Last Human

by Doug Naylor

  Suddenly, music started to blare into the hall through the massive PA system. Some kind of anthem. Lister hated anthems at the best of times. He was convinced they started wars. Especially ones like this, which was disturbingly rousing and spoke of conflict and strife and laying down your life for the cause of ultimate victory. When the anthem had finished the^ vast doors to the chamber yawned open and something that looked as if it had escaped from a really bad LSD trip entered the hall and took its place on the podium. A sickly warm tide of nausea slowly filled Lister's body from the stomach up. It had the legs of a giraffe, the body of a gargantuan slug and the earless head of a giant cobra; it also looked as if it had just had a bucket of mucus thrown at it.

  He shuddered. He hadn't seen anything this hideous since he'd last cleared out the salad tray of his fridge.

  The creature's huge, elongated head hovered over the assembled prisoners like a giant spent phallus, and its long pink tongue flitted in and out, dribbling a particularly unspeakable kind of unspeakable yellow mucus. The opening sentences of its speech were lost in a , crescendo of retching and vomiting. But it was quite used to this. Very few life forms ever met the Snugiraffe without evacuating at least part of their bodily contents. As far as the Snugiraffe was concerned, 'Hello' and 'Yurrrghhhhhhh' were synonymous. Projectile vomit was a form of greeting. It was hardly the Snugiraffe's fault that it had been created from bits of leftover DNA grizzle. It had been given the opportunity of existence and it intended to grab it with all three moist and dribbly suction pads. OK, it was revolting. It was probably the most vile, graceless, deformed, distorted, asymmetrical, eye-wateringly unsightly organism that had ever had the good fortune to breathe oxygen - well, with the possible exception of George Formby. Besides, it wasn't all about looks. This was the new world, the new solar system, a galaxy of opportunity, where all creatures were equal and anyone could become chief of the United Republic of Engineered Life Forms no matter who they were or how they were born or even if they looked like a Snugiraffe and leaked unspeakable juices over the head of anyone it addressed. It was here to do a job and it was as good as anyone. In fact, here on Lotomi 5 it was a prized member of the community, much respected and valued, because it ate all the other life forms' body effluence and reconstituted it into much-needed smokeless fuel. Not everybody could do that. Also, it was the Colony commandant.

  The Snugiraffe was halfway through its 'It may sound like a bit of a cliché, but no one has ever escaped from this penal colony and the reason for that is it's totally impossible' speech before any of what it was saying was in the slightest way audible. Those who weren't able to be sick, like the mechanoids and Holograms, were dry-retching. So the noise was substantial. The Snugiraffe continued unabashed; as far as it was concerned it was all just water off its deformed hump.

  Finally Lister was able to hear the tail end of the speech.

  '... however, if you attempt to escape and you are caught, you will be erased, but not before...' The Snugiraffe paused, and a fresh discharge, the colour of drowned frogs, leaked out of the corner of its mouth. 'But not before—' it repeated — 'you have shared my bed.'

  A monsoon of fresh vomiting. An entire equatorial forest's rainy season of puke. A cacophony of chundering that lasted fully two minutes.

  The Snugiraffe smiled coquettishly and continued to rain its ooze on the heads of its audience. 'You are here because you have all committed heinous acts against the United Republic of Engineered Life Forms. You have had fair trials on your home asteroids...'

  'I haven't,' said a voice.

  'No, neither have I,' said another.

  'Nor me.'

  The Snugiraffe tutted irritably. 'All right, most of you haven't had fair trials, but you have been found guilty. And you have been sent here to Lotomi 5 to be punished. In that department we will certainly not disappoint. After this assembly you will be escorted to the medi-floors where you will be washed, shaved and prepared. You will then be taken to the main chamber where you will each take your place in the artificial reality scenario deemed appropriate to your crime.' The Snugiraffe's tongue flitted in and out. 'Welcome to Cyberia.'

  Cyberia, because each inmate was interfaced with a gigantic cybernetic network—the brain and nervous system attached to a vast machine-generated reality — where each inmate paid for his crimes by being forced to live out his sentence in his very own self-created hell.

