Chapter 30
title: "Forty-Seven Seconds" wordCount: 2375
Marcus sees Lily die forty-seven times in the space between one heartbeat and the next: crushed against a tree, flipped into oncoming traffic, drowned when the car plunges into the bay—and in every version, he's still twelve minutes away.
"Drive." The word comes out strangled.
Sophia's already moving, the car lurching forward before I finish speaking. Viktor braces himself against the dashboard.
"Which route?" she asks.
I can't answer. The timelines are fragmenting faster than I can process them. In one, we take the highway and hit construction—thirteen minutes. In another, surface streets and a school bus blocks the intersection—fourteen minutes. In a third, we run two red lights and a cop pulls us over—eighteen minutes and Lily's already gone.
"Marcus." Sophia's hand on my arm. "Which route?"
"All of them are too slow."
"That's not an answer."
The phone in my hand rings. Lily. I swipe to answer but my fingers won't cooperate. The call drops. In timeline twenty-three, that's the last time I ever hear her ringtone.
Sophia grabs the phone from me. "What's her number?"
I tell her. The digits come out in the wrong order twice before I get them right.
She's dialing one-handed, the other on the wheel as she takes a corner hard enough that Viktor grunts. The phone rings. Once. Twice.
"Come on," Sophia mutters.
Three rings. Four.
In timeline thirty-one, Lily's already in the car. The engine turns over. She backs out of the space and the brake pedal goes to the floor and there's a cement pillar and the sound of metal crumpling and—
"Hello?" Lily's voice, tinny through the speaker.
"Lily, it's Sophia. Don't get in your car."
"What? Who is this?"
"Sophia Reeves. I'm with Marcus. Do not get in your car. Do not touch your car. Step away from it right now."
"Is this some kind of—"
"Your brake line has been cut. Someone sabotaged your car. If you drive it, you will die."
Silence on the other end. Then: "This isn't funny."
"Does Marcus think I'm funny?" Sophia's voice has gone flat, all the casual warmth stripped out. "Step away from the car. Now."
"I'm—okay. I'm stepping back. But if this is some kind of prank—"
"It's not. Are you away from the car?"
"Yes."
"Good. Now listen very carefully. I need you to get down on the ground