Last Human

by Doug Naylor

  Kryten looked at his watch again. Two minutes. Tension level — close to blow-out.

  'What is that?' The captain pointed to the black tape wrapped around the brown pole which held the leads in place.

  Kryten watched as the Dolochimp jumped out of the buggy and walked slowly up to the pole. It ripped off the tape and the leads came free. Then it traced the leads to the bottom of the pole.

  'What is this?'

  It pulled at the lead which came up out of the desert. The Dolochimp fed it back to the buried computer in its lead box.

  'What is this?'

  The Dolochimp ran across to the telegraph pole and started to climb.

  Kryten's watch. One minute.

  It reached the top of the pole and stared at the connector clips feeding into the fibre optics of the main supply. 'They're feeding something into the electric supply.'

  Two Dolochimp soldiers leapt out of the buggy and fired into the computer's lead box.

  The electrons rebounded off the lead in a shower of sparks.

  Thirty seconds.

  The Dolochimp pulled out its holo-whip and clicked it on. The orange lash shimmered into life. It looked at Kochanski and tutted as it brought the plaited light swishing down on the modem leads that ran up the length of the telegraph pole.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Cat's face flicked to the wall monitor. Two minutes.'

  'OK.' Lister slipped on his parachute and joined the line of rogue droids standing by the open bay doors. He stood behind the one who was just a waist and a pair of legs, whom they'd wittily nicknamed 'Legs', and looked down the line.

  When Kochanski had first mooted the idea of rescuing his other self he'd expected it to be a bit more of a team affair. When it came to a straight commando drop into the penal colony itself he expected to have at least three members of the crew with him. Instead what he had was a platoon of partially limbed droids. Kryten, he accepted, couldn't come, on account of his programming. Kochanski, with her EI/Eng training, was their best bet to break into the optic lines, so she too had to be in the first landing party. But what was Rimmer's excuse? At the last minute he'd showed up and claimed he was allergic to parachutes.

  'Allergic to parachutes?'

  'Absolutely.'

  'What the hell are you talking about, Rimmer?'

  'It's the silk mix in the parachute material. It gives me sinusitis. The first ten minutes after landing my eyes stream so badly I can't see a thing.'

  Of course no one believed him, but he promised he'd provide documentary proof if they ever got back to Red Dwarf. There were no depths to which the man wasn't prepared to sink to save his own bony hide. So that left only the Cat, and although he had wanted to come, someone had to pilot.

  So that left just Lister.

  Just Lister and the Deformed Dozen. The Cat's voice crackled back on to the screen again. OK, buds, it's party time. T minus thirty seconds before lights out. We're in position - now!'

  The first rogue droid flung itself out of the craft, quickly followed by the second. Lister checked his bazookoid, patted the belts of spare shells secreted about his flight suit and threw himself out into the warm night air.

  Fifty feet above the colony's Plexiglass dome he fired off the first of the bazookoid mortars. The shell ripped into the dome and shattered the centre of the structure, in a muffled thud. The roof buckled, then sagged, as its support struts gave way and, to the accompaniment of a comical creaking noise, finally fell in on itself. One by one the droids dropped through the ex-roof and into the heart of the penal colony.

  Lister made a perfect landing as he'd done so many times before on the artificial-reality simulator but, to his horror, when he twisted right to unclip his parachute he saw a battalion of Alberogs jogging down the hallway towards him. Almost in slow motion they raised their laser harpoons and fired at his defenceless body.

  'Legs', 'Lefty' and 'Righty' skidded in from nowhere and formed a solid droid wall in front of him. The laser harpoons impacted on their bodies and exploded in a series of harmless flares. He scrambled out of his parachute and the three droids chaperoned him, crab-like, to the cover of an indented hatchway.

  Lister's right eye snaked from out of the alcove as he peered down the hallway. The Gelfs were recharging their harpoons from a wall charger.

  He looked at his watch. The virus should have hit by now. The laser harpoons should have been redundant, they weren't supposed to get a chance to recharge them.

