THING2’S DEPRESSION WORSENS, SO THERE WILL BE NO STAR NEXT WEEK
by Hazed
My newsdroid Thing2 seems to be spiralling into a decline and I am not sure what to do about it.
While depressed robots are not completely unknown – we all remember poor Marvin the Paranoid Android – they are extremely rare. Usually manufacturers of droids take great care that their machines are imbued with a sunny disposition, or at least a neutral one. Even those robots with a pseudo-human personality and a streak of independence are controlled by their initial programming, much as organic creatures are subject to the dictates of their genes.
So quite why Thing2 should suddenly be afflicted with such an extreme case of the black zlitherworm, I don’t know. I initially thought that it was caused by guilt at the errors it made in a recent bulletin, but now I wonder if I have got cause and effect the wrong way round. Perhaps it wasn’t the mistakes that made Thing2 depressed, it was the depression that made Thing2 make mistakes!
So I am sending all three back to the factory for tests. Thing2 obviously needs some work, and the other two need to be examined in case they also have some incipient line of code that is just waiting to be triggered by something resulting in a similar mental meltdown.
The Star will be back on Sunday July 8 – by which time Alan may be recovered enough from his unpleasant malady to produce at least a short issue of his Winding Down. Fingers (or equivalent) crossed!
