... Die Young (Red Dwarf)mature

Dave Lister, third technician aboard the Jupiter mining vessel Red Dwarf, wasn’t too happy about being, most probably, the last human being alive. Nor was he too happy about being forty nine.
    Sometimes he would catch an image of himself in the plexiglass window of Starbug’s cockpit, and wonder what in Rasta Billy Skank’s name had happened to him. He had started making excuses so that he wouldn’t have to drive anymore, putting on headaches and pretending to vomit in the toilet, just so that he would be safe from the aging man in the window, staring back at him with soulless eyes. He had even asked Kryten to remove all the mirrors near his sleeping quarters, just so he could lose track of himself, and not see him anymore.
    At the moment, he was staring at the old man in the reflection of the drive room main computer. It looked as though he hadn’t shaved in weeks. Lister tried to ignore him, and concentrate on the numbers flickering on the screen.
    Dave Lister sat in the inexplicably small drive room of the six mile long mining ship Red Dwarf, generally worrying about everything, from his fading looks to his broken guitar strings. If things weren’t bad enough, three of the five life forms he had about the place to keep him sane had disappeared without a trace, Red Dwarf’s black box had been stolen, Blue Midget was missing, and hanger eighteen all of a sudden smelt like the medical bay.
    It had just been one of those years, he thought, whatever year it was.
    But David Lister wasn’t beaten yet.
    “One more pass, just one more,” he said in his thick scouse accent, more to himself than anyone listening. He took a sip of his beer milkshake, slurping at it favourably, and leant back in the dead Captain Hollister’s drive room chair.
    “It really isn’t worth it. Let’s face facts Listy, they’re dead. Dead as mutton.”
    “Maybe not though.”
    Arnold Rimmer, second technician aboard the Jupiter mining ship Red Dwarf, looked incredibly young for a man who had died three million, two hundred and sixty one Earth-years ago. He sat in dead chief engineer Todhunter’s chair at the opposite end of the drive room, dressed in an immaculate regulation boiler suit, rubbing the ‘H’ on his forehead, staring at nothing in particular. The ‘H’ stood for hologram. Lister liked to think it stood for twat.
    Lister’s eyes stayed fixed on the computer terminal in front of him, watching the scanner take in the ship’s surroundings, trying to home in on a distant signal. Lister could sense Rimmer’s growing disgruntlement and frustration. It was a seventh sense that Lister had developed over nearly twenty five years of living with him. Lister’s sixth sense was the ability to feel the aura of chilli powder from half a mile away.
    “It’s been nearly three weeks!” Rimmer leapt up from his seat and began to pace up and down, nostrils wide with anger. “They’re gone and that’s that.”
    “Why are you so negative Rimmer? We can’t just abandon them.”
    “We could be spending this time doing something useful,” Rimmer said, but not with a great deal of conviction.
    Lister put his feet up on the drive terminal and looked at Rimmer expectantly.
    “Go on then Napoleon, what are my orders?”
    “Oh, I don’t know, do what you like then,” Rimmer said, thumping back onto his chair and crossing his arms. “We had better just start getting used to the idea of spending the rest of your life together, that’s all.”
    “Don’t you think I’m depressed enough?” Lister said, sucking the last of his milkshake out with a straw, and making a lot of noise in the process. “The signal’s there Rimmer.”
    “I mean, think of me! Think about how I feel why don’t you,” Rimmer said, bursting up into a pace again. “I’ve got to sit here day after day and watch you fester in your own filth and eat curries until you die from a chilli overdose, and then it gets even better! Because then, I’m alone for the rest of eternity with that idiot.”
    Rimmer pointed to a round, bald head without a neck on the terminal screen nearest Rimmer, who gave him a scowl. The head belonged to Holly, the ship’s computer.
    “I’m no idiot,” said the head. “If it wasn’t for me, this ship wouldn’t even be moving, and you, Arnold, would not even be here. You’d just be a wotsit on a thingy.”
    “Exactly! How the hell do you think that makes me feel for smeg’s sake? My life... my death, in the hands of a pocket calculator with delusions of grandeur.”
    Lister’s attention drifted back to the scanning terminal, that searched tirelessly for the faint signal they received earlier that week, and let himself become mesmerised by it. He watched the coordinates flick across diagrams and graphs. It was like watching clothes spin in a washing machine. There was nothing particularly interesting about it, but if you watched it spin for more than five seconds, you couldn’t help but continue watching, just to admire its speed and efficiency. Lister surmised he had been in space just too long.
    “They’ll be around here somewhere,” Lister said, almost in a trance. “You can’t ignore that distress signal Rimmer, it is there.”
    “It could be anything. Like aliens.”
    “As long as the signal is there, in my head, it’s coming from them, okay? That’s just how it is, Rimmer. We’re going to keep looking until we find them.”
    Silence descended on to the room.
    “Aliens,” Lister said, mockingly.
    Rimmer’s frustrated expression relaxed slightly, as boredom took over.
    “Do you want another game of Guess Who?” he asked, knowing the answer.
    “I’m not even going to dignify that with a response,” Lister replied. “Actually though, I wouldn’t mind a game of Risk today.”
    “What?” Rimmer said, eyes widening.
    “Yeah, I was reading that instruction manual you gave me, really interesting stuff. I had no idea that dice were so crucial to military manoeuvres in the nineteenth century.”
    “Really?” Rimmer loved nothing better than a game of Risk. He was actually good at it, and he wasn’t good at many things. “You... really want to play?”
    “No not really, got you excited for a couple of moments though, didn’t it?”
    Lister smiled chirpily, the way that he knew Rimmer especially hated.
    Rimmer walked out. Lister didn’t see him again that day.

