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Sirius Cybernetics Corporation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation is a fictional company from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
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In the series, the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation is responsible for the design and creation of a wide range of robots and labour-saving devices, such as lifts, automatic doors, ventilation systems, the infamous Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser, digital watches (substituted by polyphonic ringtones, palmtops and computer operating systems in the 2005 radio series).
Despite the fact that the "fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws" of everything they produce, the marketing-driven company will still exist until a revolution in the next thousand years. When a person asks for a drink from the Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser, the dispenser probes the customer's taste sensors and pleasure receptors of the brain. Despite its sophisticated artificial intelligence, it always dispenses the same drink: a concoction that tastes "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea".
The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation invented a concept called Genuine People Personalities ("GPP") which imbue their products with intelligence and emotion. Thus not only do doors open and close, but they thank their users for using them, or sigh with the satisfaction of a job well done. Other examples of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's record with sentient technology include an armada of neurotic elevators, hyperactive ships' computers and perhaps most famously of all, Marvin the Paranoid Android. Marvin is a prototype for the GPP feature, and his depression and "terrible pain in all the diodes down his left side" are due to unresolved flaws in his programming. Ironically, the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as "your plastic pal who's fun to be with".
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy describes the Marketing Division as "A bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first against the Wall when the Revolution comes". In a version of the Encyclopaedia Galactica that fell through a time warp from 1,000 years in the future, the Marketing Division are described as "A bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the Wall when the Revolution came."
The only profitable division of the company is its Complaints division, which, according to the series, takes up all of the major landmasses on the first three planets in the Sirius Tau system. The theme song for the Complaints division is Share and Enjoy, and has since become the theme apparent for the company as a whole. The main office building and headquarters for the company was originally built to represent this motto, but due to bad architecture it sank into the ground, killing many talented young complaints associates. The downside to this is that the building now read, in the dialect of the planet it was on, "Go Stick Your Head in a Pig."
In addition, during the backstory Young Zaphod Plays it Safe, the corporation designed and produced synthetic personalities to order, but they turned out to be the "By-products of Designer People - amalgams of characteristics which simply could not co-exist in naturally occurring life forms" . Some of these were dangerous as they did not alarm people. In the Starship Billion Year Bunker there were three in the hold, on their way to being blasted out of the universe, but one had escaped to Earth, apparently Ronald Reagan, "the man babbling gently about a shining city on a hill".