  He walked down the corridor phalanxed by six guards as a cold, tormenting air hissed out of the recyc vents, reminding him of his newly bald head.

  They'd taken his hair. Lopped off his locks, the five rasta plaits he'd had since he was seventeen.

  Two steel doors slid back and the party walked through into the main chamber. Its sickly-sweet smell was all too familiar.

  He gazed at the gigantic matrix of heads: all bald, all bobbing on the surface of the giant cyberlake, all wearing Cyberia's regulation issue headsets.

  Headsets that drilled needle-slim rods directly into their brains and transported them to Cyberhell.

  He stood, helpless and sullen, while they made their preparations. A Gelf doctor, businesslike and unsmiling, injected him with an air syringe and he felt his body buckle and go limp.

  Two assistants ripped off his flimsy white dressing-gown and hauled his naked body into a white-tiled cubicle and turned a hose on him. The hose spewed out a foul-smelling plastic liquid, which quickly cooled on his body and started to set. Soon he was covered with the gossamer-fine coating of cyberfoam that would control and manipulate his senses, obeying the commands of the giant mainframe that monitored the prisoners' scenarios. The two assistants hauled him to the edge of the vast pink cyberlake and gently lowered him into its warm, sweet waters.

  They reminded him of his crimes, which he was too dejected and numb even to deny. Then they bent down and activated the headset. The rods were unleashed.

  They burrowed into his skull like hungry rats that had been denied food for weeks. He felt the heat and smelt the stench of lasered skull as the rods punctured his brain and made a home in his mind.

  Soon they had altered his whole perception of reality.

  PART TWO

  Time Fork

  CHAPTER 1

  Something was about to happen. Something almost imperceptible.

  A click in the darkness. A click in the perfect silence of non-time. Then the click was followed by a second click.

  And light.

  Light that gradually filled the room with a shallow blue beam as the Deep Sleep unit flared into action and slowly began to drop from the ceiling. The unit landed softly on the deck and its hood hissed back, allowing tendrils of smoke to tumble out of the sleep chamber as the body of a slowly waking man sat upright, his face hidden behind a mad explosion of facial hair.

  He scratched his chest with one of his six-inch-long fingernails and a groan crawled out of his body like a wounded bear. He swirled his tongue around his mouth and swallowed his saliva. It tasted like a cross between a stagnant canal and airline chicken Kiev.

  He looked around. The cabin was familiar and unfamiliar in about equal parts. He knew it intimately and yet hardly knew it at all. An old star-shaped guitar with two missing strings leaned against a chair; framed posters of zero-gee football stars were propped against the walls and unpacked boxes and crates littered the floor.

  His name was Retsil, he recollected. Retsil Evad. He picked up an empty tumbler resting on a stabilizer cabinet next to the Deep Sleep unit and tilted it to his lips, waiting for the water to gush out of his mouth and fill the glass up to the brim.

  Nothing happened.

  He cast his legs over the bed and waited for them to carry him into the bathroom where he would remove toothpaste from his teeth and brush it neatly back into the tube. After that he'd dab wetness on to his face from one of the bathroom towels before scooping the dripping water into the already full basin and watch as the liquid was sucked up into the two taps.

  Strangely, none of this h
appened either.

  Then Retsil realized what was weird.

  Time was running forwards. No longer was he living in a backwards reality. No longer was he living in a dimension where time moved in reverse. That was why the room was both familiar and strange. These were his quarters, but he'd been away for so long living in a backwards reality - that was why it all felt so odd. In fact, come to think of it, Retsil Evad wasn't his name. His name wasn't backwards any more. His name was Dave Lister.

  Dave Lister. At least he remembered something. In fact, that was the only thing he remembered.

  He staggered to an uneasy balance and shuffled his way across the obs deck, walking on the outside of his feet to avoid standing on his six-inch-long toenails. Halfway across he caught his reflection in the Plexiglass of the view-screen. He looked like an arthritic penguin whose flippers were one size too small. After he'd completed the trek across the room and flopped into the leather swivel chair behind the flatbed scanner of the star-chart computer, he hauled his foot up and started to trim his nails in the table-top pencil sharpener.

