We all know how the story of Project Poonga ends: with a band of gentle gardener robots, marooned on a faraway jungle-covered asteroid, bereft of any hope of rescue. The MAA-LEE droids have achieved iconic status, familiar in popular culture throughout the Local Group. We know them as tragic figures, lost and famously doomed. Their small rock orbits a neutron star in the globular cluster M4 which will one day become an X-ray burster, certain to destroy them all... if the robots don’t perish first from radioactive decay.

But what of the project’s beginning?

Avakkai & Chukka explore the history of the stranded mechanical gardeners and the mysterious communiqués they have sent to Samudra Rani, the 25th century's most popular pop star and revolutionary.