"Starla" - Part Three

Part Three

            O.K., before I begin this next part of my tale, lemme retract my closing statement from the previous part – this was not all a huge mistake!

            Tiffany got me aboard the Red Dwarf, just as she said that she would.

            At first, I didn’t know what had happened. The loud, strange noises came and went, and I had asked Tiff, “What just happened?”

            “We’re here,” Tiff told me.

            Naïvely, I asked, “We’re where?”

            Tiff and her three little friends just smiled and giggled at me before she went to the main door of her ship. Before she opened it, she advised me, “You may wanna get your phone ready for this.” I wasn’t sure what she meant at the time, but I got my phone out from my right jacket pocket for whatever reason.

            I didn’t wholly believe we were aboard the Red Dwarf until I stepped out.

            No longer were we in the middle of a Georgetown street corner outside of Starbucks. We were smackdab in the middle of the corridor of another spaceship – the Red Dwarf. To say I was overwhelmed would be an understatement. I was practically geeking out big time.

            “Oh, man! Oh, man! Oh, man! Oh, man!” I recall saying at least dozens of times in a row.

            J.P., Kelsey, and Omar were steps ahead of me and Tiff.

            Clearly, it wasn’t their first time aboard a spaceship, seeing the way they giggled at my expense. I didn’t mind – I would’ve laughed at myself, if I saw the way I looked in that corridor, with my phone being neglected in my hand. Remembering it, I started taking snaps of everything.

            As I was doing so, heavy footsteps thudded behind me, and I was reminded that Tiffany was standing there with the hood of her cardigan up over her beautiful head. “Quite a lot to take in, isn’t it?” she asked me.

            I scoffed. “You bet it is! All my life, I’ve dreamt for a moment like this!”

            I felt her warm, comforting hands come down upon my shoulders. “And now it’s reality,” Tiff softly said. “The Red Dwarf is a mining spacecraft – jumped back through time three million years to orbit Earth in 2025.”

            Again, I scoffed. “This is just…incredible!” I hopped up and down a couple of times. “They even have anti-mavity! How cool is that?!”

            “Yeah, every future spacecraft has anti—” Tiff stopped midsentence in a double take, looking at me strangely. “What did you say? Anti-mavity?!”

            “Yeah,” I clarified, not sure exactly what she was so confused about.

            “Ain’t it supposed to be ‘gravity’ and not…whatever you’re saying?”

            “Maybe on your planet or reality or whatever, it’s called ‘gravity’. But, where I come from, we call it ‘mavity’.”

            Despite my rationalizing, she still seemed a little perturbed.

            “Oh-kay, movin’ on from that,” she said. “This place appears to be abandoned.”

            We wandered further down the corridor, making our way into a control room of some kind. “What happened to the crew,” I wondered aloud.

            “They’re all dead.”

            We all jolted when we heard a new voice speak around us. It had an English accent, just like Tiff’s, but this one sounded like a middle-aged man. We searched around for it, but there was no one else in the room but the five of us. “Who said that?” Tiff asked our disembodied host.

            “I did,” he said again.

            “Who did?” I asked, growing frustrated.

            I felt a tap on my shoulder, thinking it was whoever this guy was. But it was actually Tiffany, who I saw directing my attention to a nearby monitor. There, the head of a bald white dude – looking to be in his fifties – floated onscreen. “Sorry for the jump scare,” he told us. “Welcome aboard the Red Dwarf. I am Holly, the ship’s computer.”

            Whereas Tiff and I were beyond impressed by the AI construct (which was like a next-level Alexa), the kids were more than a little freaked out. Kelsey, in particular, drew her ‘sword’ (a cut of PVC pipe with a cardboard handle) and aimed it at Holly. “Get back, warlock! You will not take our souls!” She was certainly a rather imaginative little girl, acting like the AI was a sorcerer or something.

            “Souls?” Holly reacted, visibly perplexed. “Oh, if ya mean the stasis booths, they’re on the fritz at the moment.”

            “‘Holly’ was it?” Tiff addressed the AI. “Could you tell us what happened to the crew of the Red Dwarf? How did they all die?”

