepathic, and it was used in BTL, and Kochanski played it in the earlier phases..." He stopped, and then his face lit up like a lamp, and he laughed out loud. "Are you seriously telling me that you think Krissy's telepathic? Get outta town!"
But Hippolyta didn't laugh along with him. Instead, she sighed in satisfaction as a large piece of the puzzle fell into place. "That's exactly what I'm suggesting, Lister. Kristine Kochanski has latent telepathic abilities."
"What?" Kochanski had paled, then blushed, then paled again. "That is the most ridiculous piece of nonsense I've heard since my first semester of poli-sci!"
"But it's true. And you've got them buried so deep you don't even know you have them. When you called me a bully earlier, I shut up real quick, didn't I?"
"Of course you did, you were pissed off."
"No, Kochanski. You shut me up. Mentally. You're doing it even now. Projecting your emotions at us so we feel uncomfortable."
"I don't feel uncomfortable," said Kryten.
"I do," said Lister.
"Oh please, Hollister. You're talking rubbish."
"These are not the droids you're looking for?" asked Hippolyta. "Kochanski, think about it. Think back to your first days on this ship. Think about how Lister kept missing your portal connection."
"Yes, he was being a prat!" yelled Kochanski.
"No, he was giving in to your subconscious desire to stay with a real live boy as opposed to a hologram. I'm right, you know I'm right."
"Hollister, you've had your brains scrambled by what you've been through this last three weeks. The smell of the G.E.L.F. got to you and rotted them out. I am NOT telepathic!"
"Prove it."
"Prove it?"
"Yeah. Prove it. I'm thinking of a number between one and..."
"Anything I say, you'll just agree with, Hollister! I'm not stupid!"
"Ok, fine." She turned to Lister. "You think of a number. And try to let Kochanski read your mind."
Lister turned to Kochanski. "Ok. Go."
"Dave!"
"Hey, she might be onto something here. Go for it."
Kochanski rolled her eyes and heaved a deep sigh. "No. I'm not playing this stupid game with you. I'm tired and I want to go back to sleep. Hollister, go back and get the water specs and leave me alone!"
"Kris..."
"No! You've all gone absolutely mad! No!"
"Krissy..."
"NO!"
"Kristine!"
"Seventy three! Alright? It's bloody seventy three!"
There was a moment of silence following this pronouncement, in which Lister looked over at Hippolyta with a slightly glazed look on his face. Then, silently, he nodded once.
Kochanski seemed not to believe it. "What? You're serious? It really was seventy three?" Lister nodded again. "You're not just saying that?" Lister shook his head, his eyes wide with fear and awe.
"Pick up that book, Kochanski," whispered Hippolyta, pointing at a slim comic book on the nearby table. Kochanski started to reach for it, but Hippolyta grabbed her wrist. "Pick it up without using your hand."
The mood in the room was so intense now that Kochanski didn't even protest once. Curiosity overpowering common sense, Kochanski stared at the book for a moment, and was as startled as everybody else when it levitated up off the table and did a small swoop.
"Smegging hell..." breathed Lister, his mouth open like a bass on a fishing line.
Hippolyta let Kochanski go, and turned to Kryten, her eyes shining with triumph and power. "Kryten, see if we've taken enough water on board. If we have, we need to get underway. Even if we haven't, see if we can make do with what we've already got. It's going to take a week to get back there, but we've got a surprise for Bai. Oh yes."
"Miss Kochanski... that... you... I I I I I guh guh guh guh..." Kryten was stuck again.
"Oh, damn it." Hippolyta walked over to Kryten and slapped him on the back of his plastic skull. This seemed to knock the skip out, and Kryten wibbled for a bit before turning to stare at Kochanski.
Kochanski swallowed, and then ran into the bathroom. They all heard the retching noises as she vomited for a bit. Hippolyta came down from her minor power trip and realized what a sanity shattering thing she'd just exposed Kochanski to. And Lister. Lister, too, looked like he wanted to vomit. Hell, she wasn't feeling so hot herself. Nausea swelled in her abdomen, and Hippolyta clenched her jaw tightly to keep herself from joining Kochanski in the john.
Oh, smeg. Kochanski was doing it. Now that the cat was out of the bag, her thoughts and feelings were echoing back, lashing out, influencing those around her.
And there wasn't a damn thing Hippolyta could do to keep herself from running out of the room and barfing all over the floor.
A moment later, she was done, and was doubled over, clutching at her knees, panting like a dog on a hot day. Smegging hell, we've got to figure out how to control this. But how? And, what if she... oh smeg... Kochanski and Lister appeared in the doorway, both of them leaning on Kryten for support. Everybody but the mechanoid looked green around the gills, and Hippolyta noticed that Lister's newly shorn hair was soaked through with sweat.
