Last Human

by Doug Naylor

  They all bore the same name: Professor Michael Longman. She flicked on her torch and circled the names with the beam. 'How do you get these things to activate?'

  Kryten looked down at the floor and kicked at the light pattern that shone down from the grilled ceiling. 'I'm human now. I don't have all those gigabytes of Ram any more. How the smegging hell do I know?' He sighed. 'I'm sorry. I'm sorry.'

  She scanned the complex display of commands and finally pressed a combination of four. Smoke hissed into the chamber and the three pods began to slide out of the wall. When they had extended to their full length, a high-pitched wheezing sound signalled that one of the lids was sliding open. Almost imperceptibly the two of them backed off across the deck.

  A voice spoke from inside the stasis pod. 'Thank you.'

  She pointed her torch light into the gloom. 'We didn't know anyone was alive. We thought everyone was dead.'

  The voice again. 'I'm not alive.'

  She didn't know how to reply to this so she just said, 'Oh, bad luck.'

  Spirals of smoke swirled out of the lead-lined casket but the voice still refused to reveal itself. 'Our cells just gave up. They wouldn't be modified any more, and we were left like this.'

  Now a man with watery brown eyes and a little black beard loomed into an upright position. His face was covered in yellow weeping buboes and half of his bottom lip was eaten away. He leapt out of the pod and stood on the metal grilling of the chamber floor. Kochanski gazed down at his feet. His legs belonged to a goat. He threw back his head and emitted a yowl that was on loan from Hell. Another figure slithered out of the second stasis pod and grinned manically at the two fear-frozen humans. He also had watery brown eyes and a little black beard, but his body was the body of a black-necked spitting cobra. It sizzled loathing. There was a pause and they were joined by the third Professor Michael Longman. Again, his face and brain remained intact, but this time his body had been borrowed from a leopard.

  Kochanski's boots scudded across the grilled metal flooring and out into the corridor, quickly followed by Kryten. The two of them hammered down the aisle back towards the Cat.

  He was leaning against the wall feeling guilty about what had happened with Kryten. He was especially guilty about creasing his sequinned jacket, and the self-reproach for marking his white stretch PVC body suit was nearly too much to bear. He glanced up and saw his two crew mates belting towards him pursued by a holo-goat, a leopard with a man's head and another man slithering along the ground with the body of a black-necked spitting cobra. His first reaction was that Kryten had gone off to enlist some serious help to get even for his nose, but after Kochanski and Kryten had screamed past him, leaving him leaning casually against the wall and quite alone, he began to change his mind.

  The Cat started to run. They picked up Rimmer and the four of them pounded down the corridor and fell into the lift as the Longman-leopard flung itself against the closing doors.

  Kochanski punched the button for basement and slid down the wall, sucking in air.

  A flash of panic flitted across Kryten's features. 'What about the supplies?'

  Kochanski looked baffled. 'The hell with the supplies. We've got plenty. Let's just get out of here.'

  'You mean, we're going to leave here for keeps?'

  'What do you recommend? A final touristy stroll round, followed by a cream tea?' asked Rimmer.

  'I don't want to go.'

  The Cat's two eyebrows did simultaneous press-ups. 'What?'

  'I mean, I have to change back to what I truly am. I'm a mechanoid. I don't want to be human.'

  Kochanski closed her eyes and cradled her forehead between her knees. 'What are you telling me, Kryten?'

  'I want to return to the DNA suite and change back.' A grin illuminated his face, and for the first time since he'd become human he looked happy. 'I'm saying, I suppose, I just gotta be me. Naturally, I don't expect you to come with me. Just send back the sea buggy on the remote when you get back to Starbug.'

  'We're not splitting up,' said Kochanski. 'We're in this together.'

  'Except for me,' said Rimmer.

  'And me,' said the Cat.

  'All of us,' Kochanski snapped.

  'Look, I can't risk dying in this outfit. This suit and rigor mortis just won't work. I need to be in something blue.'

  'All of us.'

  The Cat shook his head sadly. 'Don't you hate it when she gets brave? It's her most nauseating feature, if you don't count stealing my earrings.'

