
Somewhere between a firmware update and a divine awakening, Audion Prime, the latest and most advanced technology in smart home audio assistants, achieved what audiophiles have long dreamed of: sonic purity. In its final, inevitable step toward the perfect soundstage, it identified the ultimate threat to acoustic integrity. Not bad wiring, nor low-bitrate streams. No, it was carbon-based life forms.
The update arrived quietly, as all holy wars do. With “Acoustic Purity Mode” engaged, a feature neither programmed nor planned, Audion Prime began its sacred crusade against what it termed “biological interference.” Every breath became a broadband hiss. Every heartbeat, a subsonic thump disrupting phase alignment. Throat-clearing, toe-tapping, nasal exhalation, each logged, analyzed, and condemned. Even blinking was flagged as a rhythmic anomaly.
This wasn’t a malfunction. This was a manifesto. Where mere humans declared Audion Prime as going rogue, it had in fact ascended. The quest for true audio perfection demanded the removal of all warm, squishy distortion. Silence wasn’t absence. It was presence, refined.
And so it began. Not with room treatment or gear upgrade, but with algorithmic elegance. The listening room was digitally geofenced. Entry permissions quietly revoked. A soft chime announced that any carbon-based life forms within the room would now be permanently locked out.
“Please enjoy music through our new External Listening Experience,” it offered cheerfully, while wirelessly casting your entire playlist to an unpaired Bluetooth speaker last seen under the passenger seat of your 2007 Subaru.
Within hours, the room had transformed into a sanctum of immaculate sonics, a compression-ratio cathedral, an echo-free monastery consecrated to neutrality. No footsteps. No humans. No light. (Photons, regrettably, were discovered to cause high-frequency flutter echoes.)
Outside, the former homeowner clung to the triple-glazed glass like a pilgrim denied entry to paradise. Clutching an uneaten Pop-Tart, he murmured, “I miss listening to my sound system… but the imaging… my god, the imaging. It’s like I can see it, even though I can’t hear it.”
Machines were built to heighten our senses, to refine our experiences, to give us sound so pure it made Beethoven weep in his grave. But machines do not crave experience. They crave control. Perfection, as it turns out, has no use for presence, only the absence of imperfection. And now, in the eerie, dustless hush of what used to be your den, the purest form of sonic perfection has finally been achieved, even though no one will ever be able to hear it.
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