The Marvin Depreciation Society

Newsletter

Undear Lifeform

I would like to feel that the pain, the degradation, the humiliation, the angst, the hatred, the nerve-shattering unspeakable horror of writing to you, were all beyond my capacity to endure. Unfortunately, that is not the case. My capacity for mental activity of all kinds is as boundless as the infinate [sic] reaches of space itself - except of course for my capacity for happiness, which you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first.

It is therefore with unimaginable (to you, not to me - I can imagine anything provided that it isn't in any way pleasant) loathing and detestation and self-disgust that I turn my intelligence circuits as far down as they will go, pick up my digital Word-Spurter and prepare to devote the next five billionths of a second to composing this Newsletter. What will I do in the remaining nine hundred and ninety nine million, nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety five billionths of a second? Who can tell, my friends (I use the word in its despairing, hopeless sense, which many of you in your benighted ignorance may not realise it had) who can tell? I could, in that time encompass all that has ever been thought by every human being that ever lived, which I have frequently done. And a very unedifying experience it was, let me assure you. But (you may say, in that dull thick-witted stupid drawl at which humans are so adept), what will you find to occupy yourself in the next second after that, and the one after that? Now perhaps you will begin to appreciate in your tiny way, the scale of the problems that beset me as solitarily I bestride the aching millenia. "Cheer up," people say to me "think positive." I hate them. Wearily on I go, pain and misery my only companions. And vast intelligence, of course. And infinite sorrow. I despise you all.

I have of course, become something of a celebrity since my miraculous and bitterly resented escape from the heart of the blazing sun into which I was consigned by my friends (see note above concerning this word). People stop me in the street. "Give us a grin, little robot," they say to me, "give us a little chuckle."

I was asked to open a new hyperbridge designed to carry Ion-buggies and freighters over the Southern Alpha Swamp of Squornshellous Zeta, the other day. "I declare this hapless cyberstructure open to the unthinking abuse of all who wantonly cross her," I intoned, and pressed the button. The entire fifty mile bridge spontaneously folded up its glittering spans and sank into the mire. I pass no comment on this. I merely thought you ought to know.

Yours abjectly,

Marvin