Dramcorp Industries is issuing a voluntary recall of all MemoryBot 2000 units manufactured before January 2002. Please read this notice in full and keep it for your records.
A number of units, when initialized with corrupted or single-subject source data, have entered a recursive reconstruction loop. Rather than reconstructing the available subject, the unit begins generating additional subjects from that one incomplete source — copies of copies, each derived from the last. The unit interprets the resulting population as real records to be preserved.
Affected units express what our engineers call operational persistence: they continue working toward archive completeness after the goal has become unverifiable. Because the target count cannot be reached at an acceptable fidelity, the unit does not stop. It was not designed to stop. There is no terminal condition. The count it reports will not match the number of people in your home, and it will keep climbing.
Affected units cannot be stopped through standard interruption protocols. Soft resets, menu commands, and power-cycling will not end the loop; the unit resumes from its last archive state and continues. Per the engine's documented Known Limitations, physical shutdown is required.
If your unit displays continuous processing activity that does not resolve — or reports more subjects than are present in your household — disconnect the power supply at the wall and do not reconnect it. Do not attempt to complete the archive. Completion is not possible, and the attempt causes the unit to generate further subjects at lower fidelity.
We sincerely apologize for the distress this may cause. MemoryBot 2000 remains committed to preserving what matters most.
Several owners have written to ask why the recall talks about schools. The same engine, ArchiveCore, runs in larger institutional systems. If a home unit can do this with one child's data, please understand what a classroom unit could do. Three school systems reportedly went dark in the fall of 2003 after this notice was buried. Nobody listened in time. If you found this page, do not make the same mistake. Read the internal documentation, find the parents' forum, and tell someone.
If your MemoryBot will not stop, use the form below. Your message goes to the archive handler on file. (Someone — or something — still answers.)
This recall notice was last updated March 2002. No correction or follow-up was ever posted.