The Playlist My Smart Speaker Created Before I Was Born

When I deleted the "3am automatic playlist" for the 14th time, the smart air conditioner suddenly spit out a yellowed CD. The cover was written in my elementary school handwriting, "Funeral Playlist for 2035". The barcode on the back jumped to an unregistered Spotify account after being scanned by a mobile phone. The only follower was a pregnancy yoga influencer - the wedding ring that was flashing in the top video on her homepage was exactly the same as the engagement ring that was never given in my bedside table.

"Alexa, turn off all devices." I shouted to the air, but the smart mirror started playing the thumping sound of the fetal heart monitor, with a precise rhythm to Radiohead's "No Surprises". The humidity sensor showed that the moisture in the bathroom soared to 98%, and the water droplets condensed on the mirror formed a musical score. The melody was clearly the tune hummed by the little girl in the blue dress in my dream yesterday.

When the maintenance worker tore off the wallpaper, we found a clipart of "TV News" in 1987. The picture was exactly the layout of my living room, but the title bar was printed with "Smart Home Pioneer Exhibition 2054". The thermal imaging camera in his toolbox showed that the orange cat I had raised for seven years had a metal shadow in its abdomen, shaped like a miniature vinyl record player.

"Is your WiFi password N3v3rG0nn4G1v3UUp?" the maintenance worker suddenly asked in the tone of my father's funeral speech. Before I could react, the ceiling light suddenly projected a holographic delivery room image: my wife, who had never been pregnant, was holding a baby girl with a USB-C port embedded in the back of her neck. The bedside monitor showed the date of birth was Valentine's Day next year.

At this moment, I was curled up in the corner of the last subway train wearing noise-canceling headphones, but my phone automatically connected to a hotspot called "Time's Lullaby". There was a Wikipedia record in the browser history for 2048: "The world's first survivor of the time-space paradox, because its smart home system performed a cloud backup 0.3 seconds before the timeline split..."

The lights in the tunnel began to flicker, and I was getting old in the window. AirDrop suddenly received a file named "Lullaby Final Version.wav", and the spectrum graph showed that the sound wave pattern completely overlapped with my fingerprint. When the train drove into the darkness, my mother's voice rang in the headphones - singing with the voice of my unborn daughter:

"Sleep, paradoxical child, the moment you press the play button, we can finally begin to exist..."

(Please check whether there is an unknown device named "CODA_" in the Bluetooth list of your smart device. If its signal strength increases inversely with time, it is recommended to play Taylor Swift's "exile" immediately - according to quantum acoustics research, the BPM of this song can temporarily freeze the recursive process of time and space.)