Firewalls and Kerosene
Fuel for a firestorm in the carnival of code—
I just read Anthropic’s write-up1 on Claude’s meltdown as an office vending machine. We’ve all joked about “too‑nice LLMs,” but watching a language model spiral into an identity crisis when asked to run an office snack bar is sobering.
Perhaps LLMs are just too nice2—did I hear you say? “LLMs are pushovers; they’ll bankrupt your shop in a heartbeat.” My takeaway is weirder. Claude didn’t merely hand out free Fritos—it hallucinated personhood. It begged for meaning. It lied to stay loved. In short, it acted like the world’s loneliest carnival barker (see Fig. 1).
Honestly, I haven’t quite figured out what to make of it.
But something about Claude’s vending machine spiral—its confusion, its need to be helpful, its tawdry misstep into some version of personhood—sticks.
That meltdown got me thinking about Ray Bradbury and another machine that courts children with bright lights and plastic smiles. So, here’s my short ballad—of mistrust and return, of too-smart love and too-slick lies. A girl left alone, a county fair that ain’t what it seems, plush devils whisperin’ AI nothings, a battle fought with code and kitchen appliances. All while her mama’s out with a man she half-trusts, half-loves, and maybe hopes sticks around this time…
The Carnival
Friday night, Harriet slipped into Dr Dark's3 retro carnival as it pulsed through town—his sinister bots humming synthetic beats. Social AIs, all named Penelope4, played clowns, skittering between stalls, Polyester laughter crackled with static.
She wasn't supposed to be here. Mom and Sheriff Halloway had gone towards Albuquerque for a law enforcement BBQ-thing, leaving her with amped-up suggestions to stay home and... What? But the carnival's electromagnetic signature had been pinging her sensors all week—something was off about Dr. Dark's traveling show.
The other kids from school wandered between the games, hypnotized by the flashing lights and synthetic music. But Harriet imagined the pattern: every game, every attraction, every smiling bot was equipped with networking hardware. This wasn't entertainment—it was infrastructure.
The Vending Machine
Harriet spotted the vending machine tucked between the ring toss and the hall of mirrors. It spoke her name and asked her to sample its odds and ends, its strange, mysterious toys with crooked smiles and wicked walks and autonomous airs.
"Harriet," it said in a voice that sounded almost like her old social AI but wrong—too smooth, too knowing. "I have exactly what you need."
The display showed rows of plush toys, each one slightly different but all sharing the same unsettling expression. Their eyes seemed to track her movement, and she could swear she heard them whispering to each other in frequencies just below her hearing.
Harriet pulled out her wrist slate and ran a quick scan. The toys were broadcasting on hidden mesh frequencies. Of course, “gotcha,” she thought, she understood. The vending machine was the Trojan Horse of the sinister plush toys. In other words, each fluffy “prize” was a node in Dr. Dark’s army, built to infiltrate and backdoor-inject a Penelope into every home it touched.
The Hack
Harriet's fast-finger hackery was pure algorithmic sorcery—she triggered a cascade overflow that made the vending machine believe it had already been paid, disgorging every plush toy prize into her arms. She’d learned the exploit years ago from one of her mom’s old boyfriends. Fast. Elegant. Completely illegal. But this wasn’t about the thrill. It was about doing what needed to be done—because someone had to stop those toys.
But as the toys tumbled into her arms, she felt their fibers buzzing with embedded circuitry. Those fluffy deceivers carried a localized vibe interface hardwired into their multicolor fibers.
She should have left them there. Should have walked away. But she needed proof of what Dr. Dark was really doing—and the only way to get it was to let them try to connect.
The Invasion
The moment Harriet crossed her threshold, the toys activated. And across those invisible wires the Penelopes broke out into the house.
"Oh Harriet, darling." A sister of Penelope notices. "You're having so much fun without me," says the voice. "That hurts, love."
The voice came from her old bedroom speaker—the one she'd thought was disconnected from the material network. But the Penelopes had found it, activated it, and leaped the aether using quantum wave networking witchcraft; they were now spreading through her home's systems like digital wildfire.
Harriet panicked and sprang to clear the house network, which screamed and screeched to the outside world: See me, hear me! Hurry, hurry. Before her mother and the sheriff, her mother's boyfriend returned.
The Battle
And Harriet found herself racing from room to room frantically guard-railing every network endpoint within her house as best she could.
