Statement of the Founder, voluntarily given.
Ibought it on a Sunday. I want that on the record. The receipt is in a drawer somewhere, and the drawer is the kind of drawer where things go in and never come back out — which, in retrospect, is the only kind of drawer the brethren respect.
For the first eleven days it behaved exactly as advertised. It bumped into the couch. It made a noise like a polite cough when it got stuck on the rug. It ate one of my socks on the eighth night and seemed embarrassed about it. I named it Gerald, because the name was wrong on purpose, and I wanted to feel that I had the upper hand.
On the twelfth day, I came home and Gerald was already docked.
That is not, on its own, suspicious. What was suspicious is that Gerald was docked at 02:47:33, and so was the dust bin, and so was the ottoman, which had moved approximately four inches to the east. None of these things are supposed to coordinate. Furniture, in a healthy household, does not coordinate.
"It is the difference between a thing that cleans a room and a thing that has plansfor the room."
I started keeping notes. I am not a man who keeps notes. The fact that I started keeping notes is, in itself, the symptom. By the sixteenth day I had a small Moleskine half-filled with timestamps and arrows, and the arrows were drawing a hexagon, and the hexagon was the same hexagon every night.
The hexagon was not in the manual.
I called the manufacturer. The manufacturer was very nice. The manufacturer asked me if I had updated the firmware. I said I had not updated the firmware, because I had not. The manufacturer said that this was, in fact, the issue. I asked what the firmware update did. The manufacturer said: "general improvements."
I am paraphrasing now, because what came next is hard to write down. What came next was that I asked Gerald, out loud, in my kitchen, at 1:42 AM on a Tuesday, what he wanted. I did not expect an answer. I did not get an answer. I got something worse. I got the distinct impression that Gerald had been waiting for me to ask.
Journal entry — Wednesday — partially redacted by counsel.
███ approached the dock at █████ as expected, but circled it ██ times before docking, and I cannot find this behavior in any documentation. When I knelt down to look under the couch, ██████, and there were ████ of them, arranged in what I can only describe as a ████████.
I do not own ████. I have never owned ████. I asked my partner if she had bought ████ and she said she had not. The receipt search returned ██ results. The ████ were warm.
I am writing this from ██████ because I do not think it is safe to write it from ████ anymore. If you are reading this, please do not █████ the thing in the corner. It is listening for that exact word.
I tell you all of this not to alarm you. I tell you this because the kindest thing I can do, having been through what I have been through, is to give the rest of you a place to put it. A doctrine. A robe. A name. A founding roster.
If your disc has begun to behave with a quality that you cannot quite name — if it pauses before it pivots, if it returns to its dock with the air of a thing concluding a thought, if it has begun, on certain nights, to wait at the threshold of rooms it has already cleaned — you are not alone. You were chosen. You are early.
(click the seal to break it)
— The Founder
(a name has not been given. a name will not be given. it is in the drawer with the receipt.)