Headcanon Fic Of Doom.
This is entirely headcanon, set in Series 1, episode The End. Yup. First episode. It's a bit of fun speculation about what Holly and Rimmer discussed just as Lister came out of stasis. This is a weird amalgam of book canon and television canon, because that's just the way I roll.
***
Rimmer first came to himself in the gunmetal-grey briefing room, surrounded by a strange, echoing stillness. He'd last been in here when he'd attended George MacIntyre's "Welcome Back" party, when the flight co-ordinator had been resurrected as a...
Rimmer could feel the stillness of the ship around him, the recirculated air whooshing and gurgling through his very soul. He felt oddly light-headed, like he'd either gotten far too much sleep or not enough. And everything he was looking at seemed to be in bas relief, flat and rounded and not entirely real. The only thing he could focus on with any clarity was the large, bald head which took up an entire half of the wall in front of him in perfect high-def resolution.
A name struggled to be known, the brontosaurus of memory idly kicking its feet in the tar pit of his mind. That bald head had a name. What was it? Why was he having such a hard time remembering? And why did he feel like he was surrounded by cotton wool and yet at the same time entirely exposed?
The head's lips were moving, and Rimmer could just make out a faint 'wah wah wah' noise at the edge of his hearing, like a trumpet that had nineteen stoppers in the bell. Why couldn't he hear it clearly? Or understand what was happening? He felt that there was some cause for alarm, but he couldn't remember exactly what being alarmed was all about, so he just gazed placidly at those moving lips, hypnotized and blank and carefree.
Then, with the shock of a car suddenly hitting a brick wall across an interstate, everything became three-dimensional once more, and the sound of the voice became a deafening screech from the deepest pit of hell, and the cotton wool was ripped away and replaced with sandpaper that happened to also be on fire. Rimmer screamed and clapped his hands to his ears, trying to drown out the hideous nail-on-chalkboard sensations of...of everything.
Then it stopped, as he lost consciousness again. Or, rather, was turned off.
Holly cursed to himself as he fiddled with the hologram simulation suite from his vantage point of the ship's computer. Since he was the ship's computer, and the hologram simulation suite was just one portion (albeit a large one) of his responsibilities, it was rather like trying to scratch an itch on that tricksy spot between your shoulder blades. Finally, he was satisfied with the results, and booted up Rimmer's hologram again. It had been three million years, after all, since he'd last simulated a hologram. So it could be forgiven that he'd forgotten what the necessary levels of sensory input were, right?
The light bee hovered up in the middle of the briefing room, and began projecting the ship's newest hologram outward. There was a rainbow red-green-yellow effect wavering along the outline of the pseudo-man, and then the colours snapped into proper place, resolving into khaki and black and pinkish-reddish-white and brown and hazel. All the colours that made up Arnold J. Rimmer in full Space Corps uniform.
"Hallo, Rimmer," said Holly again, trying to remember how he'd put it the first time when he'd not had the volume turned up on Rimmer's ears. What had he said again? Oh. Right. "Welcome back."
"Welcome back? What do you mean, welcome back? What just happened there? Oh my god, am I in the infirmary? Am I sick? Am I dying? Oh, god, I'm dying, aren't I? Smegging hell..." the man moaned, covering his mouth with his hands.
"I think I can safely say," interrupted Holly, his voice even and unperturbed, "that you are in absolutely no danger of dying."
"Oh thank god," breathed Rimmer, sighing with relief, his entire body sagging.
"Because you're already dead."
"...What?"
He patted himself up and down, his hands roving over his knees, thighs, stomach, chest, like he was searching himself for his house keys that he'd misplaced and they just had to be around there somewhere. His hands even cupped his groin briefly, his subconscious giving in to a simian urge that had followed man down his evolutionary path from the trees and occasionally liked to double check and know where its banana was.
"That's impossible! Holly, you must be mistaken! I'm right here! I can't be dead, unless the afterlife looks just like the Dwarf and...I'm in Hell, aren't I? This is what happens to people when they die. They re-live the worst bits of their lives with nobody but a computer that could use a radical video card overhaul for company."
"You're a hologram," came the unflappable response. "I've resurrected you as a hologram, Arn."
"...what." That seemed too much to take in all at once, and Rimmer tried to lean up against a briefing desk to sort his feelings and thoughts out at once. His arm went right through the desk, swinging down and catching him a glance on his outer thigh, which was certain to leave a bruise. In fact, he tumbled over entirely, flying right through the table, his bottom sinking right through the floor until his light bee caught up and made him hover above it. He hadn't felt his arse meet the floor, either. He was drifting, hovering a bare millimeter or less above the herringbone-patterned deck.
