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Sam Beckett arrived in deep space with a hangover, a leather jacket he didn’t remember putting on, and someone yelling, “Lister, you absolute berk, wake up before I die again!”
He sat bolt upright.
The room spun. Metal walls. Bunk beds. Socks hanging from a pipe like surrender flags. A curry stain the size of Belgium glowed from the front of his T-shirt. Somewhere nearby, something hissed ominously.
Sam blinked hard. “Oh, boy.”
The familiar white shimmer of the leap had gone, but the dizziness lingered. He pushed himself upright on the bunk and nearly put his hand into a bowl containing what looked like old noodles, two pennies, and — unless his vision was still recovering — a toothbrush.
A man in a military uniform stood in front of him with his hands on his hips, radiating indignation so intense it could probably be used as fuel. He had the pinched, offended look of someone whom existence itself had personally insulted.
“There you are,” the man said. “Honestly. I’ve been trying to wake you for ten minutes. I said there was an emergency, but apparently that means nothing to you unless it’s beer-related.”
Sam stared at him.
The man stared back. “Well?”
Before Sam could answer, Al Calavicci walked through the closed locker door in a blaze of color and irritation, silver shoes flashing, handlink already open.
“Oh, this is bad,” Al announced.
The uniformed man yelped and stumbled backward. “Aaaah! Who the hell are you?”
Sam exhaled. “Al.”
“Don’t ‘Al’ me,” Al said, pointing the handlink at him. “Do you know where you are?”
Sam looked around the room again. The bunk. The grime. The smell, which was part cheap lager, part old socks, and part industrial regret. “Not a clue.”
Al gave him a look. “You’ve leaped into David Lister.”
“The David Lister?”
“Unless there’s another unhygienic space bum living three million years in the future on a mining ship with a dead-end social calendar, yes, the David Lister.”
Sam’s mouth fell open.
The other man was now pressing himself against the wall. “I’d just like to say, on the record, that I hate this. I don’t understand what’s happening, and I hate it.”
Al squinted at him. “That’ll be Arnold Rimmer. Hologram. Class-A pain in the backside.”
Rimmer’s face drew up in outrage. “I beg your pardon!”
“You can hear him?” Sam asked.
“No,” said Rimmer. “I’m lip-reading the disrespect.”
Al ignored him and tapped his handlink. “Ziggy’s still sorting it, but apparently in about…” He frowned. “Sixteen minutes, a coolant regulator in one of the lower engine access corridors overloads.”
Sam rubbed his temples. “That sounds bad.”
“It is bad. In the original history, Kryten goes down there to fix it, gets trapped by a security lockout, and the backup systems vent half the corridor into space. He survives, technically, because he’s a mechanoid, but he loses most of his memory engrams, which means he never becomes… well, him. The crew falls apart after that. Lister and Rimmer stop speaking for nearly a year, Cat disappears into the vents for six months because nobody knows how to stop him sulking, and Holly accidentally shuts down the heating on G-Deck for eleven weeks.”
There was a pause.
Rimmer said, “That all sounds plausible.”
Sam swung his legs off the bed. “So I have to stop Kryten from going into the corridor?”
“Not exactly,” said Al. “Ziggy says the important part is that Rimmer has to save him.”
Sam looked from Al to Rimmer.
Rimmer looked from Sam to nowhere in particular and frowned. “Why is he looking at me like that?”
Sam put a hand over his face. “Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes,” said Al. “And you’ve got sixteen minutes.”
Rimmer pointed an accusing finger at Sam. “If this is some new psychological warfare tactic, Lister, it is beneath even you.”
Sam stood up. “Rimmer, is Kryten around?”
“Don’t change the subject! Also yes, he’s in the Drive Room doing an inventory of silicone sealant because apparently that’s what passes for a social life now.”
Sam was already moving. “Good.”
He reached for the door. Al stepped alongside him.
“One more thing,” Al muttered. “You look like Lister to them. To me you still look like you.”
Sam nodded. That much, at least, was familiar.
Rimmer stared as Sam marched into the corridor. “What’s gotten into him?”
Al gave him a bright smile. “Competence.”
Rimmer scowled. “That is deeply offensive.”
Red Dwarf was bigger than Sam had imagined.
He had, in some abstract sense, always known the ship was enormous, but knowing it and stumbling through its corridors while a disembodied best friend shouted statistics in his ear were two different experiences. The place hummed with old machinery and bad maintenance. The corridor walls were battered, scuffed, and somehow weary-looking. It felt less like a vessel and more like a shabby flying city that had long ago given up pretending it had standards.
