Chapter Text
It was dark, but then again it usually was when you didn’t have eyes. In this state, trapped in his bee, Rimmer was only aware of his surroundings through a vague sort of all-encompassing sense; neither sight nor hearing nor touch, but somehow all of the above. Human brains had not evolved to make sense of that sort of thing, and despite being only a simulation, a human brain was what Rimmer’s brain was a simulation of. He could still sense the trembling of the station surrounding him, the debris under which he was trapped, and the lack of light – including, of course, his body.
In a word, he was smegged.
Well, at least no one would ever know he… know what Howard had accused him of. This was less of a comforting thought than expected. Rimmer had heard that people who lost an arm or a leg sometimes felt they were still there. Phantom limbs, they called it. In his current form, Rimmer had a phantom body; one he could not move or see or even feel. But he knew it was there.
This must be what it was like to be buried alive. If he had adrenal glands, he might have panicked. Not having them hadn’t seemed to stop him before, but perhaps it was different when he was like this. Then again, he didn’t seem to be feeling much of everything. Whenever he tried to think about what had happened, his thoughts slipped away from him. All he had was this pseudo-sensation and the non-feeling of his body in the dark. The rumbling was growing more frequent; the station was clearly falling apart. Rimmer knew how it must feel. There was no way for him to shut off what little remained of his simulation in this state, but there was a power-save mode he’d been forced to use on one or two previous occasions. On the one hand, they would only delay the inevitable, but on the other, it would mean he’d be slightly less aware for the short time he had left in which to exist. Assuming his bee escaped the destruction of the station in one piece, which was unlikely, it could not function indefinitely in the vacuum of space.
He closed his eyes, then remembered he didn’t have any. He closed them anyway. It made no difference.
Power save mode.
The world, such as he could experience it, grew even fainter and further away by increments. Dullness enveloped him; the vibrations and almost-sounds faded away. There was a gentle rocking, a far-away something like a rhythm; regular thuds, like the heartbeat he didn’t have. Low, rolling thunder. Gentle rocking.
Nothing. Noth-
From a distance, the dancing cascades of plasma, energy and debris were actually quite beautiful, Lister thought. There was no sound in space, not that they would have heard anything this far away, but there was just something about an explosion without sound that made it seem unreal, somehow. Like fancy fireworks. Just special effects. Still, it shouldn’t be beautiful. Should it?
He dug into the folds of his jacket, and with one steady hand, extracted the oblong object hiding there. On the side of Rimmer’s bee, a red light flickered steadily, indicating power-save-mode. Lister held it carefully; it felt invasive, holding an entire person in his hand like that. Yeah, he’d done worse things to Rimmer over the years, his bee too, come to that, but that had been a spur of the moment thing, and he’d been angry. Seeing him like this… (Seeing him like that, stuck in the caved-in floor, jammed between a fallen light-fixture and a massive chunk of plasticrete…)
“Hey man,” he said, softly. The bee rolled easily back and forth on his palm. “Thought you might enjoy a bit of a rest. I dunno if that’s how these things work. Must have been some shock you had, though.” The light kept blinking, in non-response. Kryten was still trying to beat his head back into shape from where Lister had hit him with the bit of broken railing, and Cat was sleeping off the adrenaline burst he’d had getting them out of there. They had a moment to themselves. “I suppose I should be angry at ya for blowing up the station, but honestly I think that was a bit of a team effort. Besides, I can’t really blame ya. If it’d been my brother in there, I’d have done the same thing. In fact,” he cracked a grin, watching the dying explosion as it faded out, “I’m impressed. You’d’ve never done that a few years ago, you know.”
The light stopped blinking. Lister jumped up, cradling the bee in both hands like it was an egg about to hatch. Not a bad metaphor, perhaps, he thought. He waited a few seconds, shifting his weight from foot to foot, but nothing happened. Then, slowly, the light shifted to a steady green; stand-by. Lister sighed.
“I hear ya. Better get a lie-in while ye can, am I right?”
Taking care not to accidentally press any buttons, Lister put the bee back inside his jacket, and headed over to the medi-bay. Rimmer would be safe there until he chose to come back online.
Lister did his best not to grin when he heard the familiar nasal cough – an impressive feat – behind him in the cockpit seven hours later.
“Yer late,” he said, kicking the navigator’s seat the other way around, as an invitation. “Shift started an hour ago.”
“That’s not my station.”
Lister shrugged, offering no further explanation. He gave an internal whoop of triumph when Rimmer presently sat down next to him, with no explanation of his own.
