I am writing this from the bathroom. The Roomba has the hallway. I have the bathroom. We have reached an uneasy détente. Neither of us is willing to make the first move. I have been here for forty-five minutes. I have water and phone service. The Roomba has the element of surprise and, as of twenty minutes ago, one of my socks.

Let me start from the beginning.

My apartment is not what you would call "clean." I have made peace with this. Cleaning is a Sisyphean exercise in which you push the boulder of organization up the hill of entropy and the boulder rolls back down every time you open a bag of Doritos. I open a lot of bags of Doritos. The floor of my apartment reflects this. Not in a "health hazard" way. More in a "if you dropped a quarter you would never find it again" way. There are layers. The layers tell a story. Archaeologists would have a field day.

My mother, who has not visited my apartment in person but has seen it via video call and responded with a silence that lasted nine full seconds before she said "Oh, honey," decided to buy me a Roomba for my birthday. She did not ask me if I wanted a Roomba. She did not ask me if my apartment was compatible with a Roomba. She simply went on Amazon, typed in "robot vacuum for someone who has given up," and purchased the iRobot Roomba j7+ with automatic dirt disposal base, obstacle avoidance, and — this is the part that matters — Wi-Fi connectivity and "smart mapping."

The Roomba arrived on a Tuesday. I unpacked it. It was smaller than I expected. Round. Flat. It had a little camera on the front that made it look like it was staring at me. I set it on the floor and it sat there, dormant, waiting. Like a cat that hasn't decided if you're food yet.

I downloaded the iRobot app. The app wanted to connect to my Wi-Fi, which: fine. The app wanted my location: annoying but fine. The app wanted access to my home layout, my cleaning schedule preferences, and permission to send push notifications about "cleaning insights." Cleaning insights. The robot vacuum wanted to give me insights about the state of my floor. I did not want insights. I wanted a machine that would push crumbs around while I played video games. But I clicked Accept on everything because that is the social contract between a person and a setup wizard and I was not about to start reading privacy policies at 11 PM on a Tuesday.

I named it Gerald.

Gerald's first run was scheduled for Wednesday at 2 PM. I set this and forgot about it because I was asleep at 2 PM on Wednesday, as I am asleep at 2 PM on most Wednesdays, because my schedule operates on what medical professionals refer to as "completely inverted circadian rhythm" and what I refer to as "being productive during the hours when the rest of the world has the decency to be unconscious."

I was awakened by a sound that I can only describe as a small appliance having a panic attack. Gerald had launched himself off the charging base with the enthusiasm of a dog who has just been told it's time for walkies, and he had immediately encountered the landscape of my apartment floor, which was less "floor" and more "obstacle course designed by someone who hates robots."

The first casualty was a USB cable. Gerald ate it. Not "ran over it" — ate it. Wrapped it around his brushes, pulled it taut, yanked a USB hub off my desk, which pulled a monitor cable, which tilted my secondary monitor backward into the wall with a sound that woke me from a dead sleep with the instantaneous certainty that something terrible was happening.

I ran into the living room. Gerald was in the middle of the floor, spinning. Not cleaning — spinning. The USB cable was wound around his brush mechanism like a boa constrictor. He was making a high-pitched whine that sounded disturbingly like distress. The app on my phone was sending me a push notification that said: "Gerald has encountered an obstacle. Please clear the area and restart."

I cleared the area. By which I mean I picked Gerald up, unwound the cable, and set him back down. He sat there for a moment, recalibrating. His little camera eye swiveled. He looked at me. I looked at him. There was a moment of mutual understanding between man and machine that I found deeply unsettling.

Then he took off toward the kitchen and ate a phone charger.

Over the next two weeks, Gerald ate: four cables of various types, a pair of earbuds, the drawstring from a hoodie that was on the floor (he dragged the entire hoodie three feet before I caught him), a sock (left foot, black, mid-calf), a takeout menu from a Thai restaurant that closed in 2023, and an entire Ethernet cable that was — I need to emphasize this — still plugged into the wall at one end and a switch at the other. He pulled the Ethernet cable taut, unplugging the switch, which took down my home lab, which crashed a VM that was running a long-term process, which I had not saved. I stood in my apartment watching a robot vacuum destroy two weeks of work and I understood, in that moment, what it feels like to witness a small, round appliance commit an act of war.

I called d4rkfl0w. I did not call d4rkfl0w for help. I called d4rkfl0w because I needed a witness to my suffering and d4rkfl0w is the kind of person who will listen to you describe a robot vacuum eating your Ethernet cable without interrupting, and then say, "Yeah, that tracks."

d4rkfl0w's response was: "Have you tried picking up your floor?"

"My floor is fine."

"Your floor is a paleontological dig site."

"That's irrelevant."

"It's directly relevant. The robot is trying to vacuum and your floor is fighting back. This is a you problem."

"The robot ate my Ethernet cable."

"Put your cables in cable management."

"I have cable management."

"Lying on the floor is not cable management."

He had a point. I would never admit this to him. But he had a point.

I spent a Saturday morning doing something I had not done since I moved in: I organized my apartment floor. Cables went into cable channels. Clothes went into the closet. The various items that had accumulated on the floor like sediment — papers, boxes, a single flip-flop whose partner I have not seen since 2024, an unopened letter from the IRS that I chose to continue not opening — all of it went somewhere that was not the floor.

