"Cat, you are driving me totally, absolutely, smeggin' insane."

Cat had been acting unbearable for weeks – in a peculiar way. Lister admitted that he always was peculiar, and he doubted he would ever perceive Cat as 'normal', but peculiar in a sense that he was acting wild. And, smeg, did he mean wild.

"Shhhh…" Cat hissed.

Lister, slack back comfortably over his car-themed sofa, watched Cat pathetically stalk into his bedroom. His eyes were wide, and he looked more focused than Lister could have ever imagined he had the intention span for.

"Caaat.." he sighed, "Seriously, you're freakin' me out, stop."

"I said shush!" he hissed again. Lister rolled his eyes.

"Shush, whaddya mean 'shush', what on earth are you doing this time?!"

"Come on gerbil-face, you're throwing me off here! I have it this time…"

Lister huffed, crinkling his 'Pottery for Postpartum' magazine that he found somewhere in the depths of the mailing room against his forehead in frustration.

"There is nothing in here, Cat, there has never been anything in here, Cat, we have been through this before, Cat, don't make me get the spray bottle out again, Cat."

Cat's head popped up next to his, his claws digging into the fabric of the chair. If Lister didn't have the magazine strewn over his face, he would have swatted Cat's hands away. But he did. And he didn't see Cat leap over the sofa, pouncing directly on Lister's stomach.

"AARGHH! CAT!"

They both toppled out of the chair.

"That is ENOUGH," yelled Lister. He pushed Cat off him, clumsily standing up and cradling his now sore belly, looking down at the feline in intense aggravation, "Look, man, this has gone far beyond a joke, right? You are acting absolutely feral and it's driving everybody smeggin' nuts!"

Cat then stood up after him, pouting at being scolded by Lister of all people.

"Hey, come on! Just because you can't sense it, dogfood-breath, doesn't mean that nobody else can't! You're not the only one going insane!"

"Oh, believe me Cat, we could tell," he spat dryly, "How many- how many times are we going to do this, Cat? How many more times will you tackle Rimmer's lightbee, gnaw on Kryten's groinal socket, pounce on me joy compartment, how many more times are you going to act out like this?"

"I'm telling you man, I'm telling you – something is goin' on here!"

Lister was very, very frustrated. For weeks Cat has been telling them that he feels like something was wrong. Something he couldn't quite describe, but which made all of his senses stand on edge. At first it was concerning – he kept complaining of intense headaches, nausea, nightmares, enough to have him be in and out of the medibay to try and see what was wrong with him. But nothing turned up – he was very healthy even.

Then they scanned both inside and outside of the Dwarf, trying to see what sort of thing was lurking about which could cause this; but, again, nothing. Each time. And now, enough time had passed for there to obviously be no great impending danger that Cat kept warning of – now Holly's hypothesis was that he had just gone potty. And Lister could agree. The only thing that has changed with time is that Cat seemingly just continued to get worse. And he couldn't take it anymore.

"You know what I reckon the problem is?" Lister asked. Cat looked at him quizzically, "I think something feral in your DNA has started to mess with your new genetics."

Cat laughed.

"Buddy, if that was even remotely true, then your monkey genes have always been causing you problems!"

"No, no, I mean it," he continued, "I mean, Frankie, she was a feral cat. I found her out on the street when she was already pregnant, you know. There's a lot of difference between a domestic cat and a street cat. And I don't think that's ever gone away in your species."

Cat had always been 'feral'. Far from domesticated. It was hard to say if the relationship he had with him was even a friendship – Cat just seemed to come and go from people and conversation as he pleased, barely paying attention unless the attention was on him or food. Then again, Lister knew domestic cats weren't all that different in that regard. But he thought he struck something, perhaps it was a situation where his predator instincts had somehow begun to resurface again. He had no idea what or if there was a solution readily available on Red Dwarf for a problem as advance as 'sudden onset backwards evolution', but it didn't hurt to try and look.

"C'mon Cat, let's get you down to the medibay and checked out again," sighed Lister, beckoning Cat to follow him.

Cat defied, acting how Lister envisioned a normal housecat would react when knowing it was going to the vet.

"Come ooonnn, buddy! You know I-!"

Before Cat could complain, he yelped in pain. He clutched his head, looking like he was suddenly in agony.

"Cat? Cat, are you alright?" asked Lister, jogging next to him and tenderly putting a hand on his back.

"Could Dave and The Cat please make their way down to the Drive Room? The matter is urgent," suddenly came Holly's monotone voice.

