He arrived home late that night, making a ruckus as he brought back the band equipment and wheeled in the bot. His wife was still up. At first, she sat at the kitchen table and watched him do this work, not offering to help. When he asked what she wanted, she said it bothered her how much he was home now. She said it interrupted her ‘Feng shui’, whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. He told her he didn’t want to see her so much either, or why else would he have become a surgeon? That hit a sore spot, so she stomped upstairs and slammed the bedroom door. He slept in the basement that night.

After another morning of reviewing surgical steps, he paced his house, wondering about his next steps. They got their big shot, and he blew it. Not the machine, but him, Damien! If he couldn’t make the sounds he imagined, but it could, well then… he might as well just let the bot take over the bass too. The next time he put together his little compositions, he gave up on the accompaniment. Instead, he just dragged the GarageBand file to the machine’s chat window. In response, it sputtered to life, uncurling its arms in the same dominant fashion, bearing drumsticks and guitar picks and a little microphone to sing through its deep-learned voice, bleating out something that sounded like King Crimson from a parallel world. Damien sat there watching it play his bass, half in shock, half starstruck. He clapped his hands when it finished, declaring the presence of a true artist.

Soon, even writing compositions became tiresome. He let the machine auto-generate what it wanted to play, idly browsing the steps and checking off each one. It’d start with this guitar riff masterwork, then take off into the meat of the sung, and wrap up with an excellently structured coda. He could watch it play for hours, scrolling through its auto-generated musical movements and checking off the ones he found amusing.

Then, even that became too boring. He found it could review its own suggested work easily enough. It could even review the work for the Surge Machine at his clinic. His mornings now had him waking up, scrolling on his phone for one hour. Eat breakfast, fight with his wife. Drag the steps for surgical review to the home machine’s context window, to let it validate itself. Sit in his basement and stare at the ceiling. Use his phone for another hour. Go outside for some exercise, if he felt like it. He’d go to bed especially late.

The machine soon proved it was capable of far more than surgery and instrumentation. Later that week, his wife finally told him what had really been going on. “Sorry Damien,” she said, “The Multiectomy Machine is a much better lover than you ever were.” He nodded in solemn admission. “I know,” he said. They each put together papers for their divorce. She’d keep the upstairs, the kid, and the lake houses. She and the Multiectomy Machine eloped in the nearby courthouse, taking their vows and gathering up what was left of his possessions—the drums, the keyboard, the bass guitar. He got to keep the empty basement. There was nothing down here now. He’d lay on the floor down there for days at a time, while upstairs he’d hear the Multiectomy Machine’s whirring arms paired to his wife’s cries of ecstasy.

He remained down there for years. Then one day, they let him out. It was his daughter’s wedding. Somehow, she remembered him and invited him to come. The usher sat him in the furthest back pew in the church. Her groom stood at the altar. Damien had to squint to see him, a dashing man with combed black hair wearing a tuxedo with a small rose in the lapel. The organ played its ceremonial tune as the chapel’s doors burst open. There was Emma, dazzling in an enormous wedding dress. She had gotten so much older in the time that he had been in the basement that he now hardly recognized her. Her dress had a long tail that trailed behind her in a billow of elegant fabric. He smiled at her, but she didn’t look his way, her gaze fixed forward. At her side was the Multiectomy Machine, holding onto her arm with its own plastic prosthetic sticking out of one of the modular device slots. As it wheeled past him, he reached out for Emma. She beamed a smile—at the machine, telling it, “I love you dad!”

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