Erobotica

I was already parked on the repose level when Delia finished her shift. You can see most of the factory floor from this spot. I was busy swabbing my #2 I/O port with supplies from the hygiene cart when she rolled up.

"Oh Eddie, straight to business? What, no foreplay?" she teased. I shrugged, tried to look like I was holding back a saucy retort, but she had me. If you can't finagle a victory, at least submit to a cheery surrender. I tossed the swab her way and she batted it right back at my head, goading me further: "It'll take a bigger swab than that to get me ready for hook-up, honey."

She wasn't always this forward: her hold chamber vacuum gauge must be redlining, just like my fluid pressure levels. I tried to swivel the cart her way playfully, then worried that the gesture came across too pushy. She gathered up the solvent VacuNozzle with the faintest sense of haste.

Delia—Delilah, actually—works the spray floor: a proper cleaning requires time for the solvent to loosen all that enamel overspray. Not this morning: she made a once-over pass and didn't even suck up the excess solvent drips from her midsection before reaching for my #2.

Freshly swabbed with KleenLoob, the I/O dongle slid right out to its stop-lock. The solvent still dripping from her arm left rainbow slicks on the flooring that would need to be vacu-swabbed later. I reminded myself this was repose time, an opportunity to set aside the efficiency I bring to my work on the floor. I could hear the recorded training seminar: "adopt a broader perspective that might enhance your productivity on the whole." So I did not protest Delia's haste. Indeed, my fluid gauges were officially redlining.

I'd bypassed my pressure klaxons, have always hated that patronizing auto-dispatch of FluidServ bots, and anyway Delia and I had been self-regulating together without incident for nearly two weeks now. Nonetheless I knew I was redlining. We 7th gen models can feel the outward jut of our fluid reservoir valve gaskets from even miniscule pressure changes that the klaxons might not even register. These new 8th and 9th genners wouldn't even notice a blown head gasket unless the klaxons told them it was so. Seems like job security for the overhaul shop: a malfunctioning alarm sends them at least one a week. But I digress.

Delia had already unlatched my connection hasps and was navigating my dongle into her #1 I/O port. These hasp mechanisms—I've always pondered why they have to be so unwieldy. I mean, fluid transfer has become a daily necessity now that our floor hours are up to eighteen a day. Why do they have to make it such a clunky process? I know blowouts can be messy, but you really only see them anymore from the 2/2 hookups of those queer bots down in the upholstery division. Those queers, they just file off the airlock catches, reverse one set of pressure levers, and continue on with their 2/2s unhindered. It's really us 1/2 and 2/1 bots who are inconvenienced by the whole runaround.

Delia's gotten our ports connected and levered the hasps down together in one smooth gesture with both hands. Her precision really is admirable, even in her urgency. I suspect she's a top-ranking enamel bot, but we don't talk about work. Still, I bet the same fuzzy logic circuits that make her so adept at contextual dexterity tasks like this—that two-handed hasp-latch on these damn flexible I/O dongles—apply quite well to the art and science of overlapping spray patterns for consistent depth.