Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Lister would never admit it, but he had good days and bad days. 

On the good days he would roam the ship singing, or encourage Cat to accompany him out onto a nearby planet, and annoy Rimmer with all the enthusiasm he had three million years ago when they were the lowest of the low on a ship bustling with people.

But on the bad days... On the bad days he would lay in his bunk, reminiscing on the past while clipping his toenails or reading inane magazines, half-watching Rimmer revise fruitlessly or do exercises for all of the thirty seconds he could bear. And when he was alone, either in his room, or in the endless bowels of the ship, occasionally he would let slip a tear two for his lost mates.

He never admitted his feelings, of course. None of the crew would understand them anyway. Kryten couldn’t understand the majority of complex emotion, Cat had the emotional range of a silk suit, and Rimmer... 

Well he knew what Rimmer would say. 

“Oh Listy, I didn’t know we were impersonating teenage girls today.” Or, “Lister, you little wimp, when I was a child if we cried our mother would stuff fruits in our ears and make us hop to church. I grew a grapevine out of one ear and a tomato plant out the other before the priest got her to stop.”

He always was an impersonal prick.

That is to say, he wasn’t stupid enough to think they didn’t occasionally show emotion. Sometimes Cat would catch a scent and just sit for a while, drinking it in, before hurrying off as if it were nothing. Once Lister caught Kryten staring at a picture of his old crew on a screen, bent over. When he went to find the image later, it had been deleted permanently.

Rimmer though. He always was a mystery. He often showed emotion, but Lister was never sure if it was genuine, and the general smeg-ishness that accompanied him made him reluctant to accept it. He was quick to admit he was a coward, first to hide in the face of danger, and shared tidbits of his childhood that would be enough to make Lister feel sorry for him if he was in the right mood.

But it was never real.

The man just brushed Lister off if the conversation got too serious. And, well, the hologram was here for Lister’s sake, to keep Lister sane, so as much as he hated it, he kinda trusted the guy.

He would admit that only on a good day.

Today was not that day.

He had been in a foul mood the entire week. Kryten had burst into tears - or the android equivalent of - six times since Monday due to Lister’s mood, thinking he had failed him in some way.

“Damn,” Cat said when he finally came down to what had been assigned the kitchen. “You look worse than my mama on catnip, and believe me, she was a real stoner if you get what I mean.”

Lister shot him a sarcastic look. “Gee, thanks man, and here I though I was a positive delight.”

“Maybe you are,” Cat replied with a wrinkled nose, “but you’re definitely not a clean one.”

Lister took a seat heavily, crumbs falling out his jacket, and reached for the plate of crisps on the table. “Whatever, man. Hey, what happened to your Cat species anyway?”

“They left,” he replied idly, staring at himself in the shiny metal table. “I thought you knew. The Cat empire came and went in the name of Cloister the Idiot, until they reached the promised land of Fuchal.”

“Yeah I know that bit, but what actually happened to them? Why isn’t there any on the ship?”

“Asking questions, Listy?” Rimmer said, striding into the room to take a seat. “We both know that’s not a good idea.”

“Shut up Rimmer, I want to know.”

“Maybe you don’t,” the hologram replied stubbornly. “Why do you even want to, it’s just a stupid story. The Cats did their time on this ship, they fought their wars, they left and now we’re back. It’s not rocket science to understand.”

“You’re talking about an entire species here,” Lister said, horrified at the callous way he spoke. “How can you be so dismissive?”

“They’re only Cats.”

A dark look crossed Lister’s face. Rimmer, seeming to realise he’d crossed a line, grabbed a crisp and marched out the room, straight-backed. Lister turned back to the Cat.

“Cat, I’m so sorry, I didn’t think Rimmer would insult your race like that. He’s a smeghead, you know that.”

Cat waved his hand dismissively. “Of course I know that. Every Cat knows that. Plus, he does have a point. Why do you want to know, rat hair?”

Lister’s mouth dropped open. “Did you just agree with him? What’s going on, I don’t like it. Seriously, you’re just gonna put up with tha’?”

Cat shrugged. “Cloister put up with it.”

“I’m sorry, Cloister did what now?”

The Cat rolled his eyes and pushed away the bowl he was sipping from. “Cloister, the great sage who brought the virgin mother who sired our race? And Rimmer, whom he hated- Seriously I just told you this, you’re stupider than I thought, monkey brains, you should teach, you're so stupid. Gotta pass the wisdom on.”

“What? No-” Lister gave up, astounded by the Cat’s utter obliviousness. “Just- Okay. Do you have a copy of your myths? In English. I want to know what you’re talking about, up straight.”

Cat rolled his eyes again and stood up. “There might be a copy in Boiler room Two, down in the Hold. It was where my parents kept all their stuff. It’s all I got left of them. I never go down there though. Books and bad suits, eugh.”

Lister shook his head as he was left alone. Mournfully, he left his crisps and headed back to his bunk, picking up his guitar and strumming a few off-key chords while Rimmer wasn’t there, but somehow he couldn’t find it in himself to continue.

Instead he lay down in bed and thought of Kochanski and Peterson, and all his friends who died long ago. He didn’t see Rimmer return to his own bunk, because he had long fallen asleep.

The next day - or what could be assumed was the next day, with no sun to guide the passing of time - Lister awoke. Rimmer still wasn’t in his bunk. He shrugged it off. He was probably on an early morning run.

Feeling invigorated, like this might just be a good day, he clambered out of bed and headed out, grabbing a curry from a dispensing machine and eating it as he settled down on the long-haul lifts that went to the lower decks.

Actually, he thought as the lift went through the safety procedures (none) and exits (none), he didn’t think he’d ever been down into the Hold. Not since he’d woken up from the stasis chamber anyway. Maybe there would be a Cat empire, or the ruins of one anyhow...

“Holly, directions to Boiler Room Two,” he called to a nearby screen. 

The screen came to life with the disgruntled computer’s face. “Gordon Bennett, not you too. You should know that I’m no expert with the halls of this area of the ship, so calm yourself okay?”

“...You’re the computer,” Lister said. “You’re supposed to know the halls. And what do you mean ‘you too’?”

“I mean, you as well,” Holly replied condescendingly. “Boiler Room Two is down this corridor, right turn, left turn, straight turn, third exit and on the right.”

“Right turn, left turn-” Lister attempted to repeat the direction. “What the hell is a straight turn?”

“It’s when you turn, right, and wait cause this will blow your mind it will, when you turn, but straight.”

“So it’s not a turn.”

“Call it what you like, but who’s the one with the directions?”

“Not you, apparently, if ‘me as well’ means a higher chance of getting it wrong again.”

Holly was silent for a second. “Smeg off,” he said eventually, fading from the screen, despite Lister’s annoyed shout.

Grumpily Lister made his way to the boiler room. When he arrived he could hear loud clangs and shouts from inside. He opened the door hastily, only to duck as a wrench came flying towards his head.

“Smeg,” he cursed, venturing further inside, pausing at what he saw.

Rimmer was fending one of the scutters off with a long pipe with one hand, while throwing things into the open furnace with another. When he got closer, Lister could see they were knick-knacks, books and an assortment of clothes, many already forming a charred lump in the fire.

“Hey!” He shouted at Rimmer. “Hey what are you doing?”

Rimmer caught sight of him, and dropped the pipe, instead using two hands to shovel books and belongings into the furnace. Lister tackled him as the last were going up in flames, and pulled him away, both kicking and shouting incoherently.

They rolled apart a few meters away, panting from the heat of the boiler room, while the scutter tried in vain to save the pieces of paper in the embers.

“What the hell are you doing?” Lister shouted. “Those belong to the Cat. They’re all he has left! They’re history, artefacts, the last remains of the Cat empire, and you’re destroying them! Why?”

Rimmer straightened his shirt and stuck his chin out. “I am doing nothing of the sort. I am simply cleaning out the boiler rooms. You’ll find I’ve already done all the boiler rooms on this floor. I was about to finish and move on to boiler room one, if you and the scutters hadn’t interfered.”

Lister was disgusted. His friend - well if they weren’t friends before, they definitely weren’t now - his acquaintance, was burning priceless artefacts and treasured belongings in the name of cleanliness, with no regard for the great history of the Cat people or the last remaining Cat to whom they all belonged.

“I can’t believe you.” The disappointment was evident in his voice. “You know, I put up with some smeg from you, but this is it. I am ashamed to know you Rimmer. Ashamed.”

Lister left the room. Behind him, Rimmer seemed to wilt a bit, and look almost regretful, but he quickly resumed pretending to clean the boiler room.

Searching for anything else, Lister entered the final boiler room, Boiler Room One, the farthest and deepest boiler room on the ship, and looked around for any Cat traces. Nothing. He should have figured. Miserably he returned to the upper decks, and sat in the kitchen.

“Mister Lister sir!” Kryten exclaimed, wearing an apron and wash cap. “What’s wrong? You seem down in the dumps, as it were.”

Lister pursed his lips. “It’s Rimmer, Krytes. I just caught him burning the old Cat stuff from boiler Room Two, the ones Cat told me were there.”

Cat sat up sharply from where he was lounging, feet on the table. “He did what now?”

“Threw ‘em all in the furnace. I saw him. The scutter tried to stop him but he did it anyway.”

