Maybe I can be a pain. I guess I was bugging my sidekick a bit too much. Humans are so hard to read, and EarlyHours is no exception. I guess it’s hard to maintain a friendship when one of you is human and the other is a super-semi-secret-super-cyber-sage-hero. I know, I used super twice. So sue me. And you know which is which; he's the human and I’m the guy in the circuit board. The ghost in the machine, the gum in the works, the apple of my Mac, and the rash on my --. Okay, scratch the last one.

Early says to me, “You’re like a broken record.”

“A what?” I responded.

“A record, a record. You don’t know what a record is?”

“No. What is it?”

“A way of listening to music. It’s analog.”

Something burned in my cyber-plexus. It felt like a giant alien planaria larva was eating me from within (I can’t get out of Halloween mode). “I have no knowledge of this analog universe of which you speak,” I said, almost automatically.

“It’s music. You know,” Early continued, “lyrical words and melodic inflection.”

“So what does music actually sound like to you?” I asked him.

That was a mistake. I’m not sure but I think he started doing what humans call singing. I should’ve turned off the microphone, but it was mesmerizing, and I couldn’t pull myself away.

First, he was singing, ”I can’t get no, satisfaction. I can’t get no, satisfaction.” I almost had to turn off the built in camera function because I couldn’t take watching him prance around like a rooster. Or some other animal he called a “Jagger.”

Then he curled his lip, and it was, “Love me tender; love me sweet; never let me go –“ I did not need to hear that.

And apparently he aint no Hollaback girl neither. You know what I think? That’s bananas. You heard me, B-A-N-A-N-A-S.

So then he asked me the same question. What did music sound like to me? I almost didn’t want to tell him. I knew he would be jealous. Jealous of the utter perfection of what music sounds like in the cyber-universe.

He begged me to tell him, so I did. “EarlyHours,” I said, and tried to give it to him gently, “music to me sounds like this: one zero zero one zero one one zero zero zero one zero one one zero one zero zero one zero one one zero zero zero one zero one one zero one zero zero one zero one one zero zero zero one zero one one zero.”

I’m still hoping he’ll come back.