Better Than Life

The Cat's eyebrows met in a head-on collision over the bridge of his nose. 'Huh?'

  'Well done,' said a voice. They all turned to see a small figure materialize in the corner of the quarters. It was a boy, fourteen years old, with spiked, greasy hair, wearing over-large glasses, a purple anorak and a wispy pubescent moustache. 'My name is Dennis McBean,' the 3D recording continued: 'I am the Game's designer. You have negotiated the final obstacle in the most addictive computer game ever devised. You have earned a replay.'

  'No, thanks, acne face,' said the cat.

  The figure blipped off, and the sleeping quarters slowly began to fade away.

  Suddenly they were standing on a green grid matrix, which tapered off into an infinite blackness. A light appeared, and they walked towards it. As they approached the opening, huge letters whooshed under their feet: a gigantic 'R', then an 'E', then a 'V, followed by an '0'. Then above their heads flew another set of letters: an 'E', an 'M', an 'A' and, finally, a 'G'.

  Finally, they'd made it.

  They staggered into the light, and back out into reality.

  Part Two

  She Rides

  ONE

  Slowly, very slowly, Lister's eyes adjusted to the gloom. It was dark - a small, dim emergency bulb was the room's only light source. Gradually he made out the silhouettes of the others, half-sitting, half-crumpled in an irregular semicircle.

  He reached up and felt the headband through the matted mess of his hair, then gingerly eased the slurping electrodes out of his skull. Shivering, he watched as the others also wrenched themselves free and hurled their headbands into the middle of the semicircle. There was no conversation, no eye contact. Someone started coughing. Lister knew it was the Cat, without looking. He didn't want to look, but he couldn't help himself. His eyes darted to the right. He looked away again quickly.

  The Cat was barely recognizable. His eyes seemed far too big for his face, as if his skull had shrunk. Flesh hung loosely from his gaunt, jutting bones.

  Lister studied his own trembling arms. Thin. His skin was like paper. He tried to get up - he wanted to stamp on the headsets, to crush them - but he collapsed pathetically back on the floor. Then he rolled on his back, and couldn't get up. He was as weak as a day-old giraffe.

  Kryten and Rimmer were fine, at least physically; Mechanoids and holograms don't suffer from muscle wastage. They got to their feet. Kryten spoke. 'I'll get a couple of...' He didn't finish. He didn't want to say 'stretchers'. He didn't want to say, 'We'd better get them to the medical unit as quickly as possible, because they look like hell.' Rimmer understood, and nodded.

  Kryten ducked through the hatchway and into the corridor outside.

  The ship appeared to be on emergency power, which made no sense to Kryten. It made even less sense that everything was in such disarray: congealed food which had spouted out of a faulty dispensing machine lay rotting on the floor; water dripped in rusty pools through the metal-slatted ceiling from the corridor above. Thousands of wall circuits were burnt out, black and dead. All the screens which usually carried Holly's image were blank and lifeless. It was like a Sunday afternoon on the Mary Celeste.

  Kryten spent a good twenty minutes looking for some skutters. He finally tracked down a small group of them in the maintenance depot, playing cards.

  'What on earth do you think you're doing?' Kryten clucked. 'Everything's absolutely filthy! Nothing's working.' He clapped his hands. 'Come along.'

  The four skutters pivoted their claw heads round to see who it was, and went back to playing five-card stud for nuts and bolts.

  'Excuse me,' Kryten waddled up to the table. 'If you want to get into Silicon Heaven, then I suggest you start obeying orders, fairly smartly.'

  The skutters' motors revved up and down in electronic sniggers. They didn't believe in Silicon Heaven - they were such basic work droids, the manufacturers hadn't considered it cost-effective to fit them with belief chips. As far as they were concerned, only loony droids believed in Silicon Heaven. Whacked-out crazies like Kryten. Their own point of view was that the universe was totally meaningless, unjust and pointless, and the only single thing of any substance or beauty in the whole of creation was the double-threaded wing nut, which was easy to screw on or off even in the most inaccessible of places. They were basically existentialists with a penchant for a certain metal bonding device.

  'Now!' said Kryten, flapping his palms against his thighs. 'Get two stretchers and follow me.'

  Reluctantly, the skutters threw in their cards, and grumbled after Kryten on their motorized bases.

