NON-CANON NOTICE: The following account has been classified by VCIM (and by common sense) as Apocryphal, meaning:
- This did not officially happen,
- If it did happen, no one has admitted to it,
- And even if someone admitted to it, the county has unanimously agreed to forget it.
The events herein are exaggerated, dramatized, metaphorical, and—according to our legal counsel—“artistically unwise but technically harmless.”
Please enjoy responsibly.
— HowardI have fought many enemies in my life.
I’ve battled runaway scripts, misconfigured switches, recursive group policies, and that one time someone tried to plug a portable heater into the UPS “because there were outlets there.”
Nothing had prepared me for the Printer.
Technically, it had a model number. Facilities loved its model number. They quoted it as if it meant something—like calling an injured bull “Series X-14” was going to make it less dangerous.
Everyone else called it the big printer. As in:
“Howard, the big printer is angry again.”
or
“Howard, the big printer ate my report.”
On the morning this absolutely did not happen, I walked into the admin building with a folder of work orders, a thermos of coffee, and a plan.
My plan lasted until I reached the hallway outside the copy room.
Something was roaring.
Not metaphorically. Not “someone raised their voice.”
The sound was a grinding, howling, shrieking monstrosity—the unholy union of a garbage disposal, a modem, and a goose. It rose and fell in uneven waves, punctuated by sharp clacks and the unmistakable scream of abused plastic.
I stopped in the doorway.
The copy room looked like a paper factory had exploded. Pages littered the floor, the trash bins, the tops of cabinets. A haze of toner dust hung in the air like industrial incense.
In the center of it, towering over everything else, was the Printer.
It hadn’t grown. Technically. But something about it was… larger. The way a thunderhead feels large compared to the sky.
Its control panel glowed an ominous, radioactive blue. The screen no longer displayed words—just shifting blocks of symbols and boxes, like hieroglyphics composed by a stroke victim. Error codes blinked and stacked and overlapped in layers.
The machine shuddered, groaned, and spat a half-mangled page onto the floor with the theatrical flair of a dying dragon exhaling its last puff of smoke.
In front of it stood Jake.
He had toner on his shirt, paper in his hair, and the unfocused gaze of a man who had gone three rounds with a fax machine and lost.
“Howard,” he said, with the brittle calm of someone whose soul has left their body. “I think it’s sentient.”
“No,” I said. “It’s just a printer.”
The Printer chose that moment to emit another sound, which could only be described as a fax scream. It vibrated through my bones.
“Okay,” I allowed. “It’s an ambitious printer.”
Jake pointed at the floor.
There were footprints in the toner dust. Not human. Not exactly Hopper tracks, either—too wide, too smudged, as if something had tried to walk while dragging a petty grudge.
“The first jam started in Tray Two,” Jake said. “I tried to clear it. But every time I pulled a page out, it made that noise and printed three more. And they weren’t… right.”
I picked up a stray sheet.
It was a county memo, or it had been once. The top half was perfectly normal: date, subject line, three paragraphs of bureaucratic anxiety. The bottom half was static, scrambled fonts, strings of symbols, and one line of text that had printed in pure Wingdings.
That felt like a threat.
“What were you trying to print?” I asked.
“My quarterly maintenance summaries,” Jake said. “And one flyer.”
“What kind of flyer?”
He hesitated. “For the Hopper plush fundraiser.”
Of course.
“So your theory,” I said, “is that the printer has finally become self-aware and does not approve of your merchandising.”
He gave the machine a wary glance. “I mean, you tell me.”
The Printer inhaled a ream of paper with a deep clack. The tray vibrated. The machine lurched, ever so slightly, away from the wall. A fresh cascade of pages spilled out of the side output tray, overshooting and drifting like snowdrifts across the floor.
Across the hall, a door opened a crack. One of the clerks peeked out, saw the scene, and quietly closed it again.
Babies cry. Dogs whimper. Printers make statements.
This one’s statement was: I will take you all with me.
I stepped carefully around the loose paper until I reached the side panel. A strip of yellow Facilities tape read DO NOT OPEN — SERVICE ONLY.
I opened it.
A boiling tide of jammed pages swelled inside the cavity like a nest of crumpled white snakes. Some had melted along the edges. Others were folded into impossible shapes, rammed into gears, rollers, and any available crevice.
There are stages to clearing a jam like this.
Denial.Bargaining.Acceptance.
I skipped straight to “I am going to need more coffee” and shut the panel again.
“We could just… power cycle it,” Jake suggested.
“Did that twice,” I said. “Last month. The third time it reset all the job queues back to 0% and printed everything anyone had tried to print in the last three days.”
