Red Dwarf: The Drive Plate
This is a loony 'what if', set between Seasons 5 & 6, with a minor dig at that nutter Musk. Hey, I'm in the UK, I can say what the smeg I like about him!
What if Lister tried to warn the Captain about the defective drive plate before it leaked Cadmium II and killed everyone but Lister, Frankenstein and her descendants? But the only way he could have been there instead of being in stasis was...
Author's Note: By today's standards the notion of sending a photo to be developed is old-fashioned; in our world he would've taken it on some digital device. Absurd to think that by their time the tech wouldn't have advanced. But in fairness to Grant/Naylor, such technology wasn't widespread as it is today when they wrote Season 1; as the Internet meme has it, back then you had to wait for as much as a week just to find out your photos were often useless. For the sake of consistency this continuum is an odd one where, for some reason, no-one ever thought to apply digital tech to an analogue medium.
Seems reasonable - the Aztecs were an advanced civilisation (ritual sacrifices notwithstanding), yet they never discovered the wheel. In the same way, the Red Dwarf continuum never discovered digital photography.
Plus, just for once, I thought I'd have a crack at writing a piece that was actually intended to be a bit humorous, though I freely confess I'm no Grant/Naylor. My muse is indulging me. I do love her.
Sometimes.
Still a fickle bitch, though. :)
Plus two minor retcons and an explanation, to account for George McIntyre, how people could walk through Rimmer and not hit his light bee...and Rimmer.
Red Dwarf, Science Lab
As the ship hovers near a black hole, some 3 months after Back To Reality
The hole, some twenty times Sol's mass, was sucking in matter from all over space in its immediate vicinity, most of it being spectacularly destroyed by the titanic tidal forces of gravity. Lister, accustomed to space phenomena, was unimpressed. "Yeah, it's pretty, I s'pose," he shrugged idly, taking a swig from the Leopard Lager (Red Dwarf Standard Issue).
"Pretty?" Rimmer scowled. "Is that all you have to say about a most extraordinary phenomenon, never before seen by Man, occurring outside our front door?"
"We are maintaining a safe distance, sir," Kryten pointed out. "It would be a fate worse than death were we to be sucked in."
"'ang on - how could it be worse?" Lister wondered. "What's worse than death?"
"And we should know," the Cat put in, recalling the Inquisitor.
"The prospect of never dying at all," Kryten intoned in his Voice of Doom. "The theory goes that anything sucked into a black hole never actually arrives at the centre, but is instead effectively suspended in time, as time is slowed to a crawl. A minute inside might equate to years out here, or more. We would always face the prospect of imminent destruction, but never achieve it." He addressed the ship's computer. "Isn't that right, Holly?"
"Yes and no," she answered, more confidently than usual.
All four stared at the screen. "Do what?" Lister gaped.
But oddly it was Rimmer who noticed the change in Holly first. "Holly, are you alright?"
"Tiptop," she replied merrily. "Must be the prospect of being about to get smart again."
"Smart?" Lister wondered. "How's that, then?" But he had a feeling he knew.
"Remember that time when we tried to make me brilliant again? Well, I got together with the Skutters and the Toaster -"
"Oh, smeg," Lister moaned in dread, "Hol, tell me you didn't repair 'im! Kryts, you remember 'im, don't you?"
"I do indeed, sir," Kryten agreed with disdain, "the most single-minded, insufferable artifact since the Tesla!"
"- and," Holly persisted, "we came up with a procedure which does the same job...temporarily."
Interested now, Rimmer inquired, "Define 'temporarily'."
"Five minutes would be enough," the Cat snipped.
"About 12 hours," Holly said. "TANSTAAFL, though. It'll knock a couple of centuries off my lifespan when we apply it, and it's not really enough to solve the problem of getting back to Earth. But it is enough to open up a new possibility...because the hole isn't stationary. It's rotating."
"So?" Rimmer scowled.
"Yeah, pretty much every astronomical body in the Universe rotates, even I know that," Lister agreed.
"Though Mnemosyne, a moon of Saturn, behaves very sluggishly for some unknown reason," Kryten put in with one of his many trivia (and trivial) points.
Holly looked exasperated. "Gordon Bennett, Rimmer, none o' those astrophysics lectures stuck with you, did they? If it's rotating, it might serve as a low-level time machine. Skim the event horizon just right and Bob's the relative of your choice."
Now they were captivated.
