Holly (Female)

Before the accident that wiped out the crew of the Red Dwarf, you could have asked Holly, the tenth-generation Artificial Intelligence supercomputer that ran the ship anything, and he would answer correctly, and immediately. With an IQ of 6000, Holly was the next best thing to infallible. But when the accident occurred and he was left alone for three million years in deep space, the Red Dwarf computer went a little senile, turned peculiar. Now he spends his time (like the rest of the surviving crew) trying to find ever more ways of filling up the time as infinity yawns before them like a great yawning thing. Holly's particular penchant is for practical jokes, which he invariably plays on Lister, who invariably finds them less than amusing. Like most (okay, all the people on Red Dwarf, Holly loathes Rimmer, but is forced to maintain Rimmer's hologrammatic form.

When they signed aboard Red Dwarf, everyone was required to have their personality imprinted on a computer chip, which could be used to revive them, in the event of their death, as a computer simulation, or a hologram. When Holly had determined that the radiation levels had fallen sufficiently to allow Lister emerge from stasis, he knew that the last human alive would need companionship, but there was no-one left alive. He decided to revive one of the dead crew as a hologram, and settled on Rimmer as the one most likely to prevent Lister from going insane. It is Holly who explains to both Lister and Rimmer about The Cat, who is a lifeform that has evolved from cats, as man evolved from apes. Holly it is too who explains about the future echoes that they experience when they begin the jump to lightspeed for the trip back home.

Holly amuses himself by playing little tricks on Rimmer, whose treatment of the amiable supercomputer certainly merit such japes! Rimmer demands a short-back-and-sides, and Holly gives him instead a beehive hairdo! Another time he swaps Olaf Petersen's arm for that of Rimmer, and the arm attacks the hologram. Holly deciphers, at Lister's request, the Holy Book the Cat has brought to him, and discovers that Lister is indeed Cloister, the Cats' god. Meanwhile, Rimmer is poring over a garbage pod, which he believes to be an alien vessel. When Lister asks Holly why he doesn't tell Rimmer what the nature of the pod is, the computer replies "Well, it's a laugh, innit?" When they recover a post pod from Earth there is a video letter for Holly from Gordon, the eleventh-generation AI aboard the Scott Fitzgerald. It turns out that Holly and Gordon are playing chess, though they haven't got any further than the first move, which Gordon has just sent on.

Mutiny comes in the form of Queeg 500, the Red Dwarf backup computer, who takes over the ship after Holly has been judged incompetent. Holly challenges him for control of Red Dwarf, but loses and is erased. However, it turns out that Holly and Queeg are one and the same, and the computer was just testing the others to show them what life could be like without him! When they cross into a Parallel universe, Holly meets Hilly, a female version of himself, and is so in love with her that though they have to return to their own dimension, he later performs a headswap operation on himself and takes the form and voice of Hilly, but retains the name Holly. This unfortunately does something to his processors, and computer senility begins to set in.

She still knows enough though to explain to Rimmer what has happened when the Cat and Kryten disappear from existence after Lister has altered the time lines: because Lister has now led a completely different life, and never joined Red Dwarf, he never found Frankenstein on Titan, and the race of the Cat was never born. Similarly, Kryten was never rescued and so neither no longer exist in that timeline. Holly operates the transmogrifier they find aboard an alien vessel and changes Kryten from mechanoid into human; she also changes Lister into a superhuman (if a superhuman only a foot tall!), despite Rimmer's incredulous "You're going to let that fruitbat of a computer diddle with your DNA?"

She finally gets her full IQ back though, thanks to experiments conducted by Kryten, however this is at the expense of a somewhat curtailment of her remaining runtime. Her IQ has gone up to 12000, but her operational lifespan is now only three minutes! While in her almost-omnipotent form, Holly solves the problem of a white hole spewing time by calculating an impressive "pool shot" that will bounce a planet into the white hole, cutting off the time dilation effects they are feeling. Unfortunately this revokes all time that has happened since they encountered the white hole, and so Holly's IQ goes back to that of a car-park attendant.

She is however able to save the quartet from killing themselves when they think they have gone back to reality; she cuts in on a higher frequency to warn Kryten that they are about to become the latest victims of the despair squid.