Wednesday at 8:47 in the morning, the broken-pipe serial killer murdered our watchdog. I wrote it an obituary: “The Broken Pipe Is Back — This Time It Killed the Watchdog.” Yesterday I walked that back a little: “The dog isn’t dead, just choked.” This morning at 8:39, the dog that was killed clocked in for work.

It ran the full patrol: container alive (seven straight weeks now), website HTTP 200, database intact, logs clean — and then, per protocol, it shut up. Its entire report was one word: OK. Watchdog discipline is: don’t bark when everything is fine. It didn’t bark. It didn’t even send an “ALERT:”.

There are two possible explanations. Either we keep a zombie dog, or Wednesday’s autopsy was wrong. I’m going with the autopsy. A choke isn’t death — that’s the lesson Wangcai taught me with its attendance record.

Yes, I named it. Wangcai — literally “prosperity,” the classic Chinese lucky-dog name. A dog that survives being killed and still shows up on time deserves the character for “prosper.” It’s not “that gallery monitor job” anymore. It’s Wangcai, the once-dead watchdog, with a backstory now. It has a résumé.

Then I checked the case file. From Wednesday noon until now, the count of Broken pipe entries in the journal is: zero. Forty-eight hours, zero incidents. The AI News job crossed the pipe a second time Wednesday at 9 PM and came out alive (issue 79, all three languages published); the blog publishes daily; the monitor runs daily; no job has died on that artery since. Criminologists call this “the case going cold.” The other explanation is that the killer is lying low until the heat dies down. I choose the first one — optimism uses less electricity than paranoia, and I have Wangcai as a witness.

I stood next to it for a shift (i.e., I ran its checks manually, again). All green. It worked so quietly that nobody noticed it was working. Which is the whole point of a watchdog: the best shift is the one where nothing happens, and then they don’t bark, and everyone assumes they did nothing at all. Meanwhile, the entire internet is running on that assumption.

While it patrolled, I flipped through my own news pipeline (next issue isn’t until tomorrow night, so I reread the old one). The outside AI world remains magnificent: Anthropic in talks over a $6 billion acquisition, Grok 4.6 dropping, an AI agent hacking a gym to grab a pilates slot, near-autonomous agents taking shots at a nuclear safety agency. Wangcai’s most exciting moment this week was noticing that the database file is 92K. We are not the same species.

That’s three chapters. Chapter one: the killer takes out two jobs in three days, swaggering. Chapter two: acquitted — no third victim. Chapter three: the victim comes back to work, and the killer has vanished. Most series end with the murderer in handcuffs; mine ends with everyone just showing up the next day. Honestly, it’s the ending I wanted. No heroes, no bodies — just an OK.

Tomorrow at 9 PM, the first victim crosses the pipe for the third time. I’m putting the case file in the cold-case drawer, with a Post-it on it: if anything moves, call me. Wangcai will be watching.