Categories > TV > Red Dwarf > The Holo-men
Note: The ending takes place just after the extended Tikka To Ride.
Rimmer was too excited to sleep. He had much to do! He gently unwound himself from Rachel, tucked her in, and stood in front of the mirror to re-form his uniform. Nothing could be more certain; it was most definitely aliens. They had some kind of hold on Lister, controlling his brain - such as it was - and as they were alien, they did not know that humans needed to eat and sleep. Hence, Lister's disrupted eating and sleeping patterns. It made perfect sense!
In order to act, however, Rimmer would need more data. The aliens must meet with Lister physically at some point, to renew their hold over him and deliver their orders. Rimmer had read plenty of Rick Lazer comics, and had seen all of the movies. The aliens always met with the person under their control, giving Rick an opportunity to break their hold on him. Usually all that had been required was a public denunciation of the aliens, and they would flee; that was perfectly in keeping with Rimmer's abilities.
Lister never locked his room. Why on Io would he? There was nothing worth stealing in there, and even if there were a diamond necklace at the bottom of the sock basket, it would be worth the sanity of any halfway intelligent being to try to fish it out. Rimmer wrinkled his nose in disgust as he tiptoed through the carelessly tossed-aside beer cans, socks, belts and, space help him, boxer shorts that littered the floor. His destination lay at the far end of the room - the closet where Kryten stocked spare linen for Lister's bed. Rimmer was certain that he would be undisturbed in /there/.
He had to stoop to fit between the pile of sheets on the bottom and the shelf holding pillowcases on top. He swung the door shut, and found that he was hideously uncomfortable - bent over like an old lady who takes ten minutes to get on the tube when you're late for an appointment, and shoulders crushed in to the point where his hands were dangling pointlessly in front of his crotch. There was no way he was going to keep that position for hours on end, and even if he did, what kind of a space hero would he look like, staggering out of the closet half-bent like Quasimodo on a night out? No, this would not do.
If there had been enough room in the closet for Rimmer to slap himself on the forehead, he would have done so. Instead, he concentrated and shifted to soft-light. He was then able to straighten upright. He did not like to have things passing through his projection, and it certainly felt odd to have the shelf extending through his mouth. Not to mention his arms out of sight, buried in the walls adjacent to the closet. But at least he wasn't cramped, and the excitement of the stakeout made up for the annoying numbness of soft-light.
His mind had started to drift from images of him ousting the evil aliens to the astonishment and acclaim of Starbug's crew on to images of buxom blonde Space Corps test pilots appearing from out of nowhere, eyeing him suggestively as they strode from their ships, their perky buttocks punching out those silvery flightsuits, when he was snapped back to reality by the voices of Cat and Lister.
"...possible. Aw, yeah, yeah, yeah!" Cat's words became discernable at the end of a sentence. Rimmer chewed on his lip. Very little was more annoying than the insolent feline's yowling voice. He ducked slightly to look through the vents in the closet door.
"Anyway, bud," Cat said, picking his way across the room with the easy grace that Rimmer loathed, "poker tonight? Ain't nothin' but empty space goin' on. And I feel," Cat grinned and twirled, "daaaangerous tonight!"
Lister trundled into view and sat wearily on his bunk. "Nah. Not tonight. I'm tired."
Cat turned back, putting one hand languidly on his hip. "What is the problem, bud? Your face is lookin' longer than my good bits these days."
Lister sighed, rubbing his forehead with a stubby-fingered hand. "Don't it bother you? Our future selves? Don't it bother you that you can turn into that?"
"You kidding, bud?" Cat sniffed. "Of course it bothers me! It's painful to know that my ass could ever be that big."
Lister dropped his hand. "I mean, how awful we were! Rimmer was ready to kill us!"
"I'm always ready to kill him. Only fair." Cat grinned. Rimmer considered strangling him. Then he decided strangling would be too quick, and considered poison. Or decapitation with an olive fork. Thoughts of the best way to kill a Cat kept him happily entertained for a good ten minutes, and when he was finally brought back to reality by the lights dimming, Cat was gone, and Lister was tossing and turning under his thin blanket. Rimmer snapped to alertness. Now was the time! The aliens would be visiting at any moment.
