The Robot Who Loved Flowers

By Aaron McEmrys

There once was a robot who loved flowers. Its name was Dirk.

Dirk lived, if robots can be said to live, on a space station quite a long way from here. The Makers had built the station, charted its incomprehensible course through the cosmos, filled it up with robots, and then woke up one day, got into their shuttles – and simply left.

Nobody had bothered to tell the robots where they were going, when they would return or what the robots should do in their absence. So the robots just went on doing what they had been programmed to do.

They kept the station clean and neat, kept fresh coffee brewing and made sure that every laboratory was ready for use every single morning, as if the Makers would return at any moment, although they never did.

Dirk, however, never quite fit in. Dirk was as willing as the next robot to cook and clean and prepare for the Makers who never came, but its heart, if robots can be said to have hearts – just wasn’t into it.

Dirk’s real love, if robots can be said to love – was gardening, especially flower gardening. What made Dirk’s strange hobby even stranger was the fact that there weren’t any actual flowers on the space station – they were in space, after all!

So for a long time, for many, many Earth-years, in fact, Dirk tended an imaginary garden. It planted rows of tall nuts and bolts painted yellow and red and blue; old fuel canisters became watermelons and three broken coat racks with yellow plastic plates on top became sunflowers.

The other robots grudgingly put up with Dirk’s obsession for a long time, even though they all thought it must be a bit crazy – or at least that something must be wrong with its wiring.

“Put down that hoe, Dirk. It’s time to clean the bathrooms.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll be there in a minute – but you do know that no one has used those bathrooms for at least twenty-seven cycles, don’t you?”

But Dirk always went, putting down its shovel or hoe with a sigh before going to do what he was programmed to do.

And then one day, as Dirk was tidying up one of the labs, it made an amazing discovery. There, at the bottom of an old tool cabinet, was a small plastic box, labeled, “Botony Experiment 24Z.”

Dirk gasped, which is a very funny sound for a robot to make – “Botany. The science of plants. Flowers!”

Inside were several packets of soil, several packets of seeds and instructions on what to do with them.

After that Dirk became a metal whirwind of activity, moving through its regular duties with speed and efficiency that astonished the other robots.

“Dirk is highly efficient. Dirk is productive. Dirk makes very good coffee.”

Dirk hurried through its tasks because it couldn’t wait to get back to its rapidly growing garden. It discovered that by mixing the coffee grounds and leftover vegetables from the meals they made three times a day for the Makers who never ate them, it could make even more soil to grow even more plants!

And soon, Dirk’s garden was full and lush and threatened to explode out of the little closet where he recharged at night. And Dirk was very happy, and very dirty.

But soon an emergency arose that kept all the other robots far too busy to shake their robotic heads at Dirk’s increasingly damaged wiring and dirty pinchers: the space station was running out of power.

The fuel cells the station depended upon were almost out of power, and if something wasn’t done soon, the lights would turn off, the coffee pot would stop brewing and the robots would slowly, and perhaps permanently, shut down.

The robots were very well programmed, and they attempted hundreds of solutions, but none of them worked.

“If the Makers do not return very soon, it is only logical that we will shut down, and our faithful service will be at an end.”, said XZ-17, the robot with the biggest hard drive.

“Agreed, yes agreed” agreed BZ-22, the robot with the most RAM, somewhat wistfully.

And all the robots bowed their heads in forlorn resignation and went back to their closets to wait for the end.

Dirk looked at its lovely wild garden with great sadness, and yes, robots can be said to feel sad sometimes. It looked at its lovely real grass and cornflowers, daliahs and snapdragons and sunflowers and sighed deeply.

“I wonder who will take care of you when I run out of power” it said quietly. “You are all so demanding, growing so fast…”

And then its head-visor flashed bright red.

“I wonder. I wonder. I wonder, I wonder, I wonder! Yes, I wonder!!!”

And Dirk the robot flew into action as fast as its hydraulic parts could carry him.

Dirk assembled the brightest and most-learned robot experts from a number of arcane fields and soon all of their eye-visors were flashing red.

“I think we’ve got it!”

And so it came to pass that Dirk and its fellow robots raced around planting many, many, many more plants until the station looked like a space age rainforest.

Then they used special collectors to capture the oxygenated life energy of all those plants to create a kind of giant battery. Thanks to Dirk’s devoted care and attention, the plants grew like crazy, generating all the energy the station and its robot caretakers needed.

Thanks to Dirk the robot, and its fertile imagination, the space station was saved, and the Makers, when they eventually returned many years later – were shocked to discover the very first flower-powered space station in the whole galaxy!