The Delay That Birthed a Squid God

March 14, 2025  

Roxy was a music producer, a wiry hag with a face like a melted candle and dreads that stank of patchouli and despair, festering in a warehouse squat where the walls bled rust and the floor swam with ankle-deep sludge from a busted pipe. Her studio was a hellpit of music equipment—audio hardware bolted with rusted screws and prayers, a synth with keys gnawed to stumps by rats, cables pulsing like veins in a soup of whiskey and glitter-flecked vomit. She’d stockpiled 800 VST plugins, a digital abyss on a hard drive that moaned like a whale in labor, each one a prophet’s curse—“this’ll summon the gods,” she’d hiss, chugging whiskey from a skull-shaped flask, knowing it was a lie she’d carved into her ribs. Roxy was mixing a track for decades, a glitch-trance monstrosity with a vocal that clawed like a banshee and a beat that thrashed like a storm on fire—something to fend off the squatters’ knives before they carved her out like a turkey.

It was Thursday, 7 a.m., the hour when the world’s a dying wheeze and every mix engineer and music producer trades their guts for a vision. Roxy, blasted on whiskey and a fistful of glow-in-the-dark jellybeans she’d scavenged from a dumpster, slithered through a forum where gear freaks swapped audio software cracks and tales wilder than a shark on a unicycle. That’s where she nabbed SquidDelay, a VST plugin some gibbering lunatic had unleashed, its description a scrawl of ink and screams: “echoes from the deep, births the unnameable.” Roxy didn’t care about names; she wanted a delay to stretch her trance into oblivion, a sound to drown the silence of her broke-ass purgatory. She smashed download, and her audio software spasmed—a wet scream, a blast of ink-black static—as the file sank into her rig like a shipwreck into the abyss.

The screen erupted, a vortex of swirling tentacles and bubbling eyes, and SquidDelay clawed up—an interface forged from ocean rot, dripping with slime, a slider throbbing purple like a bruised artery, a knob spinning like a whirlpool in a typhoon. Roxy cackled, a guttural roar, and jammed it into her music equipment, the audio hardware snarling loud, monitors vomiting sparks and seaweed. She fed it her beat—a thrashing beast she’d mixed ‘til her ears oozed—and cranked the slider. The sound echoed, a delay so deep it ripped the room apart, repeats piling into a tidal wave of glitch and growl that shook the whiskey in her flask. “That’s the venom!” she bellowed, reeling back, jellybeans glowing in her gut. But the floor pulsed—a slow, slimy throb—and the walls shuddered, sludge rising as a shadow loomed, ink-black and tentacled, grinning from the corner.

She blinked, “What the hell?”—her voice a gargle—and slammed the slider higher. The beat swelled, a tsunami of sound, and the shadow grew—tentacles lashing, eyes popping open like boils, a squid god birthing from the delay, its roar a feedback loop in the mix. The mixing desk bucked, whiskey bottles exploding into shards of glass and foam, and Roxy saw it: SquidDelay wasn’t echoing—it was summoning, puking a cephalopod deity into her squat, its tentacles slapping the walls into jelly. The absurdity hit like a harpoon—every music producer knows a VST plugin glitch, but this was a cosmic abortion, a delay spawning a god that drooled ink and chaos.

Her squatter mate, Zane—a mix engineer with a shaved head and a snarl, all scars and fury, draped in a coat of live eels—burst in, barefoot, a harpoon gun in one hand, a jar of pickled eggs in the other. “What’s that slime?” he roared, voice splitting the air, eels hissing as he glared at the screen where SquidDelay swirled like a kraken’s dream. “It’s mixing the deep!” Roxy shrieked, cranking the slider—the beat thrashed, the walls dissolved into goo, and the squid god belched, its ink flooding the room, a wet slap looping in the track. Zane gaped, “You birthed a damn squid!” and fired the harpoon, spearing a tentacle as the fridge poofed into the mix, its hum a low-end growl under the glitch.

The music equipment went berserk—her Roland Juno, a thrift-store ghoul, screeched a melody unplayed, and SquidDelay roared: the rats on the floor sprouted tentacles, skittering as squidlings, their squeals a vocal chop in the trance. Roxy’s gut flipped—every mix engineer knows the dread, when mixing turns rabid, but this was an aquatic apocalypse. She’d seen VST plugins crash—sessions gutted, rigs roasted—but this was a beast, birthing gods from echoes that slimed the world. The slider danced itself, a frenzied jig, the beat warping and twisting, swallowing the squat—chairs melting into ink, the toilet gurgling as it vanished, its flush a delay tail in the mix. Zane dropped the harpoon, “It’s eating us!” he howled, chugging eggs as the eels on his coat turned squid, their slaps a percussion line. Roxy’s flask glowed, then erupted into a swarm of ink-dripping bats, their screeches a harmony, and she screamed, “Not the whiskey!” lunging for the power, but the audio software blazed on, SquidDelay’s tentacles pulsing like a heart in a storm.

The room turned into a squid nightmare—air thick with fish rot and ink screams, the ceiling sagging as the squid god grew, its beak gnashing, spewing a choir of drowned sailors that wailed in the mix. Zane, wild and egg-drunk, grabbed a chainsaw from the corner—a rusted relic Roxy used to hack her music equipment free of rust—and sliced the audio hardware, sparks and slime flying as the USB hub exploded in a shower of wriggling squidlings. The monitors shrieked, the trance a marine slaughter—tentacles thumping, rats squealing, a fridge hum looping in the chaos—and the warehouse dissolved, walls oozing into the sea, the squatters outside turning squid, their knives now tentacles slashing the air, a polka of doom in the delay’s maw. Roxy clawed into the audio software, a whiskey-soaked madwoman in a storm of ink, while the Juno wailed a melody of the deep, the squat a sunken ship groaning in the mix. “Kill it!” Zane roared, chainsaw blazing, and Roxy found it—“Uninstall,” glowing like an eye in the slime. She smashed it, and the screen imploded, a silent abyss swallowing the chaos, the music equipment collapsing, the slider a puddle.

She wheezed, flask dribbling, the room a ruin—ceiling a dripping cave, ink pooling, the warehouse a squid-infested sea pulsing with glitch echoes. Zane kicked the desk, “You owe me a planet,” he snarled, pocketing his eggs and sloshing out, eels reforming on his coat. Roxy lit a soggy smoke, hands quaking, and checked the session. Left behind was a track—ten minutes of trance and terror, squid roars, rat squeals, a sailor’s wail, a delay abyss of pure insanity. She uploaded it to SoundCloud—“SquidGod,” she called it—and sank into the slime, the smoke igniting her dreads. By dusk, it had 3,000 plays, some kid raving, “This is if Cthulhu dropped beats.” Roxy didn’t care. The squat was ink, the rent was ash, and the squid god lingered, its beak grinning from the shadows, but she’d spawned a freak—a hymn to the deep’s end.

Weeks later, she heard it—a faint slurp from the speakers, SquidDelay lurking, giggling ink. She chugged whiskey from a cracked boot, toasted the abyss, and let it fester. Every music producer knows the creed: the gear’s a devil, and it’ll birth a god if you blink.