He stared up at Holly, horrified. The top of his face just about cleared the surface of the table, but he was too gobsmacked to move.
"I'm a hologram?! I'm dead, and I'm a hologram?" Questing fingers, long and spidery, tentatively brushed against his forehead...and the stylized H, big and bulky and unavoidable, was indeed there, permanently grafted to his face. "Oh, no. No, no no no! How did this happen?"
Holly laid out the basics of the accident, starting with the malfunction of the drive plate and working his way up to the horrible fiery deaths of over one thousand people. "I suppose you might say that there's been a...cock up."
Guilt, repressive and humid, like a summer's day in Ibiza after a heavy night of drinking before, flushed through his new body of light, and Rimmer gulped. He'd been the one to repair the drive plate, last. In fact, he could vaguely remember telling Captain Hollister frantically that something wasn't quite right...but he saw it from the outside, like it was a recording somebody had taken of him. He didn't recall the memory first-hand, which was odd. (He later found out that this was due to the fact that his latest mind-tape recording was well before the accident...and Holly had simply spliced in the last few months of Rimmer's on-board life from the surveillance vids.)
He was the reason he was dead. He was the reason everybody was dead. He was the cock-up.
"So why bring me back?" he moaned from his seat in the table, fingers entangled in his hair. "Why bring me back as a hologram? Haven't I done enough damage? Or are you planning on berating me for the next eternity? Because if that's the case, you might as well save your breath, because I'll stick my fingers in my ears and won't listen."
Holly rolled his eyes and pursed his lips.
"No, Arn. I need your help. I need you to help me with Dave."
"Dave? Dave who?" Rimmer frowned, his nostrils flaring in confusion. He even managed to stand up and walk out from the table, too distracted to realize he'd done it. Then, it hit him like a ton of curried bricks. "Lister? You want me to help you with Lister? Isn't he dead? How am I supposed to help with Lister, unless you need me to sweep up his ashes and oh wait, I can't touch anything. Turn me back off," he demanded, folding his arms over his chest and scowling.
"Gordon Bennet, would you shut up for two seconds running?!" snapped the computer, his patience finally fraying and going 'spoing.' "Sorry, sorry," he apologised in the next breath. "I've been on me own so long, I forgot you humans like to babble. Naw, Arn. Dave's alive."
***
Rimmer stood outside the stasis booth, peering at the millennia-frozen face of David Lister, his fingers still raised in a twiddly good-bye gesture from the moment the stasis field had activated.
"So he's alive."
"Yeah," said Holly from his wall monitor outside the stasis booth.
"He's alive, and I'm dead."
"That's the basic gist of it."
"It's been three million years, he's alive, and I'm dead." Rimmer paused thoughtfully, rubbing his chin with one hand, his elbow cupped in the other. Then: "Turn me back off now."
Holly sighed again. This was going to be a long night.
***
"You want me to WHAT?!"
"He's the last human being alive, Arn. He's all alone, no future, no way home. I need you to help me keep him sane. We have an awesome responsibility to ensure the survival of the human race."
"He's been disqualified from that particular race," snotted the hologram. "I don't want the job. I refuse. I won't do it. I'll have nothing to do with Lister ever again, thank you very much."
Already the walls of defensiveness were being built up around his guilt. It wasn't, he rationalised, entirely his fault. In fact, it wasn't his fault at all, not really, not when you got right down to it. In fact, it was Lister's fault. Lister's fault for smuggling the cat aboard, Lister's fault for getting put in stasis, Lister's fault for not being there to help him, Rimmer, repair the drive plate. Yes. All Lister's fault. Everything that went wrong in Rimmer's life was Lister's fault, ever since the day he'd met the man. He was sure he would have passed his last astronavigation exam if it hadn't been for Lister. It was all Lister's fault.
Holly, who was all-too-aware of this train of thought (since he was the one directing the simulation) decided to play his trump card.
"You'll be in command," the computer wheedled. "You outranked him, yannow, and you're the highest ranking officer on board the ship, now. What with the others being stone dead and all."
A small gleam of mad ambition shone in Rimmer's eye, and for a second he was tempted to jump at the chance. Finally! Command! Officerhood! He'd have three pips on his collar and the chevrons on his sleeve. He'd be in command! But then the context came back, and he raised an eyebrow at Holly.
