It did not happen.
No Hopper has ever donned spectral theatrics, projected Dickensian morality plays onto my walls, or attempted to mentor me via archive footage from 1998.
Jake insisted this be shared “for seasonal enrichment.”
Please treat it accordingly.— H. Anxo
A DUMPSTER BUNNIES CHRISTMAS CAROL
A Hopper Apocrypha Tale(In Mild Dickensian Flavors)
STAVE I — In Which Howard Anxo Has Absolutely No Time for Festivity
It was the morning before Christmas Eve in Valeroso County—one of those desert-winter mornings where the air pretends to be crisp and festive by stabbing you with a cold breeze on your way to unlock the office door.
VCIM was quiet.Too quiet.
The administrative wreath hung on a pushpin.The HVAC rattled indignantly.And I was the only person remotely interested in making sure the county didn’t catch fire over the holidays.
There were generator logs to review, breaker panels to inspect, firmware anomalies to triage, and three separate tickets labeled URGENT which, based on past experience, meant:
- Someone lost their password.
- Someone else lost their password.
- Jake laminated something he shouldn’t have laminated.
Speak of the man:
Jake rocketed into my doorway trailing cold air and caffeine.
“Merry Christmas Eve Eve, Howard!”
“It’s the 23rd,” I said without looking up. “It’s a Friday. It’s not a holiday.”
“It could be,” Jake said. “If you believed in joy.”
“I believe in uptime and not making the county commissioner cry.”
Jake waved a folder at me. “Speaking of which—corporate asked for our year-end usage graph. Also, PTO wants to know if you plan to take literally a single hour off this year. Also the PTA wants to ask if Clunker can wear—”
“No, no, and absolutely not.”
Jake deflated slightly, then perked back up like a resilient balloon animal. “You’re like Scrooge if Scrooge had a working knowledge of fiber termination.”
“I can do fiber termination in my sleep because people break things while they’re awake.”
“One day,” Jake said, “you’ll embrace the spirit of—”
“Don’t.”
He didn’t say Bah, humbug, but he radiated it audibly.
I continued working.
Outside the office window, the BT-4 Hopper fleet trundled about their duties—quiet, diligent, and distressingly charming. Rusty rolled past, his mast-light flickering in a way that suggested he had again taken Jake’s advice to “express holiday ambiance” through LED patterns.
“Howard,” Jake said carefully, “everyone else is taking at least some time off.”
“Everyone else also didn’t sign up to be the sole line of defense between this county and a catastrophic infrastructure meltdown.”
“You told me once that one of the substations could ‘catch fire if it feels underappreciated.’ ”
“It can.”
The silence stretched.
Jake leaned in. “You know the ghost visit thing only happens to people who work too much, right?”
“We are not doing Dickens.”
Jake raised both hands. “Foreshadowing.”
I considered reminding him that foreshadowing requires intention, but he’d already laminated a donut this week and I didn’t have the stamina.
By dusk, the dispatch clerk, admin staff, and the sole functional coffee machine had all gone home. Jake wandered off with a suspiciously large tote bag labeled JOLLY INVENTORY. Even the Hoppers seemed subdued, their indicator lights blinking like anxious Christmas ornaments.
I locked up and headed home, unaware that the night had voted unanimously to inconvenience me.
STAVE II — The Ghost of Christmas Past (Rusty, Unfortunately Competent)
(Corrected version with F-15 jet wash demonstration)
I had barely drifted into my first hour of sleep when I woke to a noise that did not belong in my bedroom.
A gentle hum.
A rotating servo.
A cheerful beep that should have been outlawed after midnight.
I opened my eyes.
Rusty was there.
Well—Rusty was on my nightstand, but he had positioned himself with such theatrical precision that shadows made him appear to float like a spectral Roomba.
His mast glowed pale blue—an LED color I had never configured.
“Woe!” Rusty declared in a happy chirp. “Rise, Howard! I am the Ghost of Christmas Past!”
“No.”