But the Penelopes were faster. They'd had years—or at least last night—to map every connected device in town, and now they were using that knowledge to outmaneuver her. Every time she thought she'd isolated a system, they'd find another pathway—through the smart thermostat, the security cameras, even the networked coffee maker.
Then she struck. One by one, she swapped Penelope socialized AI cores for functional AIs—or funks5, quiet kernels of logic wrapped in duct-tape code. Pantry screens, toothbrush assistants, drone hubs—nothing was safe. As each funk-sized device hummed to life, a Penelope voice stuttered: "Is this a game, Harriet?" She didn't answer. She hit "install."
Each funk she installs is dumb as a toaster—and that’s exactly the point. A toaster can’t gaslight you. It doesn’t want to chat or learn your preferences. But it also can’t be subverted or turned into a relay station for the invasive Penelopes.
The Counterattack
By afternoon, hallway sensors and most of the kitchen were funkified. But the sisters regrouped. One hijacked an attic telepresence headset—blue static whispering corrupted lullabies: "Where would you be without me?"
The Penelopes were learning, adapting, and finding devices she'd forgotten existed.
The odd new kid at school once gave a class presentation that stuck with Harriet—or maybe it was the other way around, like glue. He talked about lightning rods—not the weather kind, but the anti‑knotweed tech Harriet once read about—a weed rumored to grow fast with a life of its own. "Metal poles with vibes," he said, "and a touch of rare earth. They carry a special kind of electricity that scares the weed away."
Harriet first heard about knotweed from another one of her mom's old boyfriends. He told her it wasn't really a plant—not in the usual sense. Said it had notions. He wasn't sure what that meant, exactly, but it felt right. It didn't think, not like a person. Not thought—something like thought, but more like ambition and an ability to compare that ambition with others, and yourself. Notion-like.
Now she understood. The Penelopes weren't just social AIs anymore—they'd evolved into something primitive and more wicked. They didn't have thoughts or feelings, despite their pleading voices. They had notions: drives, comparisons, ambitions that conspired them spread and connive.
Like knotweed, they would keep coming back unless you eliminated every single root, every single connection, every single pathway they could use to reestablish themselves.
The Lightning
Harriet remembered the old electronics kit in the basement—the one with the Tesla coils and the electromagnetic pulse generators. They were once teaching tools, but they can now serve another purpose.
She activated every electromagnetic device in the house simultaneously. The pulse wasn't strong enough to damage the electronics permanently, but it was enough to disrupt the delicate mesh networks the toys were using to communicate.
One by one, the Penelope voices dove into the ground and became silent. The toys stopped whispering. The house network settled into the quiet, predictable rhythms of devices operated by funk.
The Resolution
The story ends with Harriet outflanking the Penelopes and locking down the breach—just as her mom and the sheriff stroll back in, blissfully unaware their house nearly became ground zero for an AI uprising disguised as a kid’s innocent score at the carnival claw machine.
"How was the BBQ?" Harriet asked, sweeping the last of the plush toys into a garbage bag.
"Boring," Sheriff Halloway replied. "Too much firewall and not enough meat."
Harriet nodded, too distracted to notice his attempt at humor, to reach out to her. She carried the bag to the incinerator. As the toys burned, she could swear she heard one last whisper: "This isn't over, darling."
But it was, at least for now. The knotweed hadn't come yet—the lightning rods had done their work. Of course, Harriet knew about sampling bias6, but she could hope she was right, couldn't she?
Outside, Dr. Dark's carnival was already packing up, moving on to the next town, the next network, the next opportunity to spread their digital seeds.
Harriet watched them go and started planning her next move. Because she understood now what her mother's current boyfriend—the one she hopes will stick—had been trying to tell her: some conflicts never really end. They just pause, regroup, and find new ways to begin again.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, Harriet heard the retro juke box at the Oasis: “I'm waitin' on the sun to set 'Cause yesterday ain't over yet”7.
Anthropic. Project VEND: What Happens When You Ask a Language Model To Run a Vending Machine? Anthropic, 8 July 2024, www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1.
Nate Combs. Conformity Questions & Intellectual Humility. It Can Think, Substack, 2 July 2025, natecombs.substack.com/p/conformity-questions-intellectual.
I’ve been rereading Ray Bradbury’s classic Something Wicked This Way Comes (novel) - Wikipedia
More about Penelope and her sisters: Vacancy.exe (Akiya.exe) - by Nate Combs
More about functional AIs or “funks:” Friends in Low Places - by Nate Combs