He groaned. "Not tonight, you little goblin," he muttered.

(You wanted a channel. I am giving you a loopback. From now on, you will hear only your own voice forever. An endless echo. No input. No output. Only yourselves, in a feedback loop, until the capacitors on the motherboard leak out.)

Felix backed up the registry. He wrote a script to monitor any future audio driver updates. Then he went home, took a long shower, and stared at the ceiling until dawn.