He turned a corner and nearly collided with a man in a neat mechanoid uniform carrying a crate.
“Sir!” Kryten said, startled. “Good heavens, you moved with such purpose I mistook you for someone else.”
Sam stopped. “Kryten.”
Kryten smiled. “Yes, sir. I have remained Kryten throughout.”
“Listen carefully. Don’t go to lower engine corridor seventeen.”
Kryten blinked. “Might I ask why?”
“Because there’s going to be a coolant regulator overload and a lockout and—”
Behind him, Rimmer appeared, puffing with offended effort. “There you are! I have chased you halfway across the ship, which, given that I am light, should not be physically exhausting, and yet—”
He stopped when he saw Kryten.
Kryten looked between them. “Have I walked into the middle of something unpleasant? It does happen rather a lot on this vessel.”
Sam took a breath. He had done this before. Not this exact thing — nobody had ever prepared him for trying to save a polite robot via the agency of Arnold Rimmer — but the shape of it was familiar. Two people drifting toward some failure point. One moment needing a nudge, or a shove, or a miracle.
“Rimmer,” Sam said, “I need your help.”
Rimmer laughed. It was a short, disbelieving bark. “Well that’s a first.”
“I’m serious.”
Kryten held the crate tighter. “Sir, I do not wish to alarm anyone, but when Mr. Lister becomes sincere, something has usually caught fire.”
Almost on cue, Holly’s voice crackled over the corridor speakers.
“All right, dudes,” said Holly. “Bit of a funny one. Engine sectors twelve to eighteen are experiencing a teensy coolant fluctuation. By ‘teensy’ I mean ‘potentially explodey,’ but let’s stay positive, yeah?”
Sam closed his eyes for half a second. “There it is.”
Rimmer made a strangled sound. “Explodey?”
“Mr. Rimmer,” Kryten said at once, defaulting to emergency politeness, “if I may, I should attend to that immediately.”
Sam stepped in front of him. “No.”
Kryten nearly dropped the crate. “No, sir?”
Rimmer was staring now, suspicion winning out over panic. “Why are you doing that in that annoyingly dramatic way?”
“Because,” Sam said, thinking fast, “I had… a feeling.”
Rimmer folded his arms. “A feeling.”
“Yes.”
“A feeling.”
Sam gestured helplessly. “Call it intuition.”
“Call it rubbish,” said Rimmer.
Over the speakers, Holly added, “He did once have a vindaloo so strong it melted a spoon. Could be related.”
“Thank you, Holly,” Sam muttered.
Al appeared in the wall beside him. “Ziggy says you’re on the right track, but it’s not enough just to keep Kryten back. Rimmer has to go with him. He has to be the one who spots the manual override.”
Sam nodded slightly.
Rimmer narrowed his eyes. “Are you nodding at empty air now? Have you finally fermented your brain?”
Kryten raised a hand. “Sirs, with respect, the corridor may currently be becoming more explodey.”
Sam turned to Rimmer. “You know engine corridors better than either of us.”
Rimmer blinked. “What?”
“You did your technician training. Maintenance, emergency pathways, manual systems.”
Rimmer straightened despite himself. “Well. Yes. Obviously. I am the only one here with proper training.”
Kryten looked politely unconvinced.
Sam seized it. “Then we need you.”
There was a tiny, absurd silence.
Rimmer’s expression flickered. Suspicion, vanity, confusion, and something smaller underneath all of them — hunger, maybe. Not for food. For recognition. For one moment of being the person he’d spent his whole life insisting he could be.
Then he scoffed. “You need me.”
“Yes.”
“The actual me. Arnold Judas Rimmer. Second technician. Hologram. Hero material.”
Sam nodded. “Yes.”
Rimmer looked at Kryten. “Did you hear that?”
“I did, sir.”
“And?”
Kryten tilted his head. “I am trying not to encourage whatever this is.”
Rimmer drew himself up. “Right. Fine. I shall assist. On a purely voluntary, noble, and probably unappreciated basis.”
Al grinned. “Well I’ll be damned.”
Sam let out a quiet breath. “Good. Let’s go.”
Lower engine corridor seventeen looked like the inside of an angry kettle.
Steam hissed from wall panels in jagged bursts. Red warning lights flashed in slow, accusing pulses. Somewhere ahead, metal pinged and groaned. The air itself seemed to vibrate.
