oil bars

When autonomous and intelligent robots started walking the Earth, someone had the bright idea of inventing robot entertainment.
It was initially invented in 19XX by an avant-garde artist simply as an experimental form of expression. For two albums, he composed music at a binaural frequency that was unhearable by humans but could pulse into a machine’s auditory reception systems and transfer information to the main computer, while also layering it on top of more conventional music played at normal frequencies. In doing so, he would attempt to synthesize entertainment and the joy that comes with it into a digital format, giving his music a dual-layered purpose. When asked why, he joked “Someone’s gotta teach ‘em how to jam”.

From an entirely functional point of view, it was a completely pointless invention. A robot would be the most efficient by having all of its time dedicated to doing its function--unlike humans, they had no need of rest, relaxation, or entertainment. They were specifically engineered so that emotions wouldn’t influence their work and they could continue doing tasks they were designed and programmed to do.
That changed with the development of the Robot Master, in Dr. Thomas Light’s perpetual search in creating a world of harmony between humans and robots. Robot Masters were capable of emulating the most intricate part of the human brain: by taking in a variety of blatant (and subtle) inputs of external stimuli in environments, their neural pathways could connect and send information down arrays of different patterns that would decide appropriate responses to different situations and react as needed.

In short, robots could feel.

By simulating arrays of emotions, this brought into question how much it would affect their jobs. Why would a robot need to feel sad? *Should* a robot feel sad? Would a robot feeling sad affect their work? Giving an ideal worker the ability to be lazy or bored or depressed was counterproductive to the point of designing a machine to do a better job in the first place.

It quickly became a moot point with the discovery of the opposite end of the coin. A Robot Master that was “happy” was actually *more* efficient than unfeeling robots that simply did their job. A Robot Master that was “motivated” was more willing to go the extra mile, seek alternative solutions, find more efficient ways to do things, and work overtime simply out of “love” for the job.

With this discovery, productivity surged and people adopted Robot Masters in spades. Even with the inevitable incidents caused by sabotage of neural pathways or depressed robots, their output and ability ushered mankind into a new age of enlightenment. With this, robot entertainment found a new boom.

What started initially as an avant-garde artistic expression quickly gained extremely practical utility, and people looked for ways to cheer up and encourage robots. From this rose unique genres of music, unique television shows, and more--but perhaps the most interesting was the developments of “robot cuisine”.

The petroleum field was already a vital field in the modern boom of robotics, but no robot actively enjoyed maintenance and being opened up to be prodded inside. To address this, people developed edible power crystals, drinkable energy tanks, and refined/flavored petrols. By taking engine oils, transmission oils, diesel fuels, antifreezes, etc, and then turning them into a drink that a machine would get positive neural feedback from consuming, tune-ups became significantly less frequent with the knowledge that a Robot Master would perform check-ups and refills on itself simply because it liked to. After all, no other sensation was as motivating as a delicious meal on the stomach before a tough job or a nice drink after a hard day.

It was 21XX now. Reploids expanded on the idea of robots feeling emotions. Oil bars had expanded into franchises. Several of them did double-duty as normal bars, carrying wines, beers, and other forms of alcohol. Which was suitable, considering a lot of reploid developers were experimenting with biodiesels and trying to give reploids the ability to eat and drink “human” foods and derive power from it. An experimental technology, but people liked drinking with robots, turned out.