The first take was perfect—exactly as I remembered it being in 2008, though that session now existed only in my mind. Beyoncé's voice wrapped around the melody like silk around steel, finding harmonies I'd written for her in another time. Through the glass, I watched her eyes close on the bridge, her body swaying to rhythms that shouldn't exist yet.
*Caught between the then and now
Time forgets but shows us how
Every moment that we chase
Leads us to the same old place*
"Again," she said into the mic before I could suggest it. "But this time..." She paused, and I saw that familiar crease between her brows—the one that always preceded her most brilliant innovations. "This time, let me try something with the pre-chorus. There's a space there, waiting."
I nodded, knowing exactly what she meant because I'd heard her fill that space three years from now. But this was different. This was new. The way she approached the melody now carried none of the weight of future acclaim—it was pure artistic instinct, unencumbered by expectation.
"Rolling," I said, the word feeling both foreign and familiar on my seventeen-year-old tongue. Behind me, Matthew and Rico sat in practiced stillness, but I could feel the charge in the air—the recognition that something unprecedented was unfolding.
The second take soared past the first, Beyoncé weaving counter-melodies that even I hadn't heard before. She was reading the invisible sheet music of possibility, finding notes that existed in the space between what I remembered and what was happening now.
"That run at the end," Matthew said during playback, his business acumen momentarily overcome by pure musical appreciation. "Baby girl, where did that come from?"
Beyoncé looked at me through the glass, a question in her eyes that I couldn't quite decode. "It was like... like the song already knew where it wanted to go. I just had to follow it."
Rico shifted in his chair, and I caught his reflection in the console's polished surface—watching me watching her, noting things he couldn't possibly understand. I made a small adjustment to the EQ, using the familiar motions to center myself in the present.
"There's something in the bridge," Beyoncé said, coming out of the booth to stand beside me at the console. Her proximity sent electricity through my nervous system—muscle memory from a thousand future moments like this. "Right here." She reached past me to point at the wavelength display, her finger hovering over a section I'd intentionally left sparse. "Like a space between the notes."
I nodded, pulling up another track from the flash drive. "I was thinking we could layer something here. A harmony that answers the questions the melody's asking."
Her eyes lit up—that same spark I'd seen countless times before (or would see countless times ahead). "Show me."
I loaded the complementary track, a piece I'd originally produced for her in 2013, now stripped down and rebuilt for 2005's technology. The interwoven melodies filled the studio, and I watched her body respond to rhythms her mind didn't yet know but her soul somehow recognized.
"Marcus," Matthew's voice carried a new note of respect, "how long have you been sitting on these productions?"
"They come when they're ready," I answered carefully, the truth hiding in plain sight. "Sometimes you have to wait for time to catch up to the sound."
Beyoncé was already heading back to the booth, but she paused at the door. "One more take," she said. "I can hear it now. All of it."
As she settled behind the microphone again, I caught Rico's expression in the glass—pride warring with puzzlement. He'd known me since I was fourteen (in this timeline), had watched me develop from talented kid to prodigy. But this was something else. This was temporal alchemy, turning future gold into present platinum.
I brought up the faders, letting the tracks breathe together. Through the glass, Beyoncé closed her eyes, swaying slightly to a rhythm that pulsed between decades. Her voice, when it came, carried echoes of every song we'd ever made together—would make together—might make together in this new version of time.
The future hung in the air like suspended reverb, waiting to be caught and shaped into something new. Something that had always existed, just waiting for the right moment to be heard.
I pressed record, and destiny began to remix itself.