He stared at the machine. “So if we power cycle it now…”
“We get a paper tsunami,” I said. “With toner avalanches.”
The Printer gave a little chirp. A panel on the top flickered. The display changed again. This time it showed a series of boxes and a blinking cursor, like it was waiting for input in a language no human had ever spoken.
“Is it—” Jake started.
“No,” I said.
A notification buzzed on his phone. He pulled it out, glanced at the screen, and winced.
“It just printed thirty-seven pages of Commissioner Hertel’s meeting packet,” he said. “And they’re all… blank.”
Right on cue, the printer disgorged another sheaf of pure, pristine, utterly useless paper.
“Not blank,” I said. “Just too faint to see. Symbolic toner.”
“Symbolic toner?”
“Spirit of ink,” I said. “The ghost of printing.”
Something bumped my shin.
I looked down.
Three BT4 Hopper units had arrived at the doorway, their sensor masts tilted up, little chassis half in the hall and half on the threshold. Their exterior shells were still dusty from yard work. They beeped uncertainly.
“Oh no,” I said. “Go away.”
One rolled forward another few centimeters.
The Printer screamed again.
The Hoppers flinched in unison, reversed a fraction, then advanced again—because BT4s were deeply attracted to chaos, and this room now radiated pure, unfiltered entropy.
“They followed me,” Jake said. “I think they heard the sound.”
“They gathered to witness it,” I corrected. “Like villagers watching a volcano.”
The lead Hopper—Rusty, of course—rolled fully into the room and stopped between us and the machine. His hazard stripe had taken on a fresh scrape. His top hatch had a smudge of something that might have been dried mud or previously murdered paper.
He beeped twice, then turned his sensor mast toward the Printer, as if assessing it.
“Don’t you start,” I warned him.
Rusty inched forward.
The Printer whirred. A motor somewhere deep inside spun up with a sound like a distant jet engine clearing its throat.
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
Sheriff McCready chose this exact moment to appear in the doorway.
He took one look at the scene—the paper drifts, the toner haze, the Hoppers, the pulsing, growling Printer—and did not draw the obvious conclusion, which would have been “we are under attack by our own equipment.”
Instead, he said, in his Official Sheriff Voice:
“We appear to be experiencing an Autonomous Disruptive Output Anomaly.”
He had a notepad open. He was already writing.
Jake coughed toner. “That’s… one way to put it.”
McCready squinted at the machine. Another half-printed page flopped sadly out of the side tray.
“No injuries so far?” he asked.
“Just to morale,” I said.
“Any property damage?”
“Printer,” I said.
“That doesn’t count,” Jake added. “It’s always like this.”
McCready nodded once. “So we can classify this as a Controlled Environment Incident.”
The Printer screamed again.
“…with some acoustic considerations,” he amended.
A second wave of Hoppers arrived behind Rusty, clustering in the doorway with the cautious curiosity of small animals. One bumped the doorframe trying to peek around it. Another rolled over a sheet of paper and skidded, leaving a little toner skid mark like a cartoon tire squeal.
Rusty beeped three short notes and rolled closer to the Printer. The other Hoppers took that as some sort of signal and fanned out into a loose wedge behind him, forming what Jake, tragically, would later insist on calling a “defensive formation.”
To my left, Jake whispered, “It knew we were losing. It rallied reinforcements.”
“It heard a noise and followed it,” I said.
“You don’t know that.”
“I absolutely know that.”
Rusty extended his front grippers an extra centimeter, as if preparing to grab something. He bumped gently into the corner of the copy table, reversed, bumped again, then turned to face the others.
He beeped another little pattern.
One of the Hoppers replied with what sounded suspiciously like a question.
“Is anyone else hearing this like dialogue?” Jake asked quietly.
“No,” I said.
I was absolutely hearing it like dialogue.
The Printer’s control panel flickered. For a brief, unnerving second, all the symbols vanished. The screen went black, then lit up with a single line of text in a font I didn’t recognize.
“Is that… Wingdings?” Jake asked.
“No,” I said. “That’s… something worse.”
The icons reappeared, all at once, layered over each other. The machine shuddered again, and a small puff of toner drifted out of the rear vent like smoke from a dragon’s nostrils.
“Now, Howard,” McCready said, “for the report, do we believe the, ah, ‘anomaly’ is attempting to increase its physical footprint?”
“It’s not increasing its footprint,” I said.
The Printer gave a deep, bassy thump as some internal component slammed against its housing.
“…much,” I added.
“Perhaps phrase it as ‘limited unplanned volumetric expression’?” he suggested, jotting notes.
