The 217th Performance on Our Voyage to Mars

CHAPTER 1 (8)

They arrived at Arbinger's residence, a two-bedroom condo on the 63th floor of an ordinary 140-story apartment building. He plopped down on the sofa and placed Marsalu beside him.

It was a sultry May evening. Thirsty, Arbinger summoned his cooking robot and ordered a glass of iced tea. The robot had a red cube for head and a fat blue tubelike trunk, with four long arms and four wheels. A disproportionally tiny toque was fixated to the top of its head.

"Inexecutable," replied the cooking robot in a flat synthetic voice. "Unprogrammed recipe."

"You don't need a recipe to make iced tea! All you need to do is fetch some ice cubes and dip the tea bag into—" Arbinger sighed, getting up. "Never mind. I forgot that you're broken."

"What a primitive model," Marsalu commented.

"Compared to you, certainly," said Arbinger as he came back to the living room with a properly chilled glass of tea, complete with a pink bendy straw. "But the latest androids are amazingly advanced, nearly identical to human beings."

"You mean like real people?" Marsalu became intrigued. "Eat, shit, cry and fuck?"

"Well, your choice of words is a bit strong, but yeah, basically like that." Arbinger merrily sucked on the straw. "They're bio-androids, with real skin and flesh. They need food and can feel physical pains. It all became possible because of something called the Y-Circuit."

"The Y-Chip," Marsalu corrected him. "It's a new generation of CPU, named after its inventor, Bruce Yung. So he did succeed."

"Who?"

"Yung. Last time we talked, he was still working on that Y-Chip thing. This is interesting. Tell me some more."

"About what?"

"Everything. What happened to the world during the past six years? Never mind. Just take off your watch computer. It'd be faster for me to websurf," the robo-bulldog demanded.

"But why don't you just connect yourself to the Net and download all the big data you need?" asked Arbinger as he watched Marsalu tapping his paws on numerous holographic screen in midair.

"I'm incapable of doing that. Hello, which solar system do you live in?" replied the robotic canine, comfortably nestled amid multiple cushions in the middle of the sofa, leaving an ottoman for Arbinger. "The Edmondson Statute, passed in 2104. It forbids any attempt to make robots that'd intellectually outperform humans—at least not by a wide margin—because you people don't want us to take over the world."

"Well, I usually don't pay much attention to technology news, or history for that matter," Arbinger stammered. "But I do know the Y-Circuit!"

"The Y-Chip. No wonder you're still sticking to that antique cooking machine. Totally out of touch. Anyway, I learn the way you learn, through reading, watching, listening and thinking, word by word, bit by bit."

"But you don't forget things once you've learned them."

"Nope. At the end of the day, I remain somewhat smarter than most people."

After three days of research, Marsalu announced over dinner that he'd come up with a brilliant business plan.

"And I'm going to build a music empire out of it for you. No, wait—with you, as an equal."

Arbinger frowned, sucking in a strand of spaghetti dangling from his mouth. "You mean you and I—"

"Working as business partners, yes," Marsalu said, perching on his end of the dining table, with no food but plenty of holograms in front of him. "I get to have more power while you keep a bigger cut of money."

Leo thought about it and shrugged. "Sure."

"Good. Those are two of the things I like about you. You're open-minded and ungreedy." Marsalu tapped a front paw on several floating holographic screens, which then glided over to Arbinger's end. "Now here's what we're gonna do—"