Red Dwarf: Better Than Life

by Grant Naylor

  American football provided the greatest variety of mutant athletes, each one specifically designed for its position. The Nose Tackle, for instance, was an enormous nose - a huge wedge of boneless flesh that was hammered into the scrimmage line at every play. Wide receivers were huge Xs - four long arms that tapered to the tiny waist perched on top of legs capable of ten-yard strides. The defensive line were even larger, specifically bred to secrete noxious chemicals whenever the ball was in play.

  Genetic Alternative Sports were a huge hit, and the technological advancements spilled into other avenues of human life.

  Cars were suddenly coming off the production line made from human mutations. Bone on the outside, soft supple flesh in the interior, and engines made from mutated internal organs - living cars, that drove themselves, parked themselves and never crashed. More importantly than that, they didn't rely on fossil fuels to run. All they required was carfood - a special mulch made from pig offal. Cars in the twenty-third century ran on sausages.

  The trend spread. GELFs, Genetically Engineered Life Forms, were everywhere, and soon virtually every consumer product was made of living tissue. Gelf armchairs, which could sense your mood, and massage your shoulders when you were feeling tense, became a part of everyday life. Gelf vacuum cleaners, which were half kitchen appliance, half family pet, waddled around on their squat little legs, doing the household chores and amusing the children.

  Finally, the bubble burst. The Gelfs rebelled, just as the Mechanoids had rebelled before them.

  The unrest had been festering for half a century. The dichotomy was that, although Gelfs were created from human chromosomes, and therefore technically qualified as human, they had no rights whatsoever. Quite simply, they wanted to vote. And normal humans were damned if they were going to file into polling stations alongside walking furniture and twenty-feet tall athletic freaks.

  The rebellion started in the Austrian town of Salzburg, when a vacuum cleaner and Gelf Volkswagen Beetle robbed a high street bank. They took the manager and a security guard hostage, agreeing to release them only if Valter Holman was brought to justice for murder.

  Valter Holman had killed his armchair, and the whole of the Gelf community was up in arms, those that had arms, because the law courts refused to accept that a crime had been committed.

  The facts in the case were undisputed. It was a crime of passion. Holman had returned home from work unexpectedly one afternoon to discover his armchair sitting on his naked wife. He immediately leapt to the right conclusion, and shot the chair as it hurriedly tried to wriggle back into its upholstery.

  Finally the establishment capitulated, and Holman was brought to trial. After the two-day hearing the court ruled that since Holman would have to live out the rest of his life being known as the man who was cuckolded by his own furniture, he had suffered enough, and was given a six-month suspended sentence.

  And so the Gelf War started.

  And for a short time, humankind indulged in its favourite pastime. Humans versus man-made humans.

  Armchairs and vacuum cleaners fought side by side with bizarrely shaped genetically engineered sports stars and living, breathing motor cars.

  The Gelfs didn't stand a chance, and most of them were wiped out or captured. The few remaining went to ground, becoming experts in urban guerrilla warfare. For a short time, Gelf-hunters proliferated, and a rebel vacuum cleaner waddling frantically down a crowded street, pursued by a Gelf runner, became a common sight.

  But it wasn't the Gelf resistance fighters who caused the problem. The problem was what to do with those who'd surrendered. Legally, killing them constituted murder, but equally, the authorities could hardly send them back into docile human service.

  Fortunately the problem coincided with the nomination of Earth as Garbage World. All the captured Gelfs were dumped like refuse on the island of Zanzibar and left to die.

  Most of them did. But not all. Some survived. Not the brightest, not even the biggest, just those best equipped to cope with the harsh rigours of living on a planet swamped in toxic waste and choking poisons. The ones who could endure the endless winter as Earth soared through the universe looking for its new sun. And gradually, a new strain of Gelf evolved.

  A creature who could live anywhere. Even in the revolting conditions on Earth. A creature with a sixth sense - telepathy. A creature who was able to read its prey's mind, even through hundreds of feet of compacted ice. A creature with no shape of its own: whose form was dictated by the requirements of survival.