    The next day, or period of being awake, started as it often did, with the sound of Rimmer’s voice.
    “Lister, wake up,” Rimmer said, impatiently. “I don’t know how he’s done it, but Holly locked onto the signal, we’re here.”
    “Here is where?” Lister managed to ask, rubbing his eyes and slapping himself around the face. He noticed a cigar lying next to him. It had burnt his pillow, and some of his hair. He also noticed morning glory in his boxers. He laughed to himself, that hadn’t happened for a while. Perhaps his luck was about to change.
    When Lister finally managed to stumble out of his sleeping quarters, taking his mattress with him just incase he could steal some sleep, he found Rimmer in the drive room, hands on hips.
    “Look,” Rimmer said, pointing a finger to a terminal.
    The screen displayed an image of a round, spinning, ball type of object, with different patches of blue and green all over it.
    Holly’s face appeared on the main screen.
    “There are life forms Dave, in the billions,” he said.
    Lister’s brain couldn’t make sense of this.
    “Wait a minute, where are we?”
    “In space,” Holly replied. Lister realised his questions needed to be a lot more detailed and direct.
    “I mean, is the signal coming from this planet? Is it them?”
    “Well before all that, you dudes might want to sit down for a minute.”
    Lister frowned and looked at Rimmer, who raised an eyebrow.
    “Why?” he asked.
    “Well, you tell me. I just know that human beings like to ask other human beings to sit down when they have startling news to tell each other. I thought I would try it out.”
    “Just get on with it Holly,” Rimmer said, impatiently.
    “Alright, here goes. That there, the blue round thing.”
    “The planet,” Lister added.
    “Yes. Well, it might be Earth.”
    Holly let the news sink in. He smiled in a congratulatory manner. Lister hadn’t seen Holly smile like that before.
    “...Not really though,” Rimmer said.
    “Yes. really. It’s a very-possible-fact. De facto.”
    “What are you basing that on Hol?” Lister asked, while smelling the remains of yesterday’s milkshake.
    “Well, it looks like Earth,” Holly said, eventually.
    “Save us the technical mumbo jumbo Spock, just tell us how it is,” Rimmer said, with all the smug sarcasm he could muster.
    “Rimmer, look, he’s right! Look at the continents, you can make them out,” Lister said, gasping in awe and pointing at his house, or where he remembered it to be.
    “This is impossible, we’re light years away from Earth!” Rimmer said, as he started doing his pacing anxiously thing again.
    Lister stared at the screen. Earth. A living breathing Earth, with people on it, people just like him. His age. They might even have the same tastes as him, some of them. He wondered how the London Jets were doing in the Zero-g leagues. He wondered if he had left the kitchen light on in his flat. He wondered if it was too late to return that library book he borrowed. All these things came rushing to his mind, however big or small. After three millions years, he was home.
    “It’s strange, I admit.” Holly said. “But stranger things have happened, like that planet we passed a while back. That was pretty weird.”
    “Which planet?” Rimmer asked.
    “You know, that mad one. I’m sure I mentioned it.”
    “I’m sure you never used to be this bad.”
    “The planet with all the exact replicas of all the sex obsessed Marilyn Monroe look alikes, just running around everywhere, naked. It was such a silly planet I barely stopped for thought, just moved on by. Can’t be doing with all that.”
    “Just ignore him, he’s doing it on purpose,” Rimmer said, pointing an accusing finger Holly’s way.
    “It’s true,” Holly replied.
    “This, coming from the senile computer who said that the universe was going to collapse on itself and let us frantically evacuate the ship, only to realise that the blinds on the hull window had fallen down a bit.”
    “Easy mistake to make,” Holly said in his defence.
    “Are you sure Hol?” Lister said, entranced by the image of the planet next to him. “You mentioned life forms, how many?” Lister asked.
    “They’re all there. The whole gang. Eleven billion people, as when we left them in twenty one eighty two,” he replied.
    “What about Kryten’s signal?”
    “It’s down there too. In a desert I think.”
    “Which one?”
    “I don’t know. I destroyed my map of Earth ages ago, regarded it as useless data. Sorry but I just wasn’t ever as optimistic as you were. Anyway, I’ll take us down.”
    Lister decided there and then. He was going to get changed into his own, proper clothes for the first time in a week, go down onto the planet, and see it for himself. He was going to put on his moon boots, his least smeggy shirt. He might even have a bath. He was home.

