I unlocked the VCIM office, flipped on the lights, and listened.
No alarms.No sirens.No distant crashing noises.
Promising.
The coffee maker, on the other hand, emitted a noise that sounded like a small engine failure.
“Not today,” I told it. “You and I have an understanding.”
The understanding was that I ignored the fact that the county refused to replace it, and it ignored the fact that I was putting off descaling it until some mythical future where I had spare time.
It sputtered in what I chose to interpret as agreement and began to drip something that resembled coffee.
I settled into my chair, woke up my monitor, and checked the ticket queue.
-
One password reset.
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One printer “refusing to cooperate.”
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One ticket marked URGENT with no description.
I opened the urgent one first, because I enjoy being disappointed.
Ticket #4421 — URGENT URGENT URGENTSubmitted by: Facilities
“Breaker panel 3A making a buzzing sound that doesn’t seem normal. Smells weird. Plz advise.”
So: fire-adjacent. That actually counted as urgent.
I took a sip of coffee that could strip paint and sighed. “Okay. You win, Monday. We’ll start with potential electrical fire.”
I was halfway through grabbing my field notebook when the door banged open hard enough to rattle the “VISITORS MUST SIGN IN” sign.
Jake stumbled in, breathing like he’d sprinted the length of the parking lot. Which, knowing him, he had.
“Howard!” he gasped. “You need to come outside right now.”
“Is it actually on fire, or just threatening to be?”
“Neither,” he said. “It’s… you just have to see it. Trust me.”
Trusting Jake was not standard operating procedure, but the alternative was dealing with Breaker Panel 3A and the Smell That Doesn’t Seem Normal, so I picked my battles.
“Fine,” I said. “But if I find out this is about a raccoon again—”
“That was one time,” he protested. “And it was technically a ringtail.”
“Door,” I reminded him.
He held it for me as we stepped back out into the bright, hostile sunlight.
The BT4 yard was visible from our office—an uneven patch of gravel, shade cloth, and questionable design decisions. The Hoppers were in their usual morning pattern, trundling in loose loops as they waited for assigned tasks.
And there, front and center, was Rusty.
Rusty had found a piece of rebar.
The BT4 operating manual mentioned nothing about enrichment items, but Rusty seemed to disagree. He had the rebar clamped in his front gripper while he climbed the small dirt berm at the edge of the yard, then paused, tilted his sensor mast toward the horizon, and lifted the metal like a flag.
“He’s been doing that for ten minutes,” Jake whispered.
Rusty planted the rebar in the soft dirt, stepped back, and repositioned it, like he wasn’t satisfied with the angle. Then he walked a slow circle around it, sensors panning.
Another Hopper paused at the bottom of the berm and watched.
Rusty nudged the rebar again until it stood almost upright, then backed up and beeped twice. The second Hopper climbed the berm and stopped beside him.
Together, they stared at the horizon like a pair of extremely small, extremely determined surveyors.
I sighed. “Okay. That’s… new.”
Jake had his phone out.
“Jake,” I said.
“Yeah?” he replied, already framing the shot.
“No filming on county time without authorization.”
He shifted his stance. “I am off the clock until I clock in, and I haven’t clocked in yet.”
“That’s not how any of this works.”
He ignored me and hit record.
Rusty stepped forward, scanned the yard, and then did something I would have bet money against five minutes earlier: he moved to the edge of the berm and started driving trash back toward the base of his makeshift “flag.” Crumpled paper, wind-blown fast-food cups, a wayward plastic bag—it all got nudged downhill into something that, if squinted at from the right angle, could be called a pile.
The second Hopper mirrored him on the other side, collecting his own little wedge of debris.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
Jake slowly lowered the phone. “They’re… organizing.”
“They’re executing a prioritized task list with poor terrain awareness,” I corrected. “It just happens to look like organizing.”
He went back to filming anyway.
Rusty paused at the top of the berm, sensors sweeping across the yard again. Then he rotated his chassis, adjusted the angle of the rebar by another two degrees, and beeped three short notes in sequence.
The other Hopper beeped back and resumed pushing trash downhill like a very dedicated goat.
Jake whispered, “You cannot tell me that doesn’t look like a mission briefing.”
“I can, and I will,” I said. “Because I like my sanity.”
He stopped recording and looked at the video. “This is incredible.”
“It’s pattern-matching,” I said. “We’re wired to see intent in random behavior.”
“You’re wired to see firmware bugs,” he countered. “I’m wired to see a plucky little robot raising a flag and rallying the troops.”
“That plucky little robot once tried to sort rocks by taste.”
“Everyone experiments in their youth,” Jake said.
From the corner of my eye, I saw a third Hopper heading toward the berm, pulled off course by the promise of mild chaos. Rusty pivoted, scanned it, then beeped again—two short, one long.
The third Hopper turned aside and started patrolling the fence line instead.
“Okay,” I admitted. “That’s a little weird.”
Jake’s phone buzzed. He glanced down, thumb flicking over the screen.
“Huh,” he said. “Signal’s good this morning. I could upload this.”
I turned fully to face him. “Upload it where?”
“Just to my personal account,” he said. “Or… maybe the county’s. We have that TikTok we barely use.”
“No,” I said.
