Chapter 10

Stuart turned the Guide off. His first time with it was quite an unusual experience and for a few seconds he just gazed into somebody’s pair of eyes.
‘Argh!’ was all Stuart could shout out as he jumped back 5 metres. The other person did the same thing.
‘Argh!’
‘Eek!’
‘No!’
‘Aaaahh!’
‘Oh noes!’
The two frightened rabbits stopped screaming just enough to get some precious gulps of air and resumed their high-pitched symphony of panic.
It turns out that their panic was completely and utterly un-founded and that the real, proper Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy would have prevented this awful and abusive use of time due to its ‘Don’t panic’ sign, which is written on the front in large, friendly letters. Suddenly, Stuart got tasered again.
‘Please, Martin, that was not necessary.’
‘Q made me do it.’ The robot replied flatly.
‘Don’t look at me,’ said Q innocently, ‘Martin made me make him not make me not make him do it!’
‘Huh?’
‘Tsk, tsk. Your brain cells need topping up. What Q was saying, was that…’
‘Martin, just go do the washing up. And put down that Ouch-a-lot taser!’
‘I have deduced from my inter-universal sensors and the data from my quantum-mechanical socks that somewhere out there is a robot that is as intelligent as me and suffering from the same cruel fate of having to do these mind-bogglingly stupid household tasks,’ the robot grumbled.
Martin, however, was not aware of the fact that somewhere out there the robot he was referring to was having as much fun as Martin was only it was divided by –3x10^56000. Martin did, however, have a brain the size of a giant moon and was able to re-calculate his sensory information, correct his mistake of thinking he could find a friend, as well as solving 15, 000 virtual Rubik’s cubes simultaneously before struggling into the kitchen.
Dasel-pots’ fingers did a little tap-dance on the keyboard. Q got bored.
‘Did you know that if you turned the reflective keyboard 15 degrees laterally, swung that lamp so that it would face the keyboard, found the angle of incidence between the light beam and the normal, added it to a table showing the number of scales for 6 coelacanths, calculated the standard deviation of the numbers in the table and cubed the final result you would get the exact number of ants that perished with spaceport Zero-one-one Omega when it got eaten by the giant white rabbit?’ Q said proudly.
Dasel-pots’ fingers now began to do a fast-paced flamenco. She was getting impatient with Q, the shipboard computer, who, it seemed, had a knack for being unhelpfully helpful with his constant chattering and mentioning of unnecessary facts.
She wore tough, elastic socks, which she insisted was actually a pair of Arjan’s Elasti-purpose-stretchi-fashion boots. Her hair was brown, long and had to be done into a ponytail. Dasel-pots kept flicking it out of the way and although she would like to feel comfortable at the back of her head and cut it all short, the hair, as always, turns out to be an asset in the strangest of situations. Dasel-pots had grey-red fur, which many people associated with the infamous Bob, who almost single-handedly caused the destruction of Jazz2City. I should get it dyed some day, she thought, just to avoid getting stared at. But then again, few people in the empty depths of space would have been available for staring, even if she tried to hire professional ‘starers’, available from the gargoyles of Medivo.
She put her hair into a sink, opened the tap, and started slapping Stuart with the wet hair. If you consulted ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the JJ2 Galaxy’, you would have known that wet hair tied into a ponytail is very hard and a potent weapon against doofus guards, telephone salesmen and unconscious taser victims.
‘Wakey, wakey!’ she said to Stuart.

Martin looked up from his tedious chore and spotted Unigma. The modem was happily connected into the ship’s biotic hospital and recovery centre, which, as is typical of hyper-advanced biotic facilities, had a window that allowed everyone to peer in.
‘Bah! Here I am, brain the size of a giant moon, with none of my negative temperature coefficient thermistors working properly. Stupid modem…why should it get such good treatment when I obviously deserve…’ a titanium shield slammed down, blocking off the window. There was a little picture of a sleeping modem on it.
‘Oops, sorry,’ said Niklas, who almost reeled from the full blow of Martin’s annoyed, deep blue eyes. ‘I didn’t know you were watching that,’ he said apologetically.
He flicked a switch up but not before Martin smiled. It wasn’t a friendly ‘that’s fine’ smile, but more of a ‘that’s fine but I’m still gonna do something nasty’ kind of smile. Add to that a fundamental inability for robots to properly show facial emotions, and you have a scary combination. Niklas hurried out of the kitchen.
‘Darn robot…wait…that’s it! I’m no longer going to allow Martin to stand between me and my turtsandwiches!’ He walked back to the kitchen with a determined stride, stopped at the threshold, and went to Dasel-pots for help.
‘No, I own Martin! I can do whatever I want to him! He is my robot. Or, at least, Dasel-pot’s robot. Erm…’ mumbled Stuart indecisively. Martin had by this time finished and went back to his quarters.
‘Thank heavens!’ said a relived Stuart and rushed into the kitchen for another one of those increasingly rare ML Nil-cal turtsandwiches.
As he munched on the sandwich, he formulated a plan to teach that J2LC FOO (Frighten Own Owner) android a lesson. Cleary, the abbreviation FOO was exceeding its limits because Niklas wasn’t legally the owner of Martin. He opened his copy of the Guide.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the JJ2 Galaxy has this to say about FOO androids:

These all-purpose, all-environment have been described by the Why Bother? Magazine as …‘the pinnacle of cybernetic intelligence and usefulness. We’d give it 9.2/10 but due to the frightening nature of our example robot, we were forced to rate J2LC’s FOO android 10/10 – A Must Buy!’ The FOO stands for Frighten Own Owner and is specifically designed to target people with weak states of mind and make sure that they behave in a socially correct manner. (For more information about social behaviour, look at page 677, 000 under the heading of Treasure Chambers). The android is less effective at dealing with courageous people or those with suicidal personalities, and it will show its dissatisfaction with regular complaints, grumbling and optimistic pessimism.
The latest version of J2LC’s FOO androids has only ever been manufactured once, and is named ‘Martin’ after the mythical android ‘Marvin’ of the mythical ship with the mythical Infinity Probability Drive of the mythical Douglas Adams universe. Martin is currently serving aboard the state-of-the-art spaceship ‘Nietzsche’s Shoe’. The reason for Martin’s uniqueness is his extraordinary processing power, his brain (which has a size roughly equivalent to a giant moon), his incredible array of tools (including a built-in J2LC Ouch-a-lot taser) and his ability to FOO people that are not actually his owner. While this is seen as a bad move by J2LC’s many critics, those critics have been frightened into submission by Martin, so there’s no need to worry about that unique piece of cybernetics at all.
If you own a FOO android and are finding it too hard to deal with, please don’t hesitate to call yourself a loser and/or get a brave friend, preferably a war hero (like Bobby and Syntax of the famous massacre at J2C), give them ownership and watch the clash of the titans unfold! (Note: this doesn’t work with Martin).

Niklas groaned but he kept his hopes up by imagining that somewhere out there must be a hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy that was as reliable and as helpful as the one he was holding in his hands.