  A mechanoid head leaned in through the hatchway.

  'Welcome back on-line, sir. How are you feeling?'

  'Who am I? I don't know who I am. Apart from my name I don't remember a damn thing.'

  A smile spread across Kryten's bald, angular pink face, like a stone skipping across a lake. 'Ah, you have a touch of amnesia, sir. That's quite common after such a long period in Deep Sleep.' The mechanoid carried his sharply chiselled matt-grey body into the room. In the middle of his chest plate a port-hole-shaped CPU housing glinted faintly in the soothing amber neons. 'You've been out for just over twenty years.'

  'Twenty years?'

  'Actually, I woke you last spring, but you absolutely insisted on another three months.'

  Kryten handed him a breakfast tray. 'Here, you must be hungry.'

  Lister thanked him with a nod of his head and peered down at his breakfast. 'These cornflakes have grated raw onions sprinkled over them.'

  'That's how you like them, sir.'

  'I do?' Lister shook his head in bemusement and took a large slug of orange juice. His expression petrified on his face and his eyes widened as if they were being inflated by an air pump. The liquid arced out of his mouth and sprayed across the floor. 'This orange juice is revolting!'

  That's not orange juice, sir. That's your early-morn-ing pick-me-up; chilled vindaloo sauce.'

  'I drink cold curry sauce for breakfast?'

  'Depends on your mood. If you get up in the afternoon, you often prefer to start the day with a can of last night's flat lager. That's why you used to sleep with a tea strainer by your bed, so you could sieve out the cigar dimps.'

  'I drink, I smoke, I have curry sauce for breakfast? Raw onions on my cereal? I sound like some barely human, grossed-out slime ball.'

  'It's all flooding back, then?'

  'No. None of it is.'

  'Perhaps this will help.' Kryten turned and picked up the star-shaped guitar.

  'I play the guitar?'

  'Do I have a head shaped like an amusing ice cube? Why don't you chock out a few power chords? See if anything comes back.'

  A wistful expression sat on Lister's face, his newly trimmed fingertips lovingly surfing across the strings, as he played a song that was stored deep inside his long-term memory. It was a love song he himself had written. Possibly his finest melody. The noise was appalling, an electric obscenity: music to emigrate to.

  Kryten beamed. 'The Axeman is back!'

  'Don't patronize me. I can't play the guitar. Anyone with half an ear can tell that.'

  'Sir, when your personality's fully restored, you will firmly believe you can play the guitar like the ghost of Hendrix.'

  'Isn't there anything good you can tell me about myself? Anything laudable?'

  'Laudable... Well, in the old days you frequently helped me with my laundry duties, by wearing your underpants inside out and extending their wear time by three weeks. Does that count?'

  Lister's face deflated into a grimace. 'I'm an animal! I'm a tasteless, uncouth, tone deaf, mindless, revolting, randy, blokeish, semi-literate space bum.'

  Kryten gave him a bear hug. 'Welcome back, sir. We've all missed you so much.'

  Lister started to pick the onions out of his cornflakes. 'Why don't I remember anything? Why is none of it coming back?'

  'Perhaps you need a little synaptic enhancer. I'll make some up.'

  The Mechanoid ducked through the open hatchway and made his way up the steps to the small science room located in the ship's dome.

  Lister pushed away the cornflakes and tugged off the metal lid protecting his cooked breakfast. He gazed down in revulsion at the triple-tiered fried-egg-and-chilli-chutney sandwich. This guy, this guy he was, was unbelievable.

  'Hey.' The girl walked into the cabin wearing a short cream dressing-gown and sipping a mug of warm milk and honey. 'How're you feeling?' Her lagoon-blue eyes speared him with a look, and something inside him buckled and fell like a stunned wildebeest. Her voice was educated, with a soupçon of something Scottish, or maybe even Irish, Lister wasn't quite sure - he'd never been great at spotting accents. From her posture and her almost haughty demeanour Lister guessed correctly that she was an officer.