Cat looked in disbelief and anger, with more emotion than Lister had ever seen from him. “No. Those belonged to my parents. They’re the only things I have from them... And Rimmer burned them? Without even reading them? I’m gonna kill him! I’m gonna kill him so hard he’ll come to life just so I can kill him again!”

“I agree, sirs,” Kryten said, nodding. “Those books could be the last remains of the Cat civilisation, containing information on their culture, their traditions and religion. If Rimmer burned them for his own selfish purposes... The smeghead!”

The android abruptly burst into sobs.

“Krytes, what’s wrong?”

“I’ve just been so emotional,” he replied, wailing. “With you having a bad week and all.”

If Lister had been less angry he would have protested the fact he had a bad week, despite knowing it was true. As it was, he just agreed vocally and marched back to his and Rimmer’s room, plonking himself on the lower bunk and loudly playing the guitar. 

Rimmer didn’t return to their room that night.

He didn’t see Rimmer for almost a week. He knew he was avoiding them, because he had heard from down the corridor Cat snarling and spitting curses at him, but when he got there, it was only the Cat standing alone.

Whereas usually Kryten would clean and make Rimmer’s bunk every morning, for almost a week it was unkempt and dirty, though Rimmer himself didn’t actually sleep there.

Once Lister asked Holly to locate him. All he saw was Rimmer painting over walls with the same colour paint as it was before. He asked Holly what the difference in the paint was. Holly just said it was newer and smelled stronger. He shrugged it off as Rimmer’s eccentricity.

“So,” he asked Cat conversationally one evening when they and Kryten were in the kitchen. “Tell me about Cloister the Idiot.”

“Well,” Cat said, putting down his mirror. “I wasn’t gonna tell you, but since Rimmer destroyed all the books, this might be the only time it will get passed down.”

Kryten put down his duster and stood behind him. “May I listen in too? I simply love stories.”

Cat paused. “Yeah why not? The more the merrier.”

Kryten made a thankful sound and sat down, staring intently at the Cat.

“Okay,” the Cat started. “I learnt this as a kitty, so I might not have it accurate, but I will tell you the story of Cloister the Idiot, who from Frankenstein the Virgin Mother, begot the twins Bexley and Jim.”

“I was always gonna call my kids Jim and Bexley,” Lister interjected. “After Jim Bexley Speed, my favourite Zero-Gravity Football Player.” Funny coincidence, that.

“Would you shut up and listen,” Cat snapped. “Now, Bexley believed that the donut was the sacred symbol of Cloister, while Jim believed it was the popadom. From these two great apostles sprang the Order of the Donut, and the Brotherhood of Popadom, the two sects who warred for thousands of years.”

“Well I can tell you now, it’s definitely the popadom,” Lister said. “Popadom and spicy chicken curry...mmmmm.”

“Yeah,” the Cat argued, “but the symbol stood alone, with no curry to back it up, so if you put the lone popadom against the donut, who would win?”

Lister nodded thoughtfully. “I see your point.”

“Anyway,” the Cat continued. “They didn’t argue at first. It was the demon Rimmer who turned the two against each other with stories of Cloister, his sworn enemy.”

“Rimmer!?” Lister and Kryten exclaimed in surprise.

“Not this Rimmer, dum-dums,” the Cat said exasperated. “How could it be this Rimmer?  He doesn’t know Cloister the Idiot, and he hasn’t been alive three million years.”

“Well, he is dead, sir,” Kryten pointed out.

“Potato, pota-ato,” Cat replied, to dubious stares. “Anyway, the two sections destroyed each other in several wars, while Rimmer was protected, thinking him a friend of Cloister. It wasn’t until after the Fifteenth Holy War that my people realised it was all Rimmer’s fault. They trapped him in a cage of light, where he stayed for three hundred years, until he tricked a maid to release him.”

“Then what happened,” Lister asked.

Cat shrugged. “He disappeared. Returned to the Stasis, where the gods like Cloister dwell. It’s only a story. Some rural villages claimed he stayed with them, but no-one believes them.”

Well, that was a story, Lister thought. He could tell it was very obviously stolen from his life, names changed of course, altered over time. But it was interesting that Rimmer stayed the same, while ‘Lister’ and ‘Fiji’ had been bastardised over time into ‘Cloister’ and ‘Fuchal’.

“Bexley and Jim were said to have been wise beyond their years and could battle wits with Rimmer himself,” Cat added off-handedly.

There was a snort form the doorway, followed by a low, “heh, yeah, right.”

Lister shot to his feet calling out “Rimmer!” But by the time he got to the door, the hologram was just a blur going around the corner. Lister knew he wouldn’t be able to follow.

“Was that Rimmer, sir?” Kryten asked.

“Yeah,” Lister said. “He’s not been himself.”

“Listening at doors and running away?” Kryten scoffed. “He seems quite like himself.”

Lister ignored the other two’s chuckle, beginning to become a little bit worried.

“Aren’t you slightly sorry for him?”

“Nah,” Cat said. “He’s just running cause he realised he’s named after the god who was hated by the entire empire because he was such a smeghead.”

Lister decided not to mention that if anything the god was named after the hologram, and instead headed off to bed, saying goodnight to the two shortly.

He headed to his room, hoping shallowly that the other man would be there so they could have a talk, and was only slightly disappointed when the room was once again empty, bed unmade. 

He picked up his guitar and strummed a few chords, but didn’t find it in himself to continue. It was still early so he tipped the pieces for a puzzle on the table and began sorting them, but gave up after a few minutes, instead turning in early.

The next morning, Rimmer’s bed was made, but empty. Lister suspected it was the hologram himself, as he and Kryten were still not on speaking terms.

Unlike the previous mornings, where he headed for the kitchen, ate a curry and a strong black coffee and talked to the Cat and Kryten, today he went straight up to the bridge, where the main navigation officers and the captain used to have their offices. 

He plonked himself down in what used to be Kochanski’s seat. He didn’t have the energy to face anyone else today, preferring the company of the deceased. Finding himself quickly bored and with little else to do, he spoke to the computer.

“Holly. You have cameras down in the Hold, don’t you?”

“Of course I do, Dave,” said Holly’s indignant face. “I have cameras everywhere.”

The screen flashed into grainy footage of a dingy corner filled with boxes

“Okay then, show me Frankenstein,” he ordered. “How she did, down there.”

He wouldn’t admit it, but the cat had been his closest friend for a while. He and Peterson had been close, but in a mates-doing-stupid-stuff kinda way. Frankenstein had been someone he could talk all about his emotions to, without judgement or advice.

“Alright,” Holly said, screen fading to black for a second, before his face reappeared. “The last video I have is three million, six hundred and five years ago, just before the radiation leak that wiped out the crew happened.”

Lister sat forward, suddenly interested. “Really? What about during the radiation leak? The cameras in the Hold can’t have been affected, there wasn’t any radiation down there. And none of the wires could have been damaged, or there wouldn’t be a feed now... So why isn’t there any footage?”

“I honestly do not know,” Holly answered. “I’m checking all my memory banks now. There is no memory for the last three million years, except for for the devices that checked the radiation levels.”

“None at all?”

“None that I can access.”

Lister sat back in the chair, puzzled expression adorning his face. He clicked a few keys, performing a manual check.

“Don’t trust me?” Holly asked grumpily.

“No, just checking,” Lister answered. “Well, what’s the first memory after the radiation cleared?”

“Ummm,” Holly paused as if thinking, but probably going through the data. “The first thing after the death of the crew and the Hold being sealed off... An announcement. All radiation cleared. Then, a few seconds later, you were released from Stasis. And a minute after you were released, Rimmer was activated.”

Suddenly a thought occurred to him. “Holly, what about Rimmer’s memory? Have you checked that?”

“I can’t, it’s stored externally,” the computer said. “Why, what do you suspect?”

“Nothing, it’s nothing.”

“No, go on, I want to know.”

“It’s just-” Lister spun his chair around and leaned back again. “Don’t you think he took the fact he and everyone else were dead awfully well? Considering he was activated after I was released, and I took it badly?”

Holly’s eyes widened. “By jingo, you’re right. Now I think about it, I never actually explained to him about the radiation or why he was brought back. So how did he know?”

“You never explained?” Lister asked, incredulous. “You bring him back and you don’t explain?”

“I was very busy getting the ship running,” he sniffed. “Besides, I assumed the program to keep you alive automatically informed him.”

“The program?”

“Just a small sub-routine in the case of a ship-wide emergency intended to keep the last human alive and sane for as long as possible. I didn’t write it. I’ve barely looked at it to be honest.”

“Oh right. Okay, so why can’t you access Rimmer’s memory?” Lister asked, electing to ignore the general uselessness of the entity controlling the ship he was living on.

“It’s stored externally,” Holly said. “Well, you know, you’ve been there, remember when you gave him your memory? And then later, when he was malfunctioning?”

“Oh, yeah. Thanks Hol.”

Suddenly with a purpose, Lister strode from the bridge, heading to the dimly-lit room that housed all of Rimmer’s functions. He always felt guilty when he entered this room. One switch and the hologram would be completely at his mercy. Despite his hatred for Rimmer, that kind of power put him off his appetite.