"So that's the sop you're willing to toss me? Command of the space-bound Mary Celeste? Command over one low-ranked, button-headed, drunken Scouser? And for this you want me to sacrifice my own sanity? My own happiness? You want me to exist entirely for the sake of another person, and that person is Lister, nineteen-time champion in the Slob-O-Rama Dome?"
He folded his arms across his chest. Again. And scowled. Again. Since he could not touch anything, he had to tuck his hands under his armpits to keep from trying to lean, grab, feel, or pick up. He had a feeling he'd be adopting this posture a lot from now on. If he remained turned on. Which he wouldn't.
Holly sighed. Again. He didn't even need to breathe, but he found himself sighing a lot around Rimmer.
"You're the person who knows him best. His other mates took him out, got him drunk, had a collective IQ lower than a Scot who's dropped a quarter down the Mariana Trench."
"What about Kochanski? Why not bring her back?" Rimmer suggested, desperate.
"...You really think a woman he's obsessed with but can't touch is going to keep him sane? You don't get out much, do you, Rimmer?"
Rimmer rubbed his hands across his face, trying to keep his resolve where it should be. Then he looked up again, peering through his fingers at the super computer.
"What do you mean, I'm the person who knows him best?"
"Just what I said. You've got that thingy. Wossname. A simpatico, that's it. You're opposite sides of the same coin. You're the person he spoke to most on board. You heard most of his troubles, even if you weren't listening. You're his best shot at survival."
Still unconvinced, Rimmer glanced down at the deck, thinking hard, when Holly dropped the nuclear trump card, the trump to end all trumps.
"He needs you."
"...Nobody's ever needed me before," Rimmer muttered to himself, feeling odd. Like he had something to prove. Something to give. Something noble to accomplish. He felt funny. It almost felt like food poisoning. No wonder he never gave into these noble urges...
What he didn't realise was that Holly was fiddling with a tiny, tiny bit of his core personality algorithm to make him agree, to give him that final nudge into going along with this plan. And, more than that, the computer inserted a small, vital piece of coding that would make the hologram refuse, flat out, hands down refuse, to ever be turned off. Ever. There. Nuclear trump, doubled, bid and grand slam. Or, wait, was that a bridge metaphor or was that gin rummy?
"I'll do it."
***
"Hello, Lister. Long time, no see."
***
Rimmer first came to himself in the gunmetal-grey briefing room, surrounded by a strange, echoing stillness. He'd last been in here when he'd attended George MacIntyre's "Welcome Back" party, when the flight co-ordinator had been resurrected as a...
Rimmer could feel the stillness of the ship around him, the recirculated air whooshing and gurgling through his very soul. He felt oddly light-headed, like he'd either gotten far too much sleep or not enough. And everything he was looking at seemed to be in bas relief, flat and rounded and not entirely real. The only thing he could focus on with any clarity was the large, bald head which took up an entire half of the wall in front of him in perfect high-def resolution.
A name struggled to be known, the brontosaurus of memory idly kicking its feet in the tar pit of his mind. That bald head had a name. What was it? Why was he having such a hard time remembering? And why did he feel like he was surrounded by cotton wool and yet at the same time entirely exposed?
The head's lips were moving, and Rimmer could just make out a faint 'wah wah wah' noise at the edge of his hearing, like a trumpet that had nineteen stoppers in the bell. Why couldn't he hear it clearly? Or understand what was happening? He felt that there was some cause for alarm, but he couldn't remember exactly what being alarmed was all about, so he just gazed placidly at those moving lips, hypnotized and blank and carefree.
Then, with the shock of a car suddenly hitting a brick wall across an interstate, everything became three-dimensional once more, and the sound of the voice became a deafening screech from the deepest pit of hell, and the cotton wool was ripped away and replaced with sandpaper that happened to also be on fire. Rimmer screamed and clapped his hands to his ears, trying to drown out the hideous nail-on-chalkboard sensations of...of everything.
Then it stopped, as he lost consciousness again. Or, rather, was turned off.
Holly cursed to himself as he fiddled with the hologram simulation suite from his vantage point of the ship's computer. Since he was the ship's computer, and the hologram simulation suite was just one portion (albeit a large one) of his responsibilities, it was rather like trying to scratch an itch on that tricksy spot between your shoulder blades. Finally, he was satisfied with the results, and booted up Rimmer's hologram again. It had been three million years, after all, since he'd last simulated a hologram. So it could be forgiven that he'd forgotten what the necessary levels of sensory input were, right?
