Chapter 13
title: "The Dossier" wordCount: 2317
Patricia Vance didn't shake my hand when I entered the boardroom.
She sat at the head of the table, fingers steepled, while three other partners I'd never met flanked her like a tribunal. The dossier was already there, centered on the polished mahogany between us. My name printed on the cover in red letters: MARCUS CHEN: A PATTERN OF IMPOSSIBLE KNOWLEDGE.
"Mr. Chen." Vance gestured to the chair opposite her. "Please sit."
I stayed standing. "What is this?"
"We received this yesterday evening." She slid the dossier toward me. "From an anonymous source. Normally we'd dismiss such things, but the contents are... concerning."
I flipped it open. The first page was a screenshot of my private Slack conversation with David from three weeks ago, discussing the neural pathway feature. The second page showed a graph of my prediction accuracy over six months—98.7% success rate on market movements, highlighted in yellow with a note: "Statistically impossible without insider information."
The third page made my stomach drop. It was my personal calendar, the one synced only to my phone, showing every meeting I'd taken in the last quarter. Next to each entry, someone had annotated the outcome: "Predicted market shift 48 hours before announcement." "Knew about merger before public filing." "Avoided investment in company that collapsed two weeks later."
"Where did you get this?" My voice came out flat.
"As I said, anonymous." Vance leaned back. "But the analysis is thorough. Whoever compiled this has access to your private communications, your calendar, possibly your email. They've documented a pattern of knowledge that shouldn't exist."
"This is corporate espionage."
"Or evidence of fraud." The partner to her left, a man with silver hair and a Princeton tie clip, tapped the dossier. "The SEC takes insider trading very seriously."
"I haven't—"
"We're not accusing you of anything." Vance held up a hand. "Yet. But we can't proceed with the investment until this is resolved. You understand."
I understood perfectly. Someone had just killed my funding round with surgical precision.
"How many other firms received this?"
Vance's pause told me everything. "We're not at liberty to discuss—"
"How many?"
"Three that we know of." She stood, smoothing her skirt. "I suggest you retain legal counsel, Mr. Chen. And perhaps consider who might have both the access and the motivation to compile something like this."
I grabbed the dossier and walked out before I said something that would make things worse.
The parking lot was half-empty, morning sun glinting off windshields. I sat in my car with the dossier open across the steering wheel, flipping through pages of my own life dissected and annotated like a lab specimen.
Page seven showed a timeline of my predictions mapped against actual events. Page eight had screenshots of my GitHub commits, with notes about how certain code changes preceded market movements. Page nine—
Page nine was a photograph of me standing outside Lily's school, taken from across the street with a telephoto lens. The timestamp was from last Tuesday. Below it, a single line: "Subject demonstrates unusual protective behavior toward sister following near-miss traffic incident."
They'd been watching me. Not just hacking my accounts—physically surveilling me.
I pulled out my phone and called David.
"Hey, I'm in the middle of—"
"Have you noticed anything weird with our systems?" I kept my voice level. "Phishing attempts, unauthorized access, anything?"
Silence on the other end, then: "Why?"
"Just answer the question."
"Okay, yeah. Actually." Keys clicked in the background. "Someone tried to brute-force our GitHub repo last week. I flagged it as routine script-kiddie stuff, but the IP address was weird. Traced back to Oracle's Redwood City campus."
Oracle. Keller's company.
"What about Slack? Email?"
"I mean, there's always phishing attempts, but nothing that got through our—wait." More clicking. "Shit. There's a webhook I don't recognize in our Slack workspace. It's been active for... three weeks. Marcus, someone's been reading our messages."
Three weeks. Right when I'd started noticing the calendar notifications.
"Kill it. Now. Then sweep everything—email, cloud storage, all of it. I want a full security audit by end of day."
"What's going on?"
"Someone's trying to destroy us." I hung up before he could ask more questions.
The dossier sat in my lap, pages rustling in the AC breeze. Whoever compiled this had resources—technical sophistication, surveillance capability, access to multiple investors. This wasn't some competitor trying to steal market share. This was coordinated, professional, and personal.