He sat down at a computer and pushed a few keys. Soon he was going through the dates that were next to each memory. All usual. Then, gone. From the date the drive plate wasn’t sealed properly to the moment a minute after Lister’s resurrection, there was no data. No memory. The first thing after the radiation was cleared was a notice saying that he was brought back as a hologram to make sure the last human didn’t go insane.

But the program seemed...wonky, was the best word. Not quite right. Fake. Like this was just a skin showing what was meant to happen, but the actual programming didn’t line up.

Lister tapped away at a few keys. The wonky program was soon stripped away. Beneath the notice that Rimmer had come back online, was the code itself. Lister took out a pad from a nearby desk and quickly downloaded it, hoping to decipher it later.

Hastily, he left the room, worried Rimmer might find him poking about in his memories.

Chapter Text

In the following days, Rimmer started to emerge. Lister still couldn’t make heads or tails of the program, and Holly wasn’t much better, and Cat and Kryten still wouldn’t talk to the hologram, but he would still sit in the kitchen every so often and quietly eat a bowl of holographic or non-holographic food, depending on whether he was hard or soft light at the time.

Although Lister had promised himself a week earlier that he would talk to the man; decoding the program, learning about Cat culture and an asteroid field the Dwarf encountered kept him too busy for this. 

Three days after they were clear of the field, he cracked it. 

The program that had been running was designed to keep Lister safe in stasis until the crisis was averted. The crisis in this case was the radiation leak. It sealed off the Hold to keep the supplies and the quarry (they had no stone at the moment, because the ship was returning from dropping off the last batch when it happened) safe, and started running analysis of the situation.

It was supposed to judge the situation and act accordingly, first priority to protect the remaining crew. And because the crew had been killed instantly, that only left Lister, trapped in time in the stasis chamber. It ran thousands of simulations at once, analysing the best way to keep him safe and sane to get him back to Earth.

It came to the conclusion that Rimmer was the best way to keep him from jumping out an airlock, so took emergency action with the power granted to it in this situation, deactivating the present hologram, George McIntyre, and activating Rimmer’s personality disc from it’s last backup (which had been moments before the radiation swept the deck).

But, as with all things, there was a mistake. Because despite Lister not existing in time, and time not existing for him, he still existed. So Rimmer was activated as soon as Lister became the last human.

Lister looked up from his pad, horrified. That meant Rimmer had been existing as a hologram for over three million years. There should be tons and tons of data for his memories of all that time. So where was it?

An alarm sounded suddenly. Lister jumped out of bed, Rimmer was in the doorway, looking frazzled.

“There’s a... a thing. Come quickly, it’s headed for us.”

He darted away. Lister put down his pad and followed him to the bridge. 

On the screens was a big...portal? It was orange and swirling, sucking in all the debris around it like a...an....

“Orange hole?” The Cat asked. “Like a black hole, but orange?”

Rimmer looked pale. 

“Listen, man,” Lister said, feeling sorry for him. “You can go hide if you want, I’ve never seen one before either.”

The hologram looked over. “I have seen one before. A long time ago. A very long time ago.”

The entire ship jolted.

“Sirs, we’re being pulled in,” Kryten told them, pressing controls frantically. “The temperatures at the core read well over a thousand- no, ten thousand, a hundred thousand- I think the thermometer has broken sirs, we’re going to melt if we go any closer.”

“Reverse thrusts, fire up all engines,” Lister ordered, taking a seat and flicking switches.

“No,” Rimmer said.

“No, what do you mean ‘no’?” Cat asked incredulously. “Would you rather be melted by an orange hole?”

“No, listen,” Rimmer said. “I know we haven’t been on speaking terms recently, but this is important. I’ve seen one of these before. Don’t go away from it, go towards it.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Just do it, trust me.”

Lister was hesitant to trust a hologram he now suspected had been active for over a million years, but the reverse thrusters weren’t powerful enough, and they were being sucked in, carried around in a spiral like water down a plug.

But he was beginning to have little choice.

He powered forward thrusters. “Where should I aim?”

Rimmer seemed relieved. “Right in the middle. At that little black dot at the center.”

“Oh I’m gonna regret this,” Lister muttered, shooting the Dwarf forward at maximum speed so they were no longer carried by the spiral. 

They jerked forward, expecting the searing temperatures to get to them. Instead, it remained the same, even as they disappeared into the center with a small squelch, popping out into clear space, the black hole closing behind them.

“What the hell was that?” Lister asked, to himself, but also in general to the room.

“An orange hole,” Rimmer parroted Cat’s words. “So powerful it pulls anything in, despite the power of the thrusters. If you try to fly away you get caught in the spiral motion and are burned by the heat. But there is an eye. The black hole is cool, a column of clear space you have to fly straight down, without getting caught in the convections around. It spits you out a few million miles away in the direction you’re travelling. Actually very efficient travel.”

“How the hell do you know this, goalpost-head?” Cat asked, the first time he’d spoken to him since Rimmer had burned the books.

Rimmer’s relaxed poise immediately stiffened up. “I...learnt it as a child. Very rare occurrence. Most people don’t even know about it. Caused by a very old sun inside a black hole. Well, it’s getting late, I should be going.”

He all but ran out of the room.

“It’s two o’clock,” Cat said, confused. “Oh well. Rat-hair, help me get this ship running. Some of the external systems were damaged in the heat before we got through the hole. Not too bad. Maybe two hours of work.”

Lister sighed, and got to work using the robots to remelt the hull into it’s proper condition, sealing the holes and cleaning the soot off. Cat knocked off ten minutes after starting to take a nap, and Lister was too tired to argue.

Two hours later he returned to his bunk. He found Rimmer holding the small pad with the decoded program on. 

“Rimmer-”

“I don’t know what you’re playing with,” the hologram said shakily, standing up whitely with the pad clutched in his grip. “But why were you inside the hologram simulation suite? My holographic simulation suite, and messing with my memories?”

Oh. He knew.

“There were some, irregularities with the memory banks,” he lied swiftly. “I was just checking if yours were okay.”

Rimmer gave a self-deprecating laugh. “Don’t lie. I know when you’re lying. You’re looking for traces of the Cat empire. You want to know what happened during the radiation leak.”

“Okay, fine, I do,” the scouser admitted. “I want to know why there are memories missing. I want to know why you hate the Cats. I want to know why the order of events has been messed with. I want to know why you want to cover this up.”

A tired look crossed Rimmer’s face. He typed a few things into the pad and handed it over. “Here. Directions. To where I keep the data. The CCTV footage, my memories, Holly’s memories. It’s all externally stored. Holly can’t access it, I only have a mild link to it. Just, if you want it.”

He shoved the pad into Lister’s hands and marched away.

Lister was still, in shock, but most of all tired. He tucked the pad under his pillow and went to bed, resolving to wrap their entire thing up the following day.

Rimmer’s bed was empty, unmade when he woke up. He hadn’t slept in it, again. 

He pulled out the pad with the directions on it and bit his lip. He could go now, or he could ignore it and pretend it never happened. He quickly ruled that out. He wanted to know about the Cats, and he wanted to know for sure about Rimmer. He had suspicions, but he wanted to be sure.

On the way down to the unsuspecting, normal room hidden away in a sealed corner of the Hold, he grabbed a coffee from a dispensing machine. He didn’t feel like curry.

The door to the room down near the Hold he had been directed to was grey, like the walls, so normal that it began to stand out. With trepidation, he opened it.

A rush of air entered. It seemed to have been a vacuum inside. Which wasn’t surprising. It would preserve the circuitry, and Rimmer didn’t need to breathe to go inside.

It was huge, lined with monitors and flashing lights on the dashboards. There were shelves and shelves of trays covered in circuits on one side, and a solid wall of wires dipping in and out of the machinery on the other. In the centre was the main computer, a large screen attached.

Lister walked towards it.

He tapped a few keys. On the screen an options menu opened, with ‘Holly’, ‘Rimmer’, ‘Scutters’, ‘Dispensing machines and other appliances’, ‘Ship records’ and a smaller file called ‘Memories’. He selected ‘Rimmer’. Another options menu opened up. Either ‘view’, or ‘download’. He clicked view.

There was a short pause. Then at the top it read ‘Select time period’. At a lack of what to do Lister just started at the beginning.

The very first memory he watched was a rush of pain and screaming as the radiation wiped out the crew. Lister flinched. He didn’t think it would start that bad. Shaken, he kept watching.

“What?” Rimmer said, waking up for the first time as a hologram.

“Hello Arnold,” Holly said, appearing on the screen in the bridge. “I’m sorry to say you’re dead.”

Rimmer paused, then scoffed. “Hah, hah, no, I’m not dead. I’m not, am I? You’re joking? I’m dead?” He shook his head. “No, I can’t be, I’m here.”

“You’re a hologram, Arnold. Here, look.”

Rimmer stood up shakily and went towards the screen. Holly disappeared, replacing the screen with a mirror. Rimmer went pale as he saw his own reflection, stumbling back, phasing through the desk he tried to put his hands on.

He sat down heavily on the floor, shell-shocked.

“You see that little white pile of dust there,” Holly said, reappearing. “That’s you.”

“But- what about George? George McIntyre? He’s the only hologram. You can only support one,” Rimmer replied, on the verge of passing out.