Lister wondered what the smeg was going on this time.

"It's far too small to be an asteroid."

"It cannot be a meteoroid either. The scans are saying that it's hollow and perfectly spherical."

"But it also says it's a geode – and organic. What the smeg could it be?"

Kryten and Rimmer were frantically combing through the monitors in the Drive Room. Well – Kryten was, and Rimmer was ordering him to go through whatever Rimmer saw as important.

"An unidentified object is currently hurdling towards Red Dwarf at break-neck speed. We know it's on collision course and is at a velocity to smash right though us."

"…Good evenin', Rimmer, mind telling me what's happenin'?" said Dave sarcastically as he just walked into the room.

Cat had been leaning on his shoulders, thankfully the lifts making the task of yanking Cat through a city of floors and stairs a little less tedious. As Lister gently sat him down on the nearest chair, Rimmer swiftly stopped Kryten from going over and checking up on him.

"But he needs my help!"

"Kryten," began Rimmer, "We are about to get a human hamster ball-sized bullet hole straight into the heart of our engines. I think everyone here would much rather appreciate it if your priorities could be useful for once. Open up Cam1190 again or God help me, one of your spare heads gets it."

Begrudgingly, Kryten did what he was told.

Lister took a seat around the main monitors next to the mechanoid, scanning over the overwhelming array of data. It only took a moment for him to recognise that it was all utterly useless – they couldn't even properly identify it's mass.

"Right, okay, what are we going to do then?" asked Lister, feeling a slight pit of nerves jump in his still sore stomach.

"Well," started Holly.

"…Yes?"

"We're going to wait until it comes a bit closer."

"Right."

"Then I can identify it a bit more."

"…Yesss?"

"And then we all get hit, run out of power and die."

That set everybody off into a series of exasperated complaints.

"No, Holly, that is not the plan."

"What on Earth can you possibly offer up that is better than the practically all-knowing mind of a super computer, Lister?" Rimmer spat, impatiently pacing around with his hands on his hips.

"Well I don't smeggin' know, anything better than that!"

Kryten would have sighed if he could. Instead he just shook his head and began combing through the monitors once more. There had to be a better plan than that. And it was likely it had to come from him. So he sat and thought.

"Why can't we just detonate it?!" Lister suddenly chimed up. It had somehow escaped his mind that Red Dwarf was stocked up on SRRMs – or 'Space Rock Repellent Missiles', "That's what we normally always do when there's an asteroid comin' at us! Why haven't we done that?!"

"Because, lice brain, we don't know what it is."

"Arnold's right," said Holly, "For all we know it could be impenetrable by our arsenal. Or, better yet, it could be something that could be of use to us."

"…So we're not on an immediate course with unstoppable death then?"

"Probably not," she smiled, "Only being dramatic."

Everyone sighed again.

"Well, I mean we are on an immediate course with an unstoppable death if it turns out we can't detonate it. It's going far too fast for me to get a proper read of it before it crashes into us anyway."

"What?! What's the point of reading it then?!"

"Worth a shot, innit?"

"Right," huffed Rimmer, "We're detonating it. End of discussion. This is absolutely ridiculous. Probably just a piece of advanced human space junk anyway."

"Yeah," sighed Lister, "Go on, Hol, blast it, see what happens."

"Alright Dave."

Holly faded from the monitor.

Lister was stressed. This was enough to make anybody stressed, as clearly everyone else around him was, but Lister had been stressed for a while. Enough so that he had popped through all of his tension sheets. Putting his feet up on the monitor, he wiped a layer of sweat off his forehead with his magazine and then chucked it next to his feet.

Rimmer looked down at it. He let out a long, emotionless sigh.

"Depressed again, Lister?"

"Smeg off."

"I hate it when you get like this," complained Rimmer, "Your depression is depressing."

"What do you even care, Rimmer?"

"Well it becomes a matter concerning me when you become even sloppier than usual. Leaving magazines like that all over the place, skimming through the People's Trust: Endangered Species so you can have something to relate to, cluttering up our space when I'm absolutely powerless to do anything about it. I wouldn't slave to clean up your mess, Lister, but by God, you would be reported into an escape pod and flushed into space like the waste you are at this point."

"Alright, okay, yes, I am depressed, Rimmer! I'm very depressed, in fact! I don't ever stop being depressed! It might be surprising to you, Rimmer, considering the fact you were born in a state similar to the Tinman, but yeah, it's actually very depressing to be the last kind of your species just floating aimlessly in space, 3 million years away from Earth without the slightest hope of getting back to it!"