My phone buzzed against the center console. Text from Sophia: "Can we move dinner up? Something happened."
I stared at the message, then at the dossier, then back at the message. The watch in my pocket was still ticking, counting down to something I didn't understand. Keller knew about the neural pathway feature. Someone was surveilling me. And now Sophia—
Another buzz. "Please. It's important."
I texted back: "Coffee shop on University. 30 minutes."
Sophia was already there when I arrived, sitting at a corner table with her laptop closed and her hands wrapped around a mug like she was trying to absorb its heat. Her hair was pulled back in a messy bun, and she'd chewed off most of her lipstick.
"Hey." She didn't smile. "Thanks for coming early."
I slid into the chair across from her, the dossier in my messenger bag. "What happened?"
"Okay, so." She glanced around the coffee shop, then leaned forward. "Yesterday I was at this design conference downtown, right? Networking, looking at portfolios, normal stuff. This guy approaches me—mid-forties, expensive suit, says he's a consultant doing market research on tech startups."
"What kind of consultant?"
"That's the thing. He was vague about it. Said he was analyzing founder psychology, decision-making patterns, that kind of corporate-speak bullshit." She picked at her napkin. "But his questions were weird, Marcus. Really specific. He asked about your stress responses. Whether you ever seemed to know things before they happened. How you made decisions under pressure."
The coffee shop suddenly felt too warm. "What did you tell him?"
"Nothing. I mean, I thought it was sketchy, so I gave him generic answers and got out of there." She pulled out her phone, scrolled through photos. "But I snapped a picture of his business card before he left. Look."
She turned the screen toward me. The card was minimalist—just a name, "Dr. James Whitmore," and a phone number. No company, no title, no email.
"I tried calling the number this morning." Sophia's voice dropped. "It's disconnected. And when I Googled him, nothing came up. No LinkedIn, no company website, nothing. It's like he doesn't exist."
I pulled out the dossier and opened it to page nine—the photo of me outside Lily's school. "Someone's been watching me too."
Her her gaze sharpened as she flipped through the pages. "Marcus, what the hell is this?"
"Someone sent it to my investors. Killed my funding round." I kept my voice low. "It's got screenshots of private conversations, my calendar, surveillance photos. Whoever's behind this has serious resources."
"Wait, wait, wait." She pushed the dossier back toward me. "You think the guy who approached me is connected to this?"
"You said he was asking about my decision-making. Whether I knew things before they happened." I tapped the page showing my prediction timeline. "That's exactly what this dossier is analyzing."
Sophia went quiet, staring at the annotated screenshots. When she finally looked up, something had shifted in her expression—not fear exactly, but a kind of sharp focus I'd only seen when she was solving a complex design problem.
"That's not it," she said. "This isn't just corporate espionage. Someone's profiling you. Like, psychologically profiling you."
"What do you mean?"
"These questions the consultant asked—they weren't about your business. They were about your personality, your patterns, how you think." She pulled the dossier closer, scanning the annotations. "And this analysis isn't trying to prove fraud. It's trying to understand how you're doing what you're doing."
She was right. The dossier wasn't building a legal case—it was studying me like a specimen.
"Who would do that?" Sophia asked.
Keller's face flashed through my mind. The pocket watch. The paper on temporal causality loops. "Consider the implications."
"I might know," I said. "But you're not going to believe me."
"Try me."
I almost told her everything—the neural pathway feature, the calendar notifications, the watch counting down to Lily's accident. But then I remembered: she was seeing Keller as her therapist. If I told her my suspicions, would she tell him? Could I risk it?
"Marcus?" She reached across the table, fingers stopping just short of my hand. "Whatever this is, we're in it together now. That consultant was asking about you, but he approached me. They're using our relationship as leverage."
Our relationship. The words hung between us, undefined and complicated.
A notification chimed on my laptop. I pulled it out, expecting another calendar alert I didn't create. Instead, it was an email from an address I didn't recognize: a string of random characters followed by a ProtonMail domain.
The subject line was empty. The body contained a single line:
"You have 48 hours to shut down the neural pathway feature, or we send the full dossier to the SEC, TechCrunch, and everyone who matters. This is your only warning."