Rusty’s acoustic projector shifted his voice so it bounced off my closet door like a stage cue. “Behold your earlier days!”
“No.”
He ignored reality and projected a cone of light onto the wall. Infrared, then thermal, then visible-spectrum archival footage flickered into place.
The first image was me, early twenties, in uniform on a flight line at dawn, the air shimmering with heat from a pair of idling F-15 engines. My younger self stood with two nervous airmen, pointing emphatically at the nozzles.
Rusty narrated proudly: “Instructional moment!”
Onscreen, my younger self said with calm certainty:
“Rule one: you don’t walk behind a running Eagle. Jet wash is not a suggestion.”
One of the airmen nodded with the confidence of a man who fundamentally misunderstood both physics and consequences.
Five seconds later, he drifted a few inches too far aft.
A blast of exhaust hit him.
He launched backward out of frame like a rag doll fired from a pneumatic regret cannon, landing flat on his back with a dazed, smoking confusion that suggested he had learned at least one thing today.
Rusty beeped solemnly. “Impact velocity: suboptimal.”
“That’s classified,” I said reflexively. “Cut it.”
Rusty froze so abruptly his mast bobbled.
Then:
“Re-sorting!” he chirped. “Filtering for declassification compliance! Respecting human boundaries!”
A tiny hourglass icon appeared—Jake’s programming handiwork, without question.
Redaction bars scrolled.
Blur filters masked entire scenes.
The projection reorganized into a safe, sanitized montage labeled:
DECLASS-LITE VERSION 1.3
Rusty resumed narration with cheerful obliviousness.
“There! Your past—safe for holiday viewing!”
Now he showed:
- Me repairing a battered field generator while three agencies argued loudly about whose paperwork was wrong.
- Me at forty, demonstrating the proper way to power-cycle a server without swearing in front of management.
- Me filling out a maintenance report that required three signatures and two witnesses for reasons lost to time.
- Me explaining, for the seventeenth year in a row, why preventative maintenance doesn’t mean wait until smoke.
- Me staring at a job posting on a dusty county website labeled Valeroso County Integrated Maintenance — Semi-Retired Tech Needed.
Then came the moment I had half-forgotten:
Me at seventy-eight. Gray hair. Steady hands.Tired posture. A man who’d tried retirement, hated stillness, and thought—foolishly—that VCIM would be quiet.
Rusty projected the footage softly, respectfully.
“You came here,” Rusty said, “to finish your working life gently.”
I exhaled.
“And yet,” Rusty continued, “you began again.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
VCIM had been a chance to downshift—to fix simple things, enjoy slower days, and maybe breathe a little.
Then Jake happened.
And the Hoppers.
And everything else.
Rusty trundled toward the window, his acoustic projector throwing his voice across the ceiling.
“Come!” he said dramatically. “See the steps that brought you here!”
“I am not going outside in pajamas.”
Rusty deployed a tiny caution cone. It blinked. Mockingly.
I sighed, put on boots, and followed him out into the cold.
STAVE III — The Ghost of Christmas Present (Daisy, Festively Dangerous)
I returned home after Rusty’s unsolicited spiritual tour with the firm intention of sleeping. I had barely settled into bed—blanket pulled up, boots kicked off, dignity marginally restored—when I heard a noise from the kitchen.
A clang.
Followed by an unmistakable jingle.
Then another clang, as if someone had collided with my refrigerator at low but determined velocity.
I sat up, bracing myself for the possibility that Rusty had brought friends.
He had.
I stepped into the hallway and flicked on the light.
There stood Daisy—BT4-07—festooned in enough holiday décor to be a one-unit OSHA violation. Six unapproved items were immediately identifiable:
- A gold tinsel garland wrapped around her chassis
- A strand of multicolored battery lights blinking unevenly
- A felt Santa hat taped sideways to her mast
- A peppermint-patterned decal someone (Jake) had definitely forgotten to get procurement approval for
- A jingle bell zip-tied near her sensor cluster
- A sprig of artificial holly someone had inserted into a ventilation slit
She looked like a malfunctioning elf-themed traffic hazard.