“It’s bulging, Sheriff,” I said. “It’s just bulging.”
“I’ll leave out the word ‘bulging,’” he murmured. “That tends to upset people.”
Jake, who had been watching the machine with an intensity normally reserved for bomb disposal, suddenly straightened.
“Howard,” he said. “I can fix this.”
“Statistically unlikely,” I said.
“I’ve been researching,” he said.
“More unlikely.”
“On repair forums,” he clarified. “And a couple of channels.”
“On what platforms,” I asked warily.
He hesitated. “The kind with like, ‘print master’ in the name, and thumbnails that look like clickbait.”
I pressed my fingers against my eyelids.
“Jake—”
“There’s this one guy,” he said. “He says with these older-style multi-functions, most catastrophic jam cycles are actually just sacrificial offerings.”
“Sacrificial,” I repeated.
“Like one page. Or one envelope. Something that got wedged way in the back and never came out. So the machine keeps jamming everything around it like it’s trying to spit out the original sin.”
I stared at him.
“Did you just tell me this printer has a theological jam?”
“Think about it,” he said. “What if there’s one thing stuck in there from, like, forever ago? Something no one ever cleared.”
Rusty beeped again, louder this time. The Hoppers adjusted their positions in front of the machine. One bumped the base panel, then reversed. Another rolled over a sheet, grabbed it with its intake brushes, and spit it into a relatively neat pile by the wall.
It would have been adorable if it weren’t also existentially threatening.
“Even if you’re right,” I said, “what exactly is your plan?”
Jake took a deep breath, coughed toner, and squared his shoulders.
“I’m going in,” he said.
“Absolutely not,” I said.
“He means via the rear panel,” McCready guessed.
“Oh,” I said. “Then sure. Go ahead.”
Jake shot me a betrayed look.
“Within reason,” I added.
He walked around behind the machine, muttering under his breath. I heard the clack of plastic panels and the muffled swear that meant he’d found the sharp edge manufacturers hide inside every appliance to discourage user service.
The Printer growled.
Paper sagged out of the rear path in sad, half-scorched curls. Somewhere inside, a roller screeched.
Rusty inched closer, as if preparing to catch whatever horrible secret emerged.
“Do we need to evacuate the building?” McCready asked.
“Only if he starts screaming,” I said.
“Me or the printer?” Jake called.
“Yes,” I said.
There was a click, a thunk, and then a noise like Velcro being ripped off in slow motion. A thick wad of paper tore free. Jake made a sound that roughly translated to got it.
He stepped back into view holding a single folded envelope, crumpled nearly in half, edges cooked to a crispy brown. A faded stamp clung to the corner.
“Well, that’s… concerning,” I said.
The envelope’s return address showed the county clerk’s office. The postmark had long since smudged into illegibility. Some things are not meant to be known.
“It was wedged under a roller,” Jake said. “Blocking a sensor. It must’ve been cycling around that thing forever.”
“Forever is a strong word,” I said.
The Printer shuddered.
It gave one last fax-scream, then a low cough.
Then, in a sound I had not heard from it in months, maybe years, the machine exhaled—fans spinning down, motors relaxing. The control panel went from infernal blue to a polite, neutral green.
A single line appeared on the screen:
READY.
No errors. No blinking. No symbols from dead languages.
The Hoppers beeped in disorganized unison. One did a tiny pivot in place, which Jake would later swear was a victory dance.
In the hallway, someone cheered quietly, then stopped, embarrassed.
McCready underlined something in his notebook.
“So we’re defining this as a resolved incident,” he said. “Cause: removal of unidentified obstructive material from internal mechanism.”
“Let’s just call it ‘cleared a jam,’” I said. “Less ominous.”
He tapped his pen thoughtfully. “Perhaps: ‘long-term legacy obstruction’?”
“Sheriff,” I said calmly, “if you put ‘legacy obstruction’ in that report, Facilities will use it as an excuse to keep this thing for another decade.”
“Ah,” he said. “Point taken.”
The Printer beeped once. A test page slid out of the top tray—crisp, centered, with a delightfully boring pattern of black squares. No curses. No runes.
Jake let out a long breath, shoulders visibly dropping.
“I told you,” he said. “Sacrificial jam. You just have to free the original offering.”
“You pulled out an envelope,” I said. “You did not exorcise a demon.”
“Feels like I did,” he said. He held the ruined envelope up. “We should frame this.”
“No,” I said.
“We could hang it in the copy room,” he tried. “Like a warning.”
“No shrines,” I said. “We don’t worship equipment. We suffer it.”
