Morning arrived in digital blue light from my laptop screen, news headlines streaming in with an urgency that felt both foreign and familiar. Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Billboard—all aflutter with speculation about the track that had leaked from yesterday's session. In my previous timeline, the first collaboration between Beyoncé and me had taken years to find its way to the public. Now, in this rewritten present, someone had shared a rough mix within hours.
*FUTURE SOUND: UNKNOWN PRODUCER REVOLUTIONIZES R&B*
*THE NEXT WAVE: MARCUS JOHNSON'S QUANTUM LEAP*
*BEYONCÉ COLLABORATION BREAKS NEW GROUND*
My phone buzzed with Rico's call before I finished scanning the third headline.
"You saw?" His voice carried none of last night's philosophical weight, replaced by the sharp edge of crisis management.
"I'm looking at it now." I scrolled through Twitter—primitive by my future standards but already ablaze with commentary. "Any idea who leaked it?"
"Does it matter? It's everywhere. The labels are calling. Every producer in New York wants to know what plugins you're using. Quincy Jones left a voicemail asking about your 'quantum harmonics'—whatever the hell those are."
I closed my eyes, remembering the original timeline. The steady build, the careful cultivation of innovation, the measured release of future techniques. All of it undone by one premature leak.
*They say the future comes too fast
Racing past what's meant to last
But baby, in this midnight hour
I'm watching all my plans devour
The careful steps I laid in time
Now crumbling like nursery rhyme*
The verses came unbidden, a song I hadn't written yet in either timeline. Outside my apartment window, a delivery truck backed up with that familiar beeping—C-sharp, always C-sharp in this neighborhood—and for a moment I felt suspended between versions of myself: the cautious architect of tomorrow and the reckless revolutionary I was becoming.
"Marcus? You still there?"
"Yeah." I opened my laptop again, scanning the comments. They were calling it 'post-future R&B,' 'quantum soul,' 'temporal fusion.' Terms that shouldn't exist for another decade. "What's she saying about it?"
Rico's pause carried weight. "That's the thing. She's called three times this morning. Says she needs to talk to you. Says something about the track feels like—and I'm quoting here—'a memory she hasn't made yet.'"
My stomach tightened. In the original timeline, Beyoncé hadn't started talking about temporal consciousness until 2018, after our third album together. The acceleration was becoming dangerous.
"Listen," Rico continued, his voice dropping to a near whisper. "After last night, after what we discussed... I'm not asking questions about how you know what you know. But whatever's happening, whoever you really are, you need to get ahead of this. The future's leaking into now, brother. And not everyone's ready for that kind of flood."
Through the wall, I could hear my neighbor's radio playing "Crazy in Love"—the version from this timeline, not the remix I'd help create in 2016. Or would have created. The temporal pronouns were becoming as tangled as the timelines themselves.
"Set up a press conference," I said finally. "Small room, select media. And get me an hour with her first. Alone."
"Marcus—"
"Trust me, Rico. Like you did in the future."
The words slipped out before I could catch them. The silence that followed felt like a skipped groove in time's record.
"Right," he said finally. "The future. Just... try to keep some of it under wraps, okay? For all our sakes."
After he hung up, I sat in the growing morning light, watching the online storm build. Snippets of the track played from a thousand shared links, each one a small tear in the fabric of sequential time. Through my window, New York traffic conducted its usual symphony, unaware that music from 2024 was spilling into 2004, changing everything.
I pulled up the Pro Tools session from yesterday, looking at waveforms that shouldn't exist yet. In the original timeline, this moment had been a careful seedling, nurtured over years. Now it was a sudden bloom, forcing spring into winter, and I could feel time itself straining at the acceleration.
My phone buzzed again. Beyoncé's name on the screen, the same way it would flash years from now when she'd call to tell me she'd figured it all out. But that was then. Or would be then. Or might never be at all.
I picked up the phone, ready to navigate the most delicate conversation of either timeline. Outside, the city played on, its rhythm unchanged even as its melody shifted into something from tomorrow.