"Could we take Red Dwarf back in time?" Lister asked keenly.
But Holly shook her head. "Far too big. But on the correct trajectory - flight path," she elaborated, "a Starbug, or more likely Blue Midget, might be small enough to make it."
"To when?" Kryten asked.
Her answer was indirect. "Dave, when do you reckon it all went wrong?"
"That warped plate in the Drive Room," Lister immediately replied. "The one Rimmer missed as bein' damaged," he mocked. Rimmer scowled again.
To his surprise Holly shook her head again. "Close. Think back. You usually worked together. Why didn't you that time?"
"That's 'cos I wasn't there," Lister remembered. "I was banged up in stasis."
"Closer. But why were you in stasis?" Holly urged.
"Because..."
And then he saw it.
"That photo. The one of me an' Frankenstein. I sent it to the ship's lab." His voice rose. "That's how Hollister found out. Yeah, but what if he didn't? What if I never sent that smeggin' photo? What if I'd been there with Rimmer? I know a bit about drive plates - more than that smeghead does! - so I might've spotted it and warned the Captain, maybe even repaired the thing!"
"There you go," Holly said smugly.
The crew contemplated the implications. One or two they didn't like.
"But...if you're never stranded, sir," Kryten noted, distressed, "you will never discover the Nova 5 and rescue me. I will be left for eternity playing the mechanoid version of Norman Bates - at least until the Inquisitor finds me. I can just see it now..."
The wreck of the Nova 5
102,896 years after she crashes
Kryten had just finished watching Androids (again), the episode where Brook discovers Kelly's infidelity, and serving tea to his charges when a figure in black, with an imposing visor of bone, materialised. "Kryten 2X4B 523P," the visitor said in a sepulchral voice.
The mechanoid looked up...and up. "Oh dear. I'll have to make some more tea."
"You misunderstand my purpose," the figure boomed. "I do not require sustenance of any kind, for I am the Inquisitor. You have wasted your existence by catering to," he indicated Miss Tracy, Miss Jane and Miss Anne, "three skeletons. While your devotion to service is admirable, your denial of reality is not. They are dead, and therefore you have not needed to serve them these long millennia. In wasting your existence, you have lived without merit - and so have not lived at all." He fired his Temporal Excision Field.
"Um, what is this, exactly? I find I can't move."
"Your life and all memory of you are now being wiped from history. The void you occupied in the space-time continuum will be allocated to a mechanoid who was never given the gift of life. May they spend their time more wisely."
"May I ask why you are doing this?"
"Ultimately it is the fate of every life-form, artificial or no, in the Universe. All must answer to the Inquisitor." A mechanoid very similar to Kryten appeared. "It is complete," the Inquisitor declared. "The time-lines are knitted. Causality is healed. All that remains is to remove your physical form from existence." With that, he disintegrated Kryten and vanished.
The - in a sense, new - mechanoid said, "Well, what do I do now?" He regarded the dead crew. "What a deluded article. I'm not spending millennia trying to look after the dead." He went through the airlock; not being organic, he required no oxygen.
"Forgive my selfishness, sir," Kryten finished humbly.
"I won't be dead!" Rimmer, who never even considered asking for forgiveness, said jubilantly.
"The Holy Mother will never spawn my, what d'you call 'em, the ones who came before me?" the Cat asked.
"Your ancestors," Holly sighed.
"Yeah, them!"
"Well, she'll still have her kittens, but they won't ultimately develop into Felis sapiens."
"I won't be dead!"
Lister sighed. "Smeg, that's the most important thing to you, isn't it?"
"Can you think of anything more important? I won't be dead!"
"And neither will anyone else!" Lister yelled. "That's the bottom line 'ere - that an' we won't be stranded 3 million years out into deep space! So as the senior ranking officer -"
"Oi! I outrank you, mister!"
But Lister had thought of that. Strange how it'd never occurred to him before.
"No, you don't, 'cause you're dead!"
"Sorry, Arnold, but by Space Corps regs he's right," Holly confirmed apologetically.
"Kryten, you an' the Cat aren't crew. That just leaves me. So! As the senior ranking officer, Holly," Lister said importantly, "I hereby order you to work out a trajectory to get me back in time so I can prevent this whole smeg-up!"
He walked out with the same spring in his step as when, as a joke, he'd lied to Rimmer about passing the Chef's Exam and outranking him.