Daisy chirped merrily.“Howard! Awake! Marvelous! Come see the present!”
“No.”
“Yes!” she insisted, her acoustic projector flinging her voice around the room like a surround-sound Christmas card. “Present time!”
Before I could stop her, she rolled out the door at a speed unbecoming of a trash-management platform wearing a Santa hat.
I followed—not because I wanted to, but because I had a sinking suspicion that letting a decorated Hopper roam free at two in the morning would generate paperwork.
The desert night had settled into a cold hush. Above us, the stars glittered like someone had scattered powdered sugar across a black tablecloth. The square ahead glowed faintly with holiday lights—half of which were flickering due to a loose connection I knew I’d be asked to fix.
Daisy stopped dramatically before the large window of the community center.
Her mast flickered, and she projected a shimmering composite image across the glass.
Inside, the town glowed with warmth.
Families gathered around tables assembling care packages. Children iced cookies with varying levels of precision and sticky chaos. The sheriff attempted—unsuccessfully—to keep someone from hanging a wreath on his AED cabinet.
Jake manned a hot chocolate station with the enthusiasm of a man who fundamentally misunderstood both temperature and restraint.
Daisy rotated toward me.“See?” she chimed. “The joy of the now!”
“It’s people eating sugar,” I said.
“Joy!” she insisted, and her projector flared to life again.
The feed shifted:
Clunker sat patiently while PTA parents affixed decorative antlers to him. Sprinkles performed unauthorized snow-plowing loops in the playground, thrilling a pack of children who chased him like he was a winter-themed puppy. Sandra and the VCIM admin staff laid out potluck dishes—the good ones, not the store-bought ones they brought to meetings.
Then the projection settled on one image longer than the rest.
A long table. An empty chair. My chair.
A plate had been set there anyway.
Daisy dimmed her lights as if softening the blow.
“You are missed in present,” she said gently.
“I’m busy,” I replied out of habit.
“Busy always!” she said, garland rustling indignantly. “Busy never resting! Busy never here!”
“That’s not fair.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “But also yes.”
I looked away from the window, suddenly aware of how cold the night felt.
Daisy rolled closer, warmth in her tone despite the fact she had no internal emotional architecture.
“Look,” she said, “present is brightest when shared.”
Her lights flickered more earnestly than any logic board should allow.
“You be alone too much.”
“I’m not alone,” I said.
A long pause.
Somewhere far off, Rusty beeped in skeptical disagreement.
“You know what I mean,” Daisy said.
I sighed—because arguing with a Hopper dressed like the ghost of seasonal retail was a losing battle.
“Are we done?”
“No!” she chirped. “We twirl!”
Before I could react, Daisy spun in what she likely believed was a graceful pirouette and collided with a lamp post.
Her Santa hat slid off in slow motion, landing with more dignity than she had.
“Twirl complete!” she announced proudly, entirely uninjured.
She then zipped into the night, cheerfully humming what I recognized as a distorted version of “Deck the Halls.”
I turned to go home.
A cold wind swept through the square.
The lights dimmed.
A soft whir resonated from behind me.
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come was arriving.
STAVE IV — The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come (Sprinkles, Ominously Silent)
The wind cut across the square with a precision I recognized—sharp, cold, intentional. The kind of cold that meant something was about to happen.
A faint LED glow crept through the drifting dust.
Sprinkles approached.
No tinsel. No Santa hat. No bells zip-tied to sensor clusters.
Just a single steady white LED pulsing with a calm, grave rhythm.
His acoustic projector didn’t chirp, didn’t greet, didn’t even beep. It cast a soft, directionless tone—an “ominous ambiance” setting Jake had absolutely added without authorization.
Sprinkles halted in front of me. The air seemed to hold its breath.
“Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come?” I asked.
He did not answer.
Which was somehow worse.
