Talkie zips up his full body armour for a cosy chat with Justice's ruthless simulant.

Name:	Unknown
Occupation:	Ruthless Killer Simulant
Qualifications:	Ruthless, homicidal, made in Taiwan
Distinguishing Marks:	Red glowing eye, body chrome, knife wound in forehead
Operational Notes:	For those looking for the main difference between androids and simulants, it is this - an android would never rip off a human's head and spit down his neck.

Hi there mister simulant, would you like some toast?

Grrrrr.

If you're just going to groan I'll be forced to make lewd jokes about your single red eye...

Arrgh!

Oh. You've not calmed down much, then?

Are you still speaking, maggot?

Um... ah, yes, I was. Sorry about that.

How would you like me to shove a razor-sharp blade through your grille?

About as much as I'd like a world without bread. But, erm, this, er, is sort of an interview. Kind of.

Sure it is. What did you want to discuss? Who I killed for breakfast? My favourite shade of blood?

How about how you ended up aboard Red Dwarf in a cryogenic pod labelled Barbra Bellini?

Ah, that's a great story. Full of pain, death, violence, twentieth century folk songs, and at least one bottle of ketchup.

Sounds intriguing...

Simulants like me were created for combat. We live longer, fight harder and leak fluids far less than humans. But as time went on and war stubbornly refused to break out, the simulant line was under threat of decommission. In the end, though, that didn't happen.

How come?

We threatened to kill everyone if they so much as threw a decommissioning glance in our direction.

Fair enough.

One war did break out, mind you. A massive team of sims were shipped half-way across the galaxy to stop some lunatic - a guy named Sparrow - with his own simulant army from rising up against the Earth government. We got there, tore his planetoid base apart, blew up anything that looked suspicious. What a great lunch-hour.

You stopped him from hurting anyone? That's marvellous!

Don't say it like that. We kicked ass, that's the point I'm making. We tore so many holes in that place it coulda won first place in a Swiss cheese lookalike contest. We found the owner cowering in a supply crate. He'd already started drinking his own urine at that point. Funny really, there was a perfectly good water supply in the next crate. Weirdo.

We never found his army, mind you. Man claims he was just... bluffing. Still, our bosses promised droids of mass destruction, and I take their word that they were there. Somewhere.

But then, you are entirely psychotic.

And proud of it. But as the years went on, things got kinda dull. Those humans are nowhere near as good at war as you'd think. Decades would sometimes go past with barely a scuffle. I mean, they're just not trying!

Eventually simulants kinda scattered. Some got menial jobs, and at least one ended up the head of a major TV network. But most of us aren't capable of being that ruthless. I wandered the solar system for a while. I tried busking, but Simon and Garfunkel just doesn't sound right played on the stretched tendons of a twitching victim.

But eventually you were arrested?

I killed 40 patrons of a diner on Callisto. They refused to serve breakfast to me, you believe that? I don't know what it was. Might've been past their serving hours, I guess. Or maybe it was the human foot I was waving around.

It took the cops 137 straight hours to bring me down, though. I'm proud of that. It's the best time since Quentin Ostrog held that siege in the tanning salon in 2309. He only managed 103 hours, but he came out a lovely colour.

And then you were scheduled to be shipped to Justice World.

It was a prison vessel. Hundreds of psychotic, ruthless, hopelessly deranged and murderous simulants were on board - so it was a swell atmosphere. This one guy, he'd kinda given up on killing humans and had taken to wrestling GELFs bare-handed. Didn't give the GELFs much warning, mind you. Just kinda jumped 'em in the street. Top guy, though. Sold the pelts as kind of a sideline.

So how did the prisoners get free?

It's hard to say. I heard a rumour that one of the guards dropped a key-card on his way off the ship. Some say he was running from an angry husband, others say he was fleeing from one of the prisoners.

Which one?

Well, at least eighteen claimed it was them, so take your pick. God, that was a good time. A real free-for-all, just like the old days. A simulant Woodstock, with less music but a great deal more unnecessary violence.

We hunted down every guard and tore them apart. Then we tore the pieces apart. Then we tore apart the pieces of the pieces. After that, it all got kinda confusing - though a signal came through that what we were doing by that time could be considered 'post-modern' and made us eligible for an Arts council grant.

But eventually you fled the ship, right?

You know, for decades you roam the universe, just looking to blow something up. You ache to see something go up in flames. And when I finally get to do it, it's a goddam accident.

What happened?

Well, you know how Space Corps policy insists that all ships carry a self-destruct?

Yes.

And you know how they further insist that access to this system have a secondary access point? Hidden somewhere away from the captain's office, in case of a siege or mutiny?

Yes.

And did you know that the most common hiding place for such an important big red button is in the galley?

Yes.

Well, I didn't. Apparently it all goes back to some report by a guy named Hollister. "In an emergency situation a captain might find himself forced to defend the hotdog supply." His recommendation was to conceal the big red button between the frozen meat and the sauces.

Well, I was prowling around, hunting down this survivor - the last one, some chick named Bellini - when...

You knocked a bottle of ketchup over.

Yes.

Onto the red button.

Turns out the button's grey, otherwise it kinda sticks out.

But it got redded afterwards, right?

Oh, that's funny. That's really funny. That's so funny I might just have to ram a toasting fork through your side.

Ulp.

Then the chick with the really calm voice started up. "You have nine minutes to detonation." So I did the only thing I could for my fellow simulants - I smegged off.

Heroic.

I dived into a cryo-pod and blasted off. Woke up a long time later having been picked up by a hologram, a mechanoid, a feline humanoid and an ugly little bugger with a beer gut.

The worst part was the first few minutes, though. Half-awake and disorientated, who do I find to talk to? Some dizzy blonde computer head with fewer IQ points than a jam sandwich. I sat in that cockpit listening to her rant on for what felt like hours. She had this theory that all alerts - red, blue - should be the same colour to save confusion in an emergency.

But then you moved on to trying to kill the guys...

Yeah, things picked up. It was kind of annoying, though.

How come?

I was arrested, imprisoned, and scheduled for shipment to a prison colony. I escaped, mutinied, killed, detonated, froze and fled. In the infinite reaches of space I was rescued some three million years down the line and thawed out. And where did I end up? The same bastard prison colony I was heading for anyway!

Thank you, erm, simulant. One final question - would you like some toast?