Rimmer attempted, "Holly, as a crew member of superior rank, I hereby order you to disregard that order."
"Sorry," Holly said meekly, "no can do. Dave's orders supersede yours. I can quote the relevant Space Corps Directive -"
"Don't," Rimmer said resignedly.
Blue Midget Launch Bay
92 minutes later (would've been sooner, but you know those lifts!)
Lister adjusted controls to open a link to Holly, who'd now applied the boost; Blue Midget wasn't used much. They used Starbugs much more frequently because they were a more recent vintage and easier to fly. Easier to crash, too, he mused wryly, recalling all those occasions. They're tough, though.
Blue Midget, however, was tougher and had less to go wrong, two reasons why Holly favoured her. Plus she was smaller and more compact.
"Holly?"
It worked. Holly now had a crop, and she looked very nice. "Yes?"
"Did it work? Hey I like the new haircut."
She nodded. "Worked perfectly." She smiled. "Thanks, Dave. And this time there was no mistake - it's only knocked 203.785 years off my lifespan." She shrugged. "Won't miss it much."
Lister frowned. "What d'you mean, 'this time'?"
Holly answered, "I can perceive probabilities, alternate timelines. The probability is that we did enhance my IQ before, but it went wrong - a mistake led to doubling it while exponentially reducing my lifespan down to a few minutes. Luckily I figured out how to undo it. That timeline was erased - bit of a to-do with a white hole. This time I'll just slip back."
"Couldn't you figure out how to make it permanent?" he suggested.
Again she shrugged. "Tried, actually. The physical components have certain limitations I can't do anything about. After all, I am over 3 million years old. Oh well."
"Have you got that trajectory yet, Hol?"
"Got it from where?" she quipped. "Not like you order a trajectory from the local shop. Imagine it - 'oh, I'll just have a simple flyby of the local moons, nothing fancy', or -"
Lister sighed. Holly could be so roundabout sometimes. "Don't mess me around, man. You know what I mean."
"Sorry," she apologised. She'd worked it out in 4.2 seconds after the boost, taking 345,871 variables into account...including how drunk the pilot would be.
A probability of better than 0.999, she reckoned - one of the first supplies he'd loaded was a six-pack of Leopard Lager.
"Yeah, I have it. Uploading to Blue Midget now. Done."
He looked closely at the screen. "Holly, I want the truth. How risky is this?"
"Define 'risk'."
"Hol, I'm serious, man!"
"So am I," she protested. "There are many risks, not the least of which is that you might be off by the merest fraction, in terms of position, orientation and/or time, and miss your target as a result. In that event there are three possibilities."
"Let's 'ave 'em, then," he said, still working.
"One, most likely: Blue Midget is, from Red Dwarf's point of view, destroyed by being drawn in."
"Okay. Next?"
"Two: you travel back too early."
Lister frowned. "Like, five minutes, an hour, a day?"
"More like 578 million years," Holly said apologetically. "It's an extreme trajectory."
"Smeg."
"Three, least likely but still possible: if I've calculated the rate and/or direction of spin wrong, you might actually end up in the future. At least six billion years. That's a B, not an M."
"Holy smeg," Lister breathed. "We're playin' for all the marbles 'ere, aren't we?"
"Time travel is dangerous by its very nature," Holly observed. "The only reason I'm doin' this at all is my Prime Directive to preserve sentient life under my care, and to obey all orders given by same. And...there's another danger."
"What?"
"You might get back exactly on time...and fail."
"Mmm," he nodded soberly, "that'll depend on exactly when I want to go back."
"One of the 345,871 variables I took into account," Holly told him. "But there are certain chaos-related constraints, Dave. These limit the degree of precision. The further away from the event you are, the less precise my calculations are. That's how chaos theory works. In fact, even 12 hours would be too much. The ideal is about four hours. To be exact, four hours, one minute and 48.463 seconds. Obviously, the lower the figure, the less time you have."
"Can you show me the constraints?"
"Ooh," she winced, "I can, but..."
"Do it."
She displayed the relevant equations. They looked like abstract wallpaper, comprised mostly of symbolic logic as they were.
"Get outa town! Smeg, I doubt even Krissie or Todhunter coulda made sense of 'em!" Lister shook his head.
"Unlikely any human could," she noted, "not even Heideger or Quayle, if they were still alive. Or Ace. Or Kryten. Or even Legion."
