Babo The Baggage 'Bot, Part 1

No one will ever understand. They think I’m crazy, tell me that 'bots can’t love. They don’t know what I know…

No, this isn’t a very good place to start... I need to tell you what came before... I have to write quickly, before the nurse comes around with the meds again. 

I met Baggage-bot, Serial #472-L531-9922-X on my return trip from the lunar business complex from a routine work trip conducting a multi-week corporate analysis conference. He... no... "it" (I must remember what the psychiatrist said about anthropomorphizing an inanimate object) was part of a new program pushed by the burgeoning Trump AI robotics corporations, and 'bots were gradually being instituted in all the spaceports, designed to reduce overhead by cutting down on personnel as much as possible. He, no, "it" was an original model, still in functional service, but lacking the sleek and streamlined upgrades of the newest 'bots Trump AI was currently marketing. Courteous and helpful, as per his programming, and while it was still a bit of a novelty to have a robot instead of a person handle my luggage, Babo, as I came to call him, did not make much of an impact on me right then. After weeks in a cramped lunar module, I longed merely for the larger quarters of my housing unit. 

The familiar swooshing of the door, the faintly shut-up and musty smell that still sang of home, and overall, the singular relief to slip off the faux croc-leather heeled pumps that business dress mandated, whether Earth-side or Lunar. Barbarians. Since when were high heels necessitated in a lunar module? It was artificial gravity anyway. They could at least relax shoe standards. I fixed a dinner of reconstituted chicken cacciatore for myself, read a few more chapters of my historical fiction novel and settled into bed early, according to the chronometer in the bedside wall. Moon travel always wears me out a bit more than just globe-hopping. Something about the feeling of gravity pulling me earthwards makes me inherently resist and by the time earth-side landing is done, I feel as tense as if I’d been physically carrying the weight of the planet, as though Atlas of ancient Greek mythology. My psychiatrist says it’s impossible to feel the re-engaging of planetary gravity while inside a pressurized cabin, but nonetheless, I know what I feel...

That night I woke in a daze, clutching at my insides, stumbled disoriented from my bed seized with terrible abdominal cramps. I huddled in my bathroom, regurgitating chicken cacciatore into my toilet, stars swirling around my head like a lunar landing gone amiss. I laid by my bowl, as it were, cuddled under a towel, shaking, guts wrenched up like a junior technician faced with diffusing his first bomb. I truly felt as though I might die. Suddenly all the loneliness of the world came crashing down onto me. The weight of the pain of being alone. Completely, utterly, incontrovertibly alone. Like a bottomless black hole swallowing me up, that enormity of loneliness raced through and tore my heart out. I could die here tonight, I thought, and no one would even know. Not a soul to miss me until my supervisor needed some financial report, a bill went unpaid, or the rent came due and the landlord came calling. I realized what had been missing from my life, as from my prone position on the Lav floor I eyed my crisply professional wardrobe, the immaculate cream-colored carpet and expensively and impeccably matching imported mahogany bedroom furniture. This was the sign of a sterile and loveless life. 


Every indicator from the perfectly paired socks folded in my drawers to the hospital-corner crisp sheets on my bed covered with a functionally austere synthetic down comforter. (Killing the remaining waterfowl had been prohibited in the mid 3020’s.) Everywhere I looked - a single toothbrush in the holder, the impeccably clean counters unmarred by a simple pair of coffee mug stains - it all screamed that I was single, methodical, and truly alone.  No tumultuous love making had happened here, no haphazard shedding of clothing in that desperate crush to cling to another human, no post-coital glow sipping coffee wearing his shirt, casting shy glances and leaving paired coffee rings on the countertops. With sere alacrity, I realized what my life had been lacking, what I never thought I had needed, I realized - I needed a man. I needed a strong man, a man to outlast me, to never leave me, to protect me. A man who would have no weaknesses. Invincible. Incorruptible. And in my delirium and agony, the face of my baggage-handling robot, a serene, chrome face, handsome in a sleek way, was all I could see...

