Meanwhile ... part 1

Legend tells of a struggling robotics firm in the late twenty-first century called Diva Droid International.
 
They had enjoyed success with their Series 500 “Skutter” but were now spectacularly failing to come up with their next big product.
 
It was at the end of a drab and rather poorly received office Christmas party that a freak time-hole opened in the very headquarters of Diva Droid and deposited a battered, well travelled mechanoid who introduced himself as Kryten.
 
‘I’m a series 4000 service mechanoid,’ the plastic man said to the astonished technicians and executives. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this, but I will be manufactured by this very company in three-hundred years time. Now perhaps you kind sirs would assist me in returning to my own time so that I don’t corrupt the very fabric of the space-time continuum?’
 
The men and women of Diva Droid had been impressed by this figure. He was the epitome of robotic engineering: mobile, with fluid movements, intelligent with the ability to learn quickly, servile and pleasant and happy to do his human masters' bidding. Best of all, his strange, misshapen head was neither eerie nor threatening. The men and women of Diva Droid International marveled at this technological wonder that represented the heights to which their company would scale.
 
Two days later they had disassembled the Kryten completely. Six months later the first 1000 series mechanoid was on the market, reverse-engineered from the future model. Suddenly slavery was fashionable again. As demand rose, so too did the resources of Diva Droid International. Its founders became staggeringly wealthy and sold the company on to people who developed the the 2000 series. History records the disastrous impact the 3000 had on humanity but soon Diva Droid had replicated the 4000, some two-hundred and fifty years early. One of these “Krytens” was loaded into a duality-jump outfitted starpod and blasted into space to fulfill the paradox. One day, hundreds of years into the future, it would find a time hole where it would fall back to Earth and repeat, word-for-word that which it had already said to them. In this way, the Universe was saved from a causal rip that would have shattered the very fabric of reality.
 
All this is really incidental. What it meant was that you could finally get someone to do the laundry without complaint which is really what you need, isn’t it?
 
***
 
The long, long ventral promenade of Blue Dwarf echoed forlornly with the intermittent squeak of an old, unmaintained cleaning trolley as it rolled with difficulty across the plastic floor.
 
Parkur tutted and glided rapidly after it, gripping its handle with a silver hand. The mechanoid dug his wheels in, turned and hauled the trolley back to its original position.
 
Parkur wagged an admonishing finger at the ancient and filthy trolley, before returning to his interrupted task of mopping the expansive floor. The mop slapped satisfyingly into the bucket, swished around briefly in the rapidly darkening water, then gave an enjoyable squish as Parkur squeezed the excess water out. Then it made another slap that echoed across the silent Promenade as he began to trace a path that would obliterate any sign that anyone had walked across this floor ever.
 
With a squeak-squeak, the cleaning trolley began to move again. Parkur wheeled over and this time he was almost cross.
 
'You had better jolly well stay right where you are,' he said, one hand on his PVC-covered hip. 'Otherwise how else am I supposed to get this Promenade clean?'
 
'We've already cleaned it,' the cleaning trolley croaked back, 'you finished the floor hours ago.'
 
'Then we'll do it again,' Parkur snapped back fussily and began to drag the trolley back.
 
'Why?'
 
'I'm sorry?' Parkur turned in surprise to the trolley. His solid, chrome-plated head couldn't really register the emotion, but his high-pitched squawk certainly carried astonishment.
 
'Why are we doing it again?' The trolley squeezed its brakes on so Parkur redoubled his efforts to pull it back to the spot they had been cleaning.
 
'Because we were ordered to clean the Promenade!'
 
'But we already did it! You're only doing this because we haven't had any more orders in ages!' The trolley was wailing now and its struggles with Parkur were causing it to tip. Dirty water splashed on to the floor, so Parkur reluctantly let it go in order to fussily mop up the spill.
 
'We carry out orders until we get new ones,' Parkur said as if that covered everything.
 
'You might. I'm a cleaning trolley. I really don't see the point of doing all this again. I'm going to watch telly.'
 
'No! Wait! Come back!' Parkur yelled as the trolley scooted off into a maintenance duct too small for the clumsy and awkward Parkur to squeeze through. ‘You come back here right now! Don’t you realise the terrible sin you’re committing? You’ll burn in Silicon Hell with all the jammed photocopiers!’
 
'Hullo? Who’s that?'
 
Parkur stopped scrabbling at the closed maintenance duct and looked up, 'hello?'
 
‘Hullo,’ the voice said again, ‘who’s this then?'
 
'Parkur, sir.'
 
'Aw great, another mech. There's you, me, the skutters, the vending machines and a singing toilet roll dispenser on J-deck.'
 
‘That’s silly,’ Parkur tutted rolling back out into the middle of the Promenade’s floor, ‘there must be some humans onboard.’
 
'Not that I've found so far,' said the voice.
 
'Sir, may I ask: who are you?'
 
'Oh yeah, no problem. I'm: uh...' there was a slight cough, then: 'hang on, it's coming. It's in one of the deep storage files. They're somewhere on D-deck. They can take a while to retrieve an answer. Of course when you've got an IQ of 6000 you need a fair bit of room to keep it in. When you're in charge of a six-mile long ship you've got to watch what you have in nearby and distant storage.'
 
'You have an IQ of 6000?'
 
'Yup.'
 
'You have storage systems across the ship?'
 
'Uh-huh.'
 
'You are in control of the Blue Dwarf.'
 
'That's me.'
 
'Are you, Holly, sir?'
 
'Hang on, let me check...'
 
'No, sir, trust me on this: you are Holly. The ship's computer.'
 
'Oh yeah. What were we talking about?'
 
'Where is everybody, sir?'
 
'I dunno.'
 
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