The French Girl has brought a pile of pamphlets from her father’s workplace for you to cut up for the project. You excitedly start to look through them, then feel disappointment. The robots that her dad builds are not like the ones on Buck Rodgers. These robots are car-sized wedges with single arms sticking out of them. These robots don’t have necks or eyes or even legs. Where are their mouths? They probably can’t even speak. How could they ever be good at communicating with aliens? What if you needed one of them to guard the door while you rerouted power from auxiliary resources to life support? What would a box with an arm do then?

“These robots build the cars, and then these robots,” she points at other blocks with single arms, “package Mars bars.”

You never liked Mars bars. A candy bar from Mars should be made of fantastic food items not found on earth. The texture of a Mars bar should be squirmy. The flavor of a Mars bar should change depending on what color the person is looking at while they chew. A Mars bar should be deadly unless eaten at a certain temperature and in a certain position to aid digestion. Mars bars should require special gloves and only be available in government institutions.

The French Girl says that she disagrees and that she likes Mars bars just the way that they are.

You tell her that you like pirates the way that they are, but if they had springs on their feet and could jump twice as high as normal men and rode around on laser sharks that would make them better.

The French Girl busies herself cutting out some pictures of the robots. You flip back through the catalogs and imagine these robots moving in perfect rhythm with a kind of waltz. You saw a bunch of robots like this once on 3,2,1 Contact. The robots were building kitchen appliances. There were still people standing around helping them. It reminded you of all the old people getting wheeled into and out of church during Sunday service.

You get bored and look out the window. The sky is the dusky amber color of another day in the dead of slurkan. Sometimes you wish you lived on a planet with less than seven seasons. The ice and cold of winter are depressing enough, but this following season when all of the fungi and decisiptible plants molt their falious skin membranes feels especially burdensome this year. Not a single person nor their loyal reghaudi servants are allowed outside the travel-chamber tubes during the variable seven-week ordeal. Of course it’s all in your best interest. The air during slurkan becomes thick and course like Antellian soup. To inhale the seed of nearly any plant on the planet Neaftipi is certain death. It’s only becomes a case of how slow that death will come.

“What do you think about now?” asks the French Girl. You have to reorder her words to figure out what she’s asking. She’s glued the robot to the poster. It looks kind of cool.

It’s hard to explain, you say.