Headcanon Fic Of Doom 2. So much TL;DR oh my god.
Soft-light holograms aboard the Enlightenment didn't do anything prosaic as "wake up." No, holograms didn't need to sleep, didn't get tired, never felt hungry or thirsty. Any eating, drinking, sleeping or fucking they did was purely an affectation, with an amused tolerance for the old "human" habits that their "human" minds still clung to.
Nirvana Crane woke up.
She was re-booted in her quarters, to be more precise, but she always preferred to call it 'waking up.' There was a bit of momentary confusion, as she sorted out the memories of before...and then the weight of her previous decision careened into her at slightly below the speed of a hot tachyon spray through soft butter.
She'd sacrificed her run-time.
She'd turned herself off permanently.
Because she'd fallen in love.
...What was wrong with her?
And now she was "awake" again, rebooted, amongst the...active. (One could never be called "amongst the living" when one was a hologram.) She had been rebooted alone, as the need for privacy was paramount on the Enlightenment. It was an acknowledgment that, even if the crew were no longer entirely human, they were based on human minds; and human minds needed both companionship and privacy, each in their turn. It was a faint patina of civilized conduct, lip service to an origin that they consciously shunned and subconsciously clung to. The arrogance of a holocrew came from their clear superiority, both in body and mind...and what they lost in love and hate and indifference and arguments and passion was more than adequately made up for by immortality.
And she, Nirvana Crane, had broken the mores and customs of her crew. She had asked, no, demanded to be shut down, and her run-time given to Arnold Rimmer. In any other situation, this demand would have been grounds for immediate termination anyway. Holograms, especially those on the Enlightenment, did not want to be shut down. So she had embraced oblivion in her doomed, romantic way, and went out with a small sigh of satisfaction.
And then they rebooted her.
Why?
With a thought, she clothed herself in her red and gold uniform, rearranged her hair into its usual fiery updo, and glanced at the results in the mirror. All present and accounted for, except for the fact that the sad and slightly confused look in her eyes was new and unexpected.
Logically, if she was rebooted, that meant that Arnold was no longer aboard the Enlightenment. Or perhaps not. Perhaps another crew-member had dissolved into the unreachable void of disk corruption and she was rebooted to take his or her place. But she rather doubted that. The odds of random disk corruption on this ship were so unutterably low as to be laughable. So the only explanation was that Arnold was gone.
As if in answer to this line of thought, her eyes fell on a folded piece of translucent paper-substitute on her bed, tenderly placed on her pillow. It was a "physical" representation of data in the banks of the unspeakably powerful computers that ran the Enlightenment. It suddenly occurred to her, for the first time, how very wasteful that physical representation was. If she wanted the information, she could simply tap into the computers directly and read it there.
Wasteful, extravagantly and outrageously wasteful, to siphon off even a bit of the computer's finite resources to pass on a message. ...All the cups, the drinks, the food, the decorative ornaments, the soft lighting, shining and brave uniforms, the exquisitely maintained hair and makeup and codpieces of the entire crew. All of it was vanity, vanity and more vanity. They were more human than they liked to admit, aboard this ship of superhumans.
She leaned down, picked up that piece of hologramatic paper, unfolded it, and began to read.
Dear Nirvana,
If you're reading this, which I sincerely hope you are, then I'm back aboard the Red Dwarf and winging my way elsewhere. I will always remember you fondly, and look back on my time with you as one of the happier moments of my existence.
But I cannot remain aboard the Enlightenment.
When I found out that you were my opponent in my test, I was shocked. I know what you'd hoped to accomplish by handing me your life, whole cloth, and I thank you for it. But I cannot allow you to sacrifice yourself for me. I'm not worth it.
Not to mention the fact that it wouldn't have worked out in the least.