The light bee hovered up in the middle of the briefing room, and began projecting the ship's newest hologram outward. There was a rainbow red-green-yellow effect wavering along the outline of the pseudo-man, and then the colours snapped into proper place, resolving into khaki and black and pinkish-reddish-white and brown and hazel. All the colours that made up Arnold J. Rimmer in full Space Corps uniform.
"Hallo, Rimmer," said Holly again, trying to remember how he'd put it the first time when he'd not had the volume turned up on Rimmer's ears. What had he said again? Oh. Right. "Welcome back."
"Welcome back? What do you mean, welcome back? What just happened there? Oh my god, am I in the infirmary? Am I sick? Am I dying? Oh, god, I'm dying, aren't I? Smegging hell..." the man moaned, covering his mouth with his hands.
"I think I can safely say," interrupted Holly, his voice even and unperturbed, "that you are in absolutely no danger of dying."
"Oh thank god," breathed Rimmer, sighing with relief, his entire body sagging.
"Because you're already dead."
"...What?"
He patted himself up and down, his hands roving over his knees, thighs, stomach, chest, like he was searching himself for his house keys that he'd misplaced and they just had to be around there somewhere. His hands even cupped his groin briefly, his subconscious giving in to a simian urge that had followed man down his evolutionary path from the trees and occasionally liked to double check and know where its banana was.
"That's impossible! Holly, you must be mistaken! I'm right here! I can't be dead, unless the afterlife looks just like the Dwarf and...I'm in Hell, aren't I? This is what happens to people when they die. They re-live the worst bits of their lives with nobody but a computer that could use a radical video card overhaul for company."
"You're a hologram," came the unflappable response. "I've resurrected you as a hologram, Arn."
"...what." That seemed too much to take in all at once, and Rimmer tried to lean up against a briefing desk to sort his feelings and thoughts out at once. His arm went right through the desk, swinging down and catching him a glance on his outer thigh, which was certain to leave a bruise. In fact, he tumbled over entirely, flying right through the table, his bottom sinking right through the floor until his light bee caught up and made him hover above it. He hadn't felt his arse meet the floor, either. He was drifting, hovering a bare millimeter or less above the herringbone-patterned deck.
He stared up at Holly, horrified. The top of his face just about cleared the surface of the table, but he was too gobsmacked to move.
"I'm a hologram?! I'm dead, and I'm a hologram?" Questing fingers, long and spidery, tentatively brushed against his forehead...and the stylized H, big and bulky and unavoidable, was indeed there, permanently grafted to his face. "Oh, no. No, no no no! How did this happen?"
Holly laid out the basics of the accident, starting with the malfunction of the drive plate and working his way up to the horrible fiery deaths of over one thousand people. "I suppose you might say that there's been a...cock up."
Guilt, repressive and humid, like a summer's day in Ibiza after a heavy night of drinking before, flushed through his new body of light, and Rimmer gulped. He'd been the one to repair the drive plate, last. In fact, he could vaguely remember telling Captain Hollister frantically that something wasn't quite right...but he saw it from the outside, like it was a recording somebody had taken of him. He didn't recall the memory first-hand, which was odd. (He later found out that this was due to the fact that his latest mind-tape recording was well before the accident...and Holly had simply spliced in the last few months of Rimmer's on-board life from the surveillance vids.)
He was the reason he was dead. He was the reason everybody was dead. He was the cock-up.
"So why bring me back?" he moaned from his seat in the table, fingers entangled in his hair. "Why bring me back as a hologram? Haven't I done enough damage? Or are you planning on berating me for the next eternity? Because if that's the case, you might as well save your breath, because I'll stick my fingers in my ears and won't listen."
Holly rolled his eyes and pursed his lips.
"No, Arn. I need your help. I need you to help me with Dave."
"Dave? Dave who?" Rimmer frowned, his nostrils flaring in confusion. He even managed to stand up and walk out from the table, too distracted to realize he'd done it. Then, it hit him like a ton of curried bricks. "Lister? You want me to help you with Lister? Isn't he dead? How am I supposed to help with Lister, unless you need me to sweep up his ashes and oh wait, I can't touch anything. Turn me back off," he demanded, folding his arms over his chest and scowling.
"Gordon Bennet, would you shut up for two seconds running?!" snapped the computer, his patience finally fraying and going 'spoing.' "Sorry, sorry," he apologised in the next breath. "I've been on me own so long, I forgot you humans like to babble. Naw, Arn. Dave's alive."
