The world returned to Alex in quiet, disorienting fragments. The starched white of a hospital ceiling that smelled faintly of antiseptic. The rhythmic, almost accusatory beep of a machine charting the frail rhythm of his heart. The low, concerned murmur of his father's voice on the phone, stripped of its usual commanding tone. And then, the unnerving stillness of his own childhood bedroom—the same room where this impossible journey had begun, its faded band posters of Muse and The Killers now seeming less like idols and more like ghosts of a life he barely recognized.
He slept. For the better part of a week, he did little else. It wasn't the restorative sleep of a peaceful night; it was the deep, leaden slumber of collapse. He would drift for twelve-hour shifts, navigating vast, dreamless oceans of nothingness, only to surface briefly into a blurry reality where his mother would bring him trays of soup he couldn't finish, her face etched with a loving concern he hadn't seen since he was a boy with a fever.
Downstairs, a conversation he couldn't hear was taking place. David Vance stood by the kitchen window, staring out at the manicured lawn, his hands shoved in his pockets.
"The doctors called it acute exhaustion, Helen," he said, his voice rough. "Dehydration, stress. They used a lot of medical terms. But I was there. I saw him backstage before they took him home. It was more than that. He was… hollow."
Helen, Alex's mother, finished wiping a counter that was already clean. "He's just a boy, David. Sixteen. We watched this hurricane build around him, and we let it. We called it ambition."
"I thought it was ambition," David countered, turning from the window. The confidence he projected in boardrooms was gone, replaced by a deep, unsettling uncertainty. "The songs he was writing… the focus he had… it was genius. You don't question genius. You fund it. You facilitate it."
"And what happens when the genius burns out?" she asked softly, her question hanging in the quiet kitchen.
Upstairs, Alex was wrestling with his own kind of silence. On the third day home, a flicker of ingrained habit pushed through the fog of exhaustion. He had to know the damage. His mind, weak as it was, formed a command that had once been effortless: Analysis: Projected financial impact of North American tour cancellation.
For a moment, the familiar blue interface tried to answer his call. A ghostly grid shimmered at the edge of his vision, but the complex data tables and strategic summaries wouldn't resolve. The characters wavered and blurred into meaningless hieroglyphs, and the attempt sent a sharp, throbbing spike of pain behind his eyes. His mind felt like a muscle he had torn from overuse.
He gritted his teeth, took a slow breath, and simplified the query, a desperate attempt to prove he still had control. Access: "Let Her Go" - Passenger.
Again, the flicker. The song title appeared, crystal clear for a fraction of a second, but the details underneath were a scrambled, unreadable mess, as if he were trying to read a water-damaged book. The connection was unstable, glitching, a direct and brutal reflection of his own frayed mental state.
The realization hit him with a chilling clarity. The Codex wasn't offline; he was. His own mind, the biological processor for this incredible tool, was too burned out to render the complex data streams. The library was there, but the librarian was in no condition to work. For the first time since this journey began, the symphony in his head had gone quiet, and the silence was terrifying.
His phone vibrated on the nightstand. It was Olivia. He hesitated, shame coiling in his stomach, then answered, his voice a dry rasp. "Hey."
"Hi," she replied, her voice gentle, careful not to be too loud or too cheerful. "Sorry if I woke you."
"It's okay. I should probably be awake anyway."
There was a pause, and then she asked the real question. "How are you feeling? For real."
He considered a lie—"I'm fine, just tired"—but the effort felt monumental. "I feel… untethered," he admitted honestly. "And everything is too quiet. It feels like I've been running a marathon, and even though I've stopped, my legs don't know how to stop twitching. But I can't actually move."
"Maybe that's okay for a little while," she said after a moment. He could hear her thinking, choosing her words. "Maybe you just need to let them twitch. My grandma says after a big storm, the ground needs time to just sit and soak up all the water before anything can grow again. Maybe you're just… soaking."
