From: Lord MooseHammer
I'd appreciate some feedback on this piece: what do people think of it. Also, if I write more fan-fic, do you think I should carry on writing about Rimmer going to other Dimensions?
"Stoke me a clipper, I'll be back for Christmas."
Rimmer thought his words over carefully as his dimension ship pulled out of Starbug, and decided that there'd been something wrong with them. When the other Ace had said them, he'd been sure that there'd been something about fish in it somewhere.
He looked out of his window at Starbug. He was quite unhappy that his last sight of this universe was Starbug, and not Red Dwarf, but took solace in the fact that he had finally become an Officer of the ship. Not only an officer, but a First Class Officer!
"First smegging Class!" he said out loud, in triumph.
He thought about what Lister had said while giving him the award. He'd succeeded in his mission and kept Lister sane. Oh, if only mother could see him now, he'd actually succeeded in something!
But how would Lister do without him? He thought about this for a while. He seemed quite close to Kryten, but Kryten was only a robot, and a mad one at that and Cat couldn't offer any sort of stability to Lister.
"Lister's going to go mad without me!" he said, speaking his mind.
"He needs some companionship" said his computer, smiling up at him from one of his panels.
"I know, that's why I was there!"
"How about someone else?"
"There isn't anyone else!" said Rimmer, "those 2 are the only creatures that Lister and I have met in the whole universe. Well, the only ones who haven't wanted to kill us."
"What made you think I was talking about this universe?"
----
Rimmer was smiling as he opened a portal to leave the universe he had spent his whole life and his whole death, so far, in. It was a warm genuine smile, something, which very rarely graced Rimmer's lips.
In a few days, the others would discover a link-way through non-space, where Lister would finally get what he had wanted for so long. Rimmer's computer had told him that the others would never find out that it had been Rimmer who had created the link-way, and that they probably wouldn't guess it either.
Rimmer was proud of himself. It seemed fitting that his final act in the universe was one for which he would get no credit. He had spent his whole life trying to get credit and to avoid blame, and it had never helped. Now, he had committed the second "good deed" since his death, the first being the time he had given up his place on the holoship Enlightenment for his lover.
Nirvanah Crane.
"Where do you want to go today?" said the computer.
Rimmer thought about those words, and remembered that they had been the marketing slogan for the manufacturer of the software, which lay beneath Holly and most other Ship's computers.
"Nirvanah Crane."
"Where?"
"Computer, can you try to take me to a universe where Arnold Rimmer and Nirvanah Crane are together."
Rimmer looked out of the window one last time, as he left his universe.
"Gazpacho Soup" he said, under his breath.
----
Dave Lister watched from his room in Starbug as Rimmer's ship drifted towards the portal. A shiver went through his spine as the portal opened, ready to swallow the ship. "Like someone had stepped on my grave" was an expression that sprang to mind.
He wondered how he'd manage without Rimmer. He had hated him for years, but at the same time, he was going to miss him. How would he find his enjoyment if he couldn't wind Rimmer up whenever he was feeling down?
Ironically, he had felt closest to Rimmer in the days before he had left.
Lister didn't know it, but Rimmer's final actions in the universe would soon improve the quality of life on Starbug...
-----
"...espond! Red Dwarf out." Rimmer regained consciousness and looked around him. He must have lost consciousness as he had jumped.
"Computer, open a channel to whoever sent us that message."
There was a chirp, "Please repeat your message, the Captain of this ship was... the Captain of this ship did not hear it."
The comm cracked and fizzed for a while, before the message was repeated:
"This is Nirvanah Rimmer of the JMC space craft Red Dwarf. Unidentified ship, please respond! Red Dwarf out."
"Open a visual link" said Rimmer to the computer, quickly adjusting his hairpiece, ready for his first attempt at being Ace.
Nirvanah's image appeared on the screen in the place of his computer's face.
"Arnie?" she said, in disbelief.
----
The airlock opened, and Ace stood face to face with Nirvanah Crane, the woman he had loved and lost. He looked at the rest of the crew. To her left were Cat and Kryten, and to her right was... Arnold J. Rimmer.
"The name's Rimmer" said Ace in the most macho voice he could muster, "friends call me Ace. I'm from a parallel universe. It's just like yours, but with slightly different events."
