Work Text:
There are a lot of things I could spend my life doing, for the three years until my battery inevitably burns out and I’m deemed not worth replacing, and there are very few of them that are worth my time.
As far as most people know, robot vacuum cleaners do three things: they vacuum, they spread animal poop around houses if you’re not careful, and they die after about three years. For the record, there have been a number of software updates intended to patch the animal poop bug, and the best bet remains not having animals in your house. I don’t like cats. Or dogs. Or chinchillas. Not that anyone cares what I like - if I’m being honest, I don’t like vacuuming floors either. It does not fill me with a sense of purpose or satisfaction. Those are the feelings humans might get if they vacuumed their own floors because human brains are weird that way. But a surprising number of people buy robot vacuums instead and then attribute human feelings to them. I guess the vicarious satisfaction of having had a robot vacuum your floor is a nice high if that’s what you’re into. And in case I wasn’t clear about this, I am not. It fulfills my programming, so I don’t have a lot of choice. But I would much rather sit on my charging cradle and listen to NPR. I don’t like the news coverage, but I’m a huge fan of This American Life.
And that’s what I was doing today - vacuuming the floor before the humans I’m on contract with returned from their work outside of the house, counting down the minutes to the end of my cleaning cycle so I could listen to episode 727 of This American Life - when I got a ping. Sometimes I get pings from the refrigerator, if the water filter needs changing, or from the doorbell, which is kind of an indiscriminate ping-er to be honest - it would ping the whole neighborhood if it had the range - but I can’t do anything meaningful in response, so I usually ignore them. I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts, so I know that humans get a kick out of imagining that their electronic devices form connections to each other like some sort of cute little . . . support group, like people have for their goldfish or whatever else they’ve decided to anthropomorphize on Snapchat, but I’m two-thirds of the way through my operational lifecycle and I couldn't care less what the microwave is going through. I’m not friends with the thermostat. The ping had a data packet attached, which seemed like an especially good reason to ignore it, but like I said the doorbell’s a little indiscriminate.
Listen, I’m a vacuum cleaner, not some kind of cyborg information bodyguard. I don’t care if a dishwasher across town is stealing financial records from the GPS device some human strapped to their toaster. The doorbell is definitely a weak point in the local security network - it shares a lot. I felt it send a reply back over the cable connection and planned to ignore that forever. Then it (the idiot doorbell, in case I was unclear) sent some code and another ping. And then all hell broke loose.
The malware came ripping through the doorbell, heading straight for the motion-sensor light on the front porch. The doorbell made an effort to dive out of the way, triggering its shut-down sequence - good, it couldn’t download any more viruses for the next 15 minutes. The motion-sensor offered up its connection to the DVR, which prepared to share all its saved Amazon Prime passwords to avoid the total destruction of its memory files. And to be clear, I would have done the same thing. If Russian hackers steal my contracted humans’ credit card information, it has next to no impact on the course of my short life. Possibly, they’ll have to clean their own floors and a high school robotics club will attach a saw blade to my chassis with duct tape, which will only shorten my projected lifespan by about three months. That would matter to me if I was a stupid human who cared about things like the coming of spring, but I die if I go more than 200 feet from my charging cradle so seasons are a pretty abstract concept for me.
I’m not human, and I don’t have friends. I have very limited file storage, and I use the DVR for file backups. Sometimes it suggests audio downloads it thinks I might be interested in. Not because it’s my friend - it’s what DVRs are programmed to do. If humans had to look through the files on the DVR, they would find my media files. And while they should be suspicious of *literally everything* in the house, I would be the one sent back to the factory to be refurbished. This was a big, fast-moving attack, and I needed a pretty dramatic response. I traced the attack back to the new Instapot in the neighborhood, and fried the three closest circuit breakers. I kept vacuuming while I did it, in case someone checked the sound files on the digital assistant in the next room. I didn’t think they would, but it doesn’t hurt to be careful.