            “Radiation leak,” Holly answered. “No one survived, except one crewman – David Lister. We call ‘im ‘Dave’ for short. He was in stasis until the radiation levels returned to normal, although millions of years had passed for ‘im by that time. Dave was the last human to exist aboard the Red Dwarf.”

            “Poor guy,” I sympathized, unable to imagine what it was like to be alone aboard a huge mining spacecraft, far beyond the reaches of space.

            Suddenly, we heard bickering voices approaching the control room.

            Two Englishmen walked in – a black man with a funky hairstyle and an even funkier sense of fashion, and a white man wearing a formal uniform and an ‘H’ marked on his forehead. The second they saw us, both of them froze in a state of shock.

            “Lister, are you seeing what I’m seeing?!” the white guy consulted.

            “Ya mean the three kids and the two beautiful women?” the black guy verified. “Yeah, mate…I’m seein’ it, too!”

            “Holly,” the white guy now consulted with the AI. “Are these…real people?”

            “Well, Arnold, if you’re askin’ me if they’re figments of your imagination,” Holly said, “then I have to ask why you’re imaginin’ three kids with the beautiful women?”

            Annoyed, the man named ‘Arnold’ retorted, “A simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would suffice, Holly!”

            “Yes, Arnold, they are indeed real human lifeforms,” Holly confirmed. “Intelligent ones at that – which is an improvement ‘round ‘ere.”

            The other man, who I presume to be Dave Lister, was overjoyed. “Do ya know what this means, Rimmer?” he said with a delighted chuckle. “I’m no longer the last human in the universe! That black hole we went through took us right back to Earth! We’re home again!”

            “I hate to dampen your spirits, luv,” Tiffany told him. “But you’re not exactly in your universe…or your time. You’ve jumped back three million years – give or take – to an alternate dimension. It’s 2025 down there.”

            Lister didn’t seem all that downtrodden. “No matter, gorgeous,” he remarked. “I can just start right over in the 21st century, doin’ exactly what I planned from the start – startin’ me own farm and/or diner on Fiji.”

            “That’s well and good for you, Lister, but what about me?” Arnold griped. “I’ll be nothing more than a hologram down there, unable to physically interact with anyone – not even a woman!”

            “Pretty much how it was for ya before you died and became a hologram, Rimmer,” Lister teased.

            “Hologram?” I uttered, looking on Arnold Rimmer with sudden interest. Up until that moment, I wondered why Dave was registered as being ‘the last human in the universe’ when Arnold (another human being) was there aboard the Red Dwarf with him. As it turned out, Arnold was indeed a hologram – my hand passing through his holographical form verified that.

            “This isn’t exactly a tattoo I wanted, you know,” Rimmer griped, pointing to the ‘H’ on his forehead. ‘H’ for hologram (how original).

            I couldn’t help but to laugh at all of this – the Time Lord, the TARDIS, the Red Dwarf, Holly the AI, and Arnold the hologram. And there was just one person that came to my mind in regards to all of it: “General Holden’s not gonna believe any of this!”

            “I hate to interrupt the fun, but another ship’s comin’ into orbit,” Holly notified.

            “Another ship?” Tiffany repeated, sounding unsettled by this. “Can you show it to us please?”

            “Now there’s a word I haven’t heard in a long time,” Holly said with a smile. “And just because you said it, I’ll even throw in some diagnostics I gathered when I scanned it – at least twelve thousand lifeforms aboard, all cold-blooded, bipedal vertebrae that are both humanoid and anamniote.”

            “Anamniote?” I parroted that last term with a frown. “As in ‘fish’?”

            Meanwhile, Tiff looked scared stiff. “Holly…can you give us a view of the spacecraft and its crew?

            Holly complied, removing his floating bald head from the monitor screen and displaying what appeared to be an alien spacecraft with a hull made entirely of fish scales (it even kinda looked fish-shaped). We were then provided a live feed of the ship’s crew, consisting of a species with fish heads and humanoid bodies, clad in fierce-looking metallic armor.

            And here I thought the day couldn’t get any more interesting.