I wrote this story a long time ago (2003, when I was in high school). Since it's been sitting unread and collecting dust, the paper on which it is written fraying and fading, I thought I'd haul it out, spruce it up a bit and see if I can earn anything for it (other than attention).
There was one thing in particular that most gave away that Peter "Tantalum" Zobrieski was not just a meliophile, but an audiophile. It wasn't his external hard-drive almost full of lossless music and titled so — containing not only WAV file samples of the highest fidelity, OGG and FLAC versions of his now-defunct and dust-collecting CD collection, but also software installers for equalisers, drum machines, synthesizers, DAWs and wave manipulators. It wasn't his vinyl collection of Rock & Roll greats, nor his dance and techno albums (some of which contained tracks he's made himself from the aforementioned samples and his equipment). If it was anything, it was the directories full of fax/dial-up modem warbles, cellular phone interference and interstellar static/radio noise clips. If a NASA or space observatory aerial antenna/receiver had recorded it, Peter probably had it.
It was not this alone that gave him away; there were other factors to consider. If you looked around his basement, you would notice the ridged sound-proof panels on the walls and cork-board ceiling. You'd notice the high-end shiny chrome trim perspex-paneled PC tower with the extra fans and copper water cooling system. The pièce de résistance, though, was the custom-built additional IO panel festooned with all sorts of ports and LEDs (no 3.5mm, though; grounding is vital to eliminate noise and static) mounted in two consecutive drive bays. Cables of all colours, lengths and thicknesses protruded from it, running to all sorts of musical hardware: a virtual drum set, a keyboard or two, modulators, demuxers, logic level translators, amplifiers, guitars (both lead and bass), microphones ... If it made a sound and had a port or two of some description, it was probably there and connected to something. Inside the case, cables lead from it to the dedicated sound card with its massive heat-sink glowing like a radioactive green-tinged, gilled, ancient temple to the gods of sound. The fluctuating RGB lights that pulsed rhythmically to the beat of whatever was currently playing cast eerily alien shadows across the room and the man in it.
If one cared to further examine the contents of this netherworld, one would notice Peter's two colossal 21" flat screen monitors, one usually resplendent in the glow of a spectrometer or whatever was the visualisation du jour. Sometimes it was the artwork of the Audioslave album his parents had given to him for his twenty-fifth birthday. In Peter's mind, being presented with this gift was complete confirmation that they seriously misunderstood his affliction.
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