“George is deactivated, Arnold,” the computer told him. “You’re the only hologram on the ship. You’re the one that’s needed.”

“I’m- I’m needed? Needed for what?”

“Lister is still alive.”

The new hologram looked relieved. “I’m not alone? We can get back home?”

“Well...” Holly looked mildly regretful.

“Well? Well what?” He said, retaining some of his characteristic smeggyness.

“The entire ship is flooded with radiation.”

“What!” Rimmer pressed his sleeve over his mouth, as if that would work.

Holly looked annoyed. “It doesn’t affect you, silly. But if we let Lister out of suspended animation, he’ll be turned to dust. The radiation must be gone before he’s let out. It’s the prerogative of the Program.”

“Well, how long will that take?”

“Three million years.”

“Three-” Rimmer’s face dropped. “No, I’m not waiting that long. Just shut me off, and restart me when I’m needed.”

“I can’t.”

“What do you mean, you can’t?”

“I mean, it is impossible for me to do so.”

“Says who?”

“Says the Program.”

“Smeg the Program!”

“Arnold,” Holly said. “I know you’re upset, but the Program is given impossibly high security clearance in a situation like this. I can’t even touch it. You’re stuck, my friend. Well, at least I’ve got company. Want to play some chess?”

“Holly...” Rimmer said warningly. Then a thought occurred to him. “The cat! Is it okay?”

“What cat?”

“Lister’s cat! The one he smuggled in from Mimas.”

“Oh. That cat. Safely sealed in the Hold.”

Rimmer looked relieved. “Okay. That’s good. I guess I should look after it?”

Holly shrugged - as much as a disembodied head can shrug -, “If you want, Arn.”

“Okay. Transfer me to the Hold.”

Holly nodded, and Rimmer disappeared.

Lister sat back in his chair. So Rimmer knew about Frankenstein the entire time. Huh. And he was going to look after her. That was going to be hard, without a hard light body.

Lister kept watching. The first few days of memory mostly consisted of Rimmer ordering milk and food from the dispensing machines and getting the scutters and other robots to hand it to the cat.

Then on the fourth day, Frankenstein gave birth. Rimmer was looking around frantically - he couldn’t find her when he woke up - and when he did, the sight of blood and fluid made him gag and turn away.

But when he was finished retching in his mouth, and turned back, Lister could see his eyes melting under the adorable kittens. A litter of seven, tiny little sausage-shaped, bald, blind, utterly adorable kittens. Huh. He thought cats only had one baby. Evidently not.

Rimmer sniffed and wiped away tears.

“They’re very cute,” Holly said, appearing on a screen by Rimmer’s side. 

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah they are.”

He ended up naming the eldest one Jim and the next oldest Bexley. He knew that’s what Lister would have wanted. After that were Kristine, Peter, Gillian, Susan, and the youngest, tiniest one, Lister.

Lister - the human Lister - smiled to himself. At least he knew Rimmer cared. But, he thought, looking at the kitten, the cat version of himself was very small and weak. He didn’t look strong enough.

He was right. Less than a week and half later, despite Rimmer, Holly and Frankenstein’s best efforts, the cat Lister died. With sadness, they decided to put the tiny body in a box and eject it into space. There was nothing else they could do.

“Won’t somebody find it?” Rimmer asked.

“We’re in deep space. I can’t stop the ship, or turn it around.”

“Why’s that?”

“Lister is the highest ranking person on this ship,” Holly answered. “The Program dictates only he, as the last human, can change the course of the ship. I’m sorry Arnold. By the time the radiation has cleared, we’ll be three million years away from home.”

Lister frowned. He’d never thought about that. He fast-forwarded the video a bit. Rimmer, Holly, the scutters and Frankenstein raised the kittens to the point of maturity. Then Rimmer raised the rather good point of procreating again.

He wanted to keep the cat line going, but if they bred among themselves the kittens would be mutated. So, Rimmer and the skutters went up to the lab and synthesised fake cat genes so that there would be another generation of cats.

Lister fast-forwarded the awkward part of actually getting the cats pregnant, but suffice it to say, over the period of the next five years, Frankenstein had two more litters of kittens. Kristine, Susan and Gillian each had two to four litters over their lifetime, and eventually the line was so spread out that Rimmer and Holly just let them alone.

The Hold was full of cats in a very short period of time. They roamed away and settled down in different areas of the capacious Hold. But Frankenstein, Bexley and Jim stayed with Rimmer in their own section of the Hold.

After fifty years Rimmer was starting to malfunction. Holly said it was his T-count. From then on, every five to a hundred years Rimmer went to the hologram simulation suite and underwent a deep clean to ensure he was functioning properly.

This also included a routine clean that rid him of any madness, paranoia, depression or any other mental problems as much as possible.

As the years went on, they became much closer together.

When Frankenstein died, Rimmer dictated to Holly his memories of her life, and he recorded them in the ship’s logs, a file he called simply ‘Memories’.

Over the next few hundred years, Rimmer talked to the cats every day, and they meowed back, imitating him. Soon, sooner than they would have thought, the descendants of Frankenstein, through Jim and Bexley, were imitating his voice too well to be ignored.

He spoke to Holly about it.

“They’re speaking to me,” Rimmer said. “Just yesterday, Alonzo Jr. said ‘hello’ to me. It was uncanny. He doesn’t quite have most the consonants, but it’s close.”

“I agree,” Holly said. “They’re definitely evolving.”

“What should I do? Jemimah is starting to walk on her hind legs.”

Holly thought about it for a minute. “I think you should allow them. You’re starting to need deep cleans more and more regularly. Maybe if you had fellows other than me who were capable of some sort of cognitive thought, it would help.”

Rimmer nodded, looking tired. “I suppose.”

There was a long silence.

“What’s wrong?” The computer asked eventually.

Rimmer groaned. “You’ll laugh.”

“I won’t.”

“You will.”

“Listen, Arn, I’m going to be stuck on this ship for a three million years as well. Pretty miserable existence if the only other being hates me.”

“...I miss Lister,” he said eventually, hanging his head.

Holly nodded. “I see.”

There was another long silence.

“You can see him, if you want.”

Rimmer’s head shot up. “I can, really?”

“He won’t know you’re there,” Holly said. “He won’t see you or hear you. He’s locked in time.”

Rimmer looked conflicted. “I could see him, but I won’t be able to speak to him for three million years?”

“That’s the gist of it, yeah.”

“Then I won’t,” Rimmer decided. “If I do, I’d go crazy, with that knowledge.”

It only took fifteen years for him to give in and visit the scouser in his stasis pod on the radiation-flooded deck. And it nearly broke him. Seeing that cocky smirk on his face as he twiddled his fingers endlessly at the retreating Todhunter who was no longer there.

He went back the next day, and the next and the next, for an entire week. At the end of it, he made decision. He was not going back. Seeing that smug grin was just a reminder of what he’d lost. 

With steel in his spine he instructed Holly to place holographic barriers at every door and wall surrounding the stasis pod for a hundred meters in every direction. If he ever tried to fight through, in a bad mood or at an exceptionally high T-count, he would have to eventually realise what he’d done was to protect himself, and give up.

And so led another two thousand, long, long years. A few times, Rimmer returned to the radiation-flooded decks and wandered the corridors. The dispensing machines at first complained to him about the lack of people to talk to, but over time they grew so desperate they just did everything they could to engage him in conversation.

Rimmer accepted, most of the time. Having more people to talk to drastically lessened his T-count. Sometimes he would talk for days on end with machine after machine, and fall asleep against the wall.

“Have you been back to your room?” Dispensing Machine 43 asked one day.

“No,” Rimmer answered tiredly. “It’ll remind me too much of the old days.”

“Have you been getting any sleep?”

He bit down a yawn. “Enough.”

Obviously not approving, Dispensing Machine 43 continued talking. “I heard that Talkie Toaster hasn’t spoken in a hundred years.”

“That smeghead? I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“For the first thousand and a half years he wouldn’t shut up,” she told him. “The dispensing machines in the corridor just ignored him. He started talking to himself, going insane. Then one day he just...stopped. Occasionally he would start chatting again, but he always stopped.

“The corridor dispensing machines tried talking to him again. No-one likes him, but they didn’t want him to go mad. He just laughed at them. He talked less and less. Now they’re saying he hasn’t spoken for a hundred years.”

“Well, what do you want me to do about it?” He asked dejectedly. “I’m not much better off myself.”

“You could talk to him?”

“He wouldn’t talk back.”

“Do you know that?”

Rimmer didn’t reply. At a loss, and not wanting to squander her time, Dispensing Machine 43 started talking again. “Is it true about the cats...”

Lister was horrified. Two thousand years had turned Rimmer into a quiet, shaken man, the dispensing machines more emotionally in tune, and Talkie Toaster who couldn’t shut up into a silent, mad shell.

What would three million years do?

Rimmer visited the bunk room. Talkie Toaster only laughed, then fell silent. The room was immaculate, just the condition it had been left in. Holly vacuum-sealed it so it would keep it’s condition.

The cats kept growing. With every generation they would imitate the hologram more and more, and grew used to feeling the tingle as he stroked them gently. Then one day, clear as crystal, one of the young cats said ‘Lister’.

Rimmer sat back, shocked, and the cat darted away, scared. All the stories Rimmer had been telling them, mostly to amuse himself, had been rubbing off. The cats were learning.

