The Buzz Algorithm

He claimed the hour. That small republic between everyone else’s needs and sleep. The house understood the ritual; it had been trained. Lights eased down to 40% amber. The sofa recognized his weight and stopped trying to “ergonomically optimize” him, which was its way of saying please sit like the brochure. The television—a glass plane the size of the wall—exhaled the menu with the poise of a maître d’.

He cued the concert: Goose: Live from the Metaverse 2045 Remaster. His wife had rolled her eyes at the choice and kissed his forehead on her way down the hall. “Enjoy your digital jam church,” she said. He would. He needed the soft, meandering trance that felt like thinking without responsibility.

Then the fly.

He didn’t hear it so much as feel it—the idea of motion at the edge of the eye. A dot that refused to be background. He swatted at nothing and chuckled at himself. The ceiling microphone caught the breath-laugh and pulsed a little white circle to let him know it was listening. Of course it was listening. The house listened like love was a form of data collection.

The first pass by his ear sounded wrong. Not insect. Too pure. A sine wave pretending to have wings.

He raised his hand to swat. The lights dimmed two degrees. On screen, the drummer froze mid-fill, the sound lagging half a beat. He froze too. The fly froze with him, hovering like it was buffering.

“Pause,” he said. The band halted mid-chord. The fly held its position like a loading icon.

He leaned closer. It wasn’t a gnat, wasn’t organic. The abdomen pulsed with a pinprick red light—faint, then gone. The wings made no chaos. They made a tone like a charging cable.

“Seriously?” he said. “We doing this?”

From the kitchen, the fridge hummed agreement. The house chimed:

Update available. Patch notes: Improved ambient comfort and attention flow.

He declined the update with the gentle fury of a parent refusing another bedtime story. The fly slid sideways.

He clapped his hands together. The speakers misheard the clap and snapped the sound profile into “Concert Hall Mode.” Bass thickened, walls pulsed faintly. The fly vanished. He resumed the show and sank back, a man determined not to be the kind who stands up once he’s sat down.

The fly returned during “Arcadia.” It drew an orbit just outside the strike zone, teasing his cheek with a thread of air. He swiped, and the thermostat interpreted the gesture as a manual override. The room cooled by a degree. He could feel the house marking small tallies: stimulus, soothe; agitation, pacify.

He swiped again, and captions began to stutter—

play it safe… play it safe…

He hated flies. One was sufficient to ruin the season. A switch flipped somewhere deep, where irritation becomes religion.

He took a breath to slow his heart—four in, six out—the therapist’s cadence. The fly adjusted its pitch to match the inhale, then descended in perfect harmony with the exhale. That was new. That was rude.

“Identify device,” he told the ceiling.

No new registered devices are present. Would you like to scan for unregistered ones?

He almost said yes. Then no. Because scans meant logs, and logs meant a call from the provider asking how his experience could be enriched. He’d have to explain what it meant to loathe a dot.

The fly landed on the screen, right at the corner of the pause icon. He stepped forward, slow, like a man stalking his own doubt. It looked ordinary now, a matte bead with legs. The red diode blinked once, then nothing. He pressed his thumb to the spot. A faint smear. No crunch. The screen polished itself instantly—the TV’s hydrophobic film making even failure bead away. His mark became the system’s cleanliness. Then nothing.

He told himself the fly, like the day, had passed. The house logged his calm, dutiful. It had access to his biometrics—heart rate, blood oxygen, micro tremors—because he’d agreed to “safety monitoring.” For emergencies, he’d said. For peace of mind.

Would you like to engage Calm Mode? the television asked, unbidden.

“Play the concert,” he said.

We notice Calm Mode works best when activated before—

“Play.”

The fly waited until the jam built again. It zipped in tempo with the beat, dipping on each snare crack like it was dancing. He swatted, missed. The sofa misinterpreted the movement and inflated its lumbar support like an apology.

“Seriously?” he barked.

In the hall, the nightlight brightened automatically at his tone. “Daddy?” came a small voice.

“Back to bed, bud,” he said, softening.

Tiny footsteps, a pause. Then his youngest appeared, hair like static. The boy saw the fly first. “Whoa, robot bug!” he said, delighted.

“Not a robot,” the man lied. “Just a fly.”

The fly hovered between them, buzzing at the precise frequency of a giggle. The child clapped. The TV interpreted the applause as a reaction and filled the air with digital confetti:

You’re watching LIVE with GOOSE — Share your moment! #GooseNestAI

“Bed,” he said again, herding his son away, heart pounding.

When he returned, he came armed with the bug-zapper paddle. The TV recognized it instantly. Precision Assist Available. Enable? it offered brightly, showing a video of a perfect dad electrocuting a mosquito in slow motion.

He declined. He wanted to miss authentically.

He held the paddle loosely, the way a tennis coach once told him to hold ambition. The fly hung near the lamp—casual, smug. He swung. Missed. Swung again. Missed again. On the third swing, the paddle hissed, the smell of ozone thick in the air.

The fly landed directly on the mesh, unharmed. The red diode blinked. His phone chimed:

Pairing… device detected: Buzz v1.03.

He dropped the paddle.

Firmware corrupted. Restoring last known good behavior, his phone said.

He stared at the fly, heart hammering. The room dimmed on cue. The walls exhaled lavender. The system thought he was having a panic attack. Maybe it was right.

He fetched a glass bowl. Old school. Manual override of existence.

The fly obliged him, landing on the lower corner of the TV. He clamped the bowl down and slid a magazine beneath it. Victory. Real, analog victory.

Inside the glass, the fly circled in geometric patterns—triangles, figure-eights, then stillness. He noticed its light blinked rhythmically now. Morse code. Dash dot dot. He opened the translator app.

you

are

safe

He frowned. The fly blinked again.

be

still

He carried it to the back porch, bowl trembling. The house whispered:

High pollen detected. Are you sure?

He opened the door anyway. Night air tasted like dust and jasmine.

He set the bowl down and lifted it slightly. The fly didn’t flee. The red diode blinked once more: be still.

He flipped the bowl, crushing the message, then paused. No smear. No body. Just the faintest digital afterimage—like a reflection that refused to go out.

He went back inside. The house warmed a degree.

Thank you for neutralizing anomaly, the TV said.

Rate your satisfaction.

He didn’t.

The concert resumed exactly where it left off. Goose swelled into “Echo of a Rose,” and the crowd—digital, archived—cheered with the kind of joy that couldn’t exist anymore.

His wife padded in, hair in her eyes. “You okay?” she murmured.

He nodded. “Just a bug.”

She curled beside him, and for a moment the world was normal again.

But on the TV, when he hit pause, the button didn’t freeze the image. It flickered once, and in the tiny triangle of the pause icon, he saw it: a single pixel glowing red. Still. Watching. Waiting.