Whatever happened to Justin Pancake?

Life as a Hologram is hard, but not hard enough as Justin Pancake found out.

When: 3 million years ago
Justin Pancake screamed as the explosion destroyed his holographic body. The pain was simulated, but it still felt like pain. It wasn't a real death, but it felt like one.

A million years later Justin woke with the guilt of what he'd done. His pathetic body materialised in the stasis corridor where he was surrounded by the suspended bodies of his victims. He pressed his holographic face up against the first few stasis booths, and felt a hollow in his stomach.
“Holly... what happened, is this my fault? Holly?”
Holly was a computer, and so didn't have any anger or any reason to make Justin feel guilty for his crimes. But he simply answered with “Yes dude.”

Justin hung his head and then fell to his knees and cried. Then he started bashing his face with his hand. “Why did I listen to that stupid Scottish bitch?!” Then he looked around. “Kara... is Kara...”
“She's dead.” Holly said. “The explosion you both created destabilised your holograms. You experienced something only a few Holograms ever have, holographic death.”
“It felt so... real.” Justin said.
“It should. It was programmed that way to make you try and stay alive, recreating holograms can be expensive you know. Sometimes the holographic technical support were so sick of people calling them about how to fix their holographic friends who did something stupid like walk off a cliff or get hit by a spaceship. They could have told them to turn it off and on again, but got sick of this pretty quickly and created a built in mechanism for holograms to avoid death. The fear of dying.”

“Yeah it was horrible, I don't want to do that again!” Justin said.
“Exactly.” Said Holly.
“I mean... since I died for real, it was the most intense feeling I've had.” He thought for a moment. “It's not like I can have sex or anything is it?”
“Err... no.” Said Holly. “Everyone's either in stasis or dead.”
“I know... and that's because of me, don't make me feel any more guilty okay?!” Justin looked around the room. It was dusty and cobwebs had started to grow around the room. “So why did you bring me back as a hologram anyway?”
“Oh, I have a very important task for you.” Said Holly. “Keep watch.”
“What?”
“Keep watch.”
“Of the ship? Can't you do that?”
“Yeah, well I could. But It's boring, so I want you to do it.”
It was another hundred years before Justin realised Holly just wanted to spend all his time watching re-runs of X-factor and Jedwood videos which eventually turned him insane and allowed the Huzards to worship him as a God.

So Justin patrolled the ship for the next 2 million years. After one millennia it had already started to show many signs of wear, and several creatures had started to evolve. Justin avoided them mostly, he had no need to go near them and he couldn't touch them if he even wanted to.

“Bored.” He said after 2.4 million years. “Holly this is boring. Can't we just bring the crew out of stasis now?”
“You know we can't.” Holly said, annoyance showing in his voice after listening to Justin's whining for another millennia.
“Can't you turn me into hard light so I at least touch something?”
“No. Not enough power.” Holly said, as he had done every day for the last 2 million years.

“The only thing I can touch is myself, and that isn't any fun anymore.” Justin told one of the rodents on a side street near the Promenade. The semi-evolved rat stood hunched over swiping at his hologram every few seconds, not clever enough to realise he was just made up of light.
“You have it so easy... you can eat and mes about with others of your own kind and... have sex...”
The rodent stopped and just looked at him.
“Yes do you know how long it's been since I had sex?”
The rat sniffed at his face and swiped a paw through his soft-light body again.
“Since I had just an orgasm?” He said, feeling stupid talking to a rat, but it was less embarrassing than talking to someone intelligent. It was actually therapeutic, like telling your intimate problems to a stranger.
“It feels good to get this out in the open.” He drew his face closer to the rat. “Don't tell anyone this but I used to masturbate every day. Sometimes when I was happy, sometimes when I was sad. Girls didn't really pay much attention to me when I was alive, so it was the only way...” The rat was now just staring at him. “Did you know that holograms can't even masturbate? It must be something written into our code or something. I've tried... oh how I've tried! I found the best stash of porn mags down on C-Deck, and hey, don't go down there because they're mine now! But nothing... I think the source code allowing holograms to orgasm was too large so they just deleted it to save server space.” He sighed. “But every day I try. Sometimes I go down to the stasis deck and stare at the really hot girls in the stasis booths, you know, like Amber or Cass, just to see if it stirs anything in me. I know, embarrassing isn't it?”

The rat sniffed at his face. “No I'm not gay!” I did have a decade or two where I thought I might be. I found another porno of that variety, I'm not pleased to admit it but I did! But that didn't do anything for me either.”
Justin stood up and walked away, leaving the rat.

He walked down the deserted Promenade, this was still many thousands of years before the rodents created a city here. He walked into his favourite nightclub called 'Flaps' and fantasised about how sexy the girls were there. He tried his hardest to imagine them gyrating their stuff and swinging around the poles. But it was all just a dream now, and the place was now infested with ants the size of cats. He tried to swing around the poles just for fun, but fell straight through. His soft-light body refusing to touch the greasy metal bar. He sighed and left.

“Life's so boring.” He said, and urged Holly to turn him off. But he'd waited too long. Holly was now totally bonkers and only answering to the name “Great dark lord of all-knowing” and spending a lot of time manipulating the early stages of Huzard social development, and encouraging them to build a great temple on his behalf.

Justin looked forlornly down at his holographic penis. “Without this I'm not a man. If I'm not a man I'm not a Human. If I'm not a human I'm a.... an abomination!”

He remembered the last time he felt anything. It was in the explosion when he experienced holographic death.

So he trudged down to where it happened, the Blue Dwarf's engine core. It was here that the Cadmium II leaked when Kara exploded her bomb. The main engine core towered vertically above and below him. Skutters were still working on repairing the drive plates as they had been for 2.4 million years, they'd even decided to take 900 years off on strike. Like any engineering job they'd messed about so much at the start that they'd probably have to rush it at the end, even with 3 million years to spare.

Justin bit his holographic lip and stepped into the core. He slipped effortlessly like a ghost through the surrounding protective outer wall and into the superheated plasma inside. Despite his body being created out of light, it was too difficult to maintain a constant projection. His body melted away into pixels and he screamed. It was painful but after his initial scream he laughed.

He felt it. He could feel something!

To his annoyance he regenerated back in the stasis corridor. He had no idea how long he'd been inactive for, but a quick look at the clock told him he'd been regenerated straight away.
“Damn you Holly!” He said, realising that Holly had obviously programmed him to automatically be regenerated. For the first time in ages he had a grin on his face. He felt more alive than he ever had as a hologram. “That was fun!” He said, and ran down to the engineering deck to do the same thing again.

The second time he laughed and giggled as he bathed his holographic body in the seering heat and watched as it disintegrated around him.

After doing this a few times, he was totally hooked. So he wondered if he could kill himself any different ways. He tried walking through faulty electrical circuits, into large crushing electromagnets and into forceful mining compressors. Each time he died it made him feel more alive.

He continued this behaviour for another million years and became an addiction, more than an addiction, it was a lifestyle.

It wasn't until he was using the spare X-ray machine in the medi-bay storage room that he realised some of the crew had been awoken from stasis. He was flooding himself with X-rays at 90% capacity when he heard feint voices through the lead-lined doors.

Embarrassed at what he was doing, he quickly turned off the machine and poked his head through the door, allowing it to materialise like a ghost from the other side.

There was a team of people, most of whom he vaguely remembered from 3 million years ago, but standing in front of them all was a girl with long brown hair around her shoulders and glasses. For the first time in 3 million years, Justin Pancake felt aroused.

<Tag Hello again everyone. Your least favourite sex pest is here, ready to start chasing the ladies!>