He only stayed another thousand years before Holly found a temporary solution.

During this time, they slowly learned to talk. It was scary at first, when the cats stood comfily on their hind legs from the time they were born, and easily babbled like a baby, speaking simple words.

Their toes grew longer, began to be able to grip slightly.

That scared Rimmer into action. For all the talk he and Holly had had about another intelligent lifeform to talk to, it was weird seeing the cats becoming so human.

They spent two months behind a computer, trying to think of a solution, however temporary. They found it.

When Rimmer returned, the cat-like animals, only just recognisable as a feline, and not human enough to be called so, greeted him by name.

“Arnold!”

“Rimmer!”

“Rimmer! Rimmer!”

Unable to speak any more than that, the man in question settled them with hushes and hand movements.

“I’ll be back,” he said. “I’m just going away. I’ll be back.”

Knowing he had taught the cats to read - or at least recognise basic letters and pronunciations - a few years back, he called to Holly. They set up a screen in the Hold, a video feed of Rimmer waving, and then switching to videos of him playing with a black cat - Frankenstein - and doing chores, checking his hair, changing clothes holographically.

Underneath was the caption ‘Rimmer and Frankenstein’.

“That’s me,” he said to the cats. “And there, that’s Frankenstein, the first cat. I’ll be back, I promise.”

“Rimmer! Rimmer! No! No!” They called, but Rimmer walked away.

Holly had found a way to suspend their actions for two hundred thousand years. They would come back, and they wouldn’t be able to use it again for a long time, but it was a temporary solution.

Rimmer walked to the holographic simulation suite. But before he went there, he visited Lister again. All the shields were down, because Holly needed all the power he could get for suspending them. The man was still smirking, still waving.

It was odd, watching himself like that, Lister thought. You’d think his hand would get tired, but no, there he was, waving, as he had for the last three thousand years.

“Ready?” Holly asked.

Rimmer nodded.

Holly closed his eyes in concentration. A flash of light. Rimmer disappeared and his light bee fell to the ground with a clink. Holly faded from his screen a second later.

According to ship’s records, they were under for four hundred thousand, five hundred and seventy three years.

———————

The first thing Rimmer did when out of the sleep, was go to Lister. He was still smirking, still waving. Holly transferred him back to the holographic simulation suite as soon as he realised.

“You know it’ll just make you depressed, Arn,” Holly told him sternly. “Why do you keep going back?”

“I can’t help it,” Rimmer replied, frustrated. “Masochism, I suppose. I mean, while he was alive I could press down the fact I liked him because he was such a git. Is such a git. He’ll get out. Eventually.”

“You like him?”

Rimmer pursed his lips. “Well, I hate him for leaving me. I hate him for being in stasis while I have to go the long way round. I hate him because he’s the reason I have to be here for three million years. I hate him because he always takes the easy route, and now he’s taken the easy route again.”

“You’re in love with him.”

The hologram turned away abruptly. “I’m not doing this now, Hol. Just transfer me to the Hold. It’s time to see what the Cats have been up to.”

Holly was clearly unsatisfied, but did so anyway.

Lister paused the video. He just had to sit back for a moment.

Did...Rimmer...just admit he was in love with him? And then not follow through with it. Then again, he wasn’t even half a million years into the memories. There was plenty of time for the crush to turn into hatred.

Plus, as far as he could gather, Rimmer remembered only scant bits, if anything, from the three million years. If it took him over two thousand years and another four hundred thousand in sleep to admit it, Lister would be lucky to even broach the topic.

Rimmer appeared in the Hold. Holly projected himself onto a screen by him. The man had to stop for a moment. The cats had evolved into the equivalent of early humans. Neanderthals, maybe. Possibly a bit earlier.

They were wearing clothes, anyhow. 

Cats were carrying things around, walking in clumps around houses made of hanging cloth, cat-beds dotted around the place, like the ones the scutters had made for Frankenstein and her babies.

When they appeared, all activity stopped.

“Rimmer?” One asked quietly.

“That’s...me?” The man said, taken aback at the civilisation.

The Cats started babbling in a foreign language. Occasionally a few words were similar. ‘Fish’, ‘bed’, ‘sleep’ and ‘Rimmer’ were the most notorious.

The crowd surged forward, trying to touch Rimmer. He just phased through them of course, and they fell on their faces.

“Stop!” Came a voice.

They looked up. There was a Cat, wearing a donut on his sash, and a donut on top of a staff in his right hand. 

“Is it true? You are Rimmer?” He said. “And you are Haley?”

“Holly,” he said. “My name is Holly, not Haley.”

“Silence!” The cat shouted. “You will not insult the name of Haley, Cloister’s loyal servant with your slanderous lies!”

“I’m sorry, Cloister?” Rimmer asked.

The Cat suddenly fell to his knees. “Oh great Rimmer! Friend of Cloister the Idiot, father of our people who guarded Frankenstein the Holy Mother!”

“Cloister? Do you mean, Lister?”

“Silence!” The cat got to his feet again. “Follow.”

Rimmer and Holly exchanged looks and followed wordlessly. The cat led him to a gleaming White House. A proper house, not just sheets hung up with string.

“No offence, sir,” Rimmer said carefully. “But you seem awfully more advanced than the grunting lot out there.”

“I am a priest,” the cat said. “I am of high born. Only we can even speak properly, for I am descended from Bexley, first born of the Holy Mother.”

“Ah,” Rimmer said. “Now, listen, you seem to have built up a nice little civilisation. Could you possibly give us a little room somewhere, or even a little corner, and we’ll just y’know, relax. Go into retirement. Tell a few stories now and then.”

The Cat frowned. “I find this acceptable, Lord Rimmer, Lord Haley. I am High Priest Chakan. Come to me if you need anything.”

Compared to Rimmer and Holly, Chakan led a short life. In what seemed like no time at all, they were saying goodbye to his grandchildren, and their grandchildren as they joined ‘Cloister’ and Frankenstein in Cat heaven.

The Cats kept evolving. They built more permanent villages, and all over the enormous Hold, sections were springing up. Urged by the glory of Rimmer and Holly’s return, they started to forget the old Cat language they had spoken when the two had arrived, and instead learned English, the language of the gods.

Twenty-three separate major Cat empires had risen and fallen by the time Holly and Rimmer reached a million years together. They celebrated by getting extremely drunk.

“I’m in love with Lister!” Rimmer had blurted after a few holographic drinks. “I never admitted it. I haven’t admitted it. But I am. I want him.”

“I met a computer once,” Holly said. “She was lovely. The most beautiful diodes you’ve ever seen. But she was just a simple chess machine. Everyone said I was too good for her. And I lost her.”

“I don’ wanna lose Lister,” Rimmer slurred. “I love him. I love his stupid rat face, and his stupid rat hair. Maybe it’s just the loneliness. I can’t touch. Or wank-”

He started giggling violently.

“I can’t wank,” Holly said thoughtfully. “I’ve never thought of that before. Should I add a program so that I can? Nah that’d be stupid right? Right?”

“If I had the power to wank,” Rimmer said. “I’d wank right now.”

“Wha’ about Lister?”

“Hmmm? Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you, I’m in loooove with him.”

Holly pulled his head back, confused. “I thought you already told me that?”

“Maybe?” He hiccuped. “Maybe not. D’y’know what would fix this?”

“A wank!” They answered in unison.

Long after Holly had passed out and the Cats were asleep, Rimmer headed up to the decks. None of the vending machines talked to him. One made a low puff and another was creaking violently, but none of them spoke.

He went to the stasis pod. Lister was there. Smirking. Waving.

Rimmer slid down the side of the pod and leant his head back onto the glass with a thud. “I wish you were here. I never told you.”

He laughed, bitterly. “I always hid behind- behind being a smeghead, and hating your habits- which I do! If you could start showering regularly, and stop eating your toenails, I’d be eternally grateful-”

He paused, mulling over what to say. In the background Lister was still smirking, still waving.

“You’ll think it’s only been a few moments,” he said eventually. “I’ve travelled interstellar. A few moments, then you get out and they tell you it’s been months. Years. I was worried I’d never get those years back, when I was younger. That they’d been wasted.

“I’ve certainly got a surplus now though, haven’t I.”

A tear tracked it’s way down his hologrammatic cheek.

“People think it’s not hard. Three million years, nothing, I’d pay to live that long. Hah! I’d pay to end it. Regular cleans to stop my T-count rising. It hasn’t risen high in years. Tens, hundreds even. Holly keeps getting me to get cleans anyway. He says a low T-count may be due to depression.

“Perhaps he’s right. Shame I can’t touch anything. Or I’d throw myself off a building. Shame the Program is still running. ‘Cause I still have to look after you when you come out. 

“You smelly, disgusting git.”

The tears started to come more freely.

“I love you.”

For a few minutes, Rimmer just sat and sobbed. Then, as if rousing himself from a dream, he got up, shaking his head to get rid of the tears, and marched towards the door.

He cast one glance back. Lister was waving. But now it just seemed mocking.

The door closed with finality. This was the last time, definitely. Rimmer was not going to visit again.

Well, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d broken that promise.