  That was the plan - withstand the early fire then, once the virus had hit, the whole colony would be defenceless.

  A harpoon bolt bansheed into the wall just above Lister's head and he was showered by a fist of flying sparks. 'What are you doing, guys?' he sang quietly to himself. 'Why's there still electricity?'

  * * *

  The holo-whip skimmed effortlessly through the muggy desert night as the Dolochimp began his downward stroke to sever the oblivion virus from its modem.

  Then something persuaded the Dolochimp not to.

  It was Kryten. Well, Kryten's leg to be precise, which boomeranged through the air and caught him on the right side of his hairless snout. It arced sideways and plummeted on the hard desert road in a cringe of broken bones.

  Kryten's watch. Zero seconds.

  The oblivion virus erupted out of the computer, screamed up the telegraph pole, entered the mains supply and rocketed down the highway, destroying the electric charge as it went. Three nano-seconds after it was released it hit Cyberia. It breached all its defences, and five nano-seconds after that all power to the penal colony had been extinguished. Then the oblivion virus made its final slay. It bore down into the core of the asteroid and knocked out the artificial gravity generator. Its mission completed and all electricity on Lotomi 5 disarmed, the virus sizzled and sparked and finally burnt itself out.

  'Kill him.' The Dolochimp lay on the floor in a gymnastic contortion of broken bones, mewling quietly to himself. He raised his one good arm, pointed at Kryten and repeated his order. 'Kill him.'

  Kochanski stood up in the back of the terra buggy. 'Hey, look.' A pair of sand goggles had lifted up off the seat of the vehicle and were floating in the air. The goggles were soon followed by a pair of unoculars which had been resting on the dashboard.

  Rimmer's eyebrows dipped in fear, like two braking cars in a head-on collision. 'We're losing gravity.'

  His body lifted out of his seat and he started to float through the open roof of the transporter and out into the desert. 'I'm losing gravity. I'm...' Rimmer's scream was partially lost as he floated out of the truck.

  Kryten staggered towards him and managed to grab a hold of his ankle. 'Relax, sir, I've got you. No, wait a minute, I'm going too...'

  Kryten, still hanging on to to Rimmer's ankle, was sucked out of the roof.

  Kochanski fell across the truck, which was somehow defying gravity, and threw herself at Kryten's disappearing foot. She held on to his ankle until she too started to float skywards. As her feet passed the roof's support rail she tucked both her insteps under the rail. The chain of bodies shuddered to an uneasy halt.

  'Good plan. Great plan,' Rimmer whined from the top. 'Knock out all the electricity on the asteroid, including the artificial gravity generator. We could win things for a plan this good - the General Custer Forward Thinking Award, for starters.'

  'What do we do?' screeched Kryten.

  'I can't hold on,' Kochanski moaned.

  The two Dolochimp soldiers hugged the telegraph pole, uncertain what to do. Finally, the one nearer the vehicle hurled himself across the fifteen-foot gap between pole and transporter and was just able to catch the wheel arch with his outstretched chimp arm and haul himself back into the truck. He clicked on his harpoon. 'Out. Get out of the transporter.'

  Kochanski said, 'Can we discuss this?'

  He beat her ankles with the butt of his rifle and the chain of three took off out of the truck.

  The Dolochimp fired up the transporter, paused to
pick up the captain and the second soldier and took off down the road.

  * * *

  Rimmer, Kryten and Kochanski gently arced a 360° loop.

  'Grab hold of the telegraph wires,' Kryten called from below and the three of them scrambled to a perching position on top of the wire.

  They watched as the transporter accelerated down the highway, until it hit a hump in the middle of the road, lost gravity and spiralled through the air before it caught the ridge of a hogback dune and exploded in a Rorschach-ink-test-shaped blue flame.

  * * *

  Lister's rubber-soled flight boots squealed down the corridor as he pounded after Legs, Bader and Beethoven before he flung himself into a recess in the wall as a volley of flame scorched into an oxy-generation unit just above his head. He dipped on to his haunches and tried to catch his breath.

