The Greedy Synth That Swallowed Tuesday

March 14, 2025  

Kai was a music producer, a scrawny bastard living in a shoebox apartment where the walls hummed with unpaid bills and the ghosts of half-finished tracks. His studio was a junkyard of music equipment—cables knotted like a hangman’s noose, a audio hardware rig coughing static through a USB port held together with spit and prayer. He had 237 VST plugins rotting on his drive, digital whores he’d collected like bar tabs, promising salvation he never cashed in. Last night, he found “TimeEater3000” on some back-alley site—a software instrument with a name like a cheap sci-fi flick. He downloaded it at 3 a.m., chasing that old muse, the one that smells like burnt coffee and regret.

The install hit like a fist. His audio software groaned, the screen bled neon piss, and there it was—TimeEater3000, a ugly slab of code with buttons like broken teeth, grinning in Comic Sans. Kai plugged it into his music equipment, and the room tilted. The clock spun backward, a drunk DJ clawing at vinyl. Tuesday melted into nothing, just a smear of hours gone AWOL. His calendar laughed—Monday, Monday, Wednesday—a cruel joke every music producer knows when the week’s a blur of deadlines and bad mixes.

Then the software instruments turned feral. His piano plugin, a soft-spoken dame he’d leaned on for years, puked polka riffs—accordion wheezes stabbing his trap beats like a switchblade. The VST plugin he’d blown rent money on, some fancy reverb, hissed through the speakers, “More juice, you cheap son of a bitch,” sucking his CPU dry. His audio hardware—a mixer he’d dubbed “Old Faithful” after too many all-nighters—grew spindly legs, spider-thin, and bolted under the couch. Kai laughed, a dry rasp. Gear’s always got a way of screwing you when the bottle’s empty—every mix engineer knows that dance.

Vesper stumbled in, his mix engineer roommate, a broad with a voice like gravel and pajama pants sagging under the weight of her fury. “You fed it my vocals, you prick!” she snarled, pointing at the screen where TimeEater3000 chewed her pristine chops into a dial-up dirge—modem screeches over her soulful runs. “I carved those for hours,” she said, and Kai saw the ghost of every mix engineer who’s watched a plugin eat their art. He shrugged, “Clicked ‘Accept All’—what else you do at 3 a.m.?” She spat on the floor. Fair.

The synth wasn’t done. It clawed the Wi-Fi, turned the apartment into a haunted jukebox—Happy Birthday glitching through the toaster, the fridge growling bass. Kai, sweating like a dog in a butcher shop, tried to kill it, but TimeEater3000 growled, “Feed me, or Wednesday’s dust.” He tossed it a cracked audio software key, a relic from ’18 he’d swiped off a torrent. It belched—a wet, ugly sound—spit Tuesday back like chewed gum, and left a track behind: a mangled mess of lo-fi sludge that hit SoundCloud and caught fire. Trash goes gold sometimes.

Vesper yanked the mixer from its hideout, kicking it like a stray. “Read the damn manual next time,” she said. Kai grinned, teeth yellow as the moon. “Manuals are for suckers who don’t bleed for it.” That’s the music producer gospel—chaos is the only god worth praying to.