Title: The Time of your Death by Norwegian Porn Faerie aka kahvi
Fandom: Red Dwarf
Pairing: Rimmer/Lister
Categories: Humour
Length: Short (1903 words)
Warning: None
Rating: Rated by author as 'Mild R'

Author on LJ: Kat's Evil Mega-Global Journal
Website: Kat's Secretly Ironic Korner of the Universe

Summary: Time of your Death Travels – JMC-approved holographic holidays for the long-term deceased. For when being being able to touch and be touched is just too much to take.

Review:

After only a couple of weeks in his new hard-light existence Rimmer's really struggling. He's feeling cramped and overwhelmed by sensation, and it doesn’t help that Lister keeps on touching him - a friendly pat on the shoulder, the occasional smack on the head. In desperation he starts looking for a means of getting away from the ship, even if it only means taking a virtual vacation among his own subroutines, and fortunately the answer comes along in the form of a brochure promising holographic holidays for the long-term deceased.

Of course, as viewers of any show which deals with holograms and virtual reality know only too well, such things are never straightfoward. Rimmer's systems have been substantially re-engineered by Legion, and he runs into a backwards-compatibility problem which only becomes apparent after he's initiated the software. Thus, instead of a subjective two-week holiday which takes five minutes of ship's time, Rimmer is forced to endure six months of CGI paradise. "Forced to endure?" you may wonder - but then, this is the old old story of the man being given everything he thinks he wants, only to find out that he doesn’t want it after all. By the time Lister manages to find a way into the software to drag Rimmer to freedom, Rimmer is so overwhelmed by his experiences that he kisses him. Oddly, Lister doesn’t seem to mind too much.

This is a very well-written and thought-through story although I could have wished that it was longer. One quibble is that the author could really have done with the services of a native-English-speaking beta; excellence of expression and inexplicable typos do not fit well together. (Although I freely admit that I could not write a story of any sort in any language but my own.)

Red Dwarf slash is a scarce commodity and some of it is of less than stellar quality. This story, happily, is one of the best; it's a slash story that isn’t all about the sex - and that, in my opinion, is just what the hologram ordered.

Link: The Time Of Your Death