He laughed, a small, genuine sound that scratched his throat. Her simple, earnest empathy was a balm. She didn't offer solutions or platitudes; she just sat with him in his strange, silent reality. "What about you?" he asked, a pang of guilt hitting him. "I've been completely off the grid."
"It's okay," she assured him. "I've just been doing school, writing a little. I have this huge history test on Friday. The Gilded Age. It's a lot."
The sheer, wonderful normalcy of her problems grounded him. The Gilded Age. He clung to it like a life raft. For the next ten minutes, she told him about monopolists and political machines, and he just listened, letting her voice, talking about something so blessedly unimportant to his world, pull him back to shore.
That afternoon, he did something he hadn't done in months. He saw his Martin D-28 resting in its stand, not as a tool for work, but as a piece of furniture. He walked over, picked it up. It felt cool and solid in his hands. He didn't try to access the Codex. He didn't try to write a future hit. His fingers, stiff at first, found a G chord, then a C, then an D. It wasn't a song, just a progression. He started playing the opening chords to "Blackbird," a song his original timeline father had taught him when he was a real teenager. He played the notes slowly, imperfectly, just feeling the vibrations against his chest. It was a musical exercise without a purpose, and it felt like breathing again.
------
Late one night, unable to sleep, he did something he had done since he first landed in this timeline, but this time with a sense of quiet curiosity rather than ambition. He opened SoundCloud on his laptop, not to scout, not to work, but just to listen. To wander. He scrolled past bedroom pop artists mimicking sounds he'd made popular, past rappers with muddy bass, past the endless digital noise of a million desperate dreams. He was about to close the lid when a user icon caught his eye—a simple, sun-faded photo of a smiling kid in a letterman jacket. The artist name was "K-town." The track was titled "Saved."
He clicked play.
There was no big drop, no intricate production. Just a laid-back beat, a gentle synth loop, and a voice. A voice that felt like sunshine after a long rain—warm, unforced, and radiating a soulful, easy-going sincerity.
The sound was instantly familiar, an echo from his past life. Alex closed his eyes, the mental fog parting for a moment. He knew this voice. He'd heard it on countless radio stations and playlists in 2025. It was younger, rawer, but it was unmistakably Khalid.
Just like with Billie and Olivia, a piece of his lost future had surfaced in this timeline's present. A few months ago, this discovery would have triggered an immediate, high-priority cascade of actions: a full Codex analysis, a strategic outreach plan, a conversation with his father about budgets. The thrill of the hunt would have been intoxicating.
But now, sitting in the quiet of his room, the reaction was profoundly different. There was no adrenaline rush, no urge to strategize. There was only a gentle sense of affirmation. There you are, he thought, almost like greeting an old friend.
With a newfound steadiness, he formed a simple query for the Codex, not out of ambition, but for confirmation. Confirm artist: "K-town". Match to Timeline A data.
The interface, responding to his calmer mental state, held for a moment, displaying a clear, simple data packet.
[Artist Confirmed: Khalid Donnel Robinson. Known as Khalid in Timeline A.]
[Current Location: El Paso, TX.]
[Timeline A Key Tracks: "Location," "Young Dumb & Broke," "Better."]
[Current Trajectory: Unsigned, developing regional following.]
Alex looked at the data without his usual predatory A&R focus. The information didn't represent a target to be acquired, but a future to be patiently nurtured when the time was right. It was a promise, not a project.
He created a new playlist on his SoundCloud account, the first one in this timeline that wasn't part of a work-related task. He titled it "Breathing Room." He added Khalid's song. It was the only track on it.
He didn't send a message. He didn't formulate a plan. He simply acknowledged the connection, letting it exist without any pressure. Khalid would still be there when he was ready. Echo Chamber would be there.
He leaned back in his chair, the soft melody filling the room. The powerful tool in his head was still largely inaccessible, but he knew its library was safe. Finding Khalid wasn't a signal to start running again. It was a reminder of why he needed to learn to walk. The silence in his head was no longer a void; it was a rest note, a place to gather strength before the music began again, this time with a clearer heart and at his own tempo.