Chapter 1
The Heart of Gold
"It's not fair, I'm telling you, it's just not fair." Arthur said, pacing back and forth in front of the Nutri-Matic Drinks Synthesizer. "You mastered tea, although you left us under Vogon attack. You created coffee, however endangered we were by being pulled into by the gravity of a rather large star. So, my query is, why can't you simply come up with Coca Cola?"
"Sorry, guy, but that's just not possible." Eddie, the ship's all too cheerful computer chimed in before the Nutri-Matic could.
"Why!" he exasperated. "What could be stopping you?"
"Well, we don't very well know what's in it." the small drink machine replied flatly.
"But I've told you, it's… cola." Arthur was really at a loss on how to describe Coke. He knew what went in tea and coffee, but Coca Cola was so artificially made.
"Sorry, pal, but we'll need a little more to go on to make this Coca Cola." Eddie said happily.
Arthur sighed, defeated. "Fine, just make me a glass of tea, please." After the glass finished pouring, he took a sip, only to spit it back. "The tea I described to you, Nutri-Matic."
"Share and Enjoy." it replied, the drink dispensing into the dumped out cup the first had been held in. He turned to leave and found Marvin standing in the doorway.
"Err, hello, Marvin." Arthur said, not wanting to talk to the depressing robot.
"They're terrible, aren't they." he replied listlessly. "Always peppy, never stopping to think how horrible things in the universe are."
"Marvin, please, I really must be going." Arthur said, trying to hurry the robot along.
"Why? Zaphoid and Ford have been downing Gargle Blasters for the past few minutes, so they're either too smashed or in pain to be any good to talk to. Not that they're ever any good to talk to."
"Well, what about Trillian, then?"
"Messing around trying to figure out the improbability that the Improbability Drive can send us to a decent place to eat." this was because the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, had in fact been at the side of the universe they had started to head for before switching directions. "Not that I have to eat. No one ever considers me when they think about things like that."
"But if you don't have to eat, what does it matter?"
"That's exactly it. Oh, why do I bother. You could never figure it out with the brain you've got." the depressed GPP robot trudged off down the halls.
"There has to be a way to cheer him up." Arthur said to himself, taking another sip.
"I heard that." Marvin shouted back down the hallway, still not showing any emotion.
Arthur sighed again, still sad to have ever met Marvin. He didn't have anything against him personally, it was just his personality. Thinking over this later, Arthur realized that was pretty much all that distinguished Marvin.
A thought came to him. He pulled out a shiny, new copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which they had picked up on Ursa Minor Beta, where Ford had asked to stop so he could drop of his report personally, and to get an updated copy of the Guide. As a gift, he had gotten one for Arthur as well.
The idea that had formed in his was to look up info on the GPP robot line, and to find out exactly what had gone wrong. "Genuine People Personalities Robots." he said to the electronic tome. The screen lit up with a picture of a robot similar to Marvin, only with blue, square eyes.
It said, "The Genuine People Personality line of robots were created to perfectly simulate a human being. However, if you ever come across one, you'll find that they're about the same as the common appliance, only worse. Instead of having the cheerful disposition of say, an onboard computer, they have, due to the massive brains given to them, found a way to find something wrong with everything. So, in the end, all that had been successfully created were a bunch of manically depressed robots.
"On an interesting side note, when an email notice was first sent across the Galaxy, the title, 'GPP Announcement', was mistaken by the Moldians of Medra IV, as a warning, which in their language looked like AVV Announcement. AVV standing for Attack of Vicious Valkanines, the Valkanines were a crazed and destructive race that had never master space travel. So, when the peaceful Moldians thought they were being warned of an attack, they locked themselves up in the core of their planet and haven't been out since."
Arthur closed the book and sighed.. "How does one of the greatest ships ever created end up with one of the worst robots ever created?" the human suddenly found his mouth full of cotton. He spit it up and looked around to see the ship morphing around, and he realized that the Infinite Improbability Drive had been activated.
He stumbled through the ever changing ship and made it to the Deck just as Trillian was saying, "Probability 1 to 1. We have normality."
"Yeah, another drink to normality." Zaphoid said giggling stupidly from across the room. He and Ford took another drink, followed by screams of pain. Arthur really didn't know why they would drink those things. He had tried one, and it hurt worse anything he had ever felt. After that, well, he didn't remember much between then and the next morning.
"Why'd you activate the IID?" Arthur asked in wonderment.
Trill looked to Arthur and smiled. "We were under attack from a Vogon fleet. Luckily, the system began to work in time for me to activate the drive before we were obliterated. Arthur coughed awkwardly. "Anyway, it seems the fleet was replaced by one massive thing."
"What?" Arthur asked, seeing it on the screen a second later. It was a rather enormous, and very red. It was a certain mining ship called Red Dwarf.
To be continued…