Chapter 59: The Weight of Tomorrow's Gold
The analog tape rolled with that familiar warm hiss, a sound I hadn't heard in fifteen years—or wouldn't hear for another fifteen, depending on how you counted time. Rico lounged on the burgundy velvet couch behind me, his gold chain catching the dim studio lights like tomorrow's promises, while I hunched over the SSL console that had cost him three years of savings and a debt I knew he'd never regret.
"Play it again," I said, though my fingers were already moving across the faders. The rough mix of "Tomorrow's Gold" filled the room, and Maria Chen's vocals floated through the Augspurger monitors like smoke in a speakeasy. In my previous life, I'd discovered her working as a waitress in 2018, but here in 2004, she was still a teenager singing in church choir in Queens. I'd found her three months early this time.
*When the morning comes calling,
With diamonds in hand,
Will you remember the nights
When we had nothing planned?
Tomorrow's gold, tomorrow's gold,
Weighs heavy on my soul...*
The lyrics hit differently now. I'd written them last week, but they carried the weight of two lifetimes—the one I'd lived and the one I was rewriting. Maria's voice cracked slightly on the bridge, a beautiful imperfection I'd learned to stop trying to fix. Some flaws were meant to be immortalized.
Rico stirred behind me. "You got that look again, M. Like you're hearing something that ain't there yet."
"Just thinking about the bridge," I lied, though it wasn't entirely false. "We need brass, but not the way everyone's doing it. Something..." I paused, remembering a technique that wouldn't be "invented" for another six years. "Something different."
The control room door creaked open, and my mother appeared with a bag of groceries. She'd been doing this lately—bringing food to the studio, checking on me, trying to understand this world that both worried and fascinated her. In my original timeline, she'd never set foot in a recording studio until after my first gold record. The butter-yellow cardigan she wore had been pawned by then.
"You've been in here twelve hours, Marcus," she said, setting down containers of her infamous arroz con gandules. "Even future superstars need to eat."
I caught Rico's questioning look at her choice of words—'future superstar.' If he only knew how literal that was. My mother had been the first to notice the change in me that morning I woke up back in 2004, the first to realize her seventeen-year-old son had somehow aged two decades overnight. We never spoke of it directly, but she knew. Mothers always know.
"One more take," I said, though we both knew it would be more than that. "Just need to get this bridge right."
I adjusted the EQ, pulling out frequencies that wouldn't matter on current systems but would make all the difference when streaming took over. The music filled the room again, and I watched my mother's face in the control room glass reflection. She was swaying slightly, unconsciously, the way she used to before life had hardened her rhythms.
*Tomorrow's gold, tomorrow's gold,
The future's getting old,
But baby, we can change
What's already been told...*
Rico leaned forward, his eyes sharp. "That's it. That's the one." He didn't know why it worked, couldn't know that I'd spent years in another life learning exactly how to layer vocals to cut through algorithms that hadn't been written yet. "Maria's gonna blow up with this one."
"Yeah," I said softly, thinking of the Maria Chen I'd known, the one who'd won three Grammys before dying in a car crash in 2022. "She's got a big future ahead of her." This time, I'd make sure she took an Uber that night.
The brass line formed in my head—the perfect counter-melody, borrowed from a 2012 arrangement I'd once heard in a Seoul jazz club. My fingers itched to record it, to build something that would sound classic in both timelines. But for now, I just let the rough mix play, watching my mother sway, watching Rico dream his dreams of discovery, watching the tape roll forward while my memories rolled back.
Some nights, the weight of tomorrow's gold felt heavier than others.
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Title: Second Chance: Rise from the Dead
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