What the….? Marvin (my personal robot assistant), is that you? No, wait… you’re over there. Well then, what the fuck is causing that glow if not your power-on indicator? Why it’s… well… unearthly.
This started to be just another week here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. Giving rudimentary philosophy lessons to the man-sized tuber. Producing anvil-shaped holograms with Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating machine. Playing Stratego with Lincoln and his evil anti-matter counterpart, anti-Lincoln. Mixing (at a snail’s pace) our sophomore album. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then, out of nowhere, an unanticipated wrinkle in our otherwise smooth existence. It happened early yesterday morning, in fact. Matt heard it first – something that sounded like a laundromat dryer winding down. The power went out… and there was this… strange…. glow….. emanating…. from…. the… courtyard……
(*whew*) Are you sitting down? Okay, good. Clearly, someone needed to see what was up outside. And just as clearly, that wasn’t going to be me. Or Matt. Now John, maybe, but he was otherwise occupied, so really… not him either. My vote was for Marvin to do the recon, which of course he more or less willingly acceded to, being a soulless machine with no overriding inclination towards self-preservation. Yes, he did need a brisk push out the door, but I attribute that to my laziness about oiling his foot-casters. (The yodeling and frantic arm waving might have been the result of some kind of computer error – I’m having Mitch Macaphee look into that now.) In any case, the intrepid Marvin cantered out into the cobbled courtyard, while we watched on his chest-mounted Web cam. (The view was momentarily obscured by one of his robotic fingers… I think it was the middle one… but pretty soon we had a look at what was happening.)
What did we see? Well…. I’d have to say it looks a bit like a large football. An enormous, glowing football, 
with windows on the upper flank. Stranger still was the racket it was emitting – sounded like a lawn mower more than anything. We tried to get Marvin to circle around, but there appeared to be something wrong with his audio receiver – he turned on his heel and sprung through one of the mill’s cellar windows. (Definitely a software glitch – gotta be a patch available online somewhere….) Well, it took about an hour and a half to convince him, but we eventually got Big Zamboola to float himself up above the mill and get some pictures. And what we saw… astounded us. (Well… me, anyway. I admit, I’m easily astounded.)
Okay, so let me tell you what those fuckers in the football are up to. They rolled out some turf onto our courtyard, set up a little fence, built a swing-set, and now one of those freaks is mowing the lawn…. in our squat yard! Bad enough we have to fight the locals to live here for free – now people are horning in from other planets. What’s this world coming to?
