It was the kind of noise that bypasses your ears and goes straight to your primitive brain—a loud, shattering crash that echoed through the silent house.
I sat bolt upright, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. “Did you hear that?” I hissed, shaking Mark awake.
He was already moving. I heard a crash downstairs at 3 AM.
This wasn’t the house settling. This wasn’t the wind. This was violence.
I woke my husband, and he grabbed a baseball bat.
He stood in the doorway, pale in the moonlight. I saw his hands trembling around the wooden handle. We weren’t heroes. We were accountants. He was shaking.
“Stay behind me,” he whispered, his voice cracking.
We crept down the stairs. Every creak of the floorboards sounded like a gunshot. I clutched the back of his t-shirt, terrified of what we would find in the living room. A burglar? A murderer? A ghost?
We were ready to fight for our lives.
We reached the bottom landing. Mark raised the bat high, prepared to swing at the intruder. We rounded the corner into the living room, bracing for impact.
And then, we saw him. Or rather, it.
We turned the corner and saw the culprit.
There was no masked man. There was no monster.
Our Roomba had turned itself on.
The little circular robot was in a state of absolute distress. In its confused, autonomous wanderings in the dark, it had got stuck on a rug and knocked over a vase. The shattered porcelain lay across the floor—the source of the terrifying crash.
But the robot wasn’t done. Trapped by the debris and the rug, it was panicking.
It was relentlessly ramming the wall, beeping for help.
Thud. Beep. Thud. Beep.
Mark lowered the bat slowly. The adrenaline that had been coursing through our veins turned into a strange, hysterical laughter. We had prepared for a battle to the death, and our opponent was a vacuum cleaner having a panic attack.
I walked over, picked up the distressed robot, and turned it off. The silence that filled the room was heavy, but safe. We stood there in our pajamas, surrounded by broken pottery, realizing that the only thing trying to kill us that night was our own technology’s enthusiasm for a clean floor.
