“I asked nicely,” Miles said.

Miles rubbed his eyes. “Are you drunk?”

“You didn’t hear it from me,” Silas said, lowering his voice. “In 2008, we made a batch of twenty-four V-201s for a midnight shift. The lead engineer, a guy named Gregor, was trying to model the resonance of an old Neumann lathe from the 60s. He got too close. Too pure.”

“Try this,” Silas said, ignoring the insult. “Don’t type the code. Sing it.”

Miles Chen didn’t believe in haunted hardware. He’d been a mastering engineer for fifteen years, and his weapon of choice was the T-Racks 24 V 201, a legendary analog/digital hybrid processor that could make a mix sound like it was carved from warm, breathing mahogany. The problem was, his unit was dead.

“Silas, I don’t believe in ghosts.”

Below that, a single line of text, as if typed by a ghost in the machine:

“Eight… eight… kay… zed,” he hummed, approximating the tones. “Nine… eff… four… ayy.”