"Grant Naylor - Red Dwarf" - читать интересную книгу автора (Naylor Grant)

Red Dwarf
Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers
by Grant Naylor
Version 1.0, if you find errors, typos, whatever, fix them and increase the
version number by .1 and redistribute (Yes "ageing" IS a word in Britain!)
Scanned, OCRed and proofread by RastaJew.


Part One
Your own death, and how to cope with it

ONE
'DESCRIBE. USING DIAGRAMS WHERE APPROPRIATE, THE EXACT CIRCUMSTANCES LEADING
TO YOUR DEATH.'

Saunders had been dead for almost two weeks now and, so far, he hadn't enjoyed
a minute of it. What he wasn't enjoying at this particular moment was having
to wade through the morass of forms and legal papers he'd been sent to
complete by the Department of Death and Deceaseds' Rights.
It was all very well receiving a five-page booklet entitled: Your Own Death
and How To Cope With It. It was all very well attending counselling sessions
with the ship's metaphysical psychiatrist, and being told about the nature of
Being and Non-Being, and some other gunk about this guy who was in a cave, but
didn't know it was a cave until he left. The thing was, Saunders was an
engineer, not a philosopher - and the way he saw it, you were either dead or
you were alive. And if you were dead, you shouldn't be forced to fill in
endless incomprehensible forms, and other related nonsensica.
You shouldn't have to return your birth certificate, to have it invalidated.
You shouldn't have to send off your completed death certificate, accompanied
by a passport-size photograph of your corpse, signed on the back by your
coroner. When you're dead, you should be dead. The bastards should leave you
alone.
If Saunders could have picked something up, he would have picked something up
and hurled it across the grey metal room. But he couldn't.
Saunders was a hologram. He was just a computer-generated simulation of his
former self; he couldn't actually touch anything, except for his own
hologramatic body. He was a phantom made of light. A software ghost.
Quite honestly, he'd had enough.
Saunders got up, walked silently across the metal-grilled floor of his
sleeping quarters and stared out of the viewport window.
Far away to his right was the bright multi-coloured ball of Saturn, captured
by its rainbow rings like a prize in a gigantic stellar hoop-la game. Twelve
miles below him, under the plexiglass dome of the terraformed colony of Mimas,
half the ship's crew were oft planet leave.
No planet leave for Saunders.
No R&R for the dead.
He caressed his eyelids with the rough balls of his fingers, then glanced back
at the pile: the mind-bogglingly complicated Hologramatic Status application
form; accident claims; pension funds; bank transfers; house deeds. They all
had to be completed so his wife, Carole - no, his widow, Carole - could start