Midnight found me in my childhood bedroom, surrounded by the ghosts of posters long since replaced in another timeline. Mom had insisted I stay after dinner, her intuition as sharp as ever. "Some nights," she'd said, "you need to remember where you came from to know where you're going."
The contract from Columbia lay on my old desk, its pristine pages reflecting the soft glow of my laptop screen. Maria's lawyer – a fierce woman with eyes that could slice through corporate doublespeak – had highlighted the important parts in neon yellow. But I didn't need the highlights. I'd lived through these clauses before.
My phone vibrated:
*Still awake? - B*
The cursor blinked on my screen as I crafted the response. In my previous life, I'd learned that 2 AM messages often carried the weight of destiny. Another message arrived before I could reply:
*Listen to this.*
An audio file followed. Even through the phone's compressed playback, I recognized the skeleton of what we'd created, but transformed. She'd added something – a bridge section that wouldn't have been out of place in 2025:
*Standing at the crossroads where
Yesterday meets tomorrow
Time's a mirror that we share
Reflecting joy and sorrow
But baby, in this light
Everything looks new
Like memories of tonight
Are bleeding straight through*
My fingers trembled as I pressed play again. The melodic structure was hauntingly familiar – not from our session, but from a Grammy performance that wouldn't happen for fifteen years. Unless...
I called her.
"You heard it?" Her voice was soft, intimate in the midnight quiet.
"It's..." I searched for words that wouldn't reveal too much. "It's like you pulled it straight from my dreams."
"Funny you should say that." A pause, filled with the static of possibilities. "I had this dream last night. We were older, performing this song at some huge awards show. Everything was different – the clothes, the technology, even us. But the music... the music was exactly what we recorded today."
The hair on my neck stood up. In my previous timeline, Beyoncé had never mentioned prophetic dreams. Then again, in that timeline, we hadn't spent hours on a rooftop crafting melodies that bridged decades.
"Maybe some songs exist before we write them," I offered, the half-truth settling like silk in the darkness.
"Maybe some people do too." Her voice carried a hint of something – recognition? "Sometimes I look at you, Marcus, and I see two versions. The one in front of me, and the one from my dreams. Both feel real."
My heart thundered against my ribs. On my desk, the contract seemed to pulse with its own luminescence. Outside, a distant siren wailed – the exact pitch of the synthesizer line we'd laid down earlier.
"B," I started, then stopped. How do you tell someone they're right about an impossible truth?
"You don't have to explain," she said. "Just tell me one thing – in that dream, the performance I saw? We were happy. Not just successful. Actually happy. Was it real?"
Through the window, the Bronx skyline sparkled like a constellation of earthbound stars. In my other life, that future she'd dreamed had been real. Different, but real. Now here she was, somehow glimpsing echoes of a timeline I'd lived through.
"Everything's real," I said finally. "Some things just haven't happened yet."
She was quiet for a long moment. In the background, I could hear the faint sounds of her home studio – a metronome keeping time between worlds.
"The contract," she said suddenly. "Don't sign it yet."
"What?"
"I had another dream. About rights and ownership. About changing how the whole industry works." Her voice grew stronger. "I'm calling Columbia in the morning. If they want this album – our album – they're going to have to change more than just your contract."
I closed my eyes, remembering headlines from 2027: "BEYONCÉ AND MARCUS JOHNSON REVOLUTIONIZE MUSIC INDUSTRY WITH GROUNDBREAKING RIGHTS AGREEMENT."
"You sure about this?" I asked, knowing the answer.
"Some things are worth fighting for," she said. "Even if you can't explain why you know they're right."
After we hung up, I sat in the soft darkness of my childhood room, listening to the city's midnight symphony. On my laptop, the audio file she'd sent still played, its melody weaving between what was and what could be.
I reached for a pen and turned to the contract's signature page. Instead of signing, I began to write in the margins, mapping out a future that neither timeline had seen yet. Some revolutions, I realized, happen in the quiet hours between midnight and dawn, when the only witnesses are the ghosts of futures past and the promise of what's to come.
Above my desk, a faded poster of Miles Davis caught the streetlight, his trumpet pointed toward tomorrow. "Play what isn't there," it read. Tonight, that felt less like advice and more like prophecy.