Chapter Text
It was Lister who noticed something was wrong first. If you're spend years with one guy in a room about the size of your average soup can, you tend to get the hang of their mannerisms. This was why, when Rimmer somehow started acting weirder than usual, Lister brought it up.
"Rimmer?" The hologram looked over at the beds from where he was sat "Are y'alright?"
Rimmer looked confused, and nodded quickly.
"It's just uh," Lister gestured at his right hand with his left "You're chewing yer hand"
Looking down, Rimmer's eyes grew wide as he realised what he was doing. His hand dropped from his mouth like a dog with a tennis ball, the pink bite marks that patterned his left hand already starting to fade, although that didn't make it any less concerning to either man.
Sure, Lister had seen Rimmer bite his hand before, but normally it was when he was nervous or intensely regretful. Or both. Even then, it was more like one big bite over the knuckles, not the absentminded chewing that Rimmer had been doing for the past half an hour. Lister had spotted that before as well, but only when Rimmer had been (attempting) to work on or study something without someone in the room; every time Rimmer noticed anyone else come in he would rip his hand out of his mouth so fast it was a miracle he hadn't torn a layer of skin off yet.
Rimmer didn't take his eyes off his hand as he stood up from the bunk room table and walked out the door, down the hallway, and towards the medibay, ignoring whatever it was Lister was calling after him.
——
"Sir, I don't really understand what's wrong here", said Kryten, as he stood with an increasingly neurotic Rimmer in the medibay.
"Look, bog-bot" snapped Rimmer, "I don't bite my hand like that in front of people. I haven't since I was 7 and my parents started taping my hand to the table! There is no way in hell I would be doing so casually and without me realising in front of Lister unless something was wrong with my lightbee, so check it over, laddio"
Kryten sighed, and walked over to the computer to check the lightbee's conditions. After a few moments poring over the screens output, the mechanoid very slowly lifted his head and looked over at the bed where Rimmer was sitting. He smiled nervously.
"Do you want the good news or the bad news first, sir?" asked Kryten, trying not to set Rimmer off into a spiral.
Rimmer opened his mouth to answer, his hand dropping out of it into his lap. "Bad news. No, wait, good news."
"The good news is that you're not a hypochondriac."
A thousand snarky responses sat at the edge of his tongue as Rimmer's eye started twitching. Just that moment, Lister came in and walked over to where Kryten was.
"What's wrong with him then?" Lister scanned his eyes over the screen with a look of concern on his face that did something weird to Rimmer's stomach. He brushed it off as nerves. Or at least tried to.
"It appears that Mr Rimmer may have contracted a holovirus from that military derelict we raided on Monday" Kryten looked over the results on the screen again "Something called the Bedingfield virus".
Holly's head appeared on the screen above the medibay bed. Rimmer groaned. The last thing he wanted now was for everyone on the ship to come and see how he was starting to act like a child again.
"I know about this one, I think" Holly's head bobbed up and down, "It was a new warfare tactic some army boffins were working on in the late 2280s. The plan was to get the holograms on the opposite side of the war to lose all their inhibitions."
"How would that help?" Rimmer craned his head around to look at the woman on the screen.
"They hoped the holos would start killing their living companions. How they expected them to do it when they couldn't touch anything I haven't the foggiest"
"What happened to the project? They ever finish it?" asked Lister.
"Nope. It got scrapped after all the human scientists working on it died in mysterious circumstances. Something to do with a voice activated oxygen tank"
A loaded silence hung in the air for a moment.
"So, what's actually going to happen to me?" Rimmer looked over at Kryten.
"Well, sir, until we develop a cure, you're going to gradually lose more and more inhibitions. You'll start doing things that you want to do but would never normally do so. You'll also lose the ability to recognise that what you're doing is wrong, or at least against your values. Your hand is just going to be the start of it, I'm afraid"
"Just great" said Rimmer, although it sounded more like 'djunst grneat', due to him having the side of his hand between his teeth.