I would have been exposed. The fact that I'd taken a mind patch would have eventually come out, and I would have been summarily turned off in any event. I never would have fit in, and you and I both know it. (Just writing this out is giving me a mild stroke.) I could never admit this to anybody else, and I'm certain that even now you're dismissing me in your head as an incompetent boob, but I'd rather that you know what sort of a man you'd given your existence for. I'm a fraud, Nirvana. A charlatan. A cheater and a liar, as you well know. I'm not an officer. I'm a second technician.
I've requested that Captain Platini restore your run-time, as I know you'll come to your senses and forget about me eventually. Which is as it should be. But I will always remember you, even across the light-years, even when you've properly moved on and forgotten this silly infatuation with me.
Who knows? Space is vast, but we encountered each other anyway. Perhaps someday we'll encounter each other again. Only next time, I'd like a chance to be on top, if it's all the same to you.
Love always,
Arnold J. Rimmer, BSc, SSc.
The letter was in a neat, copperplate handwriting that she found difficult to read, but her eyes poured over it and over it and over it, again and again. Taking in the tight little loops of his Os, the way his Ns all slanted at the exact same angle. Her shaking fingers ran across the signature, taking in the grandiose loops and whorls that made up his name.
"Oh, Arnie," she sighed aloud, shaking her head. "You stubborn, neurotic fool."
It wasn't a 'silly infatuation,' she knew that. She had spent the last three million years existing in a state of perpetual youth and beauty, her skills never flagging, her senses honed to computerised perfection, perfect and ageless and bored to death. Every day, the same sexual games. Every day, the same gathering of data. Every year, every decade, every century, every millennia.
He was new. He was different. He shook her up and made her look round properly, see her existence in a whole new light. That, and he was absolutely amazing in bed, damn him. How did somebody that neurotic manage to be so good at the sexual act? He did the unexpected, he just went for it, and was intense about it in a way she'd never encountered. He took a pleasant contraction and relaxation of muscles and turned it into something more. He allowed her to not only use his body, but touch his spirit, as well, which never happened. The other males and females aboard the Enlightenment were nowhere near as skilled at sexual congress. Too self-absorbed, perhaps, too arrogant and proud of the skills they didn't actually possess, too sure that they already knew it all, and that this particular set of movements at this particular proscribed time was the height of the art of human sex.
...Just like she had done, once upon a time.
And then she fell in love.
With a man who, by his own admission, was a prat.
She wondered briefly what that said about her.
Her desktop communicator chirruped genteelly at her, and she flicked the 'open channel' switch with a distracted finger, her eyes still latched firmly onto Arnold's letter. She didn't want to look away for an instant.
"Nirvana. It's good to see you again."
She looked up at the comm. The face of the Enlightenment's captain, Hercule Platini, gazed back at her, an arrogant, smug little smirk on his face. She suddenly longed to reach through the screen and throttle him. She'd never felt that way before, but now the feeling was overwhelming. It occurred to her that she didn't actually like her captain in the least. And she knew that, if she expressed that thought, the others would stare at her in bemusement. What did that have to do with anything, liking somebody you worked with and slept with?
"Captain," she answered coolly, assured that her tone of voice would be completely indecipherable to his ears, as his arrogance wouldn't let him hear her contempt. She was right.
"Quite a little display you put on there. It was almost touching, in a way. Useless, but touching." He ran a hand through his perfect ash-blond hair, not realising that she now saw through their hologramatic smoke-and-mirrors. One glitch in the system, and Platini's perfect coif would be reduced to a rat's nest. Or bald. Or worse. The thought amused her.
"It wasn't a display, sir. I was quite serious."
"Ah, yes, the matter of your falling in love." Now the contempt dripped from his tone, but it was contempt for the very concept of love, and not her. She wanted to scream at him, 'Nobody would ever fall in love with you anyway, you puffed-up, self-righteous poof!' but didn't.
"Sir," she answered neutrally.
"You're hereby stripped of rank," he said without preamble, for he didn't believe in softening blows. "For the next one hundred years, you're on probationary status, and subject to all the discipline that entails. I'll be watching you, Ms. Crane."