  He pushed the flat of his cheek against the wall and peered out left; Cyberian guards were scurrying down the gently arcing corridor, dashing in and out of the power units that lined the wall. Fifteen, maybe twenty of them. His bazookoid craned out into the corridor and unloaded a round of fire into the ceiling. That wouldn't hold them for more than two seconds. Nothing else for it. He'd have to retreat. He peered out right — Cyberian guards were advancing in and out of the power-unit recesses from that direction too.

  Oh, for a little help.

  He looked across at Saliva, who was busy trying to create a massive six-inch spit bubble, his infectious giggle rocking his shoulders back and forth, while Headless was fumbling blindly with an ammo cartridge he was trying to insert into his bazookoid.

  Lister sighed. 'Let me.' Headless gave him a thumbs-up sign.

  'Guards on the left and guards on the right. Anybody got any bright ideas?'

  Headless animatedly nodded his neck.

  'You got an idea, Headless? Well, let's hear it.'

  Headless pointed to the wall on the far side of the corridor.

  'You want to know what's in that direction?'

  Another nod.

  'A wall.'

  Headless held his thumb up again.

  'What's your plan? Run through the wall?'

  Another nod.

  'Do you know what the wall is made of?'

  Headless shook his neck.

  'Do you care?'

  Headless shook his neck.

  'Well, if you think you can do it, you go for it, guy.'

  Headless sank into the back of the recess and then catapulted himself across the corridor and towards the wall. Lister closed his eyes. There was a sound of smashing masonry. He looked up to see a haze of clearing smoke and a pile of broken bricks in front of a hole roughly the shape of Headless.

  Lister unhooked a second bazookoid from around his neck and, firing with both. hands, dashed across the corridor and dived through the hole, followed by Legs, Righty, Saliva, Van Gogh and Nelson.

  He scrambled to his feet. A sea of head-setted skulls bobbled on the surface of a giant pink lake. Thousands upon thousands of heads, all prisoners of their own minds. Lister gawked at them incredulously. This was it.

  He was here.

  Cyberia.

  Without warning everything was pitched into blackness. A thick, impenetrable cloak of rubied darkness.

  The only sound was a slowly dying scale as the electrics whinnied to a halt.

  Lister smiled. At last, something was going right. The electrics were finally out.

  He felt his body suddenly leave the ground.

  He was floating. Floating in mid-air. He kicked helplessly as he rose from the ground. Then he hit something; something hard travelling at speed. What, he never found out. The pain set off two explosive charges behind his eyes and he lost consciousness.

  * * *

  He rolled open his eyes, slowly, gingerly, like they were a pair of rattling grills protecting a store window.

  Still black, still floating.

  Groggily he groped for his bazookoid and flicked on the night-vision gun-sights. He was drifting above the cyberlake, spiralling head over heels as he gently jostled for position with the cyber prisoners who had been pulled free of the lake and their headsets. Below, Gelf guards hung on to sandstone columns and screamed for help.

  His mind began to clear: asteroids aren't large enough to generate their own gravity; the gravity on Lotomi 5 must be artificially generated and they'd knocked out the AG unit.

  He closed his eyes and tried to think.

  It wasn't unpleasant here, floating in the blackness. Almost restful. Cooling balls of water, warm and sweet, bounced off his cheeks, blown up towards the chamber's dome by the last breaths of the oxy-generation blowers. He peered through his night-sights and looked down at the large empty basin on the ground below. Why had he never noticed it before?

  Then he realized.

  He'd never noticed it before because it hadn't been there before. This basin, this enormous dry dock, was what had held the cyberlake. Before the water had gone.

  But gone where? Where the hell could it go?

  He swivelled the night-sights skyward. Above him was the cyber lake. Twenty, maybe thirty feet deep and directly above his head. His body liberated from gravity and blown by the compressed air of the emptying oxy-generation unit was sucked up into the waters.

  A deadly droplet of panic pipetted into him and began to spread its poison. He was drowning. And there was no way out. He started to hyper-ventilate.