  Her lips split into a smile, lighting up her face like a pinball machine under a mop of uncombed pecan-pie brown hair. 'You feeling OK?'

  Lister nodded a 'yes'.

  'I've been out of Deep Sleep two months now. The medi-computer detected I needed an appendectomy, so it brought me out early so I'd be fully recovered by the time it revived the rest of the crew.'

  'Oh, right,' said Lister and wondered if he should perhaps have addressed her as ma'am, or even sir.

  'Kryten did the op with a laser scalpel. He did such a great job you can hardly see the scar.'

  Lister laughed too loudly. This woman had the ability to shave twenty points off his IQ. What was wrong with him?

  He looked at her. A distance short of gorgeous, she was still pretty special, and by the clear line of her body under the silk dressing-gown he was pretty certain she wasn't wearing a whole heap underneath. Just my damn luck, he thought, to have a superior officer who turns my insides into something that you'd expect to find in a half-eaten chicken burrito.

  'Take a look,' she said. 'I bet you can't see the scar.'

  Lister was only half paying attention as she tugged open her dressing-gown and let it slide off her back on to the floor. She stood naked in front of him.

  'Can you see it?'

  His whole body still-framed with shock. Was he imagining this? Was he insane? Or was this officer-type woman standing before him stark naked? His eyebrows climbed to the top of his head and clung on to one another for comfort.

  'Can you see it?' she repeated.

  'Huh?'

  'You're not looking. Look properly.'

  Lister glanced up fleetingly and mumbled incredulities.

  'You're not looking. You're looking at the floor. Look.' She walked towards his chair and tugged his beard until his eyes were in line with the small mound of her belly. A tiny triangle of pubic hair flitted into his peripheral vision. 'Can you see the operation scar?'

  'Pardon me?'

  'Can you?'

  Lister's eyes scanned her belly and found nothing.

  'Look at me.'

  His eyes travelled up her naked body and over her pouty breasts until they reached her eyes. As he arrived at her face he was aware her lips were spiced with mischief as she stared down at the tent that had suddenly set up camp halfway down his white sleep tunic.

  Her hand stretched out and the hatchway door sighed closed. She pulled the tie-up at the top of his gown and tugged it open, then slowly lowered herself on top of him. Her arms draped around his neck and she bit him tenderly on his mouth as she started gently to sway back and forth on top of him.

  'Ooh,' said Lister.

  'Ooh,' said the woman with the invisible appen
dectomy scar.

  'Aaaaaaah,' said Lister more enthusiastically.

  'Aaaaaaah,' said the woman right back.

  And so the conversation continued until a 'Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh' and a 'Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhh' brought the exchange of dialogue to a satisfactory conclusion four and a half minutes later.

  If you'd have asked him Lister would have said it was twenty minutes later. But he'd have been wrong.

  * * *

  They sat in one another's arms, coated in a fine rain of sweat, when a soft beep announced someone was at the door. She lifted herself off him, put on her dressing-gown and clicked the door-release mechanism. Kryten waddled in carrying a second breakfast tray.

  'Ah, Kryten, I'm just going to take a shower. Just come to get a few things.' She opened one of the wooden crates and started rifling through its contents.

  Lister caught Kryten's eye. 'Who is she?' he mouthed silently.

  Kryten shrugged, not understanding. 'Sir?'

  'Who is she?' he mimed as the girl with the lagoon-blue eyes pulled out a selection of clothes from the crate and piled them neatly on one side.

  'Kochanski,' mouthed Kryten in dumb speak.

  'Who?' said Lister silently.

  'Kristine Kochanski.' he mouthed.

  'Kristine Kochanski? Who's she, then?'

  Kochanski turned and caught them in the middle of their silent conversation. 'He has got his memory back, hasn't he? I mean, he does actually know who I am?'

  Lister and Kryten cackled simultaneously and assured her that of course he knew who she was. She raised an unconvinced eyebrow and disappeared through the hatchway. Kryten took out an air syringe and squeezed off a little jet into mid-air. 'Synaptic enhancer. We'll have that memory of yours back in no time.'