She stood astonished, her eyes wide. One hundred years? One hundred years? That was nothing! That was a slap on the wrist. She'd expected to get at least a thousand years on probation for this little contretemps. He'd handed out stiffer penalties over ignoring health regulations.
"Yes, sir," she answered, standing straight and nodding. All military and correct.
He threw the Enlightenment's salute, forefinger and pinkie raised high, and nodded at her acceptance. "I also hope you'll keep our weekly appointment on the sexual recreation deck tomorrow."
The floor seemed to buckle under her feet, and she mentally cringed away from this suggestion. It went deeper than a mere reluctance to share herself with this gimboid of a man. It was a cellular-deep revulsion that made her want to retch. She had often shared an hour or two in his bed, because over the course of a three million year voyage, she'd slept with practically everybody on board the ship, even the women. Multiple times. Thousands of times, millions of times. It would be the same old calisthenics, with none of the spark or spirit she had discovered with Arnold.
And then she realised that this was part of her probation. No wonder the penalty was so light; Platini was testing her, to make sure that she wasn't hormonally or mentally imbalanced. He was making sure that he hadn't just rebooted an unstable hologram. He had the safety and security of his entire crew to think about, and logically she knew that and applauded it.
Emotionally, however, she wanted to grind his testicles under her heel until they were a reddish smear on his (computer-generated) Persian rug.
All this occurred to her in the blink of an eye, a simulated breath in and out.
"...Of course, Captain. I'll be there."
"Very good. Platini out." The comm winked off, and Nirvana had her privacy again.
She sank down on to her bed, still clutching Arnold's letter, and hugged herself around her ribcage. She wanted out. She wanted to find him, go with him, figure out some way for the computer of his ship, the Red Dwarf, to be able to simulate a second hologram. But that was impossible. He was probably already thousands of g-gucks away by now, and his ship was hopelessly primitive. She was stuck here, like he was stuck there, and they would never see each other again.
She should have given Platini the finger and been shut off again. But the small sliver of hope, that someday she'd once again see the man she loved, stopped her.
We won't be apart, she mouthed to herself. We just won't be together.
Nirvana Crane woke up.
She was re-booted in her quarters, to be more precise, but she always preferred to call it 'waking up.' There was a bit of momentary confusion, as she sorted out the memories of before...and then the weight of her previous decision careened into her at slightly below the speed of a hot tachyon spray through soft butter.
She'd sacrificed her run-time.
She'd turned herself off permanently.
Because she'd fallen in love.
...What was wrong with her?
And now she was "awake" again, rebooted, amongst the...active. (One could never be called "amongst the living" when one was a hologram.) She had been rebooted alone, as the need for privacy was paramount on the Enlightenment. It was an acknowledgment that, even if the crew were no longer entirely human, they were based on human minds; and human minds needed both companionship and privacy, each in their turn. It was a faint patina of civilized conduct, lip service to an origin that they consciously shunned and subconsciously clung to. The arrogance of a holocrew came from their clear superiority, both in body and mind...and what they lost in love and hate and indifference and arguments and passion was more than adequately made up for by immortality.
And she, Nirvana Crane, had broken the mores and customs of her crew. She had asked, no, demanded to be shut down, and her run-time given to Arnold Rimmer. In any other situation, this demand would have been grounds for immediate termination anyway. Holograms, especially those on the Enlightenment, did not want to be shut down. So she had embraced oblivion in her doomed, romantic way, and went out with a small sigh of satisfaction.
And then they rebooted her.
Why?
With a thought, she clothed herself in her red and gold uniform, rearranged her hair into its usual fiery updo, and glanced at the results in the mirror. All present and accounted for, except for the fact that the sad and slightly confused look in her eyes was new and unexpected.