    “This... this doesn’t make any sense,” Lister said.
    “Well. Yeah.”
    Lister and Rimmer watched the hustle and bustle from Starbug’s cockpit.
    “No, not that it’s here. It’s exactly how I left it. Three million years ago. It’s not changed.”
    Liverpool. A polluted neon tapestry of tower blocks that reached the clouds, ships that circled the sky, and the odd cathedral that had survived the acid rain.
    “I might even get my old job back at Sainsburys,” Lister said, staring at the business district sky line.
    “Come on, we’ve got a lock on Kryten,” Rimmer said and steered the ship away, pulling south.
    As the ship moved, Lister saw the old man in the window. He didn’t look so old now that he was smiling.

    When they arrived at the signal’s source, they found them.
    There wasn’t much left. Just bits everywhere. Lister could barely keep his eyes open to look at the horror in the sand. He nearly fainted, he wasn’t much good at the sight of blood. Rimmer kept his eyes open though, his face turning cold, and for the first time in his life wished he had been wrong.
    Rimmer picked up Kryten’s head from Blue Midget’s debris and took it back with them onto the ship. Lister whispered something under his breath as Rimmer pulled him away. He promised the bits he would be back to bury them.

    “There, he should be working now.”
    After an hour, they had managed to hook Kryten’s head up to one of his spare bodies, one that had burnt out centuries ago. They knew he wouldn’t last long.
    The mechanoid’s eyes flickered with life and looked up at David Lister, seemingly no longer the last human being alive, but certainly the oldest.
    Kryten’s eyes sparkled with life.
    “Oh sir!” he said, his voice distorted and distant.
    “Kryten, what happened? Kristine and the Cat are dead.”
    “Sir, you must go.”
    “What happened? Why Earth?”
    “Earth? Oh sir, they wanted you to follow us here. They want Red Dwarf, but couldn’t get the access code. They needed you here so they could get it from you, they couldn’t drive the ship themselves so got you to drive it for them!”
    “Who? Someone from Earth?”
    “Earth? This isn’t Earth.”
    “Where the smeg are we then?”
    “I... I don’t know. They’re not human, their vital signs are...”
    “GELFs?”
    “No...”
    “We’re going to lose him,” Rimmer said. “His circuits are about to overheat.”
    “Run,” he said, and then he was gone.
    Below Red Dwarf, the planet hummed with life.
    But not life as David Lister, the last human being alive, knew it.