Who Knows This Morning What Will Happen Tonight?

- Chinese Proverb

Congratulations on stumbling upon my very first finished slash fanfiction. It's probably not very good and if it isn't – tell me! I am a serious writer ( most of the time ;-) ) and I take all criticism with a thankful heart. Be brutally honest, not honestly brutal though. I can cry if you're mean T-T.

This is a MALE SLASH fanfiction, repeat MALE SLASH. That means it involves the unlikely scenario of two men being in love on a TV show where the writers have no intention of pushing the two men together but usually like to involve homoerotic banter between them anyway. Can everyone here say JD and Dr. Cox? Glad to see we're on the same level.

UPDATE: I have resubmitted this story with larger font and with the paragraphs broken up, to make things easier for your lickle eyes.

IMPORTANT: READ THIS. The format of the story is as follows;

HI I'M THE TITLE OF THE CHAPTER

Hi, I'm an interesting quote/proverb relating to the chapter.

I'm the actual text.

I am diary text.

I am text written around events in the diary, but in narrative form and not as Rimmer.

The Last Human

Everything is true just as it is: Why dislike it? Why hate it? - Zen saying

Have you ever tried to imagine the darkness of space? That never-ending infinity of stars and cosmic dust? The universe stretching above, beyond and below you. It's quite difficult but I'll teach you how you can gain further knowledge of everything about you.

Close your eyes. You're a dumbass.

Ah-ah! If you'd closed your eyes like I told you, you wouldn't have seen that. Try again and close your eyes. If you're in a light room you'll see darkness, but not true darkness. Your vision will be slightly greyed. Perhaps a hint of purple will be creeping through.

Close your eyes tighter. It is blacker, but you'll get blocks of red and orange light. Your eyes cannot perceive true darkness. Can never see pure black. You look into the night sky and it seems black and ominous, but it's actually a very dark blue. The universe is far darker.

But it's not black.

The colour of space is on an entirely different spectrum. Holly discovered this when she was approximately 1,000,630 years old, and still male. 1,000,630 years old was very old, even for a computer of her status. She had an I.Q. of 6,000 (supposedly) and she was created to guide a mining ship named Red Dwarf from a planet called Jupiter in a galaxy known to its inhabitants as the Milky Way.

Intelligence of species is exactly relative to the distance from the centre of the universe. The nearer the edge you are, the smarter your species is. The Milky Way was practically dead centre.

So Holly was only relatively clever. She knew pi to three thousand places, but had no idea what offside was. The information mysteriously disappeared from her data banks when she acquired a female visage and no matter how hard she tried she couldn't upload it ever again. Her circuits shorted.

Thus, Holly and her intelligent, but slightly nutty, computer brain continued to float in space. She named the colour of space Vermillion: Version 2. It was nothing like vermillion, but as her name was Holly and red was the colour of holly berries it seemed a good idea.

Her insanity grew with time. It blossomed from loneliness. Her creators had died long ago.

The species that created her only lived for as long as around eighty of their planet's rotations around its star. Their planet was Earth, the third one from the star known to them as the Sun.

The species was stupid. In its futile attempts to be clever, it had inadvertently destroyed its own planet. So, most flew away to live on and destroy the other planets in the Milky Way. This species called themselves humans, though feminist marches during a week in the 21st century had demanded the word be changed to hupersons. The word human stayed and the women ate chocolate and watched the television show 'Will and Grace' until their periods ended and they forgot all about it.

Holly had missed her humans when they died. They were annoying, but lovable, like a really hyperactive, incontinent puppy. They were on a routine trip around the galaxy when a Cadmium II radiation leak killed them all.

Except for one. He stood quite happily, frozen in time in a stasis machine. Holly left him in there until the radiation was at a suitable level.

It took three million years.

When he came out she had a lovely surprise for him. All his colleagues were dead. His friends were dead. His ex-girlfriend and love of his adult life was dead. The man he hated most aboard the ship was dead and had been brought back as a hologram. His beloved pet cat had incestuously bred over the three million years he was in stasis and had evolved into a self-absorbed and vain humanoid species of which there were only two left.

David Lister, the last human, was less than thrilled.

These misfits travelled together for a couple of years and gained a new companion in the form of a sanitation mechanoid with self-nullifying behaviour traits. During these years, David Lister lived and loved and lost.

He gave birth to twin boys and sent them away to live with their mother-father for their own safety.

His new cat slept and cleaned his suits; the other one died shortly after being found.

The hologram formally known as Arnold Rimmer buried himself in loathing and feelings of worthlessness.

Holly grew bored of her male form and opted for a pretty but dopier face; a change which had both its good and points. She forgot why golf was a great sport, but she suddenly knew the differences between the plots of the Catherine Cookson novels.

One day they discovered a way to travel through time. Some developing fluid for photographs had mutated to become something with the ability to fully animate the moments captured. By entering these in the form of projection slides, Lister found he could visit himself in the past and he persuaded his teenage self to change his future. Rimmer then found himself alone (with the exception of Holly) as without Lister, the Cat never evolved and they never rescued Kryten, a sanitation mechanoid.

Enraged by Lister's success, he went to visit his younger self to try and change his own past. Nothing ever went as Rimmer planned and he remained on Red Dwarf, but at the very least managed to get his comrades back. "So nothing's different?" he asked Holly as the others walked away from him in disgust at his selfish deed.

"Hang on a sec, something IS different. According to my data banks you're not dead."

"What?!" Rimmer felt his head. The little 'H' all holograms wore to define themselves as un-dead was gone.

He groped with exaltation the objects around him. He was alive.

He was no longer a light-projected image hovering around. He was alive.

He almost jigged down the corridor and touched everything he could find, breathing in the scent of metal and stale air with orgasmic joy. He was ALIVE.

He danced down a corridor filled with boxes of explosives. And died again.