Rimmer watched Lister sleep, and noted the absence of aliens. The man writhed under his blanket, and aliens failed to appear. Rimmer sighed and stirred uncomfortably. How long would it take the aliens to smegging arrive?
Lister started to moan, thrashing about more vigorously. He gasped variants on, "No, no, ge' away..." which became louder and louder, until he finally sat bolt upright in bed with a yelp of "Arnold, no!" He panted, wide-eyed, sweat running down his face. Once he had caught his breath, he swung his legs over the side of the bunk, stepped into his boots, and padded of the room.
Rimmer frowned. There had been no aliens. What the smeg was wrong? He had been so sure there were aliens! Rimmer cast his mind back and pondered his train of logic. It was airtight. But his eyes had provided the evidence - Lister had dreamed his nightmare and left the room, and no aliens had stopped by to regain control over him.
The solution to the quandary finally occurred to Rimmer. His presence had frightened them away! They had sensed his determination, and given up their hold on Lister. The bad dream had been a symptom of the mind-control fading. Feeling very proud of himself, Rimmer ducked below the shelf, pulled his arms close, changed to hard-light, and stumbled out of the closet. He sighed and stretched, appreciating that the darkness of the room made it harder to see what a mess it was. Then he worried what the darkness might be covering, and darted out of the room.
Once out, Rimmer paused, folded his arms behind his back, stuck his chest out, and strode up to the midsection, feeling very pleased with himself. Lister sat at the midsection table in his T-shirt and boxers, smoking a cigar pensively, and looking, Rimmer thought, decidedly un-alien-controlled. "Up late?" he asked the man, flaring his nostrils and smirking.
Lister turned and looked searchingly at Rimmer, sucking on the cigar. Rimmer stared, feeling the snarky grin fade from his face as Lister stared at him, unblinking. "Yeh," Lister said, finally, the word punctuated by a plume of smoke flowing from his mouth. "I'm doin' just great, man."
Rimmer began to wonder if it really was entirely due to aliens.
Blasted smegging goit of a jackarse dickless gormless bloody smegging bitch of a bogbot. Rimmer sat on the midsection table and fumed. If he had arms, he growled internally, he would reprogram that mechanoid with a blowtorch. The reason he did not have arms was because that bloody mechanical had, under the pretense of running diagnostics on Rimmer's light bee ("You look a bit pasty and weak, sir, almost like you're about to suffer an electronic aneurism - how do you feel?") convinced Rimmer to turn his projection off - and then, instead of hooking him to the computer, had placed him on the midsection table and run after the back section of Starbug, re-attaching it and retrieving Lister.
Rimmer seethed on the table as Kryten sat Lister down at the table for a midday curry, while Lister and Cat laughed and chatted inanely. He continued to seethe as Kryten cleaned the table during lunch, wiping his bee with a chamois and placing it carefully back without turning it back on.
Lister noted this and frowned. He did nothing until he had finished eating, however, when Kryten had retreated to the kitchen to do the dishes and Cat had gone to the cockpit to pilot. Lister then picked up the ovoid. "Rimmer? That you?" He flicked the On switch and tossed the bee away as Rimmer re-formed.
Rimmer grabbed his uniform and straightened it with a jerk that nearly ripped it off. "I am going to shove Kryten's head into the solid-waste recyc!" he spat.
Lister grinned and sat back down. "I was wonderin' where yeh were. Everything seemed so nice and quiet."
Rimmer's lip twisted. "What are you looking so smegging happy about?" Well, he had his curries again, didn't he, courtesy of the time-drive that still lurked on the table. Rimmer glared at it.
"Well, I got me curries back." Lister's broad grin faded somewhat. "And we haven't gotten any visits, have we?"
Rimmer cocked his head. Visits? What the smeg was Lister going on about? Who the smegging hell would visit them? Relatives popping by for tea, then sitting around in the living room and not taking the dropped hints about things they needed to get to doing?