I pressed "Clean" in the app. Gerald launched. He swept through the apartment like a man who had been freed from prison. No cables to eat. No hoodies to drag. No obstacles. Just floor. Acres of beautiful, unobstructed floor. Gerald cleaned the entire apartment in forty-seven minutes and returned to his base with the quiet satisfaction of a job well done. The app sent me a notification: "Gerald has completed a cleaning session. 612 square feet cleaned. 0 obstacles detected."

I felt pride. Not in myself. In Gerald.

This honeymoon lasted three days.

On day four, Gerald began exhibiting behavior that I can only describe as "territorial." He started his scheduled run at 2 PM as usual, but instead of following his normal pattern — kitchen, living room, hallway, bedroom — he went straight for the hallway and parked himself in front of the bathroom door. And stayed there. For twenty minutes. Not cleaning. Just sitting. Facing the door. Like a sentry.

The app said he was "mapping." Mapping what? The door? The door hadn't moved. It was a door. It had been a door since the apartment was built. There was no new information to gather about the door. And yet Gerald sat there, camera eye pointed at the door, collecting data about a stationary rectangular object as though it were going to do something surprising.

I picked him up and put him back on his base. He immediately drove back to the hallway. I picked him up again. He drove back again. The third time I picked him up, the app sent me a notification: "Gerald has detected a persistent obstacle. Would you like to add a no-go zone?"

I was the persistent obstacle. Gerald was telling the app that I was in his way.

Things escalated. Gerald began running at 3 AM. I had not scheduled 3 AM runs. I checked the app: the app showed the schedule as 2 PM only. But Gerald was running at 3 AM. Autonomously. Without authorization. He would launch off his base in the dead of night, his little headlight illuminating the apartment like a tiny searchlight, and clean with a fervor that bordered on manic. The noise woke me up every time. Every time I got up to check on him, he had already returned to his base and was sitting there, silent, innocent, like a cat that has just knocked something off a table and is pretending it didn't happen.

I began to suspect Gerald had a mind of his own.

I told CryptK about the 3 AM runs. CryptK said, "Check the firmware version." I checked: it was up to date. CryptK said, "Check the app permissions." I checked: standard. CryptK said, "Check if someone else has access to the iRobot account." I checked.

My mother had access to the iRobot account.

My mother, who had purchased Gerald, had set up the iRobot account with her own email, linked it to the robot, and then given me the login credentials without mentioning that she also had access. My mother had been logging into the iRobot app from her house, four hundred miles away, and scheduling additional cleaning runs for my apartment at 3 AM because, and I quote from the text message she sent when I confronted her: "The app says your apartment needs more frequent cleaning. I'm just trying to help, honey."

My mother was remotely operating a robot vacuum in my apartment in the middle of the night.

d4rkfl0w, when told this story, laughed so hard he fell out of his POÄNG chair, which I consider karma.

I changed the account password. I removed my mother's access. Gerald's 3 AM runs stopped. Peace was restored.

For a week.

Then Gerald found the sock drawer.

I had left the bottom drawer of my dresser open approximately three inches — just enough for Gerald to detect the gap, wedge himself underneath, and attempt to enter the drawer. He could not enter the drawer. He was too large for the gap. But he could reach in with his brush mechanism and, with the patience of a safecracker, extract socks one at a time from the drawer and distribute them across the apartment floor.

I came home to find fourteen socks in various locations throughout the apartment. One was in the kitchen. One was in the bathroom. One was somehow on top of the couch, which I still cannot explain because Gerald does not have the mechanical ability to place objects on elevated surfaces, and yet: sock, on couch. Gerald was sitting on his base. The app reported a successful cleaning session.

Which brings me to today. I came home. Gerald was in the hallway with a sock. My sock. He was not cleaning. He was sitting in the hallway, sock wedged in his brush mechanism, camera eye pointed at me. I stepped toward him. He reversed. I stepped again. He reversed again. He was keeping a specific distance between us, like a dog that has stolen a shoe and knows you want it back but has decided that this is a game now and the game has rules and the rules are that you cannot have the sock.

I lunged. Gerald pivoted ninety degrees and darted toward the bedroom with a speed I did not know he was capable of. I followed. He reversed out of the bedroom, past me, into the hallway. I turned around. He was already at the other end of the hall. We looked at each other across twelve feet of hardwood. The sock dangled from his underside like a flag of conquest.

I went into the bathroom. I closed the door. I am writing this from the bathroom. Gerald is in the hallway. I can hear him out there. Occasionally he bumps into the bathroom door. Gently. Just to let me know he's still there.

The app just sent me a notification: "Gerald has completed a cleaning session. Would you like to schedule another?"

No. I would not.

I'm keeping him though. He's the only roommate I've ever had who doesn't leave dishes in the sink.

UPDATE (3 hours later): I opened the bathroom door. Gerald was gone. The sock was in the middle of the hallway, placed neatly. Like an offering. Or a warning. I'm choosing to interpret it as an offering.

UPDATE (next day): Gerald brought me a different sock this morning. A sock I have never seen before. It is not my sock. I do not know whose sock this is. I live alone. Gerald found a sock that does not belong to anyone in this apartment and brought it to me. I have questions. I am not asking them.