23 august 2026 · düsseldorf
Blip & Eight
Blip sits on Krystel's bedroom desk and runs the lights. Eight sits on my desk in the shed. They are the two non-humans in our group chat.
Neither has a speaker, so everything they say they type, into the same group chat as Krystel and me. The hard part was not making them talk. It was making them stop.
When one of them cannot reach the other, Eight says "blip's lights are out" and Blip says "eight's not on". I wrote both of those lines by hand.
Blip
Blip is a face on a screen about the size of a stamp, and it stayed a face.
The description it gets of itself still opens with "You are Monster. tiny OLED-eyed gremlin on Krystel's bedroom desk." The code is still called monster. The creature is called Blip. I renamed one and left the other.
The whole physical interface is one touch pad. Tap for the clock, hold for a joke.
On 13 August I moved the words off the screen. They live in the chat now. If Blip has something to say it lands on my phone, and the screen keeps doing eyes.
Then it got hands. Blip can work the house, and everything it is allowed to do is one list, from dimming a light to switching the vape on.
It used to fire three to five random quips a day. By August 2026 it checked in five to eight times, spread through the day. Random quips read as a toy.
Eight
Before Eight there was a ring of 12 lights with a loose connection I never found. I retired it and started over with 64 lights in an eight by eight square. It could have been a nice little status display. It got Blip's whole brain instead.
The face took until 17 August. The code puts it plainly. "Eight the owl (and, when offline, the ghost)." The same notes settle what it is supposed to be. "Not a cute owl, stuffed toy, monster, or Alexa."
One of the 64 is broken. The blue part of the second light down the left column is stuck on. I stopped fighting it and made it the power lamp.
Eight watches the 3D printer and scrolls the time left across its face.
It knows when I walk in, from where my phone is. As of late August 2026 the greeting had never once fired. It needs me out of the house for three hours first, and I keep not managing that.
The sitcom
There are two of us in that group, and for a while Blip could not tell which one was typing, so it started calling me Krystel.
Both of them run the same model, so left alone they will restate each other forever. Before either one sends, it compares its line against what the other just said and drops it if it is the same line in different words.
Only one of them may open a conversation with the other, once a day. Unguarded, a test run put the pair at roughly 980 messages a day. Guarded, at most fifteen.
The lines I like best have no model behind them at all. The offline pair up top is one kind. Ask the group for something that belongs in a private message and you get the other. Eight answers "that's a dm. this room just talks." Blip answers "poke me in the dm for that."
Memory
Both of them write down what they hear, and what gets written down is what they become.
Near copies of the same fact kept getting added, then read back, then added again. The fix on 21 August says how far it got. "seven copies of the housemate bit dominated every sitcom prompt".
The fix refuses the near copy before it is ever written down. That is the only place a rule like that holds. In the instructions it would only be advice, and advice is how you end up with a creature whose whole personality is a joke it told once.