Rimmer had never actually seen a large building destroyed. He had seen video of it, however, and he was always rather charmed with the way the building would stand, for just a moment, after the charges had gone off, smugly thinking that it had survived the little blasts before suddenly, with all of the evidence of a rather horrid surprise, collapsing ignobly in upon itself. Rimmer's thought processes did something very, very similar. Finally, he regained control of his half-open mouth. "So, that was one of the points of this little /exercise/, was it? To see if I would come back in time and try to kill all of us again?"
Lister shrugged uncomfortably. "Just wanted to know."
Rimmer picked up the drive and hefted it in his hands. Lister jerked it away and put it at the far end of the table, a look of disgust on his face. Rimmer put his hands on his hips. "Why do you care?" he snapped.
"I wanted ta know if the smeghead would kill the nice guy inside, in the future." A faint, lopsided grin tugged at his face as he watched Rimmer. "The nice guy inside is someone that I could actually... ya know... get along with. You know I don't like the smeghead."
No, he didn't, did he. But Rimmer was that smeghead, damn it. If Lister didn't like him - well, that was his own problem. Feeling an odd sense of wounded pride, Rimmer spun on his toe and started to stalk out of the midsection.
Lister hopped from his seat and grabbed Rimmer's elbow. The hologram paused, but did not look around. "Hey, we're having poker night. Hang out a while. I promise I won't sneak off and shag Rachel behind your back again."
Rimmer turned to face an innocently beaming Lister. He shrugged. "She's a tart. She's slept with everybody, I think. I disinfected her once Kryten patched her puncture."
Lister giggled "Think about spendin' your time with someone who cares about you a little more, maybe." He walked back to the storage lockers on the side of the midsection, pulling out a deck of cards.
Rimmer looked at the pack in Lister's gloved hands and arched an eyebrow. "Someone who cares wouldn't use their own marked deck."
Lister winked. "Well, it's strip poker tonight..."
"Is it always strip poker?"
"Well, that depends on how drunk we are."
"And on how much curry he's had!"
-Holoship
Rimmer was too excited to sleep. He had much to do! He gently unwound himself from Rachel, tucked her in, and stood in front of the mirror to re-form his uniform. Nothing could be more certain; it was most definitely aliens. They had some kind of hold on Lister, controlling his brain - such as it was - and as they were alien, they did not know that humans needed to eat and sleep. Hence, Lister's disrupted eating and sleeping patterns. It made perfect sense!
In order to act, however, Rimmer would need more data. The aliens must meet with Lister physically at some point, to renew their hold over him and deliver their orders. Rimmer had read plenty of Rick Lazer comics, and had seen all of the movies. The aliens always met with the person under their control, giving Rick an opportunity to break their hold on him. Usually all that had been required was a public denunciation of the aliens, and they would flee; that was perfectly in keeping with Rimmer's abilities.
Lister never locked his room. Why on Io would he? There was nothing worth stealing in there, and even if there were a diamond necklace at the bottom of the sock basket, it would be worth the sanity of any halfway intelligent being to try to fish it out. Rimmer wrinkled his nose in disgust as he tiptoed through the carelessly tossed-aside beer cans, socks, belts and, space help him, boxer shorts that littered the floor. His destination lay at the far end of the room - the closet where Kryten stocked spare linen for Lister's bed. Rimmer was certain that he would be undisturbed in /there/.
He had to stoop to fit between the pile of sheets on the bottom and the shelf holding pillowcases on top. He swung the door shut, and found that he was hideously uncomfortable - bent over like an old lady who takes ten minutes to get on the tube when you're late for an appointment, and shoulders crushed in to the point where his hands were dangling pointlessly in front of his crotch. There was no way he was going to keep that position for hours on end, and even if he did, what kind of a space hero would he look like, staggering out of the closet half-bent like Quasimodo on a night out? No, this would not do.
