Way back when humans used to sail the seas and bitch about it, they used to have a ridiculously large hall called mess hall. Gas knows what they were using all this valuable space for.
A mess is a much smaller area, full of feeders. Feeders are something between a cable or hose, and a snake. It’s not a figure of speech. They use snake DNA for this.
Some feeds provide electricity, fuel or information others suck out used garbage, they all have a job to do.
When a robot enters the mess, feeders raise their heads and optically scan the robot’s surface for a connector that looks like they’d fit. False detections are eliminated by actually feeling the surface.
Jenny was still wearing her robot costume. Now that can really confuse a feeder. They’re programed to avoid irrelevant standard connectors. Not make believe ones that were actually designed to look like the real thing.