  These were the polymorphs.

  The shape-changers.

  They didn't need food for survival.

  They fed on other creatures' emotions. Their diet was fear, jealousy, anger ...

  And when no other creatures were left on the island of Zanzibar, they began to feed off each other.

  Until finally, there were only a handful left.

  TEN

  The polymorph who'd assumed Lister's shape lay on the bunk, waiting for its energy to return after its metamorphosis, while Kryten and the Toaster stared at the suddenly blank screen.

  'What've you done now? You've caused a malfunction.'

  At the sound of the Toaster's tinny tones, Kryten's eyes rolled fully 720 degrees round in his head. 'The transmission stopped. It's nothing to do with me.'

  'Why would the transmission suddenly stop? You must have pressed something. You must have pressed the wrong button.'

  'I didn't press anything, they just stopped broadcasting.'

  'Says you.'

  Kryten had had it up to his stereophonic audial sensors with the Toaster. Frankly, old Talkie was beginning to get on Kryten's nipple nuts. Fourteen hours of bouncing around in the hover dinghy, scouring the swamps, with the Toaster navigating, had driven him to the very limits of his almost limitless patience.

  Few relationships can survive the ordeal of travelling to an unknown destination over any kind of distance, with one driving and one reading the map. If Romeo and Juliet had ever been forced to jump in a family saloon and drive from Venice to Marbella, they would have split up long before they hit the Spanish border. Hopelessly lost, bawling and screaming in some deserted lay-by in the middle of God-knows-where, there'd have been no talk of suicide - they'd have been more than ready to murder each other.

  And Kryten didn't have the advantage of being madly in love with the Toaster to start with. The sight of the Toaster didn't send his soul into rapture. He thought the Toaster was an infuriatingly perky little geek.

  And that was before the journey.

  Fourteen hours stuck together had not improved things, and, uncharacteristically, Kryten was beginning to have fantasies wherein he set about the Toaster with a petrol-powered chainsaw.

  'No way would that screen have gone blank if I'd had anything to do with it,' the Toaster chirped. 'Absolutely no way.'

  'Please. I'm trying to discover what's wrong.'

  'I'll tell you what's wrong. You. You don't know what you're doing. You're a sanitation Mechanoid - bog-cleaning, that's all you're good for. You're a bog-bot. A lavvy droid. A mechanical basin bleacher.'

  'Really?' Kryten's voice was dangerously quiet. 'And I suppose a novelty Toaster is infinitely better-equipped to cope with the complex communications system aboard this vessel?'

  'Well, a certain so-called "novelty” Toaster certainly didn't do a half-bad job at getting us all out of a certain Black Hole I could mention.' The Toaster gave an arrogant twist of his browning knob.

  Kryten discreetly crushed a small section of the console's facade, and continued trying unsuccessfully to restore the communication link with White Giant.

  The pale waxy figure on the couch listened to them bickering. The words themselves meant nothing, but the shapes and colours of their emotions were new and exciting. As soon as its energy returned, it would feast.

  It had lived for so long on tiny morsels of insect emotion - mainly fear - and the little snacks it managed to cannibalize from weaker members
of its species, that every shape change left it drained and temporarily helpless.

  And now the Shadow Time was almost on it. It would need nourishment and sustenance if it was to survive the Aftering. It didn't think these things. It simply knew them. It had no capacity for abstract thought, it couldn't plan. It was a matter of instinct. The instinct to survive, moment by moment, for as long as possible.

  But the water was helping. The cooling water on its brow was helping its strength to return.

  Kryten dipped the cloth back in the water, then draped it back over his patient's forehead. 'I don't know what's wrong with the communication link. Still, that's not for you to worry about. I'm sure they'll be in touch soon.' Kryten tutted. Lister looked absolutely awful. 'Are you quite sure there's nothing else I can do?'

  'What he needs,' chipped in a tinny voice, 'is some nice, hot...'

  'No!' Kryten snapped.

