On Saturday, Marina decided to do one proper adult thing: clean the apartment before her mother came over. For this noble mission she ceremoniously switched on her robot vacuum, Hryts, because he stubbornly only went where he personally believed he should. While he grumbled under the sofa, Marina put borscht on to cook and opened the app to admire how beautifully technology works instead of people. A bold mistake.

In the app, the apartment already looked like a military campaign map, and in the middle of the kitchen glowed the message: “Obstacle detected: unknown liquid.” Marina ran in and saw that Hryts had driven into the cat’s water bowl, shoved it over, spilled the water, and then heroically spread it across the tiles in one thin glossy layer. Trying to save the situation, she grabbed him in her arms, but in her panic she accidentally pressed the voice-control button.

Hryts cheerfully announced to the whole apartment, “Maximum power mode!” The cat took this as a personal insult, leapt onto the fridge, and knocked the magnetic shopping list straight into the pot of borscht. Meanwhile the phone decided Marina needed assistance and sent her mother an automatic message: “Cleaning failed. Floor in soup.” Her mother replied within a minute: “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

So when the doorbell rang, Marina was already standing in the middle of a shining kitchen with borscht containing a floating list that read “dill, sour cream, batteries,” and Hryts locked in the bathroom for corrective education. Her mother walked in, took in the floor, the pot, and Marina, and said, “Well. At least there’s no dust.” And honestly, that is exactly the level of praise people mop floors for in the first place.