by Grant Naylor
'He's right, said the Cat; 'maybe I don't exist either. That would certainly explain why I'm so unbearably good-looking.'
'Oh, I don't believe this!' said Rimmer. 'Not only am I dead, I don't exist either! Thanks a lot, God!'
'No, look, I think we have to assume' - Lister punctuated ,assume' with a circled thumb and forefinger - 'that we all exist, and that we got into the Game before Nova 5 left Red Dwarf.'
'OK,' said Rimmer, 'how do we get out?'
'I think I can answer that,' said a fourth voice.
A familiar figure waddled through the stone archway and up to the banquet table.
And he started to explain everything.
EIGHT
Rimmer lurched happily down Corridor 4: gamma 311. 'It's a funny thing,' he slurred, 'even though I've had so much to drink I'm in total comfac of my mandulties.'
'Where is he?' said Lister, poking his head into another of the sleeping quarters on the habitation deck. 'Where the smeg is the Cat?'
'Master Holly says he's on this deck,' said Kryten, peering through the hatchway of another empty sleeping quarters.
'Then why the hell doesn't he answer?' said Lister, tugging the ringpull on another bottle of self-heating saké.
Rimmer's duplicate had been erased that morning, just before the gazpacho soup confession. Nova 5 was reconstructed, fuelled and ready to go. They would be back at Earth in three months, and they'd spent the day celebrating down in the Copacabana Hawaiian Cocktail Bar. The evening had gurgled by in a blurry haze of evermore elaborate cocktails before either of them had realized the Cat had been missing for two days. Lister had led the drunken safari up to the habitation deck to find him.
There were over three thousand separate sleeping quarters on this deck alone, and they had looked through more than half of them before they staggered into Petrovitch's old room.
The two lockers had been pulled away from the wall, and in a crudely chiselled recess was a stack of Game headbands. Petrovitch, the high-flying, career-minded leader of A Shift had been smuggling Better Than Life, the illegal hallucinogenic brain implant. He'd been smuggling it to the richly paid, insanely bored terraforming engineers of Triton.
The rumours were true.
This correct officer, this model, this paragon, was a low-life, scumbag Game dealer! At a glance Lister estimated there must have been a hundred headbands.
Petrovitch could safely have expected to make ten years' wages if he found a hundred suckers who were prepared to buy the cripplingly addictive nirvana offered by the deadly Game. And there always were suckers: plenty of them. Not one person ever entered the Game without believing he could take it or leave it.
Once inside, few ever made the painful journey back to reality.
The Cat gently rocked on the sleeping quarters armchair, giggling insanely. The silver headband glimmered menacingly on his head, the electrodes buried deep inside his brain. His face was painted with the harrowingly familiar vacant grin of the lost soul of a Game head.
***
The three of them sat around the banquet table in the baronial hall of the Cat's fantasy as Kryten recounted how Lister had followed the Cat into the Game.
'But Better Than Life's addictive! I knew that.'
'You were drunk, Mister David; you thought you'd be OK just to go into the Game and tell the Cat what danger he was in. But once you'd linked up to the Cat's headband, you didn't come out.'
'What about me?' said Rimmer. 'Why did I go in?'
'You were drunk too. You said you had the willpower to drag them both out. You got Holly to splice you into the Game. And that was the last we saw of you.'
Kryten told how they had wandered around Red Dwarf in the twilight zombie state the Game induced. How he'd done his best to feed them, and keep them from harming themselves. But over the months the Cat's and Lister's bodies had begun to wither. Sometimes they'd spend weeks in a single position and develop huge bedsores. They'd tumble down stairs and get up, bloody and laughing, believing they'd made a parachute jump or some such thing. How he'd once seen Lister eat his own vomit with delight, obviously believing he was enjoying some sumptuous delicacy. How, in desperation, he'd begun lasering the messages into Lister's arms to warn him of the danger. This had distressed Kryten greatly. It was built into his software that he mustn't harm human beings. Months of cajoling by Holly had finally persuaded him that not to do it would hurt Lister even more.
But still the three of them remained in the Game. In the end, Kryten had no choice but to enter himself.
'But that's stupid,' said Lister. 'You'll get addicted too.'
Kryten shook his head. 'Holly was right. I'm immune. I could have come in right at the start and rescued you.'
'Immune?' said Rimmer. 'Why are you immune?'
Kryten cracked his face into a hollow grin. 'I'm a mechanoid. I don't have dreams. I don't have fantasies the way you do. I have very few expectations or desires.'
'Very few?' said Lister. 'Then you do have some?'
A Valkyrie appeared, bearing a brand-new, freshly wrapped squeezy mop.
'Only one,' said Kryten, accepting the gift and tearing off the paper. 'Oh, wonderful. A squeezy mop! Just what I've always wanted.'
'OK', said Lister, leaning forward, 'the sixty-four million dollarpound question: how do we get out?'
NINE
The windscreen wipers patted the snow into neat white triangles on the model A's window as the car grunted past, the white-coated sign: 'Bedford Falls - 2 miles'.
Lister banged at the dashboard with a gloved hand, and the faltering heater whirred back from the dead, and unenthusiastically started to de-mist the windscreen. Lister craned over the steering column and tried to make out the grey ruts in the snow which served as a rough indication as to where the road might be.
He was leaving the Game. It was easy to leave the Game. Easier than he'd have thought.
First you had to want to leave. And, of course, to want to leave you had to know you were in the Game in the first place. That was the hard part, realizing that this wasn't reality. Then it was only a matter of finding an exit. Just that. A door marked 'EXIT'.
'And where are these doors?' he'd asked Kryten.
'It's your fantasy,' Kryten had replied; 'they're wherever you want them to be.'
So there it was. All he had to do was imagine an exit, and go through it.
He'd pass through the exit and find himself back on Red Dwarf, probably thin and gaunt and wasted from his two years in the Game but, nevertheless, back in reality. Once back, he could remove his headband - no, destroy his headband!
Destroy them all! - then start the long haul back to health.
But it was an individual matter. They all had to create their own separate exits. Alone. You're born alone, you die alone, you leave the Game alone.
The glimmering lights of Bedford Falls twinkled in the valley below as, for the last time, he made his way down the hill to his personal Shangri-la.
Ever since he'd left Earth, every step he'd taken had led him further away from the dirty polluted world he loved. First Mimas, then the outer reaches of the solar system, then Deep Space, and finally here - in the wrong dimension of the wrong plane of reality. It was hard to imagine how he could ever be further away from home.
The Ford juddered down the main street under the strings of lights that hung between trees down the avenue. He passed Horace's bank, and through the window saw the money still stacked in neat piles on the counter. He passed Old Man Gower's drugstore. How could he have - believed it existed? He passed Martini's Bar, alive inside with joyful revellers celebrating Christmas Eve. He headed the old car down Sycamore Avenue, and slid to rest outside no. 220.
There, in the middle of the street, a pink neon sign hung over a shimmering archway. There was his exit, just as he'd imagined it. On the other side was reality.
It started to snow. Christmas Eve.
How could he leave them on Christmas Eve?
What harm
was one more day? He turned away from the dissolving exit and crunched up the drive to 220.
One more night of that pinball smile.
Just one.
He couldn't leave them on Christmas Eve.
But, of course, in Bedford Falls it was always Christmas Eve ...
Table of Contents
Part One: Your own death and how to cope with it
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
Part Two: Alone in a Godless universe, and out of Shake'n'Vac
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
Part Three: Earth!
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
Table of Contents
Part One: Your own death and how to cope with it
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
Part Two: Alone in a Godless universe, and out of Shake’n’Vac
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
Part Three: Earth!
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