  '... tea. I was going to say "some nice, hot, sweet tea.” What did you think I was going to say?' said the Toaster.

  And then the Shadow Time came, and with it, the pain.

  Kryten was half-way back to the communication console when Lister started convulsing. His back arched up off the bed, and his limbs threshed uncontrollably in the crash couch recess. Strange sounds, barely human, drove out of his juddering throat.

  'He's choking!' yelled the Toaster.

  'I can see that!' said Kryten, hauling Lister into a sitting position and slapping him on his back.

  'Perhaps he's swallowed a fishbone!'

  'Swallowed a what?'

  'A fishbone. And you know what the cure is for a fishbone lodged in the throat.'

  'What?'

  'Dry toast! Oh, joy! I've waited for a moment like this all my life! Get me some bread!'

  Kryten yanked a fire extinguisher off the wall and hurled it at the Toaster, catching it a glancing blow on its browning knob. The Toaster was temporarily stunned into silence, and Kryten went back to slamming the still-convulsing Lister between the shoulder blades.

  And just when it seemed the convulsions could get no worse, they stopped. Something dislodged from Lister's throat, and fell into Kryten's outstretched palm.

  'It's a piece of bubble-gum.' Kryten held out the small pink wad of gum for Lister to see.

  Pale and sweating, the Lister morph sank back on to the couch, exhausted. Kryten dropped the gumball into a metal trash can, just as the communication screen crackled back to life.

  'What's going on?' asked the Toaster.

  Lines of silent machine code scrolled up the screen.

  'It's machine code.' said the Toaster.

  'Yes,' hissed Kryten, 'I'm perfectly well aware of that.'

  'Why are they communicating in machine language?'

  'I haven't the slightest clue.'

  'No,' agreed the Toaster, 'you haven't, have you? D'you want me to translate it? I'm fairly fluent in machine code.'

  'I can manage.'

  'Well? What does it say?'

  'If you can just give me half a second, I'll tell you.'

  'Yes?'

  'It says: 'Extreme danger. You have ...' Kryten's voice tailed off.

  'You have what?'

  'Nothing.' Kryten's eyes flitted across the screen, absorbing the message.

  'What d'you mean, "nothing”?'

  Kryten craned round and looked at the figure on the couch. The lifeless milky eyes stared back at him.

  'Come on - what d'you mean, "nothing”? There can't be five hundred lines of nothing on the screen.'

  'I mean ... I can't translate it,' Kryten lied. 'I don't know what it says.'

  The Toaster sighed extravagantly, and turned, by flipping its bread-release lever rapidly up and down on the table top, to face the screen. 'Once more the cavalry, in the form of a handsome yet reasonably inexpensive red toasting machine, bugles over the hill to the rescue. The message,' it said, 'runs thus: "Extreme danger. You have on board a genetic mutation” ...'

  'Shut up.'

  '... "It is not, repeat, not Lister” ...'

  'That's enough.'

  ' "Abandon your vessel” ...'

  'Quiet!'

  '... "and engage self-destruct.” Honestly, this is really easy. You'd have to be a moron not to be able to translate this. What's this next bit...?'

  Before it could continue, Kryten had wrenched the two thin steel ashtrays from the arms of the relaxation chairs and hammered them into the Toaster's bread vents. It was silenced immediately.

  The Lister creature on the couch swivelled upright and watched, expressionless, as Kryten sidled back towards the glass cabinet that contained the emergency fire axe.

  Abandon ship? How could he abandon ship? They were no longer on Garbage World, they were in space, half-way back to Red Dwarf.

  Something was happening. The shapes, the colours of the emotions of the prey were changing. The tall, thin one, the mobile one made of plastic and metal, was afraid. Very afraid.

  Delicious.

  Nurture the fear. Help it grow.

  Then feast on its succulence.

  Feast to gorging.

  Must change.

  Must change, to nurture the fear.

  But weak.

  Too weak to complete.

  Kryten's elbow smashed into the glass casing behind him, and his hand found the grip of the fire axe. Then he froze.