Below it, an attachment: "evidence.zip"
My hands were steady as I downloaded it, but my pulse hammered in my ears. Sophia watched over my shoulder as the file extracted—dozens of documents, screenshots, recordings.
The first file was an audio clip. I clicked play.
My own voice filled the coffee shop, tinny through laptop speakers: "The neural pathway feature isn't just predicting the future, David. I think it's remembering it."
Sophia's breath caught. "When did you record that?"
"I didn't." I scrolled through the other files. More recordings of conversations with David. Screenshots of code commits with timestamps. And at the bottom, a video file labeled "proof.mp4."
I hesitated, cursor hovering over it.
"Play it," Sophia said.
The video opened with shaky footage of me standing in a cemetery, rain falling in sheets. The camera was far away, zoomed in through trees. I was alone, staring at a gravestone I couldn't read from this angle. The timestamp in the corner said it was from six months ago—right after I'd started building the predictive system.
In the video, I knelt down, placed flowers on the grave, and stayed there for almost a minute before walking away.
The camera zoomed in on the gravestone as I left.
LILY CHEN 2011-2024 BELOVED SISTER
Sophia grabbed my arm. "Marcus, that's—"
"Impossible." The word came out strangled. "That's impossible. Lily's alive. She's at school right now."
"Then how—"
The video cut to black, replaced by white text on a dark screen:
"We know you remember the original timeline, Marcus. We know what you changed. And we know what happens in 48 hours if you don't fix it."
The screen went dark.
I stared at my reflection in the black laptop screen, Sophia's hand still on my arm, the coffee shop noise fading to white static in my ears. The pocket watch in my bag was ticking, counting down. The calendar notification said 72 hours until Lily's accident—the original timeline.
But Lily was alive. I'd saved her. I'd changed it.
Except someone had footage of me at her grave.
A grave that shouldn't exist.
My laptop screen flickered back to life, and a video call request appeared from an unknown number. The cursor moved on its own, clicking accept before I could stop it.
The screen filled with darkness, then a distorted voice spoke through the speakers:
"Stop investigating, Marcus. Stop trying to understand. Or we release everything—the dossier, the recordings, the proof that you've been manipulating markets with information that shouldn't exist."
"Who are you?" My voice was barely a whisper.
"Someone who understands what you're doing better than you do." The voice paused. "You think you saved her. You think you changed the timeline. But you can't change what's already happened. You can only remember it differently."
"That doesn't make sense."
"Doesn't it?" Another pause. "In 48 hours, you'll have a choice. Save Lily again, or save Sophia. The timeline can't support both. One of them has to—"
The screen changed. A photograph filled the display—me, standing at Lily's grave, the same image from the video. But this time I could see the date on the gravestone clearly.
The date was tomorrow.
Sophia's grip on my arm tightened. "Marcus, what the hell is—"
The voice cut her off: "We know you remember the original timeline, Marcus."
The screen filled with another photo. Me at the grave again, but from a different angle. In this one, I wasn't alone. Someone stood beside me, face blurred but body language unmistakable.
It was Sophia.
And she was holding my hand.
The voice spoke one more time: "Forty-eight hours. Then you'll understand what you really are."
The call disconnected. The laptop screen went black. And in the reflection, I saw Sophia staring at me with an expression I couldn't read—fear, confusion, or something else entirely.
The pocket watch in my bag ticked louder, counting down to a moment that had already happened and hadn't happened yet, and I realized with cold certainty that I'd been asking the wrong question all along.
It wasn't "how did Keller know?"
It was "how many times have I already lived through this?"
Sophia opened her mouth to speak, but before she could, my phone erupted with notifications—dozens of them, all at once. Calendar alerts I didn't create, each one timestamped for tomorrow, each one labeled with a different name:
"Lily's accident - Timeline A" "Sophia's choice - Timeline B" "Marcus's decision - Timeline C"
And at the bottom, one more:
"The moment everything collapses - All timelines"
The coffee shop door chimed. I looked up.
Dr. Raymond Keller stood in the entrance, pocket watch in hand, smiling.