Logically, if she was rebooted, that meant that Arnold was no longer aboard the Enlightenment. Or perhaps not. Perhaps another crew-member had dissolved into the unreachable void of disk corruption and she was rebooted to take his or her place. But she rather doubted that. The odds of random disk corruption on this ship were so unutterably low as to be laughable. So the only explanation was that Arnold was gone.
As if in answer to this line of thought, her eyes fell on a folded piece of translucent paper-substitute on her bed, tenderly placed on her pillow. It was a "physical" representation of data in the banks of the unspeakably powerful computers that ran the Enlightenment. It suddenly occurred to her, for the first time, how very wasteful that physical representation was. If she wanted the information, she could simply tap into the computers directly and read it there.
Wasteful, extravagantly and outrageously wasteful, to siphon off even a bit of the computer's finite resources to pass on a message. ...All the cups, the drinks, the food, the decorative ornaments, the soft lighting, shining and brave uniforms, the exquisitely maintained hair and makeup and codpieces of the entire crew. All of it was vanity, vanity and more vanity. They were more human than they liked to admit, aboard this ship of superhumans.
She leaned down, picked up that piece of hologramatic paper, unfolded it, and began to read.
Dear Nirvana,
If you're reading this, which I sincerely hope you are, then I'm back aboard the Red Dwarf and winging my way elsewhere. I will always remember you fondly, and look back on my time with you as one of the happier moments of my existence.
But I cannot remain aboard the Enlightenment.
When I found out that you were my opponent in my test, I was shocked. I know what you'd hoped to accomplish by handing me your life, whole cloth, and I thank you for it. But I cannot allow you to sacrifice yourself for me. I'm not worth it.
Not to mention the fact that it wouldn't have worked out in the least.
I would have been exposed. The fact that I'd taken a mind patch would have eventually come out, and I would have been summarily turned off in any event. I never would have fit in, and you and I both know it. (Just writing this out is giving me a mild stroke.) I could never admit this to anybody else, and I'm certain that even now you're dismissing me in your head as an incompetent boob, but I'd rather that you know what sort of a man you'd given your existence for. I'm a fraud, Nirvana. A charlatan. A cheater and a liar, as you well know. I'm not an officer. I'm a second technician.
I've requested that Captain Platini restore your run-time, as I know you'll come to your senses and forget about me eventually. Which is as it should be. But I will always remember you, even across the light-years, even when you've properly moved on and forgotten this silly infatuation with me.
Who knows? Space is vast, but we encountered each other anyway. Perhaps someday we'll encounter each other again. Only next time, I'd like a chance to be on top, if it's all the same to you.
Love always,
Arnold J. Rimmer, BSc, SSc.
The letter was in a neat, copperplate handwriting that she found difficult to read, but her eyes poured over it and over it and over it, again and again. Taking in the tight little loops of his Os, the way his Ns all slanted at the exact same angle. Her shaking fingers ran across the signature, taking in the grandiose loops and whorls that made up his name.
"Oh, Arnie," she sighed aloud, shaking her head. "You stubborn, neurotic fool."
It wasn't a 'silly infatuation,' she knew that. She had spent the last three million years existing in a state of perpetual youth and beauty, her skills never flagging, her senses honed to computerised perfection, perfect and ageless and bored to death. Every day, the same sexual games. Every day, the same gathering of data. Every year, every decade, every century, every millennia.
He was new. He was different. He shook her up and made her look round properly, see her existence in a whole new light. That, and he was absolutely amazing in bed, damn him. How did somebody that neurotic manage to be so good at the sexual act? He did the unexpected, he just went for it, and was intense about it in a way she'd never encountered. He took a pleasant contraction and relaxation of muscles and turned it into something more. He allowed her to not only use his body, but touch his spirit, as well, which never happened. The other males and females aboard the Enlightenment were nowhere near as skilled at sexual congress. Too self-absorbed, perhaps, too arrogant and proud of the skills they didn't actually possess, too sure that they already knew it all, and that this particular set of movements at this particular proscribed time was the height of the art of human sex.