***
Rimmer stood outside the stasis booth, peering at the millennia-frozen face of David Lister, his fingers still raised in a twiddly good-bye gesture from the moment the stasis field had activated.
"So he's alive."
"Yeah," said Holly from his wall monitor outside the stasis booth.
"He's alive, and I'm dead."
"That's the basic gist of it."
"It's been three million years, he's alive, and I'm dead." Rimmer paused thoughtfully, rubbing his chin with one hand, his elbow cupped in the other. Then: "Turn me back off now."
Holly sighed again. This was going to be a long night.
***
"You want me to WHAT?!"
"He's the last human being alive, Arn. He's all alone, no future, no way home. I need you to help me keep him sane. We have an awesome responsibility to ensure the survival of the human race."
"He's been disqualified from that particular race," snotted the hologram. "I don't want the job. I refuse. I won't do it. I'll have nothing to do with Lister ever again, thank you very much."
Already the walls of defensiveness were being built up around his guilt. It wasn't, he rationalised, entirely his fault. In fact, it wasn't his fault at all, not really, not when you got right down to it. In fact, it was Lister's fault. Lister's fault for smuggling the cat aboard, Lister's fault for getting put in stasis, Lister's fault for not being there to help him, Rimmer, repair the drive plate. Yes. All Lister's fault. Everything that went wrong in Rimmer's life was Lister's fault, ever since the day he'd met the man. He was sure he would have passed his last astronavigation exam if it hadn't been for Lister. It was all Lister's fault.
Holly, who was all-too-aware of this train of thought (since he was the one directing the simulation) decided to play his trump card.
"You'll be in command," the computer wheedled. "You outranked him, yannow, and you're the highest ranking officer on board the ship, now. What with the others being stone dead and all."
A small gleam of mad ambition shone in Rimmer's eye, and for a second he was tempted to jump at the chance. Finally! Command! Officerhood! He'd have three pips on his collar and the chevrons on his sleeve. He'd be in command! But then the context came back, and he raised an eyebrow at Holly.
"So that's the sop you're willing to toss me? Command of the space-bound Mary Celeste? Command over one low-ranked, button-headed, drunken Scouser? And for this you want me to sacrifice my own sanity? My own happiness? You want me to exist entirely for the sake of another person, and that person is Lister, nineteen-time champion in the Slob-O-Rama Dome?"
He folded his arms across his chest. Again. And scowled. Again. Since he could not touch anything, he had to tuck his hands under his armpits to keep from trying to lean, grab, feel, or pick up. He had a feeling he'd be adopting this posture a lot from now on. If he remained turned on. Which he wouldn't.
Holly sighed. Again. He didn't even need to breathe, but he found himself sighing a lot around Rimmer.
"You're the person who knows him best. His other mates took him out, got him drunk, had a collective IQ lower than a Scot who's dropped a quarter down the Mariana Trench."
"What about Kochanski? Why not bring her back?" Rimmer suggested, desperate.
"...You really think a woman he's obsessed with but can't touch is going to keep him sane? You don't get out much, do you, Rimmer?"
Rimmer rubbed his hands across his face, trying to keep his resolve where it should be. Then he looked up again, peering through his fingers at the super computer.
"What do you mean, I'm the person who knows him best?"
"Just what I said. You've got that thingy. Wossname. A simpatico, that's it. You're opposite sides of the same coin. You're the person he spoke to most on board. You heard most of his troubles, even if you weren't listening. You're his best shot at survival."
Still unconvinced, Rimmer glanced down at the deck, thinking hard, when Holly dropped the nuclear trump card, the trump to end all trumps.
"He needs you."
"...Nobody's ever needed me before," Rimmer muttered to himself, feeling odd. Like he had something to prove. Something to give. Something noble to accomplish. He felt funny. It almost felt like food poisoning. No wonder he never gave into these noble urges...
What he didn't realise was that Holly was fiddling with a tiny, tiny bit of his core personality algorithm to make him agree, to give him that final nudge into going along with this plan. And, more than that, the computer inserted a small, vital piece of coding that would make the hologram refuse, flat out, hands down refuse, to ever be turned off. Ever. There. Nuclear trump, doubled, bid and grand slam. Or, wait, was that a bridge metaphor or was that gin rummy?
"I'll do it."
***
"Hello, Lister. Long time, no see."