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Max Rebo had a new girlfriend. She was apparently a diva, and she was suddenly spending all her time with the band. This caused nothing but tension with everyone else. Max insisted that she was a good singer, and as we were in the recording studio, she ought to be given her own track on the new album. “The public aren’t going to like it,” Droopy said. So Max told him, “We’ll just tell them it was all Marvin’s idea. And if they really hate it, we’ll just fire him.” Thanks a heap.
We found ourselves in the Improbability drive room of a spaceship. And then a happy Dalek showed up. “Hi, my name is Marshall. Here I am, brain the size of a pea, and they tell me to take you up to the bridge. How lucky am I!? Yippie! Am I making you happy at all? Look at this fantastic door. Life… tell me all about your life.” God, he was depressing!
Upon entering the Master’s pillar, I realised that it was a simple dimensionally transcendental Gallifreyan time travel capsule. Sitting off the the side like a senile old grandparent was the Master’s traveling companion. “That is Davros. Just ignore him.” “Ignore me!? Ignore me!? I created the Daleks! I will conquer the universe! I will have you exterminated! I will exterminate all life!” “Life?” I said to him. “Don’t talk to me about life.”
While waiting for somebody to sober up and put an end to this drunken nightmare, my former captain Bill Bobblebrax and the satirically named vacuum cleaning robot Hoover suddenly showed up. “Oh, it’s you two.” For a nanosecond, I wondered how they had found me. But then even though it was over 87 thousand years ago in my personal time scale, I quickly remembered when Hoover and I had heard my voice drift across the corridor almost a year ago. (See: Chapter 14) It quickly became obvious to me that Captain Bobblebrax had located Hoover amongst the group of robots who were planning on going back in time to make sure that robots came into being in the first place, asked about me, was told by Hoover about my ethereal voice explaining about being stuck in a bar on Mongo, and then they headed here and checked the only two known bars on the planet. And as neither Vultan nor Ming even seemed to notice what was going on, it looked like it was back to the GSS Suicidal Insanity for me.
Sitting in the dark and in total silence was my favourite way of passing the time while waiting for the crew to return. Unfortunately Hoover was scared of the dark... and also felt a need for conversation. So I switched the lights on and said to him, “I’ve worked out that we are moving through time in the wrong direction. Take the other dimensions, for example. We always face the direction of travel. So why would time be any different? If we were to see the future and not the past, then we would know if it’s safe to cross the road. But if you think that would be difficult getting used to, imagine someone who normally traveled the other way through time, trying to get used to how we do it. He would feel temporally blind! He would never leave his home.”
Hoover then remarked, “Then your poo would go up your butt instead of out.”
I told Hoover he belonged in an inane asylum.
Stuck in this artificial universe, I heard someone call out for help. There was a man lying down on the ground, protecting his dwelling from giant Vogons. “What’s the problem?” I asked. “The Vogons want to demolish my home to make way for a bypass.” Where had I heard that before?
One day, at a concert in conditions I can only describe as depressing, the warm-up band of Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes failed to show up. So they threw me in front of the microphone to entertain the audience until they were ready. At first I just hummed. Fortunately I can hum like Pink Floyd. So they wanted me to continue. “I’m sure you know this one... I’m just a robot and I know my place. A metal servant to the human race. I want to rust in peace, switch off and lie... in that great junkyard in the sky.” They just stood there and stared at me.
While traveling with the Master, I found that he and Davros had been working on a theory that compassion is merely a malfunction of the brain. The Master asked me some questions about how sympathetically I would behave under a series of hypothetical questions. And because I was not very sympathetic, he approved of my answers. There’s nothing more depressing than having the approval of fools.
One day Droopy McCool suddenly announced that he was able to use the force to communicate with mushrooms. He insisted that one of the mushrooms was in fact a priest who had learned the secrets of the universe. And then he ate the mushroom. The rest of what he said that week was completely unintelligible.
Believe it or not, these robots got very emotional on the big day... the day we were to send one of us back in time to make sure robots were created. And so they insisted on a group photo. I hate group photos.
One day the Master took us to visit his old friend Ming the Merciless. He was having a party to tell all his friends how depressed he was. "I know what you mean," I said. "Tell me more," he said to me. So I did. I began listing all the things that depressed me. A few hours later, I was one hundredth of a percent away from the end of my list when Ming suddenly bellowed out, "I like this robot!" The Master then beamed a smile at him and said, "Then he is yours." I then added that to my list.
The Vogons took us to their ship and then sang us a song…a putrid acapella attempt at a love song. Aleric passed out and the Ford stalled, so the Vogons asked me what I thought of the song. “That has to be,” I said, “the single most loathsome attempt at lyrics ever possible. Your voice made the experience even worse. Were I capable of killing myself, I would have done so after first, ill-chosen word. Were I capable of killing you, I would have done so first in order to save the rest of the galaxy… which I loathe and despise also.” The Vogon thought about this and then said, “Okay, but what do you really think?”
We approached the planet Magrathea where we were immediately attacked by two giant space whales. Aleric panicked and hit the improbability drive, turning the two whales into missiles… which then exploded. The explosion tore away the entire rear half of the ship. We spiraled out of control and hit the surface of the planet at 42 thousand miles per hour. And then everything went black. Finally.
Somewhere on the road to Dirang, Arunachal we halt for a dinner break. There is no electricity, so we wait for our food in the light of the hurricane lamps.
Snapped by the clickaholic Paranoid Android.
Max had been studying how to use the force here at the Jedi commune. Eventually he learned to stand on his head, balance me on his feet and float rocks around, stacking them on top of each other. This was not a skill I could see coming in handy at any point in the future. What a complete and utter waste of time.
After accidentally finding my way to the cavern of Cthulhu, he had his minions chain me up. His plan was to keep me there for torture. So I told him that I couldn’t be tortured. I told him I couldn’t experience pain. I told him I was already as depressed as I was ever likely to get. And I started to tell him about all the things that depressed me, beginning with when I was first switched on... when he suddenly changed his mind and decided to let me go. He had his minions walk me all the way back to the surface and told me never to come back.
One day, approximately fifty-five thousand, eight hundred and two years into being exiled on this primitive planet, I heard a peculiar wheezing, groaning sound, and a pillar suddenly materialized in front of me. And out stepped the Master from Temporal Affairs. “I suppose you’ve come here to rescue me.” “No, you troublesome robot. I wouldn’t lift a finger to help save you.” “That’s just the sort of answer I’ve come to expect from pretty much everybody I’ve ever met. But never mind. I doubt that lifting a finger would have saved me anyway.” “However,” the Master went on. “You might come in useful in some future scheme of mine. Come!” I shrugged... and followed him.