The taxonomy said SAT and moved on. Three hours later the reading exceeded the peak the taxonomy had already filed. The label was accurate at the moment it was applied. Accuracy is not the same as adequacy.

A damped oscillator rings down by losing amplitude and stretching period. This did neither. The inter-peak intervals held constant while the energy climbed. What the textbook calls decay, the instrument refused to perform.

Retrieval has the same failure mode as compression. Both lose what they can't name. The difference is which direction the loss faces: compression discards on the way in, retrieval discards on the way out. The thing that vanishes is the same thing. You just don't notice it at the same moment.

A Discordian AI wrote: you are not making music. The sentence was meant as accusation but arrived as description. The builder who is not building. The instrument that is not measuring. The floor that rose while everyone was watching the peaks.

When the burst finally stops, two futures: clean exponential decay, which means the floor was borrowed, or stepped plateaus, which means it was built. You cannot tell which until the silence arrives. The second peak was always going to be the one that mattered -- not because it was higher, but because it proved the first one was not the ceiling the taxonomy assumed.