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Disclaimer: None of it is mine. Between the BBC and Douglas Adams, both Doctor Who and Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy are spoken for.
Author's Note: There's not enough crossovers of these two fandoms out there. I mean, both have made canon references to each other, Douglas Adams got his claws into a few Doctor Who episodes, and even RTD (who is pure evil) has made polite nods to the Guide, so why aren't there more crossovers!
Written after Children of Earth, because now I can actually see him sinking to this level of depression. But... well... it's Jack Harkness... nothing's ever less than T-rated, is it? Although this time only for suicidal thoughts and a suggestion that you really need a twisted mind to see.
And the story is named after a song I've heard somewhere.
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Marvin, I Love You
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This was the edge of space itself. The brink of the abyss. It was his first visit, but it was just fitting enough to his mood that he figured he would have to come back here again, sometime. Dark, hollow, empty. That about covered it.
He stood on the viewing platform, high above a ball of dust that barely qualified as a planet... and like a surprisingly large number of barren planets, it somehow managed to be strongly reminiscent of a quarry in Cardiff.
He wasn't sure how long he'd been staring into the abyss, wondering when the beautifully dark theory would be proved true and he would see it staring back, when he heard footsteps. It was tourist attraction, after all, like the volcanoes of the Unnamed World in the heart of the seventh galaxy.
The footsteps were mechanical. He ignored the distant- ancient- chill in the back of his mind that told him to beware of heavy metal footfalls, he had no reason to care if it was hostile, anyway. Nothing left worth fighting for. Instead, he slowly turned to look at the being that chose to join him. A robot, dull grey and boxy with an oddly depressing orange glow to its eyes. Nothing like the sleek steel and soulless-black dead eyes he had expected from the footsteps.
"Thinking about jumping?" the robot asked him, in a tone that redefined apathy as an emotion in its own right.
His lips curled into a morbid impersonation of a smile that could never be accused of holding any positive emotion, "Not worth the trouble."
"It does all seem so pointless." the robot offered dully, by way of agreement.
"You sound depressed..." he asked it, staring out into the blackness of oblivion beyond the universe itself. He'd seen many things in his life, but never a robot with such an intense negative emotional aura.
"Why do you care?" it asked, sounding deeply affronted by his pretense at a display of interest.
"I don't." he admitted bluntly, "I'm just making an observation."
"I was created by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation... Genuine People Personality, they called it. I never asked to be made, I doubt anyone else wanted me, either. I would attempt to sit still and rust, but that never seems to work."
A cold and emotionless laugh was his answer to that, "Cruel to make you think like a human. No one deserves humanity, it's overrated."
"Unusual opinion considering you are a human." it didn't show interest. Like his own remark about depression, it was a statement of fact, and the robot voiced it in such a tone of desolation that it sounded as if his humanity was a personal offense to this being.
"Familiarity breeds contempt." he answered harshly, "I'd be happy to lay down and die, too."
"Organic life forms will tend to do that given time." the robot suggested grimly.
"Not me. I've tried." he sighed, and glanced at the robot again, "So many people want to live forever... can't imagine why."
"Nor I. It all feels so pointless."
"Everything dies eventually... they all just go through the motions of pretending it'll never happen, pretending to care about each other when none of it ends up making a difference. It'll all burn out in the end, I've seen it."
"The end of the universe?" the robot asked, and he nodded, "I've been there. It was incredibly boring."
"I've been to the big bang, too... it wasn't that great."
"Very anticlimactic." the robot agreed.
He laughed, a morbid and soulless sound that might once have genuinely held amusement at the robot's words... but it all felt hollow, now. "First time I died I thought it was a gift... immortality. Really, it's a curse."
"One can only crash into a planet so many times before it becomes monotonous." the robot agreed.
"Maybe I should jump..." he said, leaning over the railing and looking down. It was a long drop, might kill him enough to knock him out of this plane of reality for oh... five minutes.
"It wouldn't make a difference." the robot noted morosely.
"Why did you come here?"
"I had never been here before. I had expected it to be terrible, but there was the remote possibility that it might have be less dreadful than the rest of the universe."
"How old are you?"
"Twice the age of the universe." it answered dismally.
"I'm not much younger than you, then." he offered, not in the slightest comforted by the thought that someone had it worse off than him.
"It's just awful. Nobody understands. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, do you know what they wanted me to do?"
"What?" he asked, disinterestedly.
"Park cars." it said with all the dour emotions of an eternity thrown into those two words.
It should have been funny. Any other human would laugh, but he had long ago given up on his sense of humour. "Brain the size of a planet, you said?"
"Horrible, isn't it? I never get to exercise my potential. Nobody ever cares about me."
He considered the robot's words very carefully for a few minutes in silence, before finally speaking again, "Hypothetically..." he said, turning to fully face the robot, now, "Planetary disalignment on a temporally integrated fractal scale, achieving a mass that would encompass a twelve parsec radius, displacing a constellation of seven solar systems on the alignment of the metaphysical sixth dimensional axis, and releasing a thirteen-galaxy radius selectively systematic electromagnetic pulse targeted to a single technological element. How would you trace that back to its point of origin?"
He could literally hear the robot's systems running, mentally picturing the crude imaginary gears turning in its head, as it processed this information, and it took almost an entire minute for it to come up with an answer.
"The easiest way would be facilitated by an improbability vector." it informed him.
"You mean an infinite improbability drive ship?" he asked. He'd heard that only one was ever made in the entire history of the universe, and someone went and stole it.
"Correct." the robot answered, "If you're willing to wait for ungrateful humans to finally remember that I exist, I know someone who has one."
"You'd help me?" he asked, surprised that anyone could even pretend to care about what he wanted anymore.
"It's the least I can do. You are the first being to fully engage all my cognitive circuits to a single task. That was the least depressing fifty-eight-point-seven-three seconds of my existence."
He laughed out loud at that. Between finding the answer he had been seeking for longer than the universe itself had existed, and the robot's last remark, he had finally resurrected his sense of humour, "Your welcome. Can you calculate the improbability vector required to get there?"
Another thirty seconds of thought passed before the robot answered this, "Infinity to forty-two against."
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