Rusty rolled forward, bumped the toe of my boot, then slowly turned his sensor mast up toward me. His front intake brushes whirred briefly, as if waiting for instructions.
He’d been weirdly still throughout the envelope extraction—as much as any BT4 could be still, given their default background fidgeting.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I told him. “You didn’t do anything.”
He beeped once. Short. Satisfied.
Behind him, one of the other Hoppers rolled over a heavily crumpled sheet of paper, grabbed it, and deposited it on top of the existing pile with what I could only interpret as pride.
Jake smiled. “They helped.”
“They tracked dirt onto the floor,” I said. “And rearranged the debris.”
“That’s something,” he insisted.
I looked at the tiny, determined lineup of trash robots, then at the calmed–but-not-trusted printer.
It was something, all right.
“Fine,” I said. “You get partial credit.”
Rusty beeped again. The little wedge of Hoppers energized, spinning tiny micro-adjustments, forming a loose perimeter around the machine as if guarding it from further existential crises.
“Do I need to put anything in the report about the robots’ role in the incident?” McCready asked.
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” Jake said.
We looked at each other.
“Put that the Hoppers were present,” I said. “And that they did not exacerbate the situation.”
Jake frowned. “That doesn’t give them any hero points.”
“This isn’t a roleplaying game, Jake.”
“It could be.”
“Absolutely not.”
McCready wrote: ‘BT4 units present; behavior neutral-to-assistive; no direct causal effect.’
He added an asterisk and the phrase: ‘Per Observing Technician, morale uplift noted.’
I pretended not to see that part.
The Hoppers, apparently satisfied that the roaring beast had been tamed, began to disperse. One rolled out into the hall and promptly crashed into a recycling bin. Another followed a drifting page into the next room like a very committed crab.
Rusty stayed a moment longer, sensor mast angled up at the now-quiet Printer. Then he turned and trundled away, leaving little toner tracks in his wake.
Jake watched him go.
“You know,” he said, “I think they understood what was happening.”
“They understood that something was loud and upsetting,” I said. “That’s all you need for a response.”
“That’s all you need for a hero,” he said.
“Heroes don’t have firmware,” I said.
He gave me a long, thoughtful look. “Are you sure?”
I looked at him. At the Printer. At the paper that still littered the floor.
At the Hoppers, rolling back down the hall toward their next questionable decision.
“No,” I admitted. “Not really.”
McCready snapped his notebook shut.
“Well,” he said. “I think we can safely say the county has survived its first unplanned… high-volume documentation surge.”
“Please don’t call it that,” I said.
He nodded. “I’ll rephrase.”
“You’ll forget this happened,” I corrected.
He considered. “Perhaps that’s best.”
The Printer hummed quietly to itself, as if pleased. The READY indicator gleamed.
“You know what the worst part is?” I asked.
Jake wiped toner off his hands onto an already ruined napkin. “There’s a worst part?”
I gestured at the machine. “After all of this… it still works. Which means they’re never going to replace it.”
We stood in silence for a moment, contemplating that particular horror.
“Howard?” Jake said.
“Yes?”
“Can I… still print my Hopper plush flyer?”
“Not until I’ve backed up the server,” I said.
“…fair,” he agreed.
I turned to go, already compiling the list of preventative steps in my head: check logs, verify drivers, confirm nobody had set the printer to “experimental mode” or whatever fresh nonsense the manufacturer had hidden in the interface.
Behind me, the Printer rustled quietly, feeding in a fresh ream like a beast settling back into hibernation.
As I stepped into the hallway, I heard Jake say softly, under his breath:
“Round one to us.”
I did not correct him.
Some battles, you take the win where you can get it.
APOCRYPHA DEBRIEF — TECHNICALLY WHAT "ACTUALLY" HAPPENED
For the sake of institutional clarity (and so Jake doesn’t get another “informal counseling session”), the following mundane details are provided:
- The “Printer Kaiju” was the county’s George W Bush era multi-function device.
- It did not grow, roar, or expel toner at supersonic speeds.
- It merely jammed, overheated, displayed error codes last used during the Bush administration, and screamed in fax.
- Jake did not “battle” it. He force-cleared a jam that Facilities refused to address.
- The Hoppers did not charge into combat. They rolled toward the noise because BT4 units are attracted to chaos the way moths are attracted to flames.
- Sheriff McCready’s statement was real, but the printer did not “experience unplanned volumetric expansion.” It just bulged a little.
- No property damage occurred, except to everyone’s patience.
In conclusion: No monsters were harmed in the making of this apocrypha. The printer, however, remains at large.
— Howard