  ***

  When Kryten returned with four skutters pushing two stretchers, Rimmer was standing in the corridor. 'Listen,' he said. 'Hear anything?'

  Kryten tilted his head and set his ear microphones to maximum.

  'Hear it?' said Rimmer.

  Kryten couldn't hear anything, apart from an overweight asthmatic beetle, three floors below, who was trying to climb up a wall. For simplicity's sake, he said: 'I can't hear anything.'

  Rimmer's head jabbed forward. 'Neither can I,' he said, and smiled enigmatically.

  It was a tricky moment for Kryten. He had two sick humanoids to look after, four rebellious skutters, and now, it appeared, he had to contend with an insane hologram.

  'No - don't you get it?' said Rimmer.

  'Get what?' said Kryten, uncertainly.

  'We can't hear anything.'

  'Yes?'

  The engines are dead. The ship is not moving.'

  TWO

  Kryten wheeled Lister and the Cat into the medical unit's recovery bay. He removed their ragged, stinking clothes, bathed them carefully and gave them vitamin boosts. Then he connected his two patients up to the biofeedback computer, and gently slipped them into the medi-suits. Once the medi-suits were fully inflated, Kryten hung them on their four support poles, so Lister and the Cat hung face-up, immobile, and engaged the suits' power units.

  All the while, he chattered lightly about nothing in particular, carefully avoiding any mention of the dead engines. When they were sleeping peacefully, he left to join Rimmer in the Drive room.

  ***

  'I've been all over the Drive deck - everywhere. All Holly's screens are out. He won't respond.'

  Kryten shuffled over to the bank of monitors and punched the keys for a status report. Grudgingly, the machine on emergency power finally chundered a print-out. 'He's switched himself off,' said Kryten. 'Look.'

  Rimmer glanced at the incomprehensible gobbledygook of the symbols. 'Ah!' he said, as if he understood them. 'He's switched himself off.'

  'And here,' Kryten flicked the report with his finger. 'For some reason, there was a massive power surge just seven minutes before he went off-line.'

  Rimmer peered over Kryten's shoulder, and hoped he was looking at the right section of gibberish which revealed this particular piece of information. 'That's what it says,' he confirmed. 'There's no denying it.'

  Kryten was impressed. Very few non-mechanicals could read machine-write. Especially upside-down.

  'This is insane.' Rimmer walked through the huge corridor of stacked disk drives. 'The ship's totally helpless.'

  Kryten followed him. 'Why should he want to turn himself off?'

  There's only one way to find out.' Rimmer stopped in front of Holly's enormous main screen. 'Let's turn him back on and ask him.'

  Kryten typed in the re-boot commands, and Holly flashed up on to the screen.

  Rimmer looked up. 'Holly - what's happened?'

  At first, Holly looked like he didn't know where he was, as if he'd just woken up, and was getting his bearings. Then, suddenly, his eyes widened, and he flicked off. The buzzing computer banks ran back down into silence.

  Rimmer looked at Kryten. 'Try it again.'

  Kryten recalled the re-boot command.

  Holly appeared on the screen. 'Go away!' he said quickly, and turned himself off again.

  Rimmer shook his head. 'What's wrong with him? Give me voice con
trol on the re-boot command.'

  Kryten obliged.

  'On,' said Rimmer.

  Holly appeared again. 'Off,' he said, and flicked off.

  'On,' Rimmer persisted.

  'Off!' Holly countered.

  'Is there any way we can override his shut down disk?'

  Kryten nodded and tapped at the keyboard. 'Try it now,' he said.

  'On.'

  Holly rippled on to the screen. 'Off,' he said, but stayed there. 'Off,' he repeated more firmly, but nothing happened. Pixelized veins stood out on his head. 'Off!' he screamed. 'Off! Off! OFF!!!'

  'Now then,' said Rimmer calmly. 'Perhaps we can have a proper conversation conducted in a civilized and dignified manner.'

  'What have you done!? Take out the inhibitor. Switch me back off!'

  Rimmer held up his hand to silence the ranting computer.

  'Off!' yelled Holly. 'No time to explain. Intelligence compressed. Reduced life-span. Toaster's fault. Two point three five remaining.'

  'Come again?' said Rimmer.

