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For George McIntyre, death was the best thing that had ever happened to him. His back didn’t ache, his workload had dramatically decreased, and best of all, the mafia couldn’t force-feed him his own nose. Sure, he wasn’t able to touch anything – he would never again make love to his wife (on any other woman for that matter) but to be fair that was not a particularly likely occurrence anyway. George was still able to work, watch holovids and hang out with his mates. People went out of their way to be nice to him which was far more than they had done when he was alive. No, despite all the benefits of a physical presence, George was enjoying his death immensely.
That was until the rest of the crew carked it as well. George was no fool – it was inevitable that one day a more senior member of the crew would die and he would be replaced as ship’s hologram. George had come to expect that. What he had not expected was for all of them to die at once.
It had been a normal day for him (or at least, as normal as it could be for a hologram). George had been walking to the drive room to begin his shift when he noticed a distinct shift in the quality of the ship’s background noise. He hadn’t had time to do more than notice it when his projection, usually so stable, began to flicker. With a roaring sound, what he could only describe as a fierce wind blew down the corridor at immense speed, passing straight through him and buffeting a few bits of litter down the hall and out of sight.
After a few seconds, his projection stabilised and he let out a breath of simulated air that he hadn’t realised he was holding.
“What the bloody hell was that?” he muttered, before continuing down the corridor to the drive room.
It only took him a minute to realise that something was not quite right. For one, it was oddly quiet. Usually at any time you could hear people moving about the decks, music playing from someone’s quarters, the occasional heated argument. Now, the only sound was the steady thrum of the ships engines. As he moved through the corridors he didn’t, as was usual, see any other members of the crew walking to or from their shifts. The only sign of movement was a single skutter, moving vaguely in circles, looking rather confused.
What George did notice were the small piles of white powder he spotted down the corridor. The first he took no particular notice of, assuming that someone had dropped an ashtray. But as he moved down the corridor he spotted more and more of them the closer he got to the drive room.
By the time he reached the drive room, he knew that something must have gone hideously, hideously wrong. Instead of the usual buzz of activity, people working at the consoles and moving around, the drive room was deserted. There were piles of the white stuff everywhere. Dimly, at the back of his mind, George began to get an inkling of what it could be. He pushed the thought away.
“Uhhm...Holly?” he said.
Holly blinked on to the monitor nearest to him. “Morning George,” he said, conversationally.
“Uhhm,” George said again, trying to pull his thoughts together. “What’s going on? Where is everyone?”
“They’re dead, George.”
“Oh.”
George looked around the empty drive room at the white powder, struggling to comprehend the gravity of the situation. Dead? That couldn’t be right.
“A-Are you quite sure?” he said eventually.
“I’m certain, George.” He grimaced, sympathetically.
“B-but how?” George stammered, sinking into the nearest chair.
“A drive plate was repaired ineffectively. This resulted in an explosive radiation leak that spread through the ship in seconds, killing the entire crew. ”
“You mean everyone is dead?” he said, dumbfounded. Surely he wasn’t the only one left?
“Well, not technically. Third technician, David Lister, survived the accident, sealed in stasis.”
George breathed a simulated sigh of relief. He and Dave had never talked much, but he seemed a nice enough bloke. At least he wouldn’t be alone.
“Can we bring him out of stasis?”
“I’m afraid not, George. While it isn’t a problem for you, there is still enough residual radiation to destroy any organic matter. I can’t remove him from stasis until it has completely cleared.”
“And when would that be?”
“About three million years, give or take.”
Three million years.
“B-but what about me? Are we returning to Earth?”
“When the radiation leak occurred, the ship’s failsafe systems triggered automatically. In order to prevent contamination to any planet, or any other vessel, Red Dwarf has automatically started on a course out of the solar system.”
George put his head in his hands. It was definitely not his day.
***
George McIntyre wandered the abandoned corridors of Red Dwarf in silence, unsure of what to do. He had no duties that needed attending to now that the ship was heading on its course away from home. All he was able to do was to keep himself busy. He attempted to read or watch the occasional holovid but mostly he moped about the ship, remembering the crew and feeling very sorry for himself. Every time he came across a pile of the white stuff, he would pause, and wonder who this one was and whether he had known them. He visited the stasis booths to look at the only other person alive (or rather, the only person alive, period. It’s not as if George could be classified as ‘living’, after all). Lister was dressed in the grubby clothes he usually bummed around in off-shift, his hand raised in a mocking salute. There was another crewmember’s remains just outside the other stasis chamber as if they had been about to enter. Though he couldn’t understand why someone would go into stasis in their free time, he often thought miserably about the poor sod who almost made it.
George also spent a lot of time thinking of home. He thought of his estranged wife back on Earth. They had their fair share of arguments and he hadn’t seen her since he started his term of service on Red Dwarf several years ago, but as the days wore on he found himself thinking of her more fondly than ever, as the ship moved further away.
It only took about two weeks for him to crack. To exist like this indefinitely was more than he could bear.
After a final wander through the deserted corridors, he found himself climbing the stairs to the observation dome – the great glass sphere on the top the ship where people often came to sit quietly and look at the stars. He searched the sky until he spotted the distant spec that was his home.
“Holly,” he whispered, his eyes fixed on it. “Deactivate me.”
Holly saw no need to argue. “Goodbye George,” he said.
And with that, the light bee fell to the floor and George McIntyre ceased to exist.