He winced. “Maybe?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “We do not post live footage of county equipment behaving ambiguously on the internet.”
“But this is the good kind of ambiguous,” he said. “It looks heroic. Inspiring. Environmental.”
“Environmental lawsuits are still lawsuits.”
“I’ll clear it,” he said. “I’ll run it by McCready.”
“That is worse,” I said.
He was already typing. “He’s in by now. I’ll send him the clip and ask if there’s any policy against it.”
“There is now,” I muttered.
A minute later, Jake’s phone chimed with a reply. He glanced at it and brightened.
“He says, and I quote, ‘As long as no specific incident is described and no injury, damage, or fault is implied or admitted, and as long as this is classified as general promotional material, there is no current policy objection.’”
“That means he hasn’t thought it through yet,” I said.
Jake’s fingers moved faster. “He added a smiley face, Howard. That’s practically written authorization.”
“He doesn’t know how emojis work,” I said. “He thinks they’re like stamps.”
But Jake’s mind was made up. I watched the progress bar crawl across his screen as he uploaded the clip to the “Valeroso County — Official” account, added a caption I didn’t want to see, and hit post.
“What did you write?” I asked.
He smiled nervously. “Just… you know. Something small.”
“Jake.”
He slowly turned the phone so I could read:
Caption:Even our trash bunnies raise the flag. #ValerosoStrong #DumpsterBunnies #BT4
I closed my eyes briefly. “You named them on the internet.”
“You named them first,” he reminded me. “And everyone already calls them bunnies. I’m just… standardizing the brand.”
“Don’t say brand.”
He tapped his screen again. “I’ll just let it sit. It’s not like anyone follows that account except three high schoolers and Commissioner Hertel’s niece.”
“That’s still too many people,” I said. “Take it down.”
“Let’s just see how it does,” he said. “If it gets weird, I’ll delete it.”
“That’s exactly how things get weird.”
He checked the screen again. “Hey, it already has twelve views.”
“That’s because you just posted it,” I said. “Probably auto-play.”
We walked back toward the office. I made a note to inspect Breaker Panel 3A before lunch and to check the Hopper yard cameras for any other unexpected behavior. I also made a mental note to figure out the password for the county TikTok account, so I could delete things preemptively if necessary.
By the time we reached my desk, Jake’s phone buzzed again.
“Huh,” he said. “Thirty-two.”
“Thirty-two what?” I asked.
“Views,” he said. “On the video. That’s… fast.”
“Twelve to thirty-two is not fast,” I said. “That’s just math.”
He refreshed. “Fifty-eight.”
I set my coffee down. “Are you hitting reload?”
“Um,” he said. “Maybe.”
“Stop hitting reload.”
He stopped. Waited. The number climbed again.
“Eighty-four,” he said softly.
I walked over and looked.
The tiny preview showed Rusty on the berm, rebar flag aloft, little chassis squared to the wind. The algorithm had selected the single most heroic-looking frame possible. Of course it had.
Below, the view counter ticked up in little jumps—ninety-one, ninety-six, one hundred and three.
Jake whispered, “Oh.”
Someone had left the first comment.
This is the most patriotic trash robot I’ve ever seen.
Another followed.
I would die for Rusty the Flag Bunny.
A third:
MERCH WHEN??
I rubbed my face. “Delete it.”
“I… think it’s too late to delete it,” he said.
“That is not how deleting works.”
He pointed at the number again. “Two hundred and forty.”
I felt the distinct, familiar sensation of a problem rolling downhill toward us, gathering speed.
“Jake,” I said carefully, “what hashtags did you use?”
“Just a few,” he said. “#ValerosoStrong, #BT4, #DumpsterBunnies…”
“Why would you put ‘Dumpster Bunnies’ on the internet?”
“Because that’s what they are.”
“That’s what we call them, here,” I said. “In-house. Among people who cannot be trusted, but who at least live within driving distance.”
A new comment popped up:
Dumpster Bunnies??? I’m obsessed.
Jake swallowed. “We might be… trending?”
“We are not trending,” I said. “Valeroso County does not trend. At best, we… gently incline.”
He refreshed.
“Four hundred and twelve,” he said.
I walked to the window and looked outside.
Rusty was still on the berm, still hoisting the rebar, still absolutely unaware that a slowly growing segment of the internet had just adopted him as their new favorite municipal employee.
“Okay,” I said finally. “New plan.”
Jake looked at me, wide-eyed. “Yeah?”
“You,” I said, pointing, “are going to log every single thing we did this morning related to Hopper operations. Every command, every movement, every observed behavior. If this goes sideways, I want a paper trail showing we did not ask it to reenact the Battle of Iwo Jima.”
“That was just the angle,” he protested. “He’s just on a dirt mound.”
“History doesn’t care about context,” I said. “And neither does the internet.”
“And you?” he asked.
I picked up my mug and took what passed for a deep breath.
“I’m going to go check on Breaker Panel 3A,” I said. “Because if the county is going to catch fire today, I’d prefer it be literal instead of metaphorical.”
Jake’s phone buzzed again as I headed for the door.
“Uh, Howard?” he called after me.
“Yes?”
“We just crossed a thousand.”
I didn’t bother answering.
I already knew this was going to be one of those days.