  The thought of drowning had terrified him since childhood, when he'd fallen in the local canal. Apart from being eaten alive by rats and gonad grilling it was his least favourite way of bidding the long 'so long'.

  He had to do something. He was going in the wrong direction. The wrong direction too slowly. He had to find something solid, something he could use as a springboard to power back out of the lake and back into what was left of the oxygen. He gazed around. There was nothing.

  Nothing.

  And all the time he was being pulled deeper and deeper up into the cyberlake's pink waters.

  Thirty seconds passed.

  Thirty-five. Forty.

  A ball started to grow in his lungs. A red-hot ball, like a flaming coal inside of him. His ribs couldn't contain it. His chest wanted to explode. What could he do?

  Then he saw him struggling past a renegade droid, holding on to the droid's arm and using it as a springboard to push past him. Then he was floating in front of him. Looking at him.

  His other self. His doppelgänger.

  He'd found him. But it was too late, because now both of them were going to die. Before they'd properly met. Before they'd even spoken. His other self looked at him, expressionless, then clambered on to his shoulders and pushed himself off Lister's body and disappeared into the mix of threshing bodies and was gone.

  Lister swam on. The coal in his chest was getting hotter and hotter. Bigger and bigger.

  Up ahead he saw it - the domed roof of the cyber chamber. He squinted at it through the murk of the waters. Here was the something solid he could launch himself off; that could send his body back down into the air, back into the oxygen.

  He flipped his body over and splayed his legs, froglike, on the ceiling and pushed. Down he went towards the surface.

  Down he went towards the oxygen.

  Then he stopped and started to drift back up again. Hopeless. Not even six feet.

  His lungs felt like white-hot medicine balls.

  He was going to lose consciousness. No, not yet. One more try. One more.

  For a second time he splayed his legs on the ceiling and pushed.

  Down, down, down.

  Ten feet. Twelve feet. He kicked with his feet and his hands pummelled the water as he stretched for the surface. Fourteen feet. Sixteen. Eighteen.

  He was going to do it. He could see the light. He could see the air. The oxygen. Nineteen feet.

  He opened his mouth ready to suck in an entire continent of air when something happened. Something that neutered his soul. Four inches from the su
rface he started to go up.

  Four inches short. Four lousy inches.

  Now what? Another go? He didn't have the strength. He didn't have the time. Maybe ten seconds. Ten seconds before he blacked out. Ten seconds to do something. What was that word that Kryten used to use? That special way of thinking? When you thought about the problem in a new way? Turned it upside down and took a look at it from there?

  Six seconds.

  Lack of oxygen had fogged his mind. The word?

  What was the word?

  What was it?

  It didn't matter. He should do that word anyway. Do it. Do that word. Whatever it was.

  What was it? Lateral thinking. That was the word. Think laterally. OK, that's what he would do. A head voice started to talk to him.

  'What do you need to survive?'

  'Oxygen.'

  ' Where is the oxygen?'

  'On the surface.'

  'So what's the problem?'

  'No strength. Can't reach. ' 'So what's your only alternative then?'

  'There isn't one.'

  'Think.'

  'Can't think. Too tired.'

  ' Think laterally.'

  'Laterally? Think laterally. OK, I've got it. Become a fish.'

  'Lateral but stupid. Again.'

  'An alternative to getting oxygen from the surface.'

  'C'mon.'

  'A solution. ' 'What is it?'

  'Find another source of oxygen, somewhere else.'

  'Good.'

  'Somewhere I CAN REACH.'

  ' You're cooking with gas.'

  'Where?'

  'Where's the only place you can reach?'

  'The roof. Break the roof. The water will be sucked out through the hole. And the remaining oxygen will be able to float up to me.'

  * * *

  Lister sank to the bottom of the cyberlake and examined the surface of the ceiling. A filigree of cracks patterned its surface. The water pressure was rupturing the dome's outer surface. He brought his heel down hard on a cracked plate. A fresh filigree trilled across the pane. He brought his foot down a second time.

  And a third, and a fourth.

  Slowly, water started to seep up out of the cracks, as if it was being sucked out by a hugely powerful vacuum.