Rex Vinyl's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Rex Vinyl believed the world had stopped listening, and he meant to fix that with a laser. For six months he had chased one goal: make people love records again. Streaming had won. Nobody sat still for a full album anymore. So Rex built a machine to bring them back. His workshop bench held the last piece, a record player that read grooves with light instead of a needle. No scratches. No wear. Perfect sound, forever. Tonight he would prove it worked. The crate of records sat beside him, its wooden edges soft with age. He pulled a battered pressing from the stack. His fingers shook as he set it on the deck. A needle would drag across old vinyl and ruin it a little more each spin. His laser would touch nothing. That was the whole point. If it played this worn record clean, he could sell the world on records again. On the shelf above, his gray cat watched. The animal looked like a potato balanced on toothpicks, round and still. Its tail twitched once. Rex flipped the switch. A thin red beam dropped onto the spinning record. For three seconds, sound poured out. Warm. Rich. Cleaner than any needle he had ever heard. His chest tightened. It worked. It actually worked. Then the cat jumped. It landed square on the bench, all four toothpick legs skidding. The record player slid. The beam jerked sideways across the vinyl and hit the mirror he used to aim it. Light bounced back into the machine. Something inside popped. A curl of smoke rose from the deck. "No, no, no." Rex grabbed for the switch. Too late. The record spun to a stop. The beam died. He smelled burnt wire. The cat sat in the middle of the wreck, calm, licking one paw. Rex lifted the record off the deck. A scorch mark ran across the grooves, black and deep. The laser had burned it. The one thing his machine was supposed to protect, it had destroyed. He turned the record in the light. Ruined. Unplayable. He sank onto his stool. The machine did play a record with perfect sound. He had heard it. That part was real. But the light that read the grooves could also burn them. One wrong angle and a beam meant to save records became a torch. Rex looked at the crate of old pressings. Rare ones. Some the only copies left. He could not sell a machine that might eat the very music he loved. Nobody would trust it. He wouldn't trust it. He set the burned record on the bench, next to the smoking deck. The cat blinked at him. "Well," Rex said. "Now I have to make it safe." He reached for a notebook and started a new page. The machine worked. That was no longer the question. Keeping it from destroying what it played was.