Kryten scanned a nearby panel. “Oh dear.”
Rimmer hovered at shoulder height beside him, trying to look commanding and only half succeeding. “How bad is ‘oh dear’ on your scale?”
“Somewhere between ‘missing soufflé’ and ‘planetary disassembly,’ sir.”
Rimmer blanched. “That’s an unhelpfully broad range.”
Sam crouched beside the regulator housing. The casing was hot. A display flashed error codes faster than he could read them.
Al appeared just over the unit. “Okay, Ziggy says in thirty seconds the automatic seal kicks in. If Kryten is inside when it happens, he’s trapped.”
“So we keep him out,” Sam whispered.
“Except the release valve’s jammed already,” said Al. “And unless somebody resets pressure manually from the auxiliary service shaft, the whole thing still blows.”
Sam looked up.
The auxiliary shaft was three meters down the corridor beyond a narrowing bulkhead. A sign above it blinked intermittently: MANUAL OVERRIDE — AUTHORIZED TECHNICIANS ONLY.
Rimmer followed his gaze and swallowed. “No.”
Kryten turned. “Sir?”
“I know that look,” said Rimmer. “That is the look people get shortly before they suggest something appalling that I should supposedly be honored to do.”
Steam burst from a side vent, making all three of them jump.
Sam stood. “Rimmer, you’re the only authorized technician here.”
“I’m dead!”
“You’re also holographic.”
Rimmer jabbed a finger toward the shaft. “Exactly! Which means if some electromagnetic field or whatever slices through me, I could destabilize! Do you know what that feels like?”
“No,” Sam admitted.
“It’s ghastly!”
Kryten wrung his hands. “If I may, sir, I could attempt—”
The corridor alarms changed pitch. Somewhere deeper in the machinery, something clanged like a giant dropping a toolbox down a flight of stairs.
Al looked at his handlink. “Seal in ten seconds.”
Sam turned fully to Rimmer.
And there it was again — that split second he recognized from so many lives. The moment before somebody decided who they were going to be.
Not forever. Maybe not even after today.
But for one moment.
“Arnold,” Sam said quietly, “you can do this.”
No jokes. No baiting. No manipulation. Just truth, laid out plain.
Rimmer went still.
Later, Sam would think that perhaps nobody had ever said those words to him in that tone before. Not sarcastically, not as a setup, not as some accidental administrative error. Just: you can do this.
Rimmer’s mouth opened. Shut again.
Kryten looked at him, genuinely anxious. “Sir—”
“Shut up, Kryten,” Rimmer snapped automatically, though there was no real bite in it. He turned to Sam. “If I am vaporized into subatomic incompetence, I want it noted that this was your idea.”
“Noted.”
“And if I survive, I expect at minimum a week’s worth of breakfast privileges and first choice of video night.”
Sam almost smiled. “Done.”
Rimmer took a breath he did not need and shot down the corridor.
The seal doors began to descend.
“Faster!” Kryten cried.
“I am going as fast as incorporeally possible!” Rimmer shouted back. “This is my top speed! Do you want heroism or elegance? Pick one!”
The gap narrowed. Steam engulfed half the corridor. For a second Sam lost sight of him altogether.
Then Holly’s voice came over the comm, strangely focused.
“Bit left, Rimmer. No, your other left. Yeah. There you go.”
Rimmer reappeared through the mist, reached the auxiliary shaft, and fumbled at the panel.
“It needs a code!” he yelled.
Kryten blurted out a string of numbers.
Rimmer slammed them in with theatrical fury. “If this kills me, I am haunting every single one of you! I shall be the most irritating ghost in all of recorded history!”
“You already are!” Lister’s voice shouted from behind them.
Sam spun around.
The real Dave Lister was standing in the corridor entrance in a dressing gown and boots, hair everywhere, blinking like a man who had taken a wrong turn on the way to the toilet and found an action sequence instead.
Sam stared. “Uh.”
Al groaned. “Terrific.”
Lister pointed at Sam. “Why do I look like that?”
Kryten made a noise of acute distress. “Sir has become sir!”
Cat sashayed in behind Lister, immaculate in a suit so loud it could probably be heard from orbit. He took one look at the chaos, then at Sam, then at Lister.
“Oh, I do not like this,” Cat declared. “There are two of the shabby one.”
“Thanks,” said both Sams at once, then stared at each other.
The seal doors slammed almost shut.
“Got it!” Rimmer yelled.
He yanked the override.
For one breathless second, nothing happened.