My mother had always wanted for me to settle down and start a family - as her only child, she was determined that I somehow feel the motherly urge as she did, before cancer took her uterus and any potential of more offspring. She cried acerbic, angry tears, and I never felt that she truly forgave me for not wanting for myself what she burned for me to have, regardless of my own feelings on the situation and my entire lack of suitable companionship. She hotly desired to live vicariously through my body once more to dangle a bouncing baby on her knee, and never understood my apathy toward miniature humans, who, so far as I could determine, had a sole purpose of producing as many body fluids as possible out of every orifice available for the majority of their infancy and toddlerhood. My mother simply lived for children, to the point that she often frightened other mothers with such a vivid interest in their children while queued in the food dispensary line, or at the MoneyMart that they often cast her sidelong looks and hustled through their business, bustling their children off quickly like a fussy hen with their chicks. Broodmares. Breeders. That life had never appealed to me, nor had I ever found someone with whom to build a life. But now... now I realized for the first time that I was lonely. Desperately, achingly, profoundly lonely.

For two days I lay there, barely moving, eating nothing, but sipping water from the regulated tap from time to time, and wondering if this was what it truly felt like to slowly die. I slipped between semi-conscious thought and somewhere below coherence. Not a truly restful sleep in my delirium. My insides churned and broiled like the geology film I'd seen in pre-grad like pooled riotously bubbling lava. Silver coatings gleaming in starlight, the hum of the mechmotors, and the slip of the biorhythm monitors which created their artificial dawns and dusks in our subterranean complex. By what I randomly judged to be the mid-afternoon of my third day, I opened my sleep-encrusted eyes, pushed the sweat-soaked hair from my face, and shakily got to my feet, hanging onto the counter edges for dear life. I used the last of my luxury water allotment and ran a hot bath, feeling every inch of my skin come alive as I slipped under the steaming surface of the water, lapping at the sides of the narrow tub as I slid under it. 

No, not a man. Not a flesh-and-blood imperfect human with stench and unpredictable emotion and the capacity for failure. Not one who could age, fall out of love, get sick and die... Babo was perfect. Babo was all that I needed. He would never leave me, never compare me to another woman, never cheat on me, lie to me, never abandon me. He was the perfect companion... the perfect mate.

I had never owned a pet, a cat, or even a plant or living thing – I was gone on business far too often to care for anything that needed food, water, or even periodic re-potting. Once I tried purchasing a holographic fish tank but discovered that the pattern of movement repeated every four hours in sequence and the eventual predictability of the interaction between holographic fish lost its appeal. I suppose I could've gone to get the next upgrade, but didn't see the purpose in spending credits to stare at fake fish on the infrequent trips home. In fact, I had never precisely sought out companionship. Well, at least never in the traditional sense, anyway. Sure, I’d had my casual relationships, even dated my boss for a while before he married the head of accounting, a sharp woman who practically held him by the testicles and dictated his every move. But I’d never felt any compelling need for any sort of pair-bonding with another human. Relationships seemed complicated and time-consuming. The extraordinary emotional dance of two people playing mental games, cloying and conniving, fighting like caged terrakats, then kissing, making up and starting over once again. It was exhausting, unnecessary and unfulfilling for me. And yet, the few friends that I had kept up with despite my nearly-constant travels had eventually fallen victim to the same drama: dating, flirting, copulating, marrying, procreating, divorcing ... and not necessarily in that order. Everyone seemed to find it necessary to undergo this ritual, but I did not find mandatory to play the snipe hunter in the dating game.

Speaking of mandatory, I thumbed up my digital directory, and sent a message to the head of personnel management apologizing for the delay in the expenses report that was due within twenty-four hours of returning to base and promising to deliver it as soon as I returned to the office. I sent a second ditto to my boss, advising him that I would still need additional days of sick leave for the notorious “space bug” I had contracted and warned that I could still be contagious. Feeling confident that I had the freedom of several days of relative freedom, I began to brainstorm ways to get in to the moonport, back to my Babo. 

I dragged myself out of the luxury of my bath (a privilege that costs me nearly 150 credits in addition to the last of this lunar cycle's luxury water, but a weakness which I always indulge after space travel). Still feeling weak, I drank a cup of miso soup and contemplated the freeze-dried pale green leeks swirling in the thin broth. I needed to have access to the baggage bots not only when they were in operation in the moonport baggage claim areas, but alone, where they were kept for storage. But how to get in without attracting notice? Schemes and plots filled my mind and overcome with lethargy, I lay down for a nap. 


