Colony

by Rob Grant

  'That's right, Eddie. That's very good.'

  He looks over at his old self again. Watches himself spot the sign, perform an Abbot and Costello standard double-take, and start to move towards it.

  Eddie can feel himself flashing. 'This isn't possible. How is this possible?'

  'I told you, Eddie. Time is not what you think it is. You're just used to looking at it from the wrong angle. Time isn't here and then gone. Time is a constant thing. A flow. Check this out.'

  There's that same sense of sudden flight, and they're somewhere else, instantly.

  They're staring up at Eddie's face. He's at work, now. At his old office. They're actually in his computer.

  'You can move through time?'

  'Time and space, yes.'

  'And you move through it how? Computer connections?'

  'In a way, yes. I can affect computers, electronics. But I travel ... as a consciousness. As a consciousness, I can observe. Does that make sense?'

  'Not really.' But the truth is, some part of him does seem to understand it. The ship has always been alive, in a way -- what was it Gwent said? 'A synthetic, living fabric' -- but over time it's become more than that. It's evolved a consciousness. A consciousness that can travel through time, that perceives time as a kind of river.

  He looks up at his working self, tapping away at his keypad. 'You picked me out?'

  'That's right, Eddie. Now, just concentrate a moment: we're about to take the money away.'

  Eddie senses something. Some small effort of will occurring. And he's aware that the computer's memory has been subtly altered. He sees himself staring, shocked, at the sudden anomaly in the figures, then jabbing wildly and impotently at the keypad.

  'You stole the money? You did that?'

  'We both did it, Eddie. You were here. And we didn't steal it, we moved it, that's all. It's in a bank, in Africa. The account of a children's hospice. They have better uses for it than those people you worked for.'

  'No, wait a minute here: you framed me? You framed me for a non-existent crime that had me running from the mob, set me up to take Gordon's place and got me removed from my body? That was all your doing? Is that what you're saying?'

  'It's not quite like that. Time works... there are options, alternatives. It's possible to explore the options when you know how. This was the best of the feasible alternatives. I didn't exactly make these things happen: I allowed them to happen.'

  Eddie's getting angry now. He feels manipulated and abused. 'What the hell for?'

  'For them.'

  And they're back on the Willflower, in the control centre, watching Oslo and the crew staring at their monitors.

  'For them?'

  'Someone has to look after them. They're children, really. You were the best man for the job. The only man, in fact.'

  'Why? What's special about me?'

  'Ha. The fact that you could even ask that question. That suit, the horror of it. It would drive almost anyone insane. But you, Eddie, you had such low self-esteem, you expected so little from life. You not only survived the transition mentally intact, the suit actually improved you as a person. Be honest. You were such a nothing before, weren't you?'

  This is probably true, but it still makes Eddie angry. 'All this? All I've been through was so I'd be here to babysit a bunch of immature illiterates? That's the Grand Purpose?'

  'They're more than that, Eddie. Much more. They're very, very precious. They're all that's left of the human race.'

  A flash, and Eddie and the angel are standing in a dusty, barren landscape. It's dark. There is a storm overhead, but it's a dry, lifeless storm. It looks like an alien world, but it isn't. Eddie knows where this is.

  'Earth?'

  'It can't surprise you too much. You saw how things were going.'

  The human race has died out. Not a complete surprise, true. Still, it's one thing to suspect it, but to know it for certain, to see it ... Eddie feels like he's been hollowed out, like someone's carved out his insides with an ice-cream scoop. 'The entire species... extinct?'

  The angel nods and starts scuffing her toecap against a stone on the ground. 'All except for the crew of the Willflower.' She stops kicking and looks up at him. 'It doesn't have to be this way, Eddie. We can choose another alternative. One where the money never goes missing, and you live out your life on Earth.'

  'And the human race?'

  The angel looks away and starts scuffing her toecap again.

  What kind of option is that? Eddie goes back to live out his nothing of a life in his invisible wretched way, and his species expires? He looks out over the dry, dead panorama and sighs a long, heavy sigh. 'No. I think we'll keep things as they are.'

  The angel smiles at him and nods. 'And as for the crew...' They're back on the ship again. Back where they started. '... I made them illiterate. They had to change if they were going to survive. What was here had to be broken down. They had to lose the madness Gordon and Gwent and the others had planted here.'

  Eddie says: 'Right.' It's not much of a response, but suddenly he feels very tired. He's gone from being a manipulated babysitter to The Guardian of All Humankind in the space of a few seconds, and he'd like to lie down somewhere for a few decades and think things over.