  It was a horrible sound. The most horrible sound Kryten had ever heard. Crunching bones and sickening wetness, and a scream that dipped all the way down to Hell.

  Lister stopped being Lister and started to become something else. His body folded in on itself, and when it re-emerged it was inside out. The slimy, mucus-coated organs quivered and gurgled as the ribcage split open and a strange serpent-like suction head slithered out and began sliming across the floor towards Kryten's feet.

  Kryten stood there, waxwork-still in terror, as the unspeakable appendage coiled itself up his legs. The rest of the creature lay writhing ecstatically on the floor: Lister from the shoulders up, blubbery gore below.

  The grotesque tentacle wound its way effortlessly up Kryten's torso, and wrapped around his neck, until its drooling tip quivered inches from his lips.

  It reared back, like a snake about to strike. The tentacle tip split and a pink, fleshy, pursed mouth flicked out and grinned.

  Then there was a voice. It was high pitched and metallic. It was the Toaster.

  'Hey, pal.'

  The creature's mouth slowly turned towards the bright red plastic box on the table.

  'Would you like a little toast?'

  The Toaster jiggled its crumb tray, so that it toppled on to its front, then slammed down its bread-release lever. A red-hot metal ashtray skimmed through the air, slicing through the creature's tentacle. The severed appendage thrashed and flailed, spraying green gloop around the entire control room.

  The part of the creature that was half Lister, half something else screeched with blind agony and lurched towards the Toaster.

  'Hey - don't get angry. I have a slice for you, too.'

  The second ashtray sizzled across the control room, ploughed through the neck of the Lister beast, decapitating it, silencing its inhuman shriek forever.

  The Toaster flipped back up on to its base, and said, in a voice as macho as its tinny larynx would allow: 'Was it something I said?' it burred. 'He seems a trifle cut up.”

  Kryten slithered down the bulkhead wall, sat on the deck and groaned, a long, low grumble of a groan. This was possibly the worst thing that could have happened. Saved, yet again, by the Toaster. Now it would scale new peaks of obnoxiousness.

  The Toaster was already in its stride. A little puff of smoke trilled from the top of its grill. 'Toast, quantum mechanics and now slimebeast-slayer. Not a bad buy for $£19.99, wouldn't you say?'

  Without interrupting his groan, Kryten punched the re-heat button to take Blue Midget back to Red Dwarf, double speed.

  ELEVEN

  It was a strange feeling for Li
ster, staring down at his own dead features. He shook his head. 'It doesn't make sense - I don't understand how you managed to kill it so easy.'

  'Hardly easy,' the Toaster objected. 'It was a mono a mono, ninja-type struggle, where a brave, rather ruggedly handsome red kitchen appliance finally managed to come out on top.'

  Lister wasn't listening. His finger hovered over the fire button of his heavy-duty mining laser. 'It must have been weak.'

  'Weak? It was on the brink of squeezing the very life out of a series 4000 Mechanoid. That's how weak it was. You just can't tolerate the thought that, yet again, your old buddy Talkie Toaster saved everybody's neck.'

  'Why did it wait so long to feed? It doesn't make sense, none of it.'

  'It didn't feed because it was engaged in a titanic battle a morte with a samurai toaster. It was too busy trying to dodge lethal discs of red-hot steel to be thinking about nosh time. Oh, you should have seen me, I was magnificent. I feinted right, I dodged left - I was ducking and diving, weaving and bobbing, and he didn't lay a sucker on me.'

  Lister shook his head again, and clicked and whistled a cockroach expletive.

  Kryten prodded the polymorph's remains with the shaft of his fire axe, and looked up at Lister. 'What I don't understand is why it looks thirty years younger than you do.'

  'It read your mind. You were expecting to find me the same age as you left me. That was the only data it had. So it turned into what it knew you were looking for.'

  Rimmer stood outside the hatchway on the embarkation ramp, still steadfastly refusing to enter Blue Midget. 'You've encountered these things before, then?' he called to Lister.