"Depressed enough to hang pictures of Rocko: The Last Snake River Valley Raccoon up on your bedroom walls to have an idol to aspire to be like?"

"Yes!"

Lister didn't have it in him to argue, yet he found himself biting back, purely out of frustration. But he supposed that frustration was one of the only emotions he found himself feeling when he wasn't feeling completely empty.

Truth be told – he had long lost hope of going back home. It had been years since he first stepped out of the stasis chamber now, and nothing had changed. The stagnant ship atmosphere, bouncing between the same 3.5 people to talk to, it wasn't driving him mad as much as it was driving him to feel unbearably numb. He didn't even know what to do with himself anymore than do exactly what Rimmer said, just to make him feel a bit better. He hated it when Rimmer was right – Rimmer shouldn't ever be right, it was unnatural.

Kryten watched their interaction, feeling deeply sorry for the human. Empathy had been one of the easiest emotions to learn, something which didn't require Lister's coaching. And he wondered if it was just as easy for humans to feel empathy, or if perhaps he was in such a unique position, caring for the last of human kind, that not feeling empathy would be more difficult than the opposite.

Kryten simply couldn't understand human emotions. He eagerly hoped that he could get a better grip on them, someday, but he accepted that he could never be on the same level that other humans were, even if he was designed to emulate them. All organic beings had senses completely alien to something as mechanical as Kryten. It's why he simply couldn't wrap his head around the Cat's recent plight. He knew that animals had an extraordinary sense to detect when something was wrong, just from a 'gut feeling', so they commonly say. But he was such a visceral machine, he acted entirely on input and output, that he could never understand how. That's why he didn't believe that what Cat was feeling was genuine at all – just his senses betraying him into paranoia, somehow. Afterall, if something was happening, something on the ship would have detected it. And, of course, it did – just far, far later than Cat did.

How odd.

"What even is the point?" chimed Lister, looking slightly dishevelled, "What is the point, why are we even doing this- ANY of this? Why are we trying to go back to Earth when it's so smeggin' impossible?!"

"But, sir, you wanted to!"

"Yeah, that was denial talking Kryten. Why are we even trying to keep me alive at this point? We might as well just let it hit us! Holly! Call it off, Holly, just let it come!"

"Great!" said Rimmer, "Having a mental breakdown and suicidal!"

"Come on, Holly, come back, don't even bother!"

"Oh, sir, please, calm down. I hate seeing you get so worked up like this – we need to get you into the ship's therapy system!" said Kryten, going over to pat his back.

"Yeah, right," said Dave, "Tried that before, didn't we? 3 million years in deep space, Krytes, they need the therapy more than I do. When I told them about me magazines, one of them just laughed!"

"I know, sir, I know. Let's get you sat down now."

"Yeah. Yeah…" Lister felt deflated.

"Well," Holly began, reappearing on the monitor, "Bit too late for me to call it off now, Dave."

"Did you hit it?" Kryten asked, still patting the human's back.

"Yes."

"Did it work?" furthered Rimmer.

"No."

"What?!"

"It didn't even detonate, bounced off of it like it was made of plastic."

"Smeg…" Rimmer swore, now sounding exasperated, "What is it?!"

"For the best that it didn't go off, though."

"Why's that, Holly?" Lister asked somewhat sarcastically.

"It has a high possibility of containing human life."

Everybody froze in shock.

"You what?" asked Dave, an expression of utter dumbfoundment cloaking his face.

"A high possibility, yeah. I got a reading of it, it wasn't very good, but it did detect something human in there. But the DNA reading I got was oddly very scrambled, so it could be anything – just something with human attributes."

But that was enough for Lister. That was more than enough for Lister.

He sprang to life, now suddenly scrolling through the monitors once more to get a look for himself: 'Organic'; 'Human'; 'Geode'; 'Bright Pink'; 'Hollow'; 'Force Field'; 'Inconclusive', he read, barely taking in anything but odd words. It must have been some sort of really advanced ship, or more likely, an escape pod of sorts.

Lister felt a surge of life jolt in him which he hadn't in months.

"Right, we need to get it in – safely."

"Lister, how? How are we going to do that? We don't have anything that could slow down something going that fast – if we did we would have used it already," said Rimmer, looking highly sceptical, having various memories of all the things they encountered that technically classified as somewhat 'human'. Lister included.