If there had been enough room in the closet for Rimmer to slap himself on the forehead, he would have done so. Instead, he concentrated and shifted to soft-light. He was then able to straighten upright. He did not like to have things passing through his projection, and it certainly felt odd to have the shelf extending through his mouth. Not to mention his arms out of sight, buried in the walls adjacent to the closet. But at least he wasn't cramped, and the excitement of the stakeout made up for the annoying numbness of soft-light.
His mind had started to drift from images of him ousting the evil aliens to the astonishment and acclaim of Starbug's crew on to images of buxom blonde Space Corps test pilots appearing from out of nowhere, eyeing him suggestively as they strode from their ships, their perky buttocks punching out those silvery flightsuits, when he was snapped back to reality by the voices of Cat and Lister.
"...possible. Aw, yeah, yeah, yeah!" Cat's words became discernable at the end of a sentence. Rimmer chewed on his lip. Very little was more annoying than the insolent feline's yowling voice. He ducked slightly to look through the vents in the closet door.
"Anyway, bud," Cat said, picking his way across the room with the easy grace that Rimmer loathed, "poker tonight? Ain't nothin' but empty space goin' on. And I feel," Cat grinned and twirled, "daaaangerous tonight!"
Lister trundled into view and sat wearily on his bunk. "Nah. Not tonight. I'm tired."
Cat turned back, putting one hand languidly on his hip. "What is the problem, bud? Your face is lookin' longer than my good bits these days."
Lister sighed, rubbing his forehead with a stubby-fingered hand. "Don't it bother you? Our future selves? Don't it bother you that you can turn into that?"
"You kidding, bud?" Cat sniffed. "Of course it bothers me! It's painful to know that my ass could ever be that big."
Lister dropped his hand. "I mean, how awful we were! Rimmer was ready to kill us!"
"I'm always ready to kill him. Only fair." Cat grinned. Rimmer considered strangling him. Then he decided strangling would be too quick, and considered poison. Or decapitation with an olive fork. Thoughts of the best way to kill a Cat kept him happily entertained for a good ten minutes, and when he was finally brought back to reality by the lights dimming, Cat was gone, and Lister was tossing and turning under his thin blanket. Rimmer snapped to alertness. Now was the time! The aliens would be visiting at any moment.
Rimmer watched Lister sleep, and noted the absence of aliens. The man writhed under his blanket, and aliens failed to appear. Rimmer sighed and stirred uncomfortably. How long would it take the aliens to smegging arrive?
Lister started to moan, thrashing about more vigorously. He gasped variants on, "No, no, ge' away..." which became louder and louder, until he finally sat bolt upright in bed with a yelp of "Arnold, no!" He panted, wide-eyed, sweat running down his face. Once he had caught his breath, he swung his legs over the side of the bunk, stepped into his boots, and padded of the room.
Rimmer frowned. There had been no aliens. What the smeg was wrong? He had been so sure there were aliens! Rimmer cast his mind back and pondered his train of logic. It was airtight. But his eyes had provided the evidence - Lister had dreamed his nightmare and left the room, and no aliens had stopped by to regain control over him.
The solution to the quandary finally occurred to Rimmer. His presence had frightened them away! They had sensed his determination, and given up their hold on Lister. The bad dream had been a symptom of the mind-control fading. Feeling very proud of himself, Rimmer ducked below the shelf, pulled his arms close, changed to hard-light, and stumbled out of the closet. He sighed and stretched, appreciating that the darkness of the room made it harder to see what a mess it was. Then he worried what the darkness might be covering, and darted out of the room.
Once out, Rimmer paused, folded his arms behind his back, stuck his chest out, and strode up to the midsection, feeling very pleased with himself. Lister sat at the midsection table in his T-shirt and boxers, smoking a cigar pensively, and looking, Rimmer thought, decidedly un-alien-controlled. "Up late?" he asked the man, flaring his nostrils and smirking.
Lister turned and looked searchingly at Rimmer, sucking on the cigar. Rimmer stared, feeling the snarky grin fade from his face as Lister stared at him, unblinking. "Yeh," Lister said, finally, the word punctuated by a plume of smoke flowing from his mouth. "I'm doin' just great, man."