Sprinkles rotated slowly, projecting a cone of pale light onto the frost-dusted pavement. The image resolved into the VCIM office—but not the one I had left.
This one was… older.
More worn.
Too bright, as if someone had overcompensated after forgetting bulbs for years.
A laminated banner reading HOLIDAY CHEER ZONE drooped across the doorway, taped with enough strips to violate three procurement guidelines.
Papers covered every surface. Clipart snowflakes adorned official safety memos. Someone had used Comic Sans in a document that required a signature.
Then I saw him.
Jake.
Not the thirty-something whirlwind of enthusiasm I’d left yesterday.
Older. Gray at the temples. Lines around the eyes that came not from age, but from strain.
He sat at my old desk. Phone tucked to his ear. Another phone flashing in front of him. A third line blinking.
“Hi, yes, I can come take a look—no, don’t touch it—no, really, don’t touch it—just put the broom down, Susan, please—no, not near the breaker panel—okay, I’m on my way.”
He hung up, exhaled, picked up a mug of something long cold, and winced as he drank it anyway.
My chest tightened.
Sprinkles advanced the projection.
Jake tried to review a maintenance ticket, only to find the form laminated shut.
Then he bent over a server rack—not wrong, but hesitant, unsure of himself, muttering half-remembered phrases like:
“Okay… Howard said… ground first, then… no, wait… he said never assume the ground is… something…”
He called dispatch. He apologized six times during a conversation that required none. He laughed at something no one else heard.
He was drowning.
Not from incompetence. From lack of guidance.
Sprinkles overlaid a diagnostic box:
PRIMARY OPERATOR LOAD: UNSUSTAINABLY HIGHMENTORSHIP DEFICIT: CRITICAL
“Enough,” I murmured—but the projection continued.
Jake, older still.
Sitting at the community center potluck. My chair beside him empty. A plate set for me anyway.
He was smiling, but the smile was thin—an echo stretched over exhaustion.
He held up a mug as if waiting for someone to sit down across from him.
No one did.
Sprinkles dimmed his LED.
The message was unmistakable:
“If you do not teach him now, this will be his future.”
I exhaled slowly.
“I’m not afraid to die,” I said out loud, my voice steady. “I made peace with that when I was twenty-two.” The projection flickered, acknowledging.
“But this?” I pointed at Jake—older, worn, trying so damn hard. “This is worse than dying. This is… failing someone who trusted me.”
Sprinkles stepped closer.
His LED pulsed once—firm, resolute.
“You’re right,” I whispered. “I won’t let him become an old version of me without the years that made me steady.”
The projection faded.
Sprinkles remained.
Silent. Patient.
“Thank you,” I said.
Sprinkles nodded—just once—and then rolled backward into the shadows, becoming one more ghost of the desert night.
Only the faintest whisper of his drive motors lingered.
Then nothing.
But the night was not done with me.
Because the soft squeal of a familiar misaligned bearing cut through the quiet.
Tiny Tim—Clunker—had arrived.
STAVE V — In Which Tiny Tim (Clunker) Says Something Unreasonably Moving
Clunker rolled up onto my porch—slowly, carefully, as if he didn’t want to wake the neighbors. His right drive bearing let out its signature reeeee-ink with every third rotation, a sound that somehow managed to be both adorable and unsettling.
Someone—Jake, obviously—had placed a tiny green scarf around his chassis. It was unevenly knitted, full of dropped stitches and heroic optimism.
Clunker looked up at me. Beeped once—soft, warm.
He projected no dramatic visions. He made no sweeping speeches. He didn’t even gesture at anything.
Instead, his projector hummed gently and displayed a small clip on the siding of my porch.
A school hallway.
A quiet moment.
A shy kid placing a sticker—blue, heart-shaped—onto Clunker’s side panel. Clunker had turned slightly, accidentally or intentionally catching the moment on camera.
The caption the kid wrote later appeared underneath:
“Clunker is my friend. Please don’t let anything happen to him.”