Lister started to pace around, straining his memory for an answer. But he didn't have to, because it was Kryten who quickly looked as if a lightbulb had gone off over his head – something which probably wasn't out of the possibility for him to actually do.

"The gravity net!" he cried, "The gravity net we got from The Sirius!"

Lister beamed, leaping up with a gallant fist-pump into the air, "Ohhh, great thinkin', Kryten, man!"

Despite Rimmer's various interjections and complaints, Lister soon hurried back from the stock room with two embarrassingly small nets – about the size of something you would find on a children's football pitch. Rimmer simply scoffed.

"What is that supposed to do?" he said with a snide, "Lister, you could barely use that for hockey, let alone a UFO! We don't even know if Holly could set it up!"

"We did figure out that it was very small, Mr Rimmer – roughly the same size as a waterball, as you said," said Kryten, who had moved to check over Cat, who was now either asleep or unconscious, "All we would have to do, theoretically, would be to set it up so it's directly in the path of this vessel. With the gravity mode set, the net would knock the vessel so it immediately holds and slips down into the net positioned under it. Then all we would have to do is fish it up."

"Mmm…Fish…" Cat mumbled.

"What if it kills what's inside of it?" asked Rimmer, arms crossed.

"If whatever that orb is can withstand the force of a first-class government assigned missile like that one, it should be just fine," added Holly.

"…Fine," said Rimmer.

"But I'd hurry if I was you. You have about ten minutes until impact."

The three stable of the crew instantly scrambled to the docking bay.

"This is going to backfire. Backfire bad," Rimmer said.

"Rimmer. Shut up," said Lister.

They had set the nets up, with four drones to hold one gravity net, and the other being suspended by another four drones attached to very stable chords. They were looking up on the monitor, watching as…whatever it was, was approaching Very, very fast. They still couldn't identify it at all, even as it had come into more view. They could only tell that it was very round and very…pink? Completely and totally pink.

No one knew what to expect.

"Unidentified object approaching in minus 50 seconds," announced Holly.

"Backfire it will, indeedy. I bet it's a bomb!"

"Rimmer, shut it, you're givin' me one splitting headache," moaned Dave, rubbing his temples.

"I'm just being realistic, Lister – when has any situation like this ever worked out for us?"

"Minus 40 seconds."

"Look – something in there is human, and alive. That's enough for me."

"So was the Polymorph."

"Rimmer, this isn't the polymorph – shut up."

"Minus 30 seconds."

"Come on, sirs, pay attention. This has to be incredibly precise, everything we're dealing with here is very small. If it misses, the hull is struck and melted."

"Yeah, yeah."

Lister was nervous.

"Minus 20 seconds."

Lister was very very very nervous.

He had his expectations up – he knows he shouldn't have. He's had his hopes up before, many times now, and it amounted to disappointment. But, God, something human, even something vaguely human – it was new, it was exciting, it was different. He was so excited that his legs felt weak.

"Minus 10 seconds."

Weak enough to collapse. He fainted, limping through Rimmer and bonked his head on Kryten's pointy shoulder. They both looked stunned.

"Oh! Mr Lister!" Kryten cried, rushing over to check his pulse, "What on Earth happened?!"

"Great. This is just great," tutted Rimmer, "The buffoon doesn't even have the common decency to faint the other direction. Just phase through me however you please."

"Come on, sir, let's get you sat down…" assured Kryten, gently guiding an unresponsive Dave away from the monitors.

"What?! Kryten!? Kryten, come back!"

"Embrace for impact. Good luck gents."

Rimmer was the only one there to watch it as it happened. The orb-thing collided into the net with a tremendous array of colours, the rosey-pink of the object clattering against the blues of the net to form purple sparks that seemed to dance in the black of space for a glorious second, even impressing Rimmer with it's strange beauty. Then, after a suspenseful moment of lingering in net 1, it slowly rolled out and fell into net 2, paired with an unceremonious 'plop' that Arnold imagined.

Rimmer was stunned.

"Holly. Pull it up."

"Alright Arnold."

She pulled it up. It rose up to the Quarantine Bay, slowly. Rimmer glared at it. It was transparent, but so…pink. He couldn't make out what was inside of it. But he wouldn't have to figure it out. Because when it finally came to a rest on the floors of the dock, whatever it was popped. It popped just like a bubble would, further making Rimmer gawk as it fluttered apart as if it was made of transparent rose petals.

And in its place, a boy was laying there.