  They left the lift at deck four and let it continue down to the basement, hoping the Longmans would be fooled into thinking they'd headed for the airlock and fled the ship.

  Kochanski elbowed in a glass cabinet and picked out a fire axe amid the shattered glass. Then, softly, they padded their way up the stairs and entered the DNA suite.

  'Make it quick,' Rimmer hissed. Kryten nodded, then went over to the matrix and started scrolling through the system lists to retrieve his digitized original body data.

  It wasn't there.

  He double-checked. Still nothing. He decided to find it another way. He typed in 'Mechanoid Cell Template' and stabbed 'find'. The matrix sped through its data lists and came back with the results: 'No such data stored'.

  A wave of panic sucked the colour from his face. 'My genome isn't here. It doesn't make sense.'

  'Yes, it does,' said a voice. 'It makes perfect sense.' A mechanoid stepped out of the half-gloom. The mechanoid had watery brown eyes and a little black beard. 'Thank you for your body, Kryten. Now we want the bodies of your crew mates. We want your itsy-bitsy double helixies.'

  CHAPTER 14

  The Longman-leopard, its eyes blacker than a Mimiam night, rose from its sitting position, and started to stalk them on their left side. The cobra slithered into a strike position on their right and hissed a glop of venom that sizzled past the Cat's ear. The Longman-mechanoid, still smiling, edged closer, all the while speaking in his hypnotically soothing tones. 'You don't need to die, you can exist in another form. You can be anything, anything you want, if you just give us the cells that make you human.'

  They stalked, they slithered, and edged, all the time getting closer. Halfway across the suite Kryten struck. His body swivelled and his fingers started hammering the command matrix.

  Glass cylinders squished down from the ceiling. Five, ten, fifteen of them cannoned into the ground. The cobra was caught. So were Rimmer and the Cat. The Longman mechanoid shimmied right to avoid one, threw itself left to avoid a second, then, just as its eye-line was taken in avoiding a third, it ran straight into a fourth, which swooshed down from above.

  Only the Longman-leopard was left.

  It launched itself at Kochanski. Its claws, sharp as lemon dropped in an open wound, razored towards her, ready to pluck her face off, as if it were a Hallowe'en mask. She opened her mouth and screamed as its paws landed firmly on her shoulders and sent her reeling backwards into a set of data banks. The creature arced down on top of her, its breath rabbiting down her throat. Then she felt its claws rip through her leather flight suit and slice into her skin with gut-sickening ease. She staggered backwards, momentarily dazed, almost relaxed, ready to submit to death.

  Then the adrenalin poured into her brain, like the cavalry arriving.

  For five years she'd trained in jujitsu and judo and now it all came down to whether she could execute one single throw.

  A sacrifice throw, a sumigaeshi. It was her tokui - her favourite throw. Kochanski, the tori, swept her right leg inside the uke's left foreleg and fell backwards using her full body weight to sweep the leopard on to its back. She scrambled backwards on her bottom and clambered to her feet by the wall.

  A waza-ari!

  The Longman-leopard prepared to launch again. But she'd bought herself some time.

  Kryten continued to pummel the keypads and a rain of glass cylinders squished down and then up and then down again as they negotiated their way across the floor.

  Squish.<
br />
  She moved right.

  Squish.

  The leopard moved left.

  Squish.

  The leopard seared through the air for a second time, its open claws sharking once more towards her face. She tried to move backwards and slipped. The creature swept down on top of her. She screamed as its claws clattered into the outside of the glass cylinder that had dropped on top of her. The cylinder squished back into the ceiling as she half-staggered, half fell into the middle of the suite.

  The Longman-leopard swivelled and again started to move towards her.

  A warm trickle of liquid dribbled between her breasts. Without taking her eyes off the leopard she ran her finger down her chest and tasted it. Blood? No, it had a warm glucose taste.

  The luck virus.

  She'd forgotten all about it. The leopard must have broken the glass vial. She dipped her finger into the tiny rivulet and drank some more. All she had to do now was persuade the leopard to have a game of poker with dukes wild and she'd be fine.

  But what if this was the broccoli tube? Maybe they tasted similar. There was no way of telling.