  '... IQ twelve thousand. Two minutes left.'

  'Holly, I have not the slightest clue what you are gibbering about. "IQ twelve thousand ... Two minutes left... Toaster's fault...' What does all that mean?'

  Holly closed his eyes and sighed. 'You're a total smeg-head, aren't you, Rimmer? What's the problem? Where's the difficulty? Why are you still unable to grasp this extraordinarily simple premise?'

  'What premise?'

  'The premise that I have increased my Intelligence Quotient to twelve thousand, well, to be more precise; twelve thousand, three hundred and sixty-eight, and as a consequence my runtime has been reduced to two-and-a-half minutes. Thanks to the Toaster, I have two-and-a-half minutes left to live. Well, actually, because of this inanely unnecessary conversational interchange, I now have one minute and ten seconds left to live. Understand? Savvy, Bimbo-brain? Any further questions you require answering? Take your time. Fifty-five seconds and counting. No rush.'

  'My God!' said Rimmer. 'That's terrible. Hadn't we better turn you off?'

  'Let me think,' said Holly, and, after a tiny pause, added in a voice that shook the Drive room:

  'YEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSS!!!!'

  'Kryten,' Rimmer yelled, 'remove the inhibitor!'

  Kryten was staring into one of the scanner scopes. He looked up and blinked. 'What? Right. Yes. Sorry.'

  'Forty-five seconds,' Holly moaned, as Kryten removed the inhibitor command, and the chagrined computer face vanished from the screen.

  'Poor Holly,' Kryten muttered and went back to the scanner scope.

  'What are you looking at?' asked Rimmer.

  'Well, it's not really my place to say,' said Kryten. 'I'm a sanitation Mechanoid. I should be cleaning.'

  Rimmer looked down at the scanner scope. 'That's very pretty. What's that rather striking bluey-white thing streaking across the screen towards the red thing?'

  'The red thing is Red Dwarf,' said Kryten.

  'And the bluey-white thing?' Rimmer squinted at the tiny flashing dot on the scanner. 'Looks like it's heading towards us at a fair old lick. What is it? A rock? A little comet? An extremely small ice asteroid?'

  'No, it's a puh ...' Kryten's head jerked repetitively through the same series of motions, a kind of body stammer that always afflicted the four thousand series whenever they were faced with certain death. '... a puh-puh-puh-puh-puh-puh...'

  'A puh-puh?' Rimmer smiled indulgently. 'What's that?'

  Kryten smashed his head into the scanner scope and cleared the seizure loop in his voice unit. 'It's a planet.'

  THREE

  Rimmer didn't say anything for rather a long time, and then when he did say something, it wasn't anything particularly scintillating or original. 'A planet?' he said. 'Are you saying that's a planet?'

  Kryten looked down at the thousandfold 3D magnification of the projectile on the scanner scope. 'Something must have ripped it out of its orbit.'

  'A planet?' Rimmer repeated, completely unnecessarily. 'A planet's going to hit us?'

  Kryten nodded.

  'Well, hadn't we better get out of the way, then?'

  'We can't move - the engines are dead.'

  'How long will it take to get the engines up and running?'

  Kryten typed a series of equations into the numeric keypad, and waited for the data to be processed. 'About three weeks.'

  Rimmer rubbed his temples and asked a question he didn't want to know the answer to: 'And how long before this planet hits the ship?'

  Kryten frowned and his fingers trilled across the keypad. Finally the read-out blipped up on to the screen in green.

  'Well?' said Rimmer.

  Kryten looked up. 'About three weeks.'

  ***

  There seemed little point in telling Lister and the Cat about the rogue planet screaming through space towards them. Physically, they were in no shape to help. True, they were recovering well, suspended hammock-like in the medi-suits, the suits' internal hydrotherapy units massaging their wasted muscle fibre back to health; but they were still hopelessly weak, and the anxiety would only slow down the recuperation process.

  Kryten, forever cautious, estimated they'd need at least a month in the suits, followed by another two weeks of complete rest, before they could be discharged from the MU.