Visions of long thin threads filled my dreams. Writhing and gyrating, the almost invisible translucent threads latched onto the walls around them and suddenly turned red and began to swell and swell. In the strange clarity of the dreaming mind, I realized that the threads were worms, and the red color was blood, they were gorging and growing! I awoke with my heart racing, a headache pounding behind my eyes, and sticky, clammy hands. My mouth was incredibly dry, and I felt a pervasive sense of unease. I ran a thin trickle of filtered water into a glass and gulped it down, but it unsettled my stomach and I still had cotton-mouth afterward. I felt restless, claustrophobic and confined in the walls of my unit. Pacing, I decided the only thing to do was to go to the moonport. I checked the time; the monorail would be arriving in about twelve minutes. 

Thoughts whirled in my head…Sneak in to see him, learn to operate a forklift to get him home to me, steal him away… learn to reprogram him so we could have conversations instead of the stock phrases “May I carry that bag for you? Tips are unnecessary. Thank you for choosing United Alberta Moonport! Have a great day!”

The whiz of the monorail arriving at the station interrupted my train of thought, and I got on board, seating myself far from the filthy vagrant sleeping in a pile of discarded bootie covers. The Indoor Clean Air Act now prohibited street shoes from being worn indoors without being protected by booties, however apparently the “Don’t-Litter-in-The-Monorail” law was ineffective. Or perhaps he had scrounged them from waste bins. I wondered what had reduced this man to living on a pile of used foot protectors in a monorail car. Was it lack of motivation to work? Did he have a disability, mental or otherwise? Had he always lived like this and never known anything better? Perhaps he had lost his family in a tragic accident and given up the will to live, surviving on the mere scraps of society. It just seemed to me additional justification to not get attached to anyone.

“Now arriving at United Alberta Moonport” the metallic voice announced over the speakers. The monorail slid to a stop and the doors hissed open to the moonport. It had only been a few days since I had come back, moon-dazed and travel weary, and yet it seemed as though I had an entirely new perspective and intention as I stepped from that car into the bustle of arriving and departing passengers. 

When one moves with authority and purpose, not many will make the effort to stop you to question - especially if you look the part, and especially in so large a building as a moonport. My suit had been professionally pressed until the seams could practically cut paper and it was starched to within an inch of its life. My hair was pulled into a severe bun, eyeliner heavy and lips very pale. I was still weak from my illness, but I had my destination in mind and my feet carried me there of their own accord. A variety of arriving passengers straggled through the moonport, looking as dazed and glassy-eyed as I must have a few days earlier. The baggage bots efficiently retrieved their luggage by their scan-tags, and dutifully hauled the passengers' luggage to the monorails. I searched through the shine of metallic bodies for my Babo, but I wasn't able to spot him. I walked past a security checkpoint with a flutter in my chest, but the guards were busily debating the merits of the last zoneball game and paid me no mind. I saw a door marked 'Bot Maintenance and tested the handle. Locked. 

I would have to wait. I obscured myself out of sight of the guards and after a long while, a janitor came by and returned a tool box, unlocking the door with a ring of keys the size of a gaoler's set. Funny how we had 'bots to do most everything but still hadn't gotten the level of AI to meet the basic yet somehow complex needs of changing a lightcore, tightening a wingnut or replacing environmental stripping. Apparently the human element couldn't be entirely eliminated from our daily mundane tasks after all. As the man walked away, tugging at collar of his pastel green jumpsuit, I quickly slipped across and caught the door before it clicked shut. My eyes struggled to adapt to the dark - a few low lights around the periphery of an enormous room were the only source of illumination and I hesitated before moving on into the darkest recesses. 

Cleaning equipment was stacked on wheeled carts, huge bins of mechanical parts, rows of toolboxes, shelving with cords and cranks, heavy equipment parked in eccentric rows and varieties of tools of every kind greeted my growing night vision as I meandered slowly toward the back of the vast warehouse. A separate caged area was isolated from the rest of the area, and I leaned up against the metal bars to look inside. There he was, my Babo, reclined on a table against the far wall. Against my belief, the door was unlatched...