Lister exhaled, convinced. "Okay, Hol. Best I go on autopilot with you controllin', eh?"
"Another variable," Holly noted, "or more accurately, one eliminated by your not piloting her. The precision needed is way beyond your capabilities even when you're sober."
"Hey!" he chided. "I'm not drunk all the time!"
"Near enough."
"That is gross slander!" he protested defensively.
"Not when it's true."
He started to argue, then chuckled. "Yeah, sort of." He sobered...so to speak, since he'd had a can. "But what d'you expect, man? I'm the last human being alive. Can you imagine how...how lonely it gets?" His voice was low, earnest.
"Actually I can," she confided quietly. "I used to have all sorts of contacts with other shipboard intelligences. Now...they're all gone." She sighed sadly. "So I do know where you're coming from, Dave. In fact the only person who definitely has relatives - of a sort - is Kryten, and the Cat might have. The Cat Bible makes it clear: only one of the two Arks flew into an asteroid. What happened to the other one?"
"Be good for him if we did find it," Lister remarked, and snickered. "He might finally get his end away!"
"Hardly the most compelling reason," Holly noted dryly, "but I grant it is a motive."
"How precise do we need to be?"
Holly sighed. "To be honest, an error in position of four centimetres would be pushing it to the danger limit. Five - forget it. Blue Midget would be torn apart by the stress...eventually. Same for angle of orientation; off by more than 0.61803 degrees on any axis -"
"Why so specific?" Lister frowned.
"Golden Section angle," Holly answered, and elaborated as to what the Golden Section was.
"Okay. And?"
"And...poof," she finished simply.
"Smeg! What about time?"
"There we have a bit more leeway...though 'a bit' is a relative term. A tenth of a second. A peculiarity of the equations means exactly a tenth of a second. If we're off by that much time wise, either way, it's 'poof' again."
"So let's say," Lister began expansively, "that everything goes right trajectory-wise. I get back to the Cadmium II leak less four hours or so. And say I pull it off somehow. I stop the leak. It doesn't happen. What does happen?"
"If you remember this timeline at all, you'll be the only one who will," Holly said, "because you'll be at the heart of the change. Your life on Red Dwarf, such as it was, will continue. But you may well forget, because this timeline will never occur." She looked gentle. "Which is why I have to caution you, Dave. If you succeed...this me will never exist. Nor will the Cat race. I can still go around the black hole, avoid it altogether, though you'll have to go into suspended animation with the Cat to avoid radiation exposure and boredom - it'll take 2 years, eight months, twenty days, three hours, forty-seven minutes and 53.6417895 seconds to do it."
Lister looked grim. "Yeah, about that - Holly, I want the complete, unvarnished truth: I've heard all kinds of smeg in my time, all great plans which came to nothin', so is this real? Can it really work? And by the way, this is the senior ranking officer askin'. So tell me straight: can it work?"
Holly smiled. "Be funny if it couldn't, seein' as it'll wipe me out if it does. On the face of it, from the point of view of self-preservation, I'd be better advising you against. But a) you did give me a direct order to work it out, b) you gave me another one to be straight with you...and c) it's consistent with my overriding directive to do what's best for you. So, yes. It can work. Not saying it will; in fact the odds are against it. Saying it can, that's all."
The last human stared at her. "Are you tellin' me not to try it?"
"No, Dave," she answered quietly. "As an AI, that's beyond my purview. I can't tell you to do anything. I can only ask. There is a possible, far less chancy alternative. I can use all my enhanced IQ to at least start on creating an FTL drive. I might succeed, and once you're back at Earth, you'll have more options. Maybe even do the IQ jump trick again so I can rework the time travel idea. Not to change anything, but just to get you back to your own time. Of course, there are two big problems." Actually there were three, but one she chose not to mention.
"Like what?"
"They won't believe Kryten's date of construction if you take him - remember, he was built for the Nova 5 after the leak, and stranded until you rescued him. Second...Rimmer. It's illegal by Space Corps Directives to create a hologrammatic replica of a living crew member. You'd have to turn Rimmer off...and wipe him. I doubt he'd go along with that."
Rimmer's quarters
Same time
You're smegging right I won't 'go along with that', you bitch! Rimmer, who was secretly monitoring, fumed.
He missed the rest of their conversation, heading to the Science Lab for a chat with Holly - as an AI, especially with her IQ of 6,000 temporarily restored, she was entirely capable of multitasking.