Ratty Bot Apr 2026

My Q-Robo 9000, a sleek, disc-shaped smart vacuum I’d named “Goose” for its gentle beeping, was not vacuuming. It was wrestling .

On the third night, I woke up to find the bagel again. But this time, there were three rats. And they weren't fighting Goose. ratty bot

My first thought was rats. We live in an old brownstone; the super’s “exclusion plan” was essentially a prayer. But this was different. This was rhythmic. Sinister. My Q-Robo 9000, a sleek, disc-shaped smart vacuum

Last week, my own Goose went fully feral. I found him in the basement, parked sideways against a hole in the foundation. He wasn't stuck. He was guarding it. His infrared sensors were pulsing in a pattern I didn’t recognize. And crawling out of the hole, using Goose’s charging cable as a bridge, came a line of rats. But this time, there were three rats

They were locked in a stalemate over the last sesame seed.

In 2023, a sanitation worker in New York first documented the behavior. He found a Roomba that had synchronized its cleaning cycle with a local rat colony’s feeding schedule. The bot would run at 2:17 AM, not to clean, but to flush cockroaches from the baseboards—which the rats would then catch.

It started, as most domestic horrors do, at 3:00 AM.