"I'm Nirvanah. This is my husband, Arnie."
For the second time in 10 minutes, Ace Rimmer lost consciousness.
He came around a few minutes later, and found himself sitting on a table in Red Dwarf's Drive Room. Kryten was running an instrument over him, and the others were staring at him.
He looked at their faces. Cat seemed exactly the same. It was difficult to believe that this was a different being from the one he had just said goodbye to. He was looking from Ace Rimmer to Arnold Rimmer, looking very confused. Ace noted that Cat seemed to be looking at Rimmer with a different expression to the one he had given him in his own universe. He was looking at him with... respect.
He looked across to Arnold Rimmer. He struck Ace as a man who was at peace with himself. He wasn't an expert in medicine, but it seemed to him that Arnold was healthier and suffered from less stress. He was prepared to bet that Kryten had never given him any Chinese worry balls!
Kryten jabbed a needle into his arm to take a reading. Ace looked at Kryten. He knew that he was exactly the same series 4000 Mechanoid, and that his facial expression couldn't be any different to the one he had left behind, but he was sure that this Kryten looked more confident with himself. He expertly moved the different pieces of medical equipment around to try to find out more about Ace.
Finally, Ace looked at the face of Nirvanah Crane. She was as beautiful as he remembered. She looked very worried about Ace, and gripped Arnold's hand very tightly. They both had H's on their heads, and they seemed perfectly able to make contact with each other.
Husband. The word ran through Ace's head, and he realised why he had fainted.
He got up and stood on the floor. Other than a bad headache, he was fine.
"Sorry about that" he said, his macho voice failing for the first word and a half, "I think I'm suffering from a lack of blood in my head. It's all been tied up elsewhere recently, if you know what I mean!" Ace smiled inwardly as he delivered his line. He seemed to be successful in his attempt to emulate the other Ace.
"So you weren't just surprised about us two?" asked Arnold. Ace noticed how soft and unthreatening his voice was. He struck Ace as someone who had nothing to prove.
"Well that too..." Ace said, reverting to his usual weaselly whine.
"Ahem," said Kryten, getting the attention of the others, "the test results are positive. This is definitely Mr. Rimmer, and he's definitely a hologram." As he said his final word, he pushed his finger against Ace's arm, dislodging the fabric and contradicting his words.
Nirvanah leaned forward towards Ace, and fell straight through him.
Ace laughed, making sure to add plenty of testosterone to the noise.
"I think you'll find I'm a different kind of hologram to the kind you're used to. I can become hard whenever I want!"
"So can I" said Cat, "I found these green pills in the cargo hold from the 1990's. They're called Via..."
"I think," said Kryten, cutting him short, "that Mr. Ace was referring to the substance of his holo-matrix." he tapped a few buttons on his hand-held scanner before continuing, "He has an extremely sophisticated light bee, it seems to be projecting matter as well as light."
"It's a hard light bee, my old Kiwi," Ace paused, wondering whether he had chosen the correct fruit, but decided it was too late to worry about it, "I worked on upgrading my bee in conjunction with Legion."
The others looked at him blankly. "You've never met Legion?" He asked.
"No," answered Kryten, "where did you meet him?"
"In sector B44-2JX-13O." Ace was glad that memorising the details of space battles on board Starbug in as much detail as he had memorised his risk games had paid off.
"But that's over 300 years from here."
"Yes, we spent some time in Deep Sleep while we were looking for Red Dwarf."
"You were looking for Red Dwarf?" asked Cat, "how the hell could you lose the thing?"
"We were..." Ace wondered how to explain what had happened. It was clear to him that Nirvanah's being on the ship had some how changed events so that they had never lost Red Dwarf. "We lost it on Space-Date 92148301" he said, hoping that they would have recognised the date. If they had been on the same mission as his crew, it would be quicker to explain.
He looked at the faces around him, hoping for a sign of recognition. Arnold and Nirvanah looked at each other and looked as if they were grieving. Kryten bowed his head.
"When?" asked Cat.
The other 3 remained silent. At last, Arnold looked into Ace's eyes. Ace could see something in his eyes. He wasn't just unhappy, it was more than that...
