The End - Visions of Apocalypse

“Yeah,” Jamal said. “Steven, one of our project coordinators, brought it from home. He was sick of the cheese puff crumbs everywhere. We were a bunch of programmers, you know? A lot of cheese puffs and Mountain Dew. And Steven was a neat freak, so he brought this Roomba in. We thought it was a joke, but… the little guy did a damn good job. At least, until things went screwy.”

One of the council members made a series of notes. Jamal shifted his weight, his butt already going numb. The bamboo bench they’d wrangled together was nearly as uncomfortable as all the eyes of the courtroom drilling into the back of his skull.

“And then what?” the lead councilman asked. “What do you mean, screwy?”

Jamal shrugged. How to explain it to these people? And what did it matter? He fought the urge to turn and scan the crowd behind him. It’d been almost a year since the world went to shit. Almost a year, and yet it felt like a lifetime.

“What exactly do you mean by ‘screwy,’ Mr. Killabrew?”

Jamal reached for his water. He had to hold the glass in both hands, the links between his cuffs drooping. He hoped someone had the keys to the cuffs. He had wanted to ask that, to make sure when they snapped them on his wrists. Nowadays, everything was missing its accessories, it’s parts. It was like those collectible action figures that never had the blaster or the cape with them anymore.

“What was the Roomba doing, Mr. Killabrew?”

He took a sip and watched as all the particulate matter settled in the murky and unfiltered water. “The Roomba wanted out,” he said.

There were snickers from the galley behind him, which drew glares from the council. There were five of them up there on a raised dais, lording over everyone from a wide desk of rough-hewn planks. Of course, it was difficult to look magisterial when half of them hadn’t bathed in a week.

“The Roomba wanted out,” a councilwoman repeated. “Why? To clean?”

“No, no. It refused to clean. We didn’t notice at first, but the crumbs had been accumulating. And the little guy had stopped beeping to be emptied. It just sat by the door, waiting for us to come or go, then it would scoot forward like it was gonna make a break for it. But the thing was so slow. It was like a turtle trying to get to water, you know? When it got out, we would just pick it up and set it back inside. Hank did a hard reset a few times, which would get it back to normal for a little while, but eventually it would start planning its next escape.”

“Its escape,” someone said.

“And you think this was related to the virus.”

“Oh, I know it was. The Roomba had a wireless base station, but nobody thought of that. We had all these containment procedures for our work computers. Everything was on an intranet, no contact to the outside world, no laptops, no cell phones. There were all these government regulations.”

There was an awkward silence as all those gathered remembered with a mix of longing and regret the days of governments and their regulations.

“Our office was in the dark,” Jamal said. “Keep that in mind. We took every precaution possible—”

Half of a coconut was hurled from the gallery and sailed by Jamal, just missing him. He flinched and covered the back of his head. Homemade gavels were banged, a hammer with a broken handle, a stick with a rock tied on with twine. Someone was dragged from the tent screaming that the world had ended and that it was all his fault.

Jamal waited for the next blow, but it never came. Order was restored amid threats of tossing everyone out onto the beach while they conducted the hearing in private. Whispers and shushes hissed like the breaking waves that could be heard beyond the flapping walls of the makeshift courthouse.

“We took every precaution,” Jamal reiterated once the hall was quiet again. He stressed the words, hoped this would serve as some defense. “Every security firm shares certain protocols. None of the infected computers had internet access. We give them a playground in there. It’s like animals in a zoo, right? We keep them caged up.”

“Until they aren’t,” the beardless man said.

“We had to see how each virus operated, how they were executed, what they did. Every antivirus company in the world worked like this.”

“And you’re telling us a vacuum cleaner was at the heart of it all?”

It was Jamal’s turn to laugh. The gallery fell silent.

“No.” He shook his head. “It was just following orders. It was—” He took a deep breath. The glass of water was warm. Jamal wondered if any of them would ever taste a cold beverage ever again. “The problem was that our protocols were outdated. Things were coming together too fast. Everything was getting networked. And so there were all these weak points that we didn’t see until it was too late. Hell, we didn’t even know what half the stuff in our own office did.”

“Like the refrigerator,” someone on the council said, referring to their notes.

“Right. Like the refrigerator.”

The old man with the shaggy beard sat up straight. “Tell us about the refrigerator.”