| abstract | - Andy was the maintenance technician at a Total Immersion Video Game arcade on the fascist Earth. When the crew of Starbug encountered a squid that disabled its prey by inducing despair with its ink, they tried to escape it. The ink caused Starbug to crash and explode, killing Lister, Rimmer, Kryten and The Cat. When they awoke, they were in gaming chairs hooked up to an artificial reality console. A recorded voice told them that they had spent the previous four years playing "Red Dwarf" and that their memories would soon return. Andy then entered the room and began to explain what had happened. He had a thick Birmingham (Brummie) accent and was generally unkempt, but seemed to know his business. He told the ex-dwarfers that the game replaced real life memories, making the players forget that it was not reality. Andy tried to move the four men into the recuperation lounge so that he could set up the console for a new group of players. "Red Dwarf" was evidently a very popular entertainment with a two-year waiting list, despite the fact that the arcade had 20 machines. Andy asked the players how they had been killed in the game. When they mentioned the squid he was amazed, as that was apparently an easy hazard to avoid. He proceeded to lampoon their similar lapses in judgement, such as Lister's failing to get Kochanski and Rimmer being unable to find a secret message about his true identity. Andy found it very funny that Rimmer had not discovered that he was a brainwashed agent for the Space Corps and had played the idiot version for four years. He was especially surprised that they had missed the relatively easy "Planet of the Nymphomaniacs", on which some players had spent years. When the new players arrived to start their game, the room became overcrowded. Andy told the players to start plugging themselves into the equipment. He again told the departing players to go to the recuperation lounge, being amazed at their lack of intelligence. He was not surprised that they had only scored 4% in the game, describing them as "a bunch of twonks". They left Andy and discovered that there real identities were even more depressing. They were people that each of them found to be disturbing, living in a fascist state. The Dwarfers later found that this had all been a part of a shared hallucination designed to make them commit suicide. Due to the dimension theory of reality, the fascist Earth and Andy continued to exist in a parallel universe.
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