Revenge of the Seeth

In a small city on Quandara* Billbop was fixing his robots. He cleaned up a spot of oil on one curved metal piece and judged his repairs. The last four attempts to fix the annoying squeaks had met with even more erratic behaviour and general jerkiness on the delivery droid. Billbop was just a peasant, but even peasants need someone to do their hard work. It's turtles and droids all the way down.

Billbop was satisfied with his repairs and wiped his hands with a bleefork skin rag. He called for his mate, Boppinmuffer to prepare some dinner. Boppinmuffer was on the phone with someone and Billbop yelled louder for her so she could hear him.

Boppinmuffer was on the phone speaking with a reporter who had called. This reporter, Mr. Gaffenhorse, was always bothering their family after the huge walffinflap incident. Mr. Gaffenhorse was a good reporter but a bit too tenacious. This was a good quality to have if you were trying to catch hooligans who terrorised the septic droids in the northeast quadrant. But it wasn't good if you happened to be a regular peasant citizen who was just trying to make a living in the backwaters of the town.

Mr. Gaffenhorse was trying to arrange a meeting with Billbop to discuss the latest allegations that Billbop had been unqualified to operate on a a friend's droid when said droid had gone berserk in the town square. The dreadful incident had resulted in Mrs. Flappenfloop (a barber) getting droid poo splashed on her new whites. Most observers of the scene had thought it was amusing but Mrs. Flappenfloop had reported the event and made demands on the police chief to impound the droid. The droid diagnostics had shown that the last worker to operate it had been Billbop.

Boppinmuffer was trying to be polite and decline the interview on behalf of her mate, but he kept yelling at her from the back where he was working on his droid (perhaps illegally, definitely in contravention to the moratorium imposed by the police chief). She excused herself politely and cupped her hand over the mouthpiece while she yelled a string of Ubettan obscenities through the back window to Billbop.

Hearing this coarse language in the back shop, Billbop got enraged and the growling in his stomach only fueled the rage more. He stormed into the house and ripped the receiver from his mate's hand and yelled a fresh round of outrage into Mr. Gaffenhorse's ears, but this time in his native Cowhatten.

Mr. Gaffenhorse spoke perfect Ubettan and Cowhatten, of course, but pretended not to understand. In fact, he was smiling to himself because whenever people were yelling at him, he knew he was onto a really good story. At the very least, he could write about the incident in an indignant tone and sway public opinion. Swaying public opinion is the only thing reporters are good at, anyway.

The question of whether man was alone in the universe was not important because these were not men. The CIO of the newspaper just wanted to expand his reach across the star systems that comprised his audience. He was certain that this story about a peasant who cursed and fixed droids could garner more monetisation across his ad properties.

*Random story generator prompt: This is an epic about vengeance. The story is about a police chief, a barber, a CIO, and a newscaster who is obsessed with a peasant. It starts in a small city in a solar-system-spanning technocracy. The question 'is man alone in the universe' plays a major role.