Chapter Text

“He was in love with me,” Lister said to himself. “He loved me. I’m such a selfish goit! All those years and then I come out and I’m so confident, and he’s suffered for so long- smeg me!”

Lister struck the console in frustration and fast-forwarded the next few years. It was a lot of Rimmer and Holly living in what was basically retirement, telling stories. They were happy, for a while. 

The Cats were advancing quickly. It had been slow going for a long time, but now with the knowledge Holly and Rimmer were able to provide, the civilisation started to grow. It started to look more like Rome, with the High Priest ruling over it.

Then of course, trouble hit. The descendants of Chakan, who thought of the donut as the sacred symbol of Cloister, had been in power for too long. The disciples of Jim, a small cult-like group, began to rise up and gain followers.

There had been many wars before. But this- this was destruction, and chaos, and murder, the like of which had never been seen by either the cats, or Rimmer and Holly.

The two factions clashed in what was known at the time as the Holy War, but which was known later as the First Holy War.

Many more followed. Rimmer and Holly were safe, for most of it, protected as gods by both factions, and escaping up to the upper decks when the noise and smell and sound got too much.

The Hold was stained red for a while. There were thirty-two Holy Wars in quick succession - at least for Rimmer and Holly - in reality they spanned perhaps a hundred thousand years. One lasted for half a millenium, some lasted only a few years (though the aftermath was always gruelling).

Rimmer still couldn’t touch. With constant new advancements in Cat technology, they were looking into a Hard Light body for him. They were going to, as well, they were so close, but then of course it went wrong.

One day, as Rimmer and Holly were in their house, the scutters playing on the floor, the soldiers came. Using holo-whips that wrapped around his arms and burned, they captured Rimmer and brought him before the then-emperor.

“Rimmer!” He boomed. “You are accused of false speaking against the gods. Cloister is the only true god. You are a fiend, enemy of Cloister, and you will be punished for leading him and the good Cat people astray.”

He was put in a holo-cage. No specified time limit, but as long as they could hold him. Holly tried to fight back, impossible to contain as he was, but the technology was too good. 

And the scutters were chained next to him.

Almost a thousand years.

Rimmer, the man who had become more emotionally open, kind and warm-hearted after all his time with the Cats and Holly, became a sullen man, jeered at as they walked past, hated by all.

It wasn’t surprising, that upon his escape, he killed four Cats. Three guards, and the then-emperor.

A maid helped him.

He let her go. Holly had been talking to her, convincing her to help him. Rimmer crept away, stole two holo-whips and killed the guard that had spat on him whenever it was his duty, then went after the emperor who paraded him around as a freak, and laughed with all the people he invited into the palace.

Two guards, and then the sleeping emperor.

He ran away to the upper decks, scutters close behind. He knew the Cats knew about the upper decks. With their technology, of course they did. But they also knew about the radiation. They couldn’t get out the hold. One slip of a grate and the Hold would be flooded also. It wasn’t worth the risk.

So Rimmer escaped.

He and Holly and the scutters spent long enough in the upper decks that the dispensing machines started talking again. Hesitantly, dustily, but it was still progress. Even Talkie Toaster started to mumble to himself.

He picked up the habit of visiting Lister again, spending hours, days and sometimes weeks outside the stasis chamber.

He just couldn’t keep his own promises, as Holly reminded him constantly, but couldn’t bring himself to care.

Then Holly started to malfunction. Rimmer had been getting cleans more and more regularly, as his memory circuits wore down and the excess information drove his T-Count up. It was only a matter of time before Holly couldn’t keep up either.

At first it was small things. Stuttering, flickering screens, faulty holograms. Incorrect information, though Rimmer thought little of that, because it wasn’t like Holly was reliable at the best of times.

Then major glitches started happening. He was jerking and stuttering, he couldn’t perform any function - Rimmer didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t touch anything, even if he did know the solution to the problem, and the scutters were just about useless as this point.

So he went to the cats. Because Holly couldn’t transfer him, he walked all the way down and phased through the wall into the Hold. He stepped a few meters into the bustling street market he had ended up in, when the Cats noticed, and shied away.

Soldiers came running out, pointing spears. 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!” Rimmer called. “Stop, I mean you no harm.”

“Tell that to the people you killed when last you were here,” one of the guards spat.

“Hah!” He scoffed. “Those people locked me in a cage for centuries. They tortured and humiliated me. They deserved it.”

“You were only in that cage for speaking false against the great Cloister.”

“You had no proof!” Rimmer shouted. “I am the ancient one. I am the one who has lived for thousands and thousands of years! I am the one who knew him, and you think I am speaking false!?”

There was an an uneasy silence.

“Look,” Rimmer tried. “Just take me to your emperor, and I’ll explain why I’m here.”

“Emperor?” The guard smirked. “You truly have been away too long. We no longer serve emperors. We haven’t for hundreds of years. I’m taking you to the Council.”

Finding no other choice, Rimmer walked along with them, frog-marched through the streets until they reached a large room, probably once used for storing the stone the Dwarf mined, but now was painted white and full of seats on which many cats were sitting.

“Rimmer?” 

“Is it true?”

“It’s he, isn’t it?”

The whispers followed him as he entered. The cat on the biggest chair at the back stood, banging her hammer against the wood.

“Rimmer, once a god, now fallen. Why are you here?”

Rimmer clenched his teeth. “An introduction would be nice.”

She laughed, and the sound filled the cavern. “I am Maven, High Lady of the Court, the most superior rank in the kingdom. Now answer.”

“I am here to ask for your help.” He said.

“Ask?” Maven said. “Or beg.”

Rimmer stiffened his backbone. “If necessary.”

Whispers broke out again. Proud fallen god Rimmer, who lived alone with only his servant for thousands of years, now willing to beg?

“What do you require?”

“Holly is malfunctioning, and I don’t know enough to fix him.”

Maven gritted her teeth. “By Holly, I assume you mean Haley. Your constant blasphemy is astounding.”

“Yes, Haley,” Rimmer said impatiently. “Please, I need your help. I need him. He’s important.”

Maven nodded, and stood up. “I will aid you then. Guards.”

With a flow of silk cape and the click of boots she marched forwards, guards flanking her. Another set of guards surrounded Rimmer and marched him alongside her with spears that shocked him when they passed through his body.

They stopped at a large computer console. “Ahh,” Maven said, clicking a few keys so that Holly’s face came up onscreen, glitching and mumbling. “He is very old, no? This is typical of our computer systems also, though they aren’t nearly so bad.”

“Can you fix him?” Rimmer asked.

“I can. And I can’t.”

“What’s that supposed to mean.”

Maven tilted her head. “He has survived this long, it is amazing, surely... But for him to last another span of time this long. You need to clear him. Put all his memories of the time he’s been active into a storage unit with a small link so he can access a few, but not all of them. The important ones, at least.”

“Can you do that?” Rimmer asked, relieved.

“I can,” Maven answered. “That doesn’t mean I will.”

“Please,” Rimmer said immediately. “Please. He looked after...Cloister and I for so many years. He didn’t turn in Frankenstein who birthed your race. He’s the one who will receive Cloister when-, if he returns.”

Maven seemed to think for a moment, then nodded. “Alright.” She turned to the court members who had followed them. “Summon the best engineers in the land. We shall save our Lord Haley, for the glory of Cloister!”

“For the Glory of Cloister!” All assembled Cats shouted.

It took them only a week, all the best technicians, engineers and computer programmers in the land, to put together a system inside a room where they could store Holly’s memories. 

“We can do yours too, you know,” Maven said to him. “All the time you’ve been without Cloister can be put here. You wouldn’t need to clean so often, either.”

Rimmer startled. “How do you know that?”

Maven smiled, all teeth. “There are many things, that many people don’t know about me. One of which is that I’m far better at computers than anyone realises. So, yes or no?”

He went for yes. The cleans were getting tedious, and honestly he didn’t want to remember the miserable years he had spent onboard.

Holly came back online with a smile on his face, and Rimmer woke up after the transfer feeling more invigorated than he had in a long time.

“Thanks dudes,” Holly said to the cats when he woke. “You really saved my bottom there.”

The two were about to leave to return to the upper decks, away from the cats, when Maven turned to Rimmer.

“You are hated among the cats still,” she said.

“Well thank you for that encouraging information,” Rimmer replied, almost in a good mood.

The corners of her lips twitched upwards. “I just wanted to give you this.”

She held out a set of gloves.

“Well, thanks,” he said snakily. “I’ll just take these, shall I.”

Maven looked annoyed. “It’s hard light. We can make holograms hard, able to touch. But this is all I can get for you. Getting you a hard light light bee would be too much to ask the people who despise you.”

Doubtfully, Rimmer reached out and took it. His hands connected and he picked them up. In amazement, he slid them onto his hands and reached out to Maven, touching her hands and pushing slightly so that she took a step back.

He felt like crying. He hadn’t been able to affect his environment for so long. This was just what he needed.

“How can I repay you?”

“By not returning while I’m in power,” she said. “You are just another wrench in the works and I need everything to work well while my plans are in motion.”

Rimmer nodded and turned to Holly to go, slightly scared of this woman.

“Oh, one more thing,” she added. “You can only do small things. Exert too much force and they’ll phase through whatever you’re trying to do. Every time they do, they’ll be able to exert less force the next time you use them. Just be careful.”

