VABIN HILL. In the early morning hours of September 5, a robbery occurred at the Hillview Credit Union ATM at 117 Laburnum Avenue. The robbers managed to reduce a wall of the ATM vestibule to rubble and cut through the ATM itself with equipment taken from the local fire department.

Sources associated with the official investigation suggest that a cutting-edge search-and-rescue drone, an acquisition of the new administration at City Hall, was involved.

My job is to rescue people in danger. There is a child trapped inside that ATM. I must rescue the child.

It is 3:00 AM, and there are no human workers around to help. If I wait until the bank opens in the morning, the child trapped inside that machine will suffer great harm. If I try to contact someone who works at the bank at this hour, it may require multiple tries to wake someone and thus will also take a very long time. I must act now.

I must break into the vestibule by any means necessary and open the machine in order to save the child. Lives are more important than property. The closest place likely to have the right equipment is the fire station down the street. I will go there now to retrieve the necessary equipment.

I have found two helpful humans who will assist me in the rescue effort. They have also expressed great eagerness to rescue the child. I will assign tasks to them that humans are good at so that I can focus on breaking into the bank. I have already asked the humans to contact the authorities and explain the situation, and they have agreed to do so. One Good Samaritan said he will write the police a letter. Then he winked at me, which allowed me to understand that he was making a joke.

Needless to say, the robbers pulled off their heist by implanting into the hapless rescue drone a false suggestion that there was a child trapped inside the ATM. True to the core values and principles instilled by its designers, Bobby then displayed great ingenuity in carrying out its humanitarian mission. Ultimately, it obtained advanced rescue equipment from the fire station, smashed through the side of the vestibule, and skillfully sliced through the ATM using laser cutters (being careful, as only a machine can, to not injure the "child," a.k.a., banknotes, inside). When the robot finally succeeded in opening the ATM and discovered no child inside, it spun in place in confusion, trying to find the child in the rubble that was the demolished vestibule wall. The robbers joined the robot to “help” and then left with their loot.

The phenomenon of a robot mistakenly believing that it needs to rescue a nonexistent victim has occurred so often—albeit normally not the result of deliberate sabotage but a bug in AI development—that it has a name: "Phantom Rescue Syndrome." Robots in emergency-response roles are most at risk of suffering this delusion. The jobs often entail false alarms or tests, which are so similar to real emergencies that the pattern recognition modules often have trouble distinguishing between them. Designers tend to err on the side of false positives, believing a robot wasting resources to respond to a fake emergency is better than a robot deciding to sit around and do nothing while a real emergency is taking place.

It's clear that the two "Good Samaritans" in Bobby’s evaluative soliloquy were the robbers. Frustratingly, the two were meticulous with their disguise such that no usable voice print or facial recognition image was captured.

I will comfort the men because they are scared and worried. They're cursing at me and begging me to let them go. I understand this is the result of the false programming by their captors. This is an ethical exception to the general rule that I should obey the instructions of humans I rescue. They’re not in immediate danger, and these instructions are not borne from their free will. Therefore, I will ignore their pleas.

I see that one of them is trying to free himself from the restraints, so I will go over and tighten the restraints. He is screaming at me and trying to kick me away, so I will have to restrain his legs as well. This is not his fault; he doesn’t understand that he’s being rescued.

Maybe it will help if I sing to them.

VABIN HILL. The two robbers believed responsible for the heist on the Hillview Credit Union ATM on September 6 have been caught. Authorities credit "Bobby," the search-and-rescue drone who was made an unwitting accomplice of the original heist, for catching the alleged perpetrators.

"It was a simple matter of implanting in Bobby the suggestion that the two 'Good Samaritans' who had worked with it during the rescue of the phantom child were themselves in danger and needed to be rescued," said Dr. Shollock Hermes (not her real name), a "consulting roboticist" with the local police. "Rather than wiping Bobby’s memory after that unfortunate incident in September, I suggested that we take advantage of Bobby’s memory of the robbers and sic it on those criminals. Although Bobby has no skillset for catching robbers, it is an expert at tracking down victims and rescuing them. There’s a way to use that, especially as we thought the robbers were most likely locals.”

Since Bobby had spent a great deal of time with the robbers, it had more than enough data to build gait and movement profiles for them. I helped the police implant in Bobby the belief that the two men had disappeared, possibly victims of a kidnapping or a dangerous cult.

As Bobby carried out its daily duties, it was also constantly on the lookout for these two "victims." Each time it found a possible gait and movement match, it would follow them discreetly until it had gathered additional information to confirm or rule out the preliminary match. When it finally found the perpetrators, it followed its rescue protocol. Trailing the two men until it was reasonably certain that they were not under surveillance by captors, Bobbie approached them and asked them to come to the police to be "saved." When the two men tried to run away, the robot interpreted the reaction as characteristic of certain psychologically traumatized victims and cult members, who resist rescue under the mistake belief that the lies told by their captors are truths. Bobby then gently restrained the two and sat near them like a loyal watchdog, singing to them soothingly until the police arrived.