#ridiculous and predictable that this is my first red dwarf fic I'm posting

[freshmangojuice]

Long after Lister and the Cat are gone, and Rimmer has shut himself down, Kryten is left alone again. Going senile like Holly and suffering with android dementia, he wanders Red Dwarf still trying to keep the ship in order.

Warning: very sad oneshot

Grade 2 dust on the G deck pipes again. Kryten flapped his microfiber dusting cloth and took care of the unsightly dust that had settled on the oxygen pipes that run along the corridor. Such details were important. Five minutes later— or was it ten? He’d have to recalibrate his internal clock. His cloth was now significantly blackened, he would have to make his way to the laundry for it to join the next load. It was just two decks down. All he had to do was get to the Xpress Lift at the end of the corridor and head down. It couldn’t be simpler. Big jerky steps took him along the guiding yellow line on the floor that led to the lift.

He was following the yellow line. Definitely the yellow line. Just like Dorothy. It was patchy in places and crossed over the green and red lines in several places. It was a right mess. They were meant to be directional, somebody was going to get lost if they tried following these to get to where they’re trying to be. Those lines need to be repainted. The skutters should be able to take care of that. Kryten stopped his walk to quickly program a reminder for himself to organise the repainting.

Kryten had always related to the tin man, but the scarecrow in need of a brain was who he felt more like these days. He wasn’t sure why, isn’t this how things have always been? That was a 20th century film. What was it called again? He wondered why he even had the information on disk. Who would have shown it to him?

Humming the tune to ‘follow the yellow brick road’ as he carefully stepped on the patchy and wonky yellow line, what Kryten wasn’t aware of in that moment, was that he had painted those wonky lines 10 days ago.

His mind was confused. He forgot things, he got lost and turned around, things that should be familiar sometimes scared him. He hadn’t always been like this. 4 and a half million years ago he was top of the range exquisite technology. His head was packed with RAM and memory far larger than any mechanoid before. Now his components were failing him. He’d long-since run out of spare parts, with no materials to replace them. Maybe it was one too many corrupt files he’d had to scrub from his harddrive. Maybe it was a scorched circuit somewhere, or a screw loose. Maybe it was because he was so, so old. His system computer hadn’t updated his status in a very long time, he wasn’t aware of what was wrong, so that meant that nothing was wrong.

The Xpress Lift parted its doors and Kryten took his robotic jerky steps inside.

‘Where to?’ asked the lift.

Kryten stood there for a few moments, calculating and examining, scanning his surroundings for clues. He’d already forgotten about heading to the laundry, even with the dirty cloth still in his hand.

"Do excuse me," he said politely to the lift, "I seem to have taken a wrong turn. I will not be needing your services right this moment," and he stepped back out of the lift. He looked at the thick, flat, intertwining breadths of colour on the floor. It looked like a muddled bag of jelly snakes all wrapped around each other, and the longer he looked at them the more muddled they became. Kryten shook his head to recalibrate his eyes. He could’ve sworn he’d seen the snakes wriggling.

There were toilets further up the corridor, and Kryten ignored the jelly snake lines as he went back the way he came to get to them.

These toilets were never dirty, never clogged. It was as if nobody ever used them. That can’t be. There had to be a crew using them every day.

Hold on. 

Where was the crew? 

Kryten’s internal cooling fans started to spin faster. 

The ship had a crew, it did. He remembered Miss Anne. She had big black hair, it got everywhere, he was always cleaning it up. But he hadn’t seen her or her hair for a long time. Hadn’t she died? Hadn’t they all died?

The noise of the fans spinning as he overheated buzzed through his body.

Yes, yes. She had died. She was on the Nova 5. They had crashed and the humans had died. Then he was alone. He’s still alone. How long had he been alone?

No, no. He was a mechanoid. He wasn’t supposed to feel alone, he wasn’t supposed to feel anything.

So why did he?

He couldn’t remember breaking his programming, nor could he remember who it was that helped him do it. The name of the ship he was on, and had been on for over a million years eluded him. The only companions he knew of now were the last remaining skutters. The only voices he heard were automated. There was nothing left to remind him of how much it meant to him to be a person. There was no one to look after, no one to joke with. Kryten had lost his friends and lost himself long ago.

#red dwarf #fmj #fmj: fic #ridiculous and predictable that this is my first red dwarf fic I'm posting