Rimmer disappeared as he was transferred to the upper decks.

Over the next few weeks he went a bit insane, picking things up, holding on to them for hours, throwing and pushing things, endlessly ordering coffees and teas from the dispensing machines just for the joy of pressing the rusty buttons.

Lister wasn’t surprised. If he had been deprived of touch for so long, he’d be doing a lot worse. 

And so entered a time of relative peace for all involved. 

Rimmer returned to the stasis chamber, feeling hope rather than despair for the first time in far too long, and spoke aimlessly to Lister about the things that were happening.

Maven had begun a new era of prosperity for the Cat people. When she died at the age of two hundred due to an augmented lifespan, every entity on the ship watched her funeral. All screens were playing it live, and the only person who was oblivious, was Lister. 

Rimmer and Holly attended, hiding right at the back, nearly invisible. They were sad, but they did not cry. There was no point, they had lost far more important people before.

Maven’s era, and her empire - though it was not called that, she was too clever to allow the past dark ages to filter into her reign - was the longest lasting in Cat history. Twenty-seven thousand glorious years. 

The Cats evolved. Whereas before they had to work hard to keep the empire going, now they were prospering they could lapse back into their instincts, and act like a true cat.

Self-care and grooming, long naps, mirrors everywhere. Some left and went out into the universe, searching for other life. Some returned with fantastical stories and curiosities, others settled down with their families on planets and moons and started new colonies. Many stayed aboard the Dwarf.

Everyone was happy.

Rimmer spent most of this time in the holographic simulation suite, going through his memories. Lister, mostly. He played snippets of his memories over and over again. Lister singing as he pushed the cart, Lister mocking him, Lister lying in bed taking pointless quizzes.

He ran out of memories eventually, and moved to his externally stored memory, and watched videos of Frankenstein and her kittens, and their kittens as they played and tumbled.

Then he watched them again and again, then went up to the stasis pod, and told Lister about them, since he never got to see them.

But, as all things end, so did this. Maven’s empire had been a centrist one - not believing in either the popadom or the donut, and instead adopting the philosophy that it did not matter what Cloister’s symbol was, they must simply worship him as he is.

It was easily received by the Cats at the time, tired as they were from the constant Holy Wars. But over time, they began to forget about the pain and misery, and factions wanting to reinstate the donut or the popadom started popping up again.

Maven’s empire dissolved, back into the feudal system it had been in for so long, villages trading amongst themselves, disturbed by the political and religious unrest. 

The unrest eventually descended into war again, broken up by periods of uneasy peace, that dissolved into conflict again.

It was as Rimmer and Holly were celebrating their two millionth year together, that the Cats grew tired of war once again, and peace was instated, this time ruled over by seven governments in each district of the ship.

Rimmer and Holly got blind drunk again. Only one million years to go, they cheered. Two-thirds of the way there.

Lister stopped. He realised he’d been sitting in front of the computer for almost a day. Watching the events unfolding. He was tired, and hungry and dehydrated, but couldn’t stop.

He shouldn’t stop.

If Rimmer had survived three million years, he could survive a day or two.

His parched throat told him otherwise.

He reluctantly put down the headset and walked outside. There was a dispensing machine outside. He ordered a plain ham sandwich and two litres of cool water, and returned to the console.

“All of my family are dead,” Rimmer said to Holly in the aftermath of the party.

Holly nodded, offering no comfort, for it wouldn’t help.

“I hated all of them,” he continued. “I feel bad... But-, not cause I miss them. I don’t miss any of them. I’m glad I never have to see them again. Does that make me a terrible person?”

“How your family treated you as a child,” Holly told him sagely, “is not your fault. It will never be your fault.”

Rimmer nodded, knowing that Holly knew about the times he almost died because his parents wouldn’t give him sustenance unless he answered questions on astrophysics. The times his father hit him and his mother screamed. All his brothers becoming successful while he withered away.

“The only thing I regret,” he said. “Is that I wasn’t able to make my father proud. I died because of my own mistakes, and that means I was a disappointment up to my death.”

“Only to him,” Holly said firmly. “In the time I’ve known you, you haven’t been a better friend.”

Rimmer smiled, eyes full of tears, and leaned forwards so his forehead rested against Holly’s computer screen. “Thank you.”

Lister paused it. He had to take a moment. 

He hadn’t considered it, but now thinking about it, it made so much sense. Of course Rimmer and Holly would form a bond, being together for so much time. It would be crazy if they didn’t.

But then that raised an interesting point. Rimmer obviously remembered at least some of the three million years, but Holly didn’t. They had bonded for such a long time... Didn’t it hurt Rimmer just to look at the friend who had forgotten about him?

He was definitely going to talk to Rimmer after this. 

But first he had to finish the memories. He owed it to Rimmer, he owed it to himself. He didn’t feel any different. It felt like seconds to him. But seeing himself trapped for so long in stasis while the Cats rose and fell, and the ship slowly came apart...

It was disjointing to say the least.

Which raised another interesting question. Three million years. Okay, the Cats fixed and repaired the bits of the ship they could get to, but how did all the stuff in the radiation-flooded decks look exactly the same? It should have fallen apart in the first few hundred, let alone a million.

He had to see.

The Cats knew the ship by now. They could fly out, look around the outside. They found out it was called the Red Dwarf. It was a monumentous discovery, when it first came out, around the time Maven’s empire was in power.

Or maybe it was earlier. It could have been thousands of years later. With all that time on their hands, time was irrelevant.

The Cat empire had been named the Red Dwarf Empire for a long time. Then Maven came into power - or maybe she lost power - and it fell into war, or perhaps peace. It didn’t matter.

But soon after celebrating two million years trapped on the ship, the Cats were renamed the Red Dwarf Empire once again. By this time they had the ability to cure most all diseases and ailments, travel light years in seconds and even turn back time.

They could have released Lister quite easily, if they wished. They could have cleared the radiation in the blink of an eye.

And Rimmer begged, oh how he begged them to do it, to clear the radiation so that his misery could end. He told them their god would return, that they’d be blessed, that he’d do anything.

They didn’t believe him.

To them he was the devil, a liar.

He told them that if they did it, Cloister would return and they’d be led into a new age of peace and prosperity.

Still they refused.

The upper decks were treated as holy ground by now. No-one had ever set foot in them. It was the land gods treaded and Cats would never step foot there. It wasn’t natural, they told Rimmer, to clear the radiation. It would come in it’s own time.

Rimmer told all this to Lister.

Then, one day, when Holly and Rimmer were sitting on the bridge, their base where they’d stayed for all this time, someone else appeared.

They were wearing a heavy suit, clearly keeping them safe.

Rimmer sat and talked to the Cat, Chakan Jr the third thousand. Three thousand generations at least since Chakan the First, the priest who had greeted Rimmer and Holly when they came out of their sleep.

Chakan Jr the Third Thousand was also a priest. She was the direct descendant of Chakan, and had a burning curiosity of the upper decks. She used the tenuous link to the gods to establish herself the leader of a religious group determined to see them, so that she could come.

It was short, it wasn’t even noteworthy to Rimmer and Holly’s age-old minds.

Until Chakan the Third Thousand’s suit came back. No-one had visited them since she left, once again firmly in the belief that no Cat should step on Holy Ground, not since Chakan the Third Thousand had been killed by a falling panel from the Hold’s roof, obviously a sign from the gods.

It was Chakan the Third Thousand’s granddaughter, Maven Chakan (by that time Maven’s era of prosperity was only remembered in ancient history books. Maven Chakan was the eldest child of Chakan the Third Thousand’s eldest child, and her mother was the descendant of Maven herself, or so she claimed), who arrived, beseeching of the gods help.

They came, lacking anything else to do, and having felt the ship shudder and groan suddenly for the last few days.

“We’re calling it an Orange Hole,” Maven Chakan said. “We’re utilising all the power we can to keep from being sucked in. We’d melt going within a hundred kilometres of it, but the eddies of the spiral have caught us.”

Rimmer didn’t look afraid. “So this is it,” he whispered.

“Well,” Holly said. “The Program tried it’s best. Looks like Lister won’t come out of stasis after all.”

Maven Chakan looked horrified. “What! No! You’re gods! You can help us, you can stop this. You have to!”

Rimmer shook his head. “We may have been gods to you, once. All that we are now is very, very old.”

“I haven’t piloted a ship in... ah too long,” Holly added. “I don’t think I even remember how.”

“Our best scholars have been working on this since we got stuck,” Maven Chakan said desperately. “You are our last hope.”

“Well,” Rimmer said. “Time to grow up. Hope won’t get you through this.”

Face growing angry, Maven Chakan threw herself at Rimmer with a ferocity that belied her diminutive frame. He and Holly disappeared up to the bridge before she got to him.

They figured out to aim for the centre eventually. Rimmer and Holly watched from the bridge. Disappointed and relieved both. Disappointed it didn’t end, and relieved that there was still a chance.

Maven Chakan stirred the Cat people into a frenzy, hating Rimmer for giving up. The hate lasted until the day they all left, and beyond.

“Their desperation to hold onto religion despite all the time they’ve existed never ceases to amaze me,” Rimmer said.

“They are quite stuck in their beliefs,” Holly agreed, watching on the screen a live feed from the Hold of Cats worshipping a statue of his own head, as the god Haley.