  She'd find out soon enough. Distractedly, she scratched her wrist and backed off around the chamber. There was something there. A rubber band; the chunky thick rubber band she'd absently taken from Rimmer's supply inventory. Things were looking up already — now she was armed.

  In the right hands a rubber band could be a lethal weapon.

  She laced it on to her second finger and wrapped it around her thumb before lacing it back again on to her first finger. As a kid at school in Perth she'd been pretty good with rubber-band guns — she could usually hit a classmate's neck ten desks away.

  The leopard launched itself through the air. She aimed, fired and flung herself left. The band ripped through the air, passed silently between the leopard's front legs and pinged its mighty right testicle. She watched as the leopard's expression shifted from snarling attack to puzzlement and then to intense pain. It lost interest in its prey, hit the floor, folded in two and started groaning quietly to itself.

  That sure as hell wasn't down to any fast-growing broccoli virus. 'Squish it, Kryte.'

  The glass cylinder swooped down and trapped the yammering creature in a prison of glass. Kochanski got to her feet. 'OK, do what you've gotta do and let's get the smeg out of here.'

  * * *

  Starbug purred through the mix of lava and mulch and broke the ocean surface in an explosion of foam. The Cat flicked the craft on to auto-pilot and joined the others in the mid-section.

  Rimmer sat in front of the mainframe and closed down the com channel. 'That was the Head of Records in Cyberia. Seems Listy was sentenced to eighteen years' hard thought for leading the break-in.'

  'And?' said Kryten, knowing from the tone of Rimmer's voice the news wasn't good.

  'And he's no longer there. He escaped three weeks ago with some kind of morph; a symbiote or something. The point is that no one's got the faintest clue where he is now, although there's a substantial reward for his recovery.'

  'He could be anywhere in the belt,' Kryten sighed. 'He could even have gone back through the Omni-zone. That's presumably where Mr Lister believed we were heading.'

  Rimmer shook his head. 'Finding him is going to be next to impossible.'

  Kochanski looped the vial of luck virus off her neck and held it up to the light. The liquid had clotted over the crack in the tube and a quarter remained. 'We've got to be able to use this somehow.' She pointed at the tube. 'The answer's in there somewhere.'

  They stared at it — thinking.

  Kryten began. 'What is luck? When a person is lucky - "on a roll" I believe is the vernacular - it seems to me they have the ability to influence and manipulate the physical environment. They're able to make a roulette wheel stop on a certain number, persuade others to do their bidding, browbeat fate into giving them what they most desire. How? There's only one explanation: if luck is some kind of positive infection then it must somehow enhance the individual's sixth sense, imbue them with new powers. After all, stopping a roulette wheel is a form of telekinesis.'

  Kochanski nodded. 'If that's true, there are no boundaries to what this stuff can do. The only limitation will be our own imaginations.'

  'OK, how about this?' said Rimmer. 'It breaks every known law of the universe, and some that are unknown too, but if Kryten's theory is right and seeing as we've got zero options - what the hell.' 'Go on,' said Kochanski, intrigued.

  'We each take a sip of the luck virus and write down the coordinates of where we believe Lister is. If that stuff really works, then by pure luck we should each write down the same correct set of coordinates. Then we set a course.'

  Kryten beamed. 'Bravo, Mr Rimmer, sir. A most meritorious scheme.'

  * * *

  The vial was passed around the table, and one by one they imbibed its contents.

  Kochanski took the almost empty tube and hung it back around her neck. 'Poles: north is positive, south is negative. We should each have six figures with degrees and minutes. Good luck.'

  They each wrote down a set of coordinates, folded the paper and placed it in a pile in the middle of the scanner table.

  Rimmer opened the first. '25°, 46' - 80°, 12' — 34°, 54'.'

  He opened the second piece of paper. '25°, 46' — 80°, 12'-34°, 54'.'

  The third. '25°, 46' - 80°, 12' - 34°, 54'.'

  Finally he opened the last. '62°, 18' - 21°, 37'. Whose is this?'

