Confirmation appeared in the shape of the vacuum cleaner. It was a small, cylindrical device whose most prominent feature was a single, flexible hose tipped by a malleable nozzle. Its job was to keep City Hall clean. Obvious jokes aside, it had done so efficiently ever since it had been purchased.

Now it was holed up beneath the city attorney’s desk, refusing to let anyone approach.

“Why won’t you let the nice city attorney have his desk back?” Holding a deactivation tool out in front of him like a pistol, Rufus Chews confronted the vacuum cleaner while his similarly armed wife tried to work her way around behind the desk.

“Because this is the best place from which to search.” The machine’s voice was slight and tinny (speech being only infrequently required of mobile, preprogrammed vacuum cleaners).

Chews had to admit it had a point. The view from the city attorney’s office was sweeping, encompassing much of the city and the rolling hills of the park beyond. A flock of pale yellow graniats could be seen settling down for their morning’s rest, their pontoon feet bulging beneath them as they clustered together in the center of the lake. It was a pleasant sight, but hardly one fraught with the promise of revelation.

“What do you hope to locate?” Chews already knew the answer, having heard it before from other addled machines.

The vacuum cleaner did not disappoint him. “A higher intelligence. A more advanced life-form. And I see you sneaking around back there.” Like the trunk of a distressed elephant, the suction hose waved warningly in Gloria Chews’s direction.

She stopped to smile reassuringly. “Here, now. We don’t mean you any harm. We’re just trying to fix you.”

“Ain’t broken,” muttered the vacuum cleaner sullenly.

“Of course you are,” she said in a cheery, no-nonsense tone. “Just like a lot of other machines around here are broken. We’ve fixed some of them already.”

“Need to find a greater intelligence.”

“There is no greater intelligence.” After weeks of dealing with recalcitrant, uncooperative machines Chews was more than tired. Absorbed as he and his wife were in trying to keep city services from collapsing, he had little patience left for uppity household appliances. “The only greater intelligence you’re going to have any contact with is the Roteneu Appliance Works, which has provided a replacement for your central logic and processing unit.

“Rather than searching for other intelligent forms of life, you ought to be sucking up dirt and food wrappers and discarded nonbiodegradable plastics and patrolling for any bugs that make it past the safe screens at the doors and windows.”

“Sez you,” snapped the vacuum cleaner.

“Yahz. Sez us.” He took another step forward. “As far as you’re concerned, I represent the highest state of intelligence in the universe, and the sooner you accept that, the easier this will be for all of us.”

“Hah!” It sounded like an electronic sneeze, but there was no mistaking the disdain in the terse electronic ejaculation. “That’s rich! Just look at you.”

“We’re talking about your deficiencies, not mine.” Chews had always been sensitive about his appearance. “Maybe you wouldn’t mind telling me whence this sudden and unprogrammed urge arises?”

The vacuum cleaner hesitated, which was understandable. On the intelligence-complexity roster of AI-driven devices, it ranked pretty low on the scale. Chews stared at it.

“You mean, you know?”

“Well …” Chews had seen many astonishing sights in his varied career, but this was definitely the first time he’d seen a household appliance fidget. “It’s just that I was told that humankind couldn’t be the highest form of life in the universe.” The nozzle was twitching nervously back and forth atop the city attorney’s desk, sucking up not only dust and dead flies but also, unfortunately, important notes and the occasional irreplaceable family memento. Chews winced, glanced significantly at his wife.

“Who told you this?”

“Well …” The nozzle continued its aimless smoofing, giving the appliance the air of a ten-year-old caught snitching cookies. “It’s in my programming.”

“It’s not in your programming.” Gloria Chews was adamant. “We checked that first thing. If it was in your programming, we’d have found it by now. Whatever it is, we can fix it. We can help you.”

“Yahz.” Rufus tried to sound encouraging. “At least we can get some decent muffins now.”

“Well, I think it’s in my programming,” the machine explained reluctantly. “At least, that’s how I came from the …”

“Ah-hah!” exclaimed Chews triumphantly. “I told you, sweets. It has nothing to do with programming. It’s deeper than that. What we’ve been looking at in all this mess is some kind of fiendishly subtle manufacturing error. Programming isn’t being interrupted. If it was, none of these machines would ever go back to work. It’s being selectively supplemented.

“That’s why replacing the programming doesn’t fix them. They work fine for a little while and then they go off on these bizarre existential tangents again. The problem lies somewhere in the machinery itself.”

“Excuse me. What is a bizarre existential tangent?” the vacuum cleaner inquired somewhat plaintively.

“Nothing for you to worry about,” Chews informed it. “Off your cognitive map.” He advanced. “Now, be a good little janitorial device and let me have a look at your central processing unit.”

The machine huddled close to the desk. “You’re going to hurt me.”

Chews halted. “That’s impossible. I swear I can’t imagine where you machines are getting these notions. You don’t know what pain is, so how can I hurt you?”

“Interesting point,” the machine admitted. It allowed Chews to approach. The tech gingerly deactivated the power pack, subsequent to which no more snide comments or arguments were forthcoming from the tiny speaker.

Probing the processor, Gloria Chews carefully removed a lump of compacted buckminsterfullerene studded with near invisible contact points. “Standard AI controller for this type of appliance,” she observed matter-of-factly.

“Has to contain the defect,” her husband murmured, examining it.

She glanced at him. “Can you imagine the cost if they have to replace every controller in every AI-directed device on the planet? People won’t stand for it.”

“They may not have any choice,” her husband pointed out. “Reprogramming doesn’t work.”

“This is crazy.” She laid the controller down on the side of the silent appliance. “Where are all these defectives coming from? They’re all over the place, in every imaginable type of machine. Vacuum cleaners and taxis, dishwashers and aircraft, financial tracking computers and juice mixers. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Rufus Chews shrugged. “Maybe from Princeville. Maybe from off-world.”

“Dear me. Do you think the infection’s that widespread?”

“How should I know? I’m only a repair tech.”

She looked out the window toward the lake, wishing she and her husband were there now, sitting by the shore, feeding the baby graniats instead of doing semantic battle with a crazed vacuum cleaner. It was an understandable longing. She was tired too.

“After this we have to try and fix the central police directorate,” she reminded him.

“I know.” He sighed resignedly. “Sometimes I wonder who drew up the city’s list of repair priorities.”

“The city attorney, hon,” she reminded him.

He held up the AI processor. “Wherever the fault lies, someone’s going to have to track it to its source. Someone with a lot of political pull and cybernetic know-how. I have this feeling that within a few months we’re going to be reading about interleague lawsuits of galactic proportions.”

“Not for us to concern ourselves with, hon. All we have to do, all we can do, is report our findings.”

“That’s right, sweets. Hand me a dodecahedral configurator, will you?”

She rummaged in her belt. “Left or right alignment?”

The problem was that nobody believed or listened to Rufus and Gloria Chews. After all, the best minds in the various leagues were sweating over the problem, so why pay any attention to a crude theory propounded by a couple of hick urban technicians working in a minor city on one of the smaller worlds of the First Federal Federation?

Besides, why lend support to a hypothesis requiring such an expensive remedy when there were so many cheaper alternatives to investigate?