...Just like she had done, once upon a time.
And then she fell in love.
With a man who, by his own admission, was a prat.
She wondered briefly what that said about her.
Her desktop communicator chirruped genteelly at her, and she flicked the 'open channel' switch with a distracted finger, her eyes still latched firmly onto Arnold's letter. She didn't want to look away for an instant.
"Nirvana. It's good to see you again."
She looked up at the comm. The face of the Enlightenment's captain, Hercule Platini, gazed back at her, an arrogant, smug little smirk on his face. She suddenly longed to reach through the screen and throttle him. She'd never felt that way before, but now the feeling was overwhelming. It occurred to her that she didn't actually like her captain in the least. And she knew that, if she expressed that thought, the others would stare at her in bemusement. What did that have to do with anything, liking somebody you worked with and slept with?
"Captain," she answered coolly, assured that her tone of voice would be completely indecipherable to his ears, as his arrogance wouldn't let him hear her contempt. She was right.
"Quite a little display you put on there. It was almost touching, in a way. Useless, but touching." He ran a hand through his perfect ash-blond hair, not realising that she now saw through their hologramatic smoke-and-mirrors. One glitch in the system, and Platini's perfect coif would be reduced to a rat's nest. Or bald. Or worse. The thought amused her.
"It wasn't a display, sir. I was quite serious."
"Ah, yes, the matter of your falling in love." Now the contempt dripped from his tone, but it was contempt for the very concept of love, and not her. She wanted to scream at him, 'Nobody would ever fall in love with you anyway, you puffed-up, self-righteous poof!' but didn't.
"Sir," she answered neutrally.
"You're hereby stripped of rank," he said without preamble, for he didn't believe in softening blows. "For the next one hundred years, you're on probationary status, and subject to all the discipline that entails. I'll be watching you, Ms. Crane."
She stood astonished, her eyes wide. One hundred years? One hundred years? That was nothing! That was a slap on the wrist. She'd expected to get at least a thousand years on probation for this little contretemps. He'd handed out stiffer penalties over ignoring health regulations.
"Yes, sir," she answered, standing straight and nodding. All military and correct.
He threw the Enlightenment's salute, forefinger and pinkie raised high, and nodded at her acceptance. "I also hope you'll keep our weekly appointment on the sexual recreation deck tomorrow."
The floor seemed to buckle under her feet, and she mentally cringed away from this suggestion. It went deeper than a mere reluctance to share herself with this gimboid of a man. It was a cellular-deep revulsion that made her want to retch. She had often shared an hour or two in his bed, because over the course of a three million year voyage, she'd slept with practically everybody on board the ship, even the women. Multiple times. Thousands of times, millions of times. It would be the same old calisthenics, with none of the spark or spirit she had discovered with Arnold.
And then she realised that this was part of her probation. No wonder the penalty was so light; Platini was testing her, to make sure that she wasn't hormonally or mentally imbalanced. He was making sure that he hadn't just rebooted an unstable hologram. He had the safety and security of his entire crew to think about, and logically she knew that and applauded it.
Emotionally, however, she wanted to grind his testicles under her heel until they were a reddish smear on his (computer-generated) Persian rug.
All this occurred to her in the blink of an eye, a simulated breath in and out.
"...Of course, Captain. I'll be there."
"Very good. Platini out." The comm winked off, and Nirvana had her privacy again.
She sank down on to her bed, still clutching Arnold's letter, and hugged herself around her ribcage. She wanted out. She wanted to find him, go with him, figure out some way for the computer of his ship, the Red Dwarf, to be able to simulate a second hologram. But that was impossible. He was probably already thousands of g-gucks away by now, and his ship was hopelessly primitive. She was stuck here, like he was stuck there, and they would never see each other again.
She should have given Platini the finger and been shut off again. But the small sliver of hope, that someday she'd once again see the man she loved, stopped her.
We won't be apart, she mouthed to herself. We just won't be together.