Rimmer began to wonder if it really was entirely due to aliens.
Blasted smegging goit of a jackarse dickless gormless bloody smegging bitch of a bogbot. Rimmer sat on the midsection table and fumed. If he had arms, he growled internally, he would reprogram that mechanoid with a blowtorch. The reason he did not have arms was because that bloody mechanical had, under the pretense of running diagnostics on Rimmer's light bee ("You look a bit pasty and weak, sir, almost like you're about to suffer an electronic aneurism - how do you feel?") convinced Rimmer to turn his projection off - and then, instead of hooking him to the computer, had placed him on the midsection table and run after the back section of Starbug, re-attaching it and retrieving Lister.
Rimmer seethed on the table as Kryten sat Lister down at the table for a midday curry, while Lister and Cat laughed and chatted inanely. He continued to seethe as Kryten cleaned the table during lunch, wiping his bee with a chamois and placing it carefully back without turning it back on.
Lister noted this and frowned. He did nothing until he had finished eating, however, when Kryten had retreated to the kitchen to do the dishes and Cat had gone to the cockpit to pilot. Lister then picked up the ovoid. "Rimmer? That you?" He flicked the On switch and tossed the bee away as Rimmer re-formed.
Rimmer grabbed his uniform and straightened it with a jerk that nearly ripped it off. "I am going to shove Kryten's head into the solid-waste recyc!" he spat.
Lister grinned and sat back down. "I was wonderin' where yeh were. Everything seemed so nice and quiet."
Rimmer's lip twisted. "What are you looking so smegging happy about?" Well, he had his curries again, didn't he, courtesy of the time-drive that still lurked on the table. Rimmer glared at it.
"Well, I got me curries back." Lister's broad grin faded somewhat. "And we haven't gotten any visits, have we?"
Rimmer cocked his head. Visits? What the smeg was Lister going on about? Who the smegging hell would visit them? Relatives popping by for tea, then sitting around in the living room and not taking the dropped hints about things they needed to get to doing?
Rimmer had never actually seen a large building destroyed. He had seen video of it, however, and he was always rather charmed with the way the building would stand, for just a moment, after the charges had gone off, smugly thinking that it had survived the little blasts before suddenly, with all of the evidence of a rather horrid surprise, collapsing ignobly in upon itself. Rimmer's thought processes did something very, very similar. Finally, he regained control of his half-open mouth. "So, that was one of the points of this little /exercise/, was it? To see if I would come back in time and try to kill all of us again?"
Lister shrugged uncomfortably. "Just wanted to know."
Rimmer picked up the drive and hefted it in his hands. Lister jerked it away and put it at the far end of the table, a look of disgust on his face. Rimmer put his hands on his hips. "Why do you care?" he snapped.
"I wanted ta know if the smeghead would kill the nice guy inside, in the future." A faint, lopsided grin tugged at his face as he watched Rimmer. "The nice guy inside is someone that I could actually... ya know... get along with. You know I don't like the smeghead."
No, he didn't, did he. But Rimmer was that smeghead, damn it. If Lister didn't like him - well, that was his own problem. Feeling an odd sense of wounded pride, Rimmer spun on his toe and started to stalk out of the midsection.
Lister hopped from his seat and grabbed Rimmer's elbow. The hologram paused, but did not look around. "Hey, we're having poker night. Hang out a while. I promise I won't sneak off and shag Rachel behind your back again."
Rimmer turned to face an innocently beaming Lister. He shrugged. "She's a tart. She's slept with everybody, I think. I disinfected her once Kryten patched her puncture."
Lister giggled "Think about spendin' your time with someone who cares about you a little more, maybe." He walked back to the storage lockers on the side of the midsection, pulling out a deck of cards.
Rimmer looked at the pack in Lister's gloved hands and arched an eyebrow. "Someone who cares wouldn't use their own marked deck."
Lister winked. "Well, it's strip poker tonight..."
"Is it always strip poker?"
"Well, that depends on how drunk we are."
"And on how much curry he's had!"
-Holoship
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