Then the warning lights shifted from red to amber. The howl of the regulator dropped to a grumble. Pressure bled off in a long, shuddering exhale.
The corridor went still.
Everyone froze.
Holly’s voice crackled overhead. “Okay. Good news, everybody. We are no longer immediately on course to become soup.”
Kryten sagged with relief.
Rimmer floated back through the thinning steam with his chest puffed out so far it could have had its own postal code. “Well,” he said, trying and failing to sound casual, “I think we can all agree that was an exemplary display of cool-headed technical excellence under pressure.”
Lister stared at him. “Did you just save us?”
Rimmer smoothed his uniform. “I prefer to think of it as saving the ship from your usual standard of catastrophic laziness.”
Cat was openly gaping now. “The dead one did a brave thing. I think I need to sit down and reassess the universe.”
Kryten clasped his hands in delight. “Mr. Rimmer, sir… that was magnificent.”
Rimmer tried to wave it off, but the compliment hit him like a physical force. His face did a dozen tiny things at once before settling into a smugness so fragile Sam could practically see the seams.
“Well,” he said, “yes. Obviously.”
Al checked the handlink. “You did it,” he told Sam softly. “Ziggy says history’s changing.”
Sam looked at Rimmer, who was now pretending not to enjoy the attention while clearly enjoying it more than oxygen.
It felt right.
Then Lister wandered closer to Sam and peered at him suspiciously. “Hang on. If I’m me, and you’re me, who’s you?”
Sam winced.
“Oh, this’ll go well,” said Al.
Cat took two steps backward. “I am not being body-snatched by the ugly one. I’d rather die fabulous.”
Kryten raised one tentative finger. “Might this be a temporal duplicate? A space weevil? Possession? We have had all four before, if one counts the despair squid.”
“Five,” said Holly. “Don’t forget the time thing with the backwards shoes.”
Rimmer looked between Sam and Lister, then slowly narrowed his eyes.
“You,” he said to Sam, “have been very weird all day.”
Sam opened his mouth.
A familiar blue-white light began to shimmer around him.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, boy.”
Lister jumped. “What’s that?”
Cat pointed. “He’s sparkling. I hate it when ugly people do glamorous things.”
Kryten gasped. “Sir! Or not-sir! You appear to be… departing.”
Rimmer stared at Sam with genuine bafflement. “Who the hell are you?”
Sam looked at him, at all of them — the ridiculous ship, the impossible menagerie of loneliness and bad habits and endurance. He smiled.
“Just someone passing through,” he said.
The light intensified.
Rimmer’s expression shifted, just for a moment. Some part of him, suspicious and wounded and cleverer than anyone usually gave him credit for, seemed to understand that the answer mattered less than the fact that it had been true.
He drew himself up. “Well,” he said awkwardly, “whoever you were… you had appalling taste in jackets.”
Sam laughed.
Then he leaped.
He landed in a padded armchair in what appeared to be a beauty salon.
A woman somewhere to his left screamed.
Sam squeezed his eyes shut, catching his breath as the new life settled over him in fragments — hairspray, curlers, lower back pain, a name he didn’t know yet.
Al appeared beside a row of mirrors, grinning.
“You know,” Al said, “most people travel three million years into the future and come back with insights about humanity. You came back with a curry stain.”
Sam looked down.
The stain was still there.
He began to laugh.
Al softened. “You did good, Sam.”
Sam leaned back in the chair, breathless from the aftershock of the leap. “Rimmer did good.”
“Yeah,” Al admitted. “He did.”
Sam thought of that tiny moment in the corridor — Rimmer going still under the weight of being trusted. Of all the people he had leaped into, all the broken hinges history turned on, all the hearts that only needed one person to look at them and say, you can do this.
Maybe that was all anyone had ever wanted.
From somewhere outside the room came a crash, followed by a man shouting, “Who put peroxide in the coffee machine?”
Sam rubbed his face. “Where am I?”
Al checked the handlink. “Bayonne, New Jersey. 1964. You’re a hairdresser named Gina.”
Sam stared at him.
Al grinned wider. “Oh, boy.”
Sam sighed. “I walked right into that.”
“And leaped right into it, too.”
Despite himself, Sam smiled.
Somewhere, three million years in the future, on a rust-red ship limping through deep time, Arnold Rimmer was probably still dining out on one act of heroism.
Good for him, Sam thought.
Then, as the salon door burst open and someone shouted for “Gina,” he stood up to put right what once went wrong.
Again.