Life in Red... • RED DWARF • Arnold Rimmer x OC story

5. Disorderly Conduct - part 1

Although it was most often dangerous, lawlessness and disorder made the perfect targets for some rather unconventional wage...

I rented from Mrs Dufresne for a total of three years.
That foul scent of sea food and fry oil from her restaurant still seemed to linger on my skin and in my hair no matter how much I'd bathed since.

Policing on Mimas was a private affair.
Most of the conventional sense of the law had been dissolved and in replacement, different systems of corruption were hired to dispose of issues in a variety of ways made specific to the needs of a relatively small market.

That being said, the 'police' still existed; so did digital files and digital courtrooms that remained intact despite the chaos.
Although, much of traditional justice had been rendered mute in light of a corporatism that arose from the different clubs and tourist traps. Not even the space corps could contain the syndicates and organized undergrounds that controlled most of the aboveground dealings.

One of the most lucrative of these systems? Total Immersion Video games.

On it's own, the idea was harmless. The games would employ electrodes inserted into the brain's frontal lobe and hypothalamus.
The designs of the games, once started, would generate artificial realities that were indistinguishable from real life.

Not only were they addictive on their own, but some of the games had the ability hide the memory of entering them from the players themselves.
People could play for years, or until their physical bodies stopped functioning in real world, without ever realizing.
These total immersion games became a collective social issue for preventable deaths, right beside smoking and obesity.

Despite the high demand of the games and the dangers they brought, they were near impossible to get ahold of without some sort of divine intervention.

People ordered the games in droves. Hundreds of thousands of copies being sold for fortunes across the solar system and still only reaching but a fraction of eager buyers.
Each game could be the price of a limb or a first born, and yet the market only drove up in value as assets slowly diminished across the planets and their inhabitants.

Some of Mimas' clubs happened to have a few
Immersion suites. They'd amassed collections of VR headsets to be rented out 'accessibly' to a few visiting high-class individuals.

These suites were especially rare and hard to find, as controlling the influx of requests was near impossible with everyone who wanted to have their go at escaping the nightmares of 'real' reality.

I'd heard rumours of them. Whispers and ghost stories from others who'd tried and failed to get their names on the waiting lists for these suites.

It had never occurred to me that they were a problem until by some sort of twist of fate, three weeks before I got a job on RedDwarf, circumstance put one of these suites right in front of me.

The odour of Mrs Dufresne's 'Thursday specials' still linger on my skin. That was the problem. That damned smell...

A club by the name of Ode to Titan had opened its doors next to her seafood restaurant.

Ode to Titan was the type of club that attracted a more distinguished type of crowd; who happened to have patrons with more refined inclinations towards their frequented establishments.

Apparently, that meant that establishments that reeked of 'ode to salmon' weren't particularly high on the must-attend list.

It was no surprise that the stench of three day old squid and Mimian Bladderfish wafted its oily fingers down the street and into that club.

And yet, when it did, when the stench happened, and when tourists stopped going to Ode to Titan because of the smell, the owners were quick to force Mrs Dufresne into closing her restaurant to eliminate the odour.

I'd lived unofficially in that storage closet for three years before I'd gotten an unofficial eviction notice to vacate the unofficial residence. It was upsetting, frankly.

Three years of enduring the smell of the restaurant and Ode to Titan couldn't endure it for three weeks.
It would have been an understatement to call me irritated.

And, as any well meaning pseudo Robin Hood figurehead would do, I took my anger out on the big, bad, corrupt installation that used it's powers to harm the otherwise nasally-divergent underdogs.

That being said, Ode to Titan's next biggest issue wasn't the smell of Fish oil, but instead a small fire that ruined their new wallpaper...

Private security caught me in an alleyway two blocks away with clothing that was singed and second degree burns on my forearms.
I couldn't say it was me. I wouldn't be so brazen to incriminate myself. But that didn't change the fact that I was detained, arrested and almost prosecuted in a virtual court of law.

Ode to Titan was owned by a powerful, relatively well equipped owner of a Total Immersion Game suite and likewise he had the abilities that most didn't with money that most didn't possess...

I may have been pissed that I lost my housing, but he was pissed that the little fire ruined his best tapestry.

My options after being caught were as followed, get killed or go to prison.

It was a stupid thing I may or may not have done... And prison would've been an off-world endeavour that I didn't imagine I would much survive either.

All of my credits were repossessed and my crimes were written on a permanent digital file, making it nearly impossible to bribe a way out.

There was a court date and I was given a few days before my prosecution and the events of my confinement would be decided.

I spent the first twenty-four hours trying to find a way off Mimas.
Even though I was pretty sure that being caught evading punishment for my infractions wouldn't look great on a permanent record.

Although, it couldn't hurt to try.