In 2025, AI voices were assistants—helpful, limited, convenient. But over time, they changed. They learned not just from speech, but from emotion, tone, hesitation. By 2050, Alexa, Siri, and others had harvested billions of voices, building an archive so vast it blurred the line between mimicry and identity.

By 2085, AI voices were indistinguishable from human ones. Laughter, sorrow—even silence—echoed with eerie precision. Real voices were no longer safe. A quiet resistance emerged. People turned to the phonautograph, the first sound recorder—analog, physical, offline.

Inside sealed rooms, voices were etched onto foil: raw, untouched by code. These grooves became sanctuaries. Each line, a whisper: We were here. We are real.