"Well," said Kochanski weakly, "if we need to get back at Bai, I can just make her chunder till her intestines explode..."
Hippolyta laughed, but it was a a nervous laugh. All smart ass remarks were gone now, and her mind was spinning, trying desperately to blank itself out. The creeping horrors finally caught up with her. All thoughts of power and weapons and using Kochanski to defeat Bai were gone. In their place was a terrified scream, a frantic, panicked desire to keep Kochanski out of her head. Cautiously, Hippolyta turned to Kryten. "Let's get going. I'm going to go..." and the lie that popped into her head was simple, "...check in on Rimmer."
"Rimmer?" asked Kochanski, apparently not noticing the lie. "Oh, God, Rimmer! Had a dream about Rimmer!"
Lister looked at Kochanski like a puppy being blamed for a mess the cat made. "You had a dream about Rimmer?"
"Not that kind of dream. It was... weird. He was scared, and lost... and wandering... away..."
When the meaning of these words hit the group, they all swallowed. "He died, you mean," said Hippolyta, her voice completely flat. "You dreamed he died." Seeing the devastated look on Kochanski's face, Hippolyta suddenly knew, she just knew, that it was true. And, because she had to know... "He's dead now, isn't he? Really dead? Oh, my God, he's dead. He's lost and gone and dead, isn't he?" She was babbling. "He's dead, I killed him because I left, oh God he's dead, he's dead..."
Kochanski didn't wait to answer, but turned and ran as fast as she could toward the medi-bay. This did nothing to bolster Hippolyta's confidence, and she did something very sissy.
She fainted.
When she came to, she was staring up at the underside of the bunk that she and Rimmer used to share. There was a figure sitting across from her, in the dark of her quarters, hunched over the table. It took Hippolyta a moment to realize that she was looking down at the figure, and she was actually on the top bunk. "Lights," she croaked.
It was Lister in the chair, asleep, his head bobbing up and down gently as he slept. Hippolyta, with knees of jelly, crawled down the ladder and placed a hand on Lister's shoulder. Lister woke up instantly and blinked a few times.
"Tell me."
Lister nodded. "He's alive, Hollister."
Hippolyta, not caring that he saw, sat down across from him and started crying. Great, heaving sobs racked her body, and her hands shook. "He's alive. Oh, God, thank God, he's alive..."
"There's some bad news, Hollister." She took a deep shuddering breath, too hysterical to stop crying now, and just stared at him fearfully through her borrowed eyes. "By the time we got there, he had almost no brain activity. He's in a coma. Probably for good."
"But he's alive." Her voice was dead, emotionless, as she clung to this fact like a drowning woman. "He's alive." All the hate, all the stress, all the anger and rage that had plagued her thoughts of Rimmer for the last three weeks was still roiling away under the surface, but relief was first in her mind. Rimmer was alive. The rest of the universe could go to hell, Rimmer was alive.
"Kochanski's asleep." Lister spoke dispassionately, like he was giving a briefing. "Kryten says the water tanks are full to capacity, all the sludge is out of our plumbing, and the Bug's fuel cells are charged and ready. We can get under way as soon as we've all had a full twelve hours of sleep. That includes you."
"But... Rimmer..."
"Is not going to come out of it, Hollister."
"He might."
"He won't. Kryten says that..."
"FUCK KRYTEN!" she shrieked. "KRYTEN CAN GO STRAIGHT TO THE SILICON HELL HE BELIEVES IN! RIMMER IS GOING TO COME OUT OF IT!" She ran out of the room, blinded by irrational anger, and fear, and the tears that these two emotions brought out. She stumbled and banged through all the doors between her quarters and the medi-bay, until she was finally there, and burying her face in his torso. A similar scene from just a few hours before, only now she was the one babbling at him.
"You bastard, you bastard, why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you tell me that she raped your mind? Why didn't you realize she was a killer? How could you not have seen it? You bastard, you idiot, you absolute moron, you smeghead!"
And, as she muffled any further expletives with her face in the blanket, the Starbug XX gently boosted off the surface of the ice moon and soared off into space, pursuing the woman who had so screwed up all of their lives.
"Dave?"
"Not now, Kris. Not now."
"Talk to me. Please?"
"Why bother? You know what I'm thinking, right? Just lift it out of my head."
"You're... you're not serious..."
"Leave me alone, Kris. Leave me alone."
Author's Note: Holy smeg. How did I let six months go by? Bad ficcer, no biscuit.
