Exes

The Jupiter Mining Corporation, an adequate mining company in history, has fallen. Now one ship, one crew have vowed to drive back the night and re-kindle the light of civilization, or just mess around in space. On the mining ship Blue Dwarf, hope lives again. Kind of.

Plisken opened his eyes, white light rushing in to his over dilated pupils. He pushed himself up, those strange black spikes clouding his vision as he sat up too quickly. As the spikes cleared, he took in his surroundings, a cluttered and messy workspace with pieces of paper and books strewn all over the place. Thick looking walls enclosed the room and a simple wooden door made and inviting exit.
“Oorite dude,” said a happy English accented voice, “You could ‘ave asked before visiting.”
“Holly?” muttered a confused Plisken as he tried to make sense of his surroundings, walking around and looking at the books, “Where exactly am I?”
“Well, exactly speaking, you’re in my house.”
Plisken stopped in his tracks, “Your house?”
“Yeah, and you didn’t even knock before coming in.”
Plisken ran his hand over the grey walls, they felt real. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“Well, I’ve been rather busy, hiding from that virus thingie and what not,” Holly said as his face appeared hovering in the centre of the room.
“So, I’m in the computer network?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“Smeg,” muttered Plisken as he went to take a seat on one of the chairs that was sat at a desk covered in a mess of papers, “Miss. Jones’ failsafe program must have backed up my mind before I died.”
“Yeah, that was lucky,” smiled Holly as his bodiless head floated down to eye level with Plisken.
Plisken sighed, another great and wonderful adventure, “Is there anyway out of this?”
“Well, Phi and Katrina put your body in stasis so we could try and put your mind back into your brain.”
“Hm, I think we’d need Miss. Jones for that.”
Holly thought for while, which was something Plisken had not seen him do since… well ever. Apart from that time they had tried to remember the number for that interplanetary take-away and Holly was the first to get it. But aside from that Plisken had never seen Holly think.
“What about robots?”
Plisken was stunned that Holly had actually come up with a good idea. But there was only one place they could get a robot that could store a whole human mind, and Plisken did not want to go there.

“Alex?” spoke Plisken’s disembodied voice, a strange ethereal mix of chords floating down out the speakers.
“What the smeg?” muttered Alex. Alex was lying on a table in the medi-bay, the room empty except for Seymour also lying on a table, his wheel chair discarded in the corner of the room. A small note was lying next to him. It read "Gone kidney fishing on deck 25, sorry. -Phi"
“Oi! Alex!” shouted Plisken in a strong accent.
“Jesus!” Alex said with surprise, jumping from his seat, “Plisken?”
“No it’s Mary Queen of Scots, of course it’s me!”
“But your dead!” cried Alex.
“Yeah, well it’s a long story and suprisingly death isn't the handicap it use to be. Just look, I need you to go to the janitor closet on deck 16.”
“Why?”
“Just do it, please,” sighed a frustrated Plisken.

It didn’t take long for the elevator to reach level 16; the in-flight movie of Casablanca had made the whole journey a lot smoother. The doors slide open to reveal a normal looking corridor, ocean grey in colour, with cables and wires leaking and growing from various panels and consoles that the virus had destroyed. Various pieces of singed metal littered the floor and a couple of roof panels had fallen loose by explosions and were now dangling from the ceiling. A couple of lights still functioned, mostly the emergency red lights, but many had burst from overloads of electricity, leaving shards of glass and all the stuff that makes light bulbs work strewn on the floor, a definite safety hazard. The location of the janitor’s closet wasn’t a total mystery to Alex, something that troubled him deeply, and he had been able to find it with relative ease.
“Yes, this should be it,” Plisken cracked and grainy voice said from the broken speakers, “There are not speakers in there so I won’t be able to talk to you but you know what to look for.” Even under the poor quality of sound, Plisken’s voice seemed tense.
Alex looked at the door, nothing out of the ordinary to him. A simple sign the said Janitor’s Closet and a simple door panel. It was a simple ocean grey door. But it lead to somewhere that was could be described with a significantly more complex word than simple. It did in fact lead to somewhere fantastical.
Alex pressed his hand against the door panel. The door slide open to reveal a large hall, far larger than should have been able to fit within the cupboard. The hall stretched a way back, a vast area that made Alex feel almost dizzy, not from the size of the room but for the room’s existence. Like this was unreal and unnatural. There were several things in the hall. One was a ship, about the size of Starbug, parked near the far side of the hall. With no visible entrance or exit, the ships presence was a mystery. The sleek lines of the body were of expert design; a design far in advanced of what any mining ship would be equipped with. There was also a large conical object sitting near the ship. It was shaped like a Pepper Pot, a large circle at the bottom and then narrowing to a smaller hemi-sphere about 7’ high. Four thick ridges, evenly spaced, ran up the side of the object each decorated with a small blue screen that displayed numbers that Alex had no idea of what they meant. The last object was the strangest of them all, which was saying something. It was what appeared to be a cottage - a little one story cottage in the middle of an impossible hall in a ship 3 million years in deep space. With a thatched roof and a small chimney that puffed out smoke up to an extraction fan far above it. A small window lay open, an apple and cinnamon pie cooling on the window sill. The door was open, leading into a warm and cosy living room mainly decorated in a rich wood. Alex rapped his knuckles on the door nervously, not sure who would live here.
“Yes?” came a female voice from within the house.
Alex was stuck for words and only managed to utter a couple of noises. A tall slender female human came to the door. She had dark brown eyes set against a smooth skinned face. Her pouting lips were a bright red colour and her hair was brown and cut short.
“You kind of look like Lexa Doig,” was all Alex managed to utter.
“Yeah, I get that a lot,” responded the Lexa Doig looking woman, “Did Danforth send you?”
“Danforth?” asked a confused Alex.
“Or whatever he’s calling himself these days,” said the woman, waving her hand and turning back into her home.
“Erm, Thomas Plisken send you might have a robot to put his mind in,” said Alex, not really realising how strange that sounded until it was already out of his mouth and in the public domain.
“Oh, did he now?” she said, a smirk creeping across her face- revealing a set of perfect teeth, “Did he tell you who I was?”
“No.”
The woman turned around with a flourish, almost too happy that she was able to introduced herself, “My name is GARNET, Grand ARtificial NETwork, and I’m Plisken’s ex.”

“Jesus Alex, could you not have got a body from Garnet that was more, oh I don’t know, more me?”
“She was pretty adamant that she only had one and that was a back up for her own.”
Plisken walked out of the repair shop, his mind fully loaded into his new body. A mirror revealed the true extent of his predicament. Plisken was now the spitting image of his ex, something that he was not all too pleased about. Even to the last detail in the eyes, this back up body was the exact same as his ex-wife’s.

Now perhaps some explanation is in order because I’m pretty sure I’ve not explained this very well. Like most people, Plisken married, although his name was Danforth at the time. And he’s married about 7 different people, but that’s not the point. When he joined the Blue Dwarf crew, he was married to Garnet, an AI program that he had had Garth create for him. She had originally served as a source of knowledge for Plisken, but he soon developed feelings for the program, who could project herself as a hologram. However, Holograms are not the most interactive of the beings and instead Plisken commissioned a robot be built in her exact image for her to have control over. Now being a big fan of Andromeda, like all the cool kids of the century, Garnet looked like Lexa Doig. But after a while of being married they got divorced because of the same reasons most people get divorced. And that is why Plisken’s ex-wife has a spare robot that looks like Lexa Doig.

“This is just going to be great to explain to the rest,” muttered Plisken, leading a chuckling Alex to the Refectory where he would have to explain a whole lot.

<OCC- Sorry if it's kind of rough>