Voidwalkers Laboratory

What robots do

Something I find myself thinking a lot is "What might be the techfolk equivalent of [insert human activity here]?"

Going out for a meal with someone, for example. That's a staple of human interaction, but techfolk don't eat.

(Unless they do. They have been shown apparently eating/drinking in canon but I assumed that was Boom being goofy. I do headcanon that they can 'eat' food by throwing organic matter in their biofuel burners, but that that's not their main power source and they can't taste anything that goes in there. Which means they can happily 'eat' stale food; it burns just the same. That means that eating isn't a particularly pleasurable activity for them, so it's never the focus of a social gathering.)

You could imagine techfolk going to a 'restaurant' where they plug in to charge instead of eating food, but I think that might be more like going to a hookah bar.

There are so many other things for which there's no obvious parallel. Bathroom graffiti? They don't go to the toilet - might there be another activity that's done in a private pocket of space within a public venue? Going grocery shopping? How does that change when you don't need food? And in the war setting, it might be something that doesn't even happen because everyone gets given what they need by their base quartermaster.

And... not every human activity even needs a robot equivalent! A cow, say, might wonder what humans do instead of chewing the cud. There isn't an equivalent activity because our bodies just don't do that. Which leads me to think of what robots might do together that humans don't. But I have trouble thinking about that, because I'm not a robot. But I want to think of stuff! It seems unkind to robots to think of them as 'like humans except they just don't do a lot of stuff'. What do they do?

#techfolk