“I suppose,” Rimmer said, not looking at him, “there’s no chance you found…”
Lister shook his head. “I would’ve told ya. We would have found some way to timeshare, or… something,” he ended, lamely. “We’d’ve worked something out.”
Rimmer didn’t nod, but shifted faintly in his seat.
“Hey, tell you something that’ll blow yer mind?” He chanced a quick smile. Rimmer decidedly did not return it.
“My mind’s had all the blowing it can take for one un-lifetime, thank you very much.”
“Nah, you’ll love this.”
“I doubt it.”
“Remember Legion?”
“Lister…”
“No, honestly, you have to hear this!” Rimmer rolled his eyes, and Lister pressed on. “Kryten downloaded the project archives when we were there. D’you know who was part of the project team?”
Rimmer sat up, tilting his head cautiously. “That was decades and decades after John’s research took place - it couldn’t have been…”
Lister waved a hand impatiently. “It wasn’t John. There were no Rimmers on staff; we would have noticed when Kryten first filed the info. But there was a Saunders.”
Rimmer’s eyes widened. He gripped the arms of his chair. “Saunders!?”
“Audrey Juliette Saunders. Daughter of John Rimmer and Eustace Saunders. Seems she took after her old man. Her file states she was a world-renown physicist, a pioneer of experimental holography. Hand picked for the project.”
“Daughter?” Rimmer stared at the viewscreen. He didn’t sound angry. He didn’t sound… anything.
“Yeah. Gene-mixed clone, not adopted. They went to Io for the procedure, if you can believe it.”
Rimmer nodded. Lister did not expect him to say anything, and he didn’t, his expression that particular shade of unreadable reserved for things for which he had no frame of reference. Lister saw that one more and more, lately.
They rode in silence for a while, Rimmer wordlessly checking the coordinates and pressing buttons. After what seemed to Lister like hours, he finally sat back and rubbed his temple.
“Clones,” he said. “We’re all clones. All the Rimmer brothers.”
Lister tried to make a nonplussed gesture. It made quite a bit of sense, come to think.
“You wouldn’t know it if you ever met Howard.”
“Rimmer, he looked exactly like you! I’ve seen pictures.”
“That was when he was young. I came home one year from school to find him with an entirely different face. Mum said it was puberty, but he was 19 at the time. I think he might have gotten surgery. Dad kept talking about the importance of ‘looking the part’, and Howard failed his first attempt to get into cadet school.” Rimmer shrugged. “Might have been his own idea, I don’t know. He got in eventually, made an excellent career for himself for about ten years, then boffed off to Europa.”
The gay capital of the solar system. Lister knew better than to comment.
“Mum and dad had him declared legally dead.”
“Is that a thing, in your family?”
“It allowed JMC to resurrect his hologram and keep him working for them. The personality download was taken before he…” Rimmer tried in vain to gesticulate, so Lister came to his rescue.
“Right, right.” Lister frowned. “D’you suppose he’s still out there, then?”
“Who smegging cares? And if he is, what are the chances we’ll ever meet him?” Rimmer sighed. “I don’t know. None of us ever looked like dad, come to think.”
“The way they messed around with those genes, I’m not surprised.”
Rimmer crossed his arms and gave a snort. “None of that matters. I’m still a Rimmer; I’ve still got his DNA, no matter how it was jiggled about before I gestated.”
“So?”
“So, I have a family legacy to live up to. I’m my father’s son. Always have been, always will be.”
Lister considered for a bit, then nodded to himself. Now was definitely the right time. He unzipped a pocket in his jacket, and took out a square of what looked like faded paper. “Here,” he said, proffering it to Rimmer, who took it without comment. “I had Kryten mock it up for ya,” Lister explained, as Rimmer turned the picture this way and that.
“How did he do that,” he said eventually, his voice unusually quiet.
“You said it yerself; you’re all clones. Took a bit of work, but we managed to create a composite using bits of Frank and John and Howard, tweak it a bit, and…” He tried a smile. “What do you think?”
Rimmer stared at the photo. There was John, off to the side as usual. There was Howard’s unmistakable scowl. Frank, holding up the rope and grinning. And then, the tree, and in front of it now, previously visible foot seamlessly merged with reconstructed legs, stood a sullen, hazel-eyed, wild-haired little boy in the Io House winter uniform.
“I think you’re right,” Rimmer said, his finger tracing the contours of the younger self he technically never had been. “There is a certain family resemblance.”