  'It's time for me to go now, Eddie.'

  'Go? Where would you go? You're everywhere, aren't you?'

  'I have to leave you.'

  'But you'll be back, right?'

  'You needed to know certain things. There are some things I can't tell you, that you'll have to work out yourself. You'll understand, eventually.'

  'Wait. Are you saying this is our one and only conversation?'

  The angel looks away. 'I... I don't know.'

  'You don't know? Well, why don't you just zip off to the future and check it out, Dr Who?'

  'It's complicated. I can only go back. I can't access the future.'

  'That doesn't make sense. How would you know this is the right thing to do, then? To have this conversation with me?'

  'I assume it's right, because I haven't come back to tell myself it's wrong.'

  Eddie says 'Right' again. What else can he say?

  'Apton is about to revive, I have to send you back, now.'

  Back in the suit. Great. 'One last question?'

  'I'll answer it, if I can.'

  'Just one. Something I've been puzzling about for a long time. Maybe you're smart enough to tell me.'

  The angel glances over at Styx. 'Quickly, now.'

  'What the hell does "DFI" stand for?'

  But the angel doesn't reply. She just smiles one last smile, waves and vanishes.

  And Eddie's back in the suit.

  But it feels different now. Better. He tries moving his right arm, and his right arm actually moves. He evokes the impulse to raise his left leg, and his left leg really rises obligingly. The connections are right, now. The ship has managed to rewire him. He takes an exploratory step. And another. He can walk. He feels quite nimble, in fact. He may take Salsa lessons.

  He hears a groan. Styx is trying to get up. Eddie bounds over to him. He kneels and slides his claw under the injured drone's neck. It's a gentle, subtle movement.

  The floor he's kneeling on starts to curl up around them.

  Eddie doesn't try to resist. He trusts the ship to take care of him.

  The floor forms itself into a tunnel, a tube. He's slipping down it, like a slide at a water park. Styx is safely in his arms.

  And they're tumbling now. Down a chute.

  And suddenly, they're back in the control centre.

  Peck's there. And Oslo. And Gwent.

  They haven't seen him, yet, but they're starting to turn towards him.

  And a message appears in his helmet.

  'DFI = Different Fucking Idea.'

  Eddie smiles. The crew are facing him now, looking puzzled and confused. Their mouths are forming questions. Lots of questions.

  'The ship'

  'It's fixed itself..
.'

  'What's going onavitch?'

  Eddie takes a step towards them, and holds up his hand. 'OK, people,' he says. 'Questions later. We've got a lot to do. There's a planet to colonize. Let's get to work.'

  He hears the angel voice one last time: 'Good luck, Eddie.'

  Luck?

  Eddie grins.

  What's luck got to do with anything?

  There is a jolt as magnificent engines kick into wonderful life.

  The good ship Willflower peels away from Jockstrap, and arcs towards humankind's new home.

  About the Author:

  Rob Grant was born in Salford. Despite being hopelessly and incurably tone-deaf, he spent ten years at Chetham's School of Music. He maintained his place in the soprano section of the cathedral choir long after his voice broke by silently mimicking the lip movements of the person in the opposite row. Even though insanely liberal lecturers provided the exam questions months before the exams, he managed to fail his second year at university without ever sobering up. He has been fired from every job he ever had, including selling ice-cream and shoes, moving drums around in a chemical factory and an eighteen-month stint putting paper into one end of a computer printer and taking it out of the other. He spent what he can remember of the eighties churning out radio scripts for every living comedian before moving into television. He co-created Red Dwarf for BBC television in 1983, and in 1988 BBC television actually got round to making it. He recently created and wrote the pre-medieval comedy Dark Ages for ITV, and the alien-invasion comedy The Strangerers for Sky.

  Colony is his first novel since the international bestseller Backwards.

  He has the chiselled body of an Olympic athlete, makes love like a Greek god and has the vivid imagination of an incurable congenital liar.

  Also by Rob Grant:

  Novels:

  Incompetence (2003)

  Fat (2006)

  Series:

  Son of Soup (1996) (Red Dwarf Scripts with Doug Naylor)

  Backwards (1996) (Red Dwarf)

  Note: Grant Naylor is a collective pseudonym for the writing duo Rob Grant and Doug Naylor.

  Table of Contents

  PART TWO

  PART THREE

  PART FOUR

  Table of Contents

  PART TWO

  PART THREE

  PART FOUR