Holograms Never Die?

Chapter One

You will achieve your dreams. Size doesn't matter. You are very handsome. And women think you're extremely attractive…

Even that wasn’t enough anymore — those lies. After rewinding the tape, as if to give some pseudo reassurance, a Liverpudlian voice said, "You can trust us, you really can." Seconds later, the dictaphone was hurled across the sleeping quarters, thrown against the wall and smashed to bits.

The hologram’s long, pale legs swung over the side of the bed, feet firmly on the ground. He felt as though he was hung over. Headache, heart palpitations, dizziness; all signs that he badly needed sleep — but he couldn’t. He needed to stay awake; he needed to think. Even though thinking caused all the pain, he didn’t care. His mother who was a bitch queen from hell, his brothers that superseded him, his military crazed, abusive step father and his so-called friends, both from the past and present; despite the fact they all made him physically, emotionally and mentally sick, for some unsound reason, he felt empty without those thoughts fogging his mind.

Through bleary eyes he could half-way make out his reflection in the mirror. He meandered toward it, staggering the whole way. He stared long and hard at himself — eyeballing the constant reminder on his forehead that all he had been and all he’d ever be: dead. How he wished for that to be true. Although the darkness scared him, it was something he still longed for; a painless non-existence instead of being stuck as a hologram, supposedly keeping his bunkmate sane. He gave up his own sanity for this.

His hands tightened into fists, facial features twitched indignantly. He couldn’t stare at himself anymore, blurry as the image may have been. He pulled his arm back and slammed his fist into the mirror. Normally, this would make a person bleed, and he was hoping that by some strange happenstance he would, too — no, all it did was cause a slight glitch in his hand, pixels appearing inverted or not at all. It frustrated him even more; all that pain and nothing to show for it.

Furious, simulated tears flooded his eyes; a couple fell to his feet as he looked down, glowering at the one thing that kept him, in a sense, alive: his light-bee. He learned from Ace that a single blow to it was enough to effectively kill a hologram, but he had nothing on the ship to harm himself with. Unfortunately, his bunkmate, Dave Lister, had taken away everything he’d ever used or tried to use.

Why? he wondered. I’m not that important. Why would they want me to stay?

Rimmer glanced out of the door to the sleeping quarters, eyeing the bazookoids that laid propped up against the corridor wall; they’d been there since the whole Officer Rimmer fiasco.

Doesn’t anyone ever clean up around here? What has that bog bot been doing? Still, a bazookoid would do the trick, wouldn’t it?

It would also do more damage than he’d intend, like for instance, blowing a hole in the ship. That wouldn’t be very responsible of him. What even were his responsibilities? True, he had to keep Lister sane, but how could he when his own mental status was in shambles. He was unfit for the job and therefore a failure.

"I’m thinking too big," he said to himself, pacing. "I need something… smaller." His words trailed off as he eyed one of the books that sat neatly on the shelf: Learn to Speak Esperanto.

He walked over to the bookshelf and opened to page two-hundred-fifty, where some pages were cut out to make a hole. In that hole laid a switchblade. The phrase above the hole aptly read, "Estas memmortigo malkuraĝe ?" — or "Is suicide cowardly?" Rimmer didn’t know what the phrase meant; it was just a fluke that the blade was there. But was it technically suicide if the person attempting it was already dead?

Crap, he thought. It’s all crap. Death is crap. Death has no meaning. None. Nowhere to be found. Crap. Why doesn’t anyone realise this?

His face contorted, twisting in perplexity. "What am I saying?" he asked aloud.

Rimmer looked at his small desk in the corner of the bunk room and saw a pad of paper next to some of his pens, which were in a neat row. Briefly, he considered leaving a note.

"That is what people do, isn’t it?" he wondered. He’d never properly attempted it before this moment; he didn’t know what to do.

You know what? No. They don’t deserve to know.