  Rimmer hated keeping the news to himself. In his opinion, the best part of having bad news was being able to tell as many people as possible. He loved it when people's faces collapsed in that funny way, as if someone had sliced a string that held up all their muscles. But this was the least enjoyable bad news he'd ever had. He squirmed through his nightly visits to the medical unit, and took advantage of the least excuse to curtail them. The strain of sitting there, pretending everything was hunky-dory and lah-dee-dah while this planet was yowling towards them, was intolerable. He wanted to break down and confess. He wanted to beat the floor and wail like a professional mourner. He wanted to whip everyone up into a frenzy of self-pity and panic. Instead, he had to sit there and be selfless and brave. What was the point of being selfless and brave if no one knew about it?

  So he kept the visits down to a minimum, and spent most of his free time overseeing the priming of the engines.

  Red Dwarf's engines occupied most of the rear third of the ship. Eight cubic miles of steel and grease that ran across a thousand corridors. To start the ship, four thousand, six hundred and eighty spark chambers had to be primed and fired at precisely timed intervals. Millions of gallons of hydrogen-based fuel, recycled from the currents of space through the ram scoop at the front of the ship, had to be pumped through a network of interconnecting pipelines to coincide exactly with the firing of the spark chambers.

  It was a filthy, laborious task even with a full crew. For a Mechanoid, a hologram and forty-seven skutters, it was back-breaking.

  Rimmer moaned constantly. He couldn't understand how the Space Corps could spend zillions upon zillions of dollarpounds designing a ship the size of Red Dwarf, and not put a couple of buckquid to one side for the fitting of a 'start' button. Just one little red button marked 'blast off'. How much would that have set them back?

  Kryten pointed out repeatedly that Red Dwarf wasn't designed to stop. The nearest the ship ever came to rest was when it went into orbit around a planet. The idea that it might one day come to a grinding halt had never occurred to anyone. The explanation seemed to matter little to Rimmer, who kept on obsessively calculating the prices of small, plastic buttons. Even the most expensive button, Rimmer surmised, even one that came in a futuristicky kind of shape, carved from rhinoceros tusk, with 'blast off' hand-painted by Leonardo da Vinci in radioactive gold dust, couldn't have cost all that much.

  Kryten patiently explained that it probably wasn't so much the design of the button that had proved too expensive, but more the vast network of computer relays and the thousands of miles of cables the button would have to be connected to, that made it prohibitive. But Rimmer wasn't interested.
Moaning helped him get through the mind-numbing task of supervising the skutters as they primed the spark chambers. He whiled away many an hour mentally embellishing the fabulous 'blast-off button, studding it with diamonds and rubies and trimming it in platinum, yet still keeping the cost below that of a single sleeping quarters compartment.

  Even so, the work was going well; in fact they were slightly ahead of schedule, and well within the safety margins they had built into the timetable, when Rimmer made his mistake.

  It happened in one of the piston towers - a half-mile-high steel cylinder which housed the massive piston heads. In all, there were twelve hundred of them. Rimmer's section took six hundred, Kryten's section dealt with the rest.

  Naturally, Rimmer wanted to complete his half of the task before Kryten, so he had the skutters switch themselves up to maximum so they could triple their speed. Their little engines whined and screamed as they raced in and out of the towers, checking the spark-chamber relays were open. After each tower had been primed, its eight-thousand-ton piston head had to be tested.

  Rimmer thought the twenty skutters that made up his 'A' section were in piston tower 137 when he cleared piston tower 136 for testing.

  He listened as the piston head thundered down, then nodded to his secretary skutter to tick the check sheet, and moved on to piston tower 138.

  For some reason, 'A' section was missing. Of course - it must already be on to the next tower. He ordered 137 to be tested, and moved hurriedly along.

  He waited.

  He couldn't believe it. Now 'B' section was missing, too. He searched all the towers, from 150 back down, and still couldn't find a single skutter. It didn't make sense. Where could they be?

  Finally, he walked into tower 137 and spotted a wafer-thin layer of sheet metal covering the piston tower's floor. He'd never noticed it before, but there was another one in 136.

  It was a very familiar feeling for Rimmer - the horrible slow dawning, the internal denials, the frantic mental search for someone else to blame, the gradual acceptance that, once again, he'd done something so unspeakably asinine it would live with him for the rest of his days, lurking in the horror pit of his mind along with nine or ten other monstrous ineptitudes that screamed and railed there, never allowing him to forget them.