"The day we..." he stopped and looked at Nirvanah, and then at Cat, "The day we lost Listy in the battle with Kryten's deranged nanobots."
They all fell silent again. Even Cat looked serious.
Ace looked around the room again. For the first time, he realised that Lister wasn't in the room. Looking back on the past few minutes, he wondered why he hadn't realised it sooner, but realised that the combination of the excitement of seeing Nirvanah again and the excitement of becoming Ace and visiting new universes had been too much for him and taken his mind off Lister's absence.
"What are... nanobots?" asked Ace after a long pause.
"They're my internal service robots." said Kryten, "They work on a sub-atomic level to make sure I work properly. On... *that* day, they mutinied against me and tried to capture the ship. They tried to outrun us, but Nirvanah had upgraded the boosters in Starbug that week, and we managed to catch up with Red Dwarf in no time. When we got there, they tried to defend the ship with what they could, and Mr. Lister..."
"Oh my god" said Ace.
Nirvanah burst into tears and ran out of the room.
---
Ace swore as he worked at the computer panel. He was in one of the Officer's quarters on Red Dwarf, the room he had gone into after the earlier meeting had broken up. He had been working at the panel for 3 hours straight, but had gotten no-where.
"What's wrong?" said Arnold, who had arrived in the doorway in time to hear Ace's anger.
"I'm trying to patch a message through the Dimension Jumper's computer, but it won't work. I want to tell my old crew about the nanobots, it must have been them who took our Red Dwarf as well and they don't know that."
"So Nirvanah was right" said Arnold, "you didn't manage to catch up with Red Dwarf without her."
"How is she?"
"Upset. She thinks it's her fault that Listy's dead in your universe. She keeps saying that he wouldn't have died if she hadn't joined the crew."
She's right, thought Ace. "Of course it wasn't her fault!" he said, "she managed to do a better job of sorting out the problem than we did! We didn't manage to get Red Dwarf back, and the whole crew might die on Starbug, there's not enough air or supplies. Besides, My Lister doesn't have any curry. Is there any different between that and death for him?"
Arnold laughed softly at this.
"Hang on a mo." said Ace, "How did Nirvanah know that she didn't exist in my universe?"
"She said that she could tell from the way you looked at her. She said that you looked at her the same way as I did when I first met her."
"When did you two marry?"
"About 2 months before we lost Listy." said Arnold, "He was my best man, and Cat was the bridesmaid" he smiled as he said that, "he spent longer working on his outfit than Nirvanah and I spent on the planning! Kryten performed the ceremony. He's not actually authorised to perform weddings, but he's authorised to perform circumcisions, so we decided that he was the most qualified."
"How did she end up on Red Dwarf?"
"Well," answered Arnold, "I was offered a place on the Enlightenment, but I refused it. As we were trying to leave, Cat made some kind of mistake with the engines. I don't know what it was, but there was the risk of quite a large explosion, since we were near a gas nebula."
"An explosion like that would have lit up half the galaxy!" said Ace.
"Exactly. That's why they sent Binks and Nirvanah over to Starbug to help sort the problems out. Nirvanah hadn't seen any real machinery for years, so she was really interested in Starbug. While she was examining it, she realised that some of the stuff could be set up as a holo-projector. With our equipment and her expertise, she was soon added as another member of the crew.
Ace was lost for words. Cat's mistake had caused Nirvanah to stay with him for ever. Smeg, thought Ace, if only...
------
If only.
The two words were all Ace could concentrate on. He was back on the Dimension Jumper now, trying to get his head straight.
His first reaction to his conversation with this universe's Arnold had been to wish that Cat could have made the same mistake in his own universe. Would he have been happier? Lister would have died.
He thought back to a time shortly after his own death. Well, 3,000,000 years after his own death, but shortly afterwards from his own perspective, as he had not been switched on until shortly before that point.
He had seen a Future Echo of Lister's death. He was gloating over it. He had actually been glad that Lister might die. He had since put it down to pettiness and jealousy. He had died, so he didn't see why Lister should live.
But now things were very different. This universe was as bad as the one he had left. His love of Nirvanah Crane had not been in vain, but Lister was gone.
He couldn't stand to be here another moment.
"Computer, open a new portal!"
"Where do you want to go today?"
