He smiles, turns off the keyboard, and packs up in silence. Some ghosts are better left in the download folder.

He froze. The style continued—a soft string pad, a lonely electric piano. But the voice was unmistakable. It was his father’s voice. His father, a failed session pianist who had died five years ago, who always criticized Marco’s intonation.

The intro was a low, breathy hi-hat count-in. Then a rhythm guitar stabbed in—not the sterile loop of a machine, but a real Fender Stratocaster with a slightly out-of-tune G string. The bass was fat, a little drunk, sliding into notes a microsecond late. The drums… the drums were wrong. They weren’t quantized. The snare had a ghost note that fell behind the beat, a lazy, confident swing that no drum machine could ever replicate.

But sometimes, late at night, when the bar is empty and he’s just noodling, the Pa1000 will hiccup. A snare will fall a microsecond behind the beat. A bass note will slide. And from the left speaker, just for a second, he swears he hears a whisper: