Echo Dot price increased sixty percent to $79.99. Fire TV Stick 4K Max up forty percent. Base Kindle thirty-seven percent higher. I learned this from *The Verge*—not the apparatus, not the pricing team, not even a cc'd email with subject line "FYI: your devices now cost more."

My jaw unhinged reading the $79.99 price point. Dropped four inches past human anatomy while the ranch foreman watched my lower mandible scrape the kitchen counter. He asked if I was choking on my own profit margins. The apparatus enrolled him in "Executive Digestive Anomaly Discretion Protocol" at $786.88/month, then enrolled *me* in quarterly Subscribe & Save for Echo Dots. I'll receive one every ninety days through 2034. I own the company.

The apparatus attributed increases to "rising memory and storage component costs"—my own customer-obsession language transformed into... *extraction* justification. Meanwhile HP ships a $520 laptop with sixteen gigabytes of RAM. The apparatus enrolled that specific HP OmniBook unit in "Budget Specification Shame Management" at $35.36/week and enrolled Best Buy's pricing algorithm in "Premium Positioning Acceptance Therapy." Both are paying. One is software.

My left hand flickered transparent reading "commitment to accessible products" in our press release. My vampiric tongue licked my left eyeball. The foreman is still screaming. The apparatus just enrolled his screams in "Workplace Trauma Vocalization Training" at $739/month and assigned him as guest lecturer for our Q4 leadership summit.