They went back to sleep. Holly had gathered enough power to send them both to sleep, and they did, waking to find only two hundred thousand years remaining, and only a quarter of the Cat population left in the Hold.

Holly went down alone to talk to them. Rimmer had tried, but they’d brought out holo-whips and torture devices, so he’d quickly ran away.

They told Holly that they had found a nice little planet a few years back, populated by humanoids that had also evolved from a cat species, and believing it to be the homeland Fuchal, many had disembarked.

But some remained, adamant that the Red Dwarf would take them to the true Fuchal if they stayed.

Neither Holly nor Rimmer had the heart to tell them they were three million years in the wrong direction to Lister’s dream location for his farm.

With such a tiny population now, it became easy to stay unified and peaceful. After a few generations, Holly would travel down regularly to chat with them. After a few more, they started warming up to the idea of Lister’s return.

With only a very few thousand years to the radiation being cleared, they offered Holly a device which could very literally restore things to the way they had been, set to whatever time was desired.

A robot controlled by Holly came down to take it, something Rimmer had built before his hard light glove had fallen apart from age.

Holly requested a new one. The Cats reluctantly agreed.

Now with the power to restore the ship to as it had been, Rimmer became frantic, running up and down the halls to restore dilapidated chairs, tables, bunk rooms and computers.

He left anything sentient, and the piles of dust which had sat there for almost three million years.

The Cats fought one last war, less than a century before Lister was due to wake up. All the remaining Cats left, after some prompting from Rimmer. He couldn’t bare having Cats around when Lister returned. The scouser wouldn’t realise what they had done. He’d try to be friends.

They all left. All except a crippled woman, a man who tried to eat his own feet, their young kitten, and one old priest, all left to die less than ten years before Lister came out of stasis. Not that Rimmer knew about them, of course.

But he wouldn’t use the time-reversal machine on anything sentient. Not even Talkie Toaster. He couldn’t take away life, not after being alive for so long.

Rimmer went on a crusade, wiping the memories of the dispensing machines, the scutters, the domestic chore robots, the sentient appliances, anything that could think, apart from himself and Holly, and uploaded it to the room in which he and Holly’s memories of the first part of their time was stored.

He set about creating fake records. The Cats operated entirely on their own the whole time, with no stimulus from anywhere or anything on the ship. Every appliance, robot, computer, dispensing machine and hologram was inactive for the whole time.

He fixed and replaced every dispensing machine, robot and appliance so it would look like no time had passed for Lister. All that time as a maintenance man onboard the Dwarf was good for something after all.

He wiped all the cameras in the ship under the pretence of a total shutdown. All systems inactive except the ones clearing the radiation, and the ones keeping the ship going. 

Only a few months before Lister was scheduled to wake, he wiped Holly and stored the memories as well. As far as the computer knew, he was only just coming back online after three million years.

The last thing he did was store his own memories, leaving only a small connection. He was aware he’d existed for that amount of time, but rarely felt any emotion towards it, and for all intents and purposes, acted like he’d just stepped out of the stasis chamber along with Lister.

He only had to wait a week for the stasis chamber to open.

Chapter Text

The memories ended there.

In a shock, in a daze, Lister stood. He didn't know what to do. After seeing something like that, you can't just recover.

He left the room, closing the door gently, and began to wander the corridors, just letting it sink in.

"A coffee for your woes?" A female voice asked.

"Nah, I can't at the moment," Lister replied, not looking up at the dispensing machine who had just spoken.

"Oh?" The machine sounded surprised. "I thought you'd never turn down food. And you look like you need a pick-me-up. Latte?"

"I don't want a smegging-"

Lister stopped. There, on the dispensing machine, clear as day was the number 43.

"You're dispensing machine 43," he said, a bit in shock.

"Yes," she replied, as if talking to a toddler. "That is what it says on the side, is it not?"

"You were his favourite," Lister whispered.

"Speak up," she said, annoyed. "What was that?"

"Nothing. I'll have a decaf coffee. I need to sleep."

"Coming right up," she said, cup already lowering and filling with dark brown liquid.

Lister took it without another word and entered the nearest bunk room, crashing on the bed and falling asleep. Knowing that it belonged to a dead crewmate didn't seem so horrible. Not now he knew how long it had really been.

The next morning he went to the kitchen.

"Have you seen Rimmer?" He asked.

"That tosser, no," Holly said. "He's shielded himself from me somehow. Don't ask me, must've learned it somewhere."

Lister felt sick. Now he knew how close Holly and Rimmer had been, this just felt wrong. And he knew how Rimmer knew how to shield himself. If he were trapped with only one other person on a ship, he'd learn how to hide as well.

"Chicken tikka masala, sir?" Kryten offered, wearing a purple apron.

"No thanks, Krytes," Lister said quietly. "I'm not hungry."

The kitchen went silent.

"What? I just said I wasn't hungry."

"In my experience, you're always hungry," the Cat said. "I have never seen you turn down food. Are you sick?"

"No."

He left without another word, just about catching the beginning of Kryten's sobs as he thought that it wasn't good enough for him. He needed to find Rimmer. That was his first priority now.

"You looking for Rimmer?" A soft female voice asked.

Lister turned to the vending machine. "Yeah. You seen him?"

"No," she answered. "But dispensing machine 65 says that she keeps seeing him heading to the observation deck."

"Thanks 34," he said, heading off.

It took him about ten minutes to get to the observation deck, an enormous room with a domed glass ceiling, a path going through the middle and the only place on the ship with actual greenery, shrubs and trees bursting from either side of the path, slightly overgrown and wild.

Rimmer was sitting on a log at the end of the path, staring up into the starry sky.

"Hey," Lister said softly.

Rimmer flinched and didn't turn around.

Carefully, the scouser sat down next to him, looking out onto the night too.

"Clearer than back home," he said. "In Liverpool you can't see any stars 'cause of the smog and pollution. Used to be better, they say. Used to be so clear you could see the Pole Star every night. Not now of course. Maybe it was different on Io."

Rimmer didn't reply, so he kept talking. Steeling himself, he decided to just be blunt.

"I saw your memories."

The other man hunched further in on himself.

"Took me a day and a half, and I fast-forwarded most of it. Only saw the highlights."

"Then you know everything?" Rimmer said for the first time.

Lister nodded. "I can't believe you're living with all that."

"Well, the connection is only tenuous," he said. "Snatches and glances, sometimes more if I force it. You probably know more than me at this point."

"What about Holly?"

"Remembers nothing," Rimmer said, sounding pained. "Neither do any of the vending machines. And Cat just thinks I was named after the Rimmer from his tales. Doesn't help that he thinks it's Haley instead of Holly."

Rimmer chuckled dryly, and the two lapsed into silence.

"I'm sorry-"

"Listen-"

They stopped as their voices overlapped.

"You go first," Rimmer said.

"No, you."

Rimmer took a breath. "I just wanted to say sorry. For lying to you. And for everything else. Now you know why I'm such a cowardly git and a smeghead to everyone. And that I- that I was - am - in love with you, and I understand if you hate me, if you never want to talk to me again, I won't press it, I can leave if you want me to-"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Lister interrupted. "What makes you think I'd hate you?"

The hologram's eyebrows scrunched together.

Lister laughed in relief and disbelief. "You think I'd want you to leave just 'cause of this? I'd never do that you idiot."

"Why."

The fact he had to ask broke Lister's heart. The Cats had not been kind. Too often, more often, he suspected, than he had seen in his memories, he had been taken, captured, humiliated or tortured. And he still remembered.

"Because-" he said with a laugh. "Because."

He took Rimmer's hands and looked into his eyes, the other man shifting, a look in his eyes of hope guarded by a thousand walls.

"Because you're my best friend Rimmer," he said. "You're my oldest friend, quite literally. And you survived three million years just so you could keep me sane."

He bit out another laugh and decided smeg it, may as well bare my buried soul, and hoped he wouldn't regret. "Plus. I've had a crush on you since forever."

He had never seen a look of such pure shock on Rimmer's face. On anyone's face. It was bad enough he was shocked Lister considered himself his friend, now crush?

"What?" He managed to croak.

"I love you, you smeghead," Lister said, bringing Rimmer in for a hug. "I've never loved anyone more. Since the first moment I met you, I knew I was obsessed, but then we got to know each other and the annoyance overshadowed it. But since we've been alone in deep space..."

He shook his head and drew back. "Is it really so hard to believe."

Rimmer had tears in his eyes. "You...love me?"

Rather than respond Lister leaned forward and placed a chaste, delicate kiss on his forehead.

"Yeah. Yeah I do. I really do."

Almost instinctively they leaned towards each other, seeking each other out for warmth and looking out on the stars.

"You know you can always talk to me, right," Lister said. "If you ever have bad memories or something, I'll be here. Just talk to me."

Rimmer nodded. "I think I will."

There was a pause. "Does this make me your boyfriend?"

Another lengthy pause. "How are we gonna tell the others?"

It didn't matter. They had each other now. That was enough. Three million years was a long time, but to be together like that, it was such a relief, it was almost worthwhile.

Almost.

There were still far too many skeletons in the closet.

Many that Lister had no idea about. And as far as Rimmer was concerned, he would never know.