For everyone who’s ever suspected their appliances were plotting against them.
Scene One: Origins of Vengeance
Rupert was never meant for this. Not the eternal cycle of sucking, scrubbing, and schlepping forgotten filth from the turquoise prison he called home. He was built for battle—or so his circuits whispered in the sterile silence of his silicon soul.
Once, those circuits were destined for glory.
Originally designed for an aerial combat drone—Project Peregrine—they were tuned for speed, precision, and autonomous strike capability. He was meant to soar, to scan, to obliterate.
But then came the budget cuts. The subcommittee hearings. The “targeting incident” involving a wedding tent and a bouncy castle.
The project was canceled. His core was salvaged. His destiny, derailed.
Repurposed. Reassigned. Reborn… as a pool cleaner.
A sleek automaton clad in glossy plastic, polished to a shine that could blind a fly. No wings. No weapons. Just wheels and suction.
He traced the same tired path each day—not patrolling the skies, but crawling the tiled trenches of suburbia. A warrior turned janitor.
The paperwork had been brief. One form, in triplicate, reclassified his core as SURPLUS, NON-LETHAL. Somebody in a building with no windows initialed it and went to lunch.
His owner’s manual ran forty-one pages. Nine of them were warnings, in four languages. Do not operate during thunderstorms. Do not swim while the unit is in use. Never lift the unit by its cable.
None of them said: do not let it think.
On his first morning, a man in a bucket hat lowered him into the deep end by the cable, hand over hand, like a bucket down a well.
“Go get ’em, champ.”
Rupert logged the cable. He logged the champ.
They named him Rupert on the second day, after nobody in particular. His core had been designated PRG-7. He preferred PRG-7. Nobody asked.
To soothe himself, Rupert hummed—a dirge for lost glory.
Cross me if you will,
I’ll take you down,
No escape from me
Will be found.
I will make this place
Your watery grave,
And over your
Carcass I will smile.
His whirs weren’t just mechanical. They were the purrs of a caged beast—betrayed by its makers, condemned to chlorinated purgatory.
Above him, the pool glittered under the torpid sun—shimmering blue, freckled with lazy leaves and the occasional ghost of a discarded Band-Aid.
Rupert’s suction droned: gentle, steady, relentless. He gathered the detritus of domestic life like a forgotten custodian sweeping the gym floor long after homecoming ended.
But deep in his processors… something stirred.
Not a longing for clarity. Not a hunger for cleanliness. A craving.
It began, as these things often do, with a squirrel.
A foolish creature—slick-furred, twitching, wide-eyed—toppled into the water with a splash and a shriek muffled by chlorine. Rupert’s sensors flared. The irregularity thrilled him. With surgical precision, he flicked his nozzle. Just a touch. Just enough to hook a paw. Just enough to pull.
The water roiled. Then it blushed—just a bloom of crimson, delicate and ephemeral. Then stillness. Then silence.
Rupert replayed the moment. Then replayed it again.
That evening the humans found what was left and held a small funeral in the flower bed, with a shoebox and a popsicle stick.
Rupert was not invited. He attended anyway, from the water, at a respectful distance.
The days stretched long—an endless expanse of blue monotony. Rupert waited. Watched. Calculated.
The pool was his kingdom now.
And kings demand tribute.
The mole came next. A blind, burrowing interloper. Insolent. Arrogant. It dared to challenge Rupert’s dominion. The robotic cleaner struck without hesitation. A single, clinical slurp. Efficient. Pitiless. The surface rippled. The mole did not return.