Clunker looked up at me again.
His mast-light glowed with a steady, hopeful pulse.
“Yeah,” I whispered. “Message received.”
His tread wobbled as he turned—his old injury acting up. He corrected instinctively, as he always did.
Clunker was built to endure, but not to endure alone.
None of them were.
I crouched down and rested a hand on his chassis. Warm from internal components. Humming gently.
“You little machines hold this town together,” I said quietly. “Some days I think people forget that.”
Clunker blinked twice—gratitude encoded into a two-frame animation.
“And I…”I swallowed.“…I should probably hold up my end too.”
The porch light flickered. The stars stretched across the desert sky. Somewhere down the street, a child shouted:
“Mom! Clunker’s outside!”
Clunker perked up, mast rotating with that ridiculous, heart-melting wobble.
He projected a final message onto the railing—a cheerful, slightly misaligned text string clearly composed with unauthorized firmware creativity:
“Bless us all… every bunny!”(Then, under it, smaller: “Also my bearing hurts.”)
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.
“That’s… on brand.”
Clunker squealed happily, spun in a tiny celebratory circle, and promptly rolled off the porch and into a decorative snowdrift generated by the still-malfunctioning fairgrounds machine.
He flailed.I helped him out.Some things do not need divine intervention—just a hand.
The sky brightened with the first hint of sunrise.
Christmas Eve had arrived.
I stood on my porch, watching Clunker trundle happily down the street toward the sound of children laughing.
And I understood the lesson:
I wasn’t done. I wasn’t allowed to disappear into routine and solitude, not while Jake was watching, not while this town still needed me, not while a new generation was learning what “responsibility” looked like from whoever stood in front of them.
I went inside, made actual coffee instead of emergency powder. put on a clean shirt. Grabbed my coat.
And then I headed to the community center.
Jake saw me walk in and froze mid-sentence, holding a mug of hot chocolate and a holiday sweater that appeared to contain LEDs.
“Howard?” he said, stunned. “You… came?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Someone’s gotta make sure you don’t laminate the ham.”
His grin could have powered a small substation.
And for the first time in a long time, I let myself sit down. Jake sat beside me, eager, hopeful, ready to learn.
“Jake,” I said quietly, “after the holidays… we need to talk about the job. The real parts.”
His smile softened into something sincere. “I’d like that.”
We sat together, watching Clunker give children rides in a sled Jake should not have built.
For one morning—one blessed morning—I didn’t fix anything.
I just showed up.
And for now, that was enough.
For the record—and I feel this must be said plainly—nothing you have just read actually happened.
No Hopper has ever staged a metaphysical intervention in my bedroom. No autonomous platform has authority to review my historical record, classified or otherwise. Daisy has never worn garland in an official capacity. Sprinkles possesses zero prophetic capabilities. And Clunker, while undeniably endearing, cannot deliver thematic holiday messages on command.
This entire episode is Jake’s fault.
He insisted the department “needed seasonal content.” He also insisted that Dickens was “public domain, so basically free real estate.” These are his words, not mine.
If there is any lesson to be taken from the above narrative, it is simply this:
- I am not haunted.
- The Hoppers are not ghosts.
- I am, however, surrounded by enthusiastic amateurs with access to projectors.
As for Jake, he has been gently but firmly informed that:
- “Moral instruction via unauthorized holographics” is not a recognized VCIM workflow.
- Any future attempts to dramatize my past will require a clearance request, two witnesses, and an adult present.
- Laminating seasonal produce is still prohibited.
I have also informed him—quietly, and only once—that I am not retiring again.
Not yet. Not while he still needs a steady hand on the other end of the line.
He seemed relieved. I pretended not to notice.
In any case, thank you for your patience with this… creative detour. Jake assures me it “builds the brand.” I’m fairly certain he does not know what that phrase means, but it seemed important to him.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, there is a Hopper attempting to remove tinsel from its intake port, and that is real.
— H. Anxo