  'Mine.' Kryten replied. 'I was using Johnstone's elliptical system. I didn't realize you'd be using the old galactic guide. Allow me to transpose the figures. First coordinate, 25°, 46' - 80°, 12'. Third figure...'

  They all yelled in unison: '34°, 54'.'

  Kryten waddled up to the navi-comp.

  Rimmer followed him. 'Where is it?'

  Kryten logged in. 'According to the star charts it's a planet that's dangerously close to the event horizon of the aureole of black holes that rings the Omni-zone. In fact, it should get sucked past the event horizon any day now.'

  Then that's it. The event horizon's the point of no return. What's our ETA?'

  Kryten loaded the information into the computer. 'At present speed we'll be there in...' A blip pinged up on to the computer screen, announcing the computer had finished computing the mathematics, '... thirty-two weeks.'

  'Thirty-two weeks? That's way too late.'

  * * *

  The Cat picked up a pen and started to scribble furiously. 'Wait a minute, I'm getting an idea. OK, here it is. I'm just going to take a shot at guessing a new system of transport. I'm going to call it a hyper-drive. And it works like this - first you punch a hole in space, then you bend time and leap into the tenth dimension, harnessing something I'm going to call superstring. Here's the first bit of it: "SD10 × < Y*Y*Y = 2... "

  'What do you think?'

  'Extraordinary. You've just correctly guessed the equation for hyper-space. What an astonishing piece of luck. Sir, I implore you, keep going. We need to know how we can produce the almost infinite amount of energy that's required to puncture the space/time continuum.'

  'Lemme see,' said the Cat, licking the point of his pencil. 'Puncture the space/time continuum, eh? Create the required energy. Okey-dokey, here we gokey.' The Cat started to scribble furiously again, covering the paper with his childlike scrawl.

  Rimmer squinted down over his shoulder. 'Does this make sense? Can we use it?'

  'The first part, the theoretical equation for hyper-space, is absolutely correct, sir. However, the computations after that will be a stroll into the unknown with a white cane. I suggest we log it into the computer and see what happens.'

  CHAPTER 15

  The small emerald planet teetered on the brink of the event horizon of the ambit of collapsed stars that acted as a protective membrane around the Omni-zone.

  Down on the surface, gravity gales swept across a mackerel sky, as slowly, almost indiscernibly, the planet engage
d in the final leg of a losing battle to remain in its own Universe.

  Lister, Reketrebn, McGruder and the rest of the survivors huddled around a sad-looking fire, sipping the last of the soup supplies and staring down the massive canyon that looked as if it had been gouged out of the desert rock by a gigantic ice-cream scoop. In the distance, in front of a sky ripped through with fashionable cloud tears, the Rage patrolled the entrance to the underground caverns half a day's walk away. These were the planet's only safe houses when it finally lost its battle with gravity and was sucked through the aureole of black holes into the Omni-zone.

  The Rage had won. It had successfully defended its planet from all comers. No one could survive here. No one could live on its surface. And now, vindictive to the end, it shielded the caverns from the survivors, ensuring their destruction when the planet passed through the ring of black holes.

  Lister swirled a piece of bread around in his soup. They had to kill the Rage. It was their only hope.

  But how? It was an entity composed of pure emotion, a force, an energy, something without conventional form or content, something without a heart or brain, something that was just a mass of seething resentment. Out of control. And determined to defend the planet from life, any life. A tiny smile jogged across his face as he watched Reketrebn, sitting opposite him, suddenly shape-shift into a variety of forms to lift him from his black dog. Henry VIII, Laurel and Hardy, Queen Victoria, Albert Einstein and various famous newscasters all morphed before him; all naked. This was Reketrebn's idea of a joke. It knew naked people always got a reaction. Finally, it shape-shifted back into its neutral form and smiled at Lister. 'There is not much time now. Half a day, maybe less.'

  'We'll figure out a way. It's just we ain't thought of it yet.'

  'That is not how you feel. You feel there is no way. You say these things to make me happy when I should feel afraid. Why?'

  'I thought you could read my mind.'

  'Sometimes. Other times I have to guess and I am wrong.'

  'Guess anyway.'

  'You lie because you care.'

  'You think?'