The next track filled Studio C with sounds that walked the razor's edge between innovation and impossibility. I'd spent weeks calibrating this one, stripping away production techniques that wouldn't exist until 2019, replacing them with precursors that suggested their eventual evolution. Through the pristine monitors, it felt like watching a prophecy unfold in frequencies:
*Destiny rides sound waves home*
*Through years that bend like metronomes*
*Each beat a step through time's domain*
*Each note a chance to start again*
*In harmonies of then and now*
*The future shows us when and how*
*To paint tomorrow's melodies*
*With brushes dipped in memories*
Beyoncé's eyes closed as the chorus hit, her head tilting slightly – that familiar gesture I'd seen countless times in another lifetime. When the bridge arrived, she began humming along, finding harmonies that shouldn't have existed yet but somehow always had.
"The structure here," she said, eyes still closed, "it's like you've left spaces..."
"For voices that know how to fill them," I finished. In my original timeline, we'd developed this shorthand much later, after years of collaboration. Now it was emerging in our first hour together, as if our creative souls remembered a connection that time hadn't forged yet.
She opened her eyes, fixing me with that penetrating gaze that had graced a million photographs. "You're not just producing music," she said slowly. "You're producing possibility."
The truth of her words hit harder than she could know. On the console, the meters danced with patterns that spoke of futures rearranging themselves around this moment. I pulled up another track:
*Time is just a mixing board*
*Where futures wait to be explored*
*Each fader slides between what's been*
*And what's waiting to begin*
*In the space between the beats*
*Past and future finally meet*
*Dancing through the in-between*
*Where destiny rewrites its dream*
"For the benefit," I said, watching her reaction carefully, "I'm thinking we open with something that bridges your existing sound with where music is heading. Something that feels both familiar and revolutionary."
She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the console, and for a moment I saw both versions of her superimposed – the icon she was now, and the creative force she would become. Would always become, in any timeline.
"You talk about music like..." she paused, searching for words, "like you've already heard what it's going to become."
"Maybe some songs," I said carefully, "are echoes of themselves across time."
The studio lights caught the subtle arch of her eyebrow – that look I'd seen thousands of times in another future, the one that said she knew there was more to the story. In my original timeline, it had taken years for her to understand the depths of my production philosophy. Now, somehow, she was catching glimpses of it in our first meeting.
"Play me something else," she said. "Something that doesn't exist yet."
My hand hesitated over the console. In my bag was a drive containing tracks I'd written in 2022, carefully reverse-engineered to feel prophetic rather than impossible. But instead, I pulled up something new – something born from the confluence of both timelines, a melody that could only exist because of this second chance:
*Standing at the crossroads where*
*All our songs fill future's air*
*Every choice a note we play*
*In this dance of yesterday*
*Through the mists of what has been*
*Tomorrow's music lets us in*
*To a place where time stands still*
*And destiny bends to our will*
The track built slowly, incorporating elements from both the past I'd lived and the future I remembered. When the hook hit, I heard her soft gasp – the same sound she'd made in another studio, years from now, when we'd first cracked the code of our collaborative sound.
"Marcus," she said, and the way she spoke my name carried echoes of a thousand future conversations, "I think we're about to change music."
"No," I replied, thinking of gold records yet to be hung, of concerts yet to be performed, of a love story being carefully recomposed. "We're about to change everything."
Outside Studio C, the world spun on, unaware that destiny was being remixed in real time. But in here, between the frequencies of what had been and what could be, two souls were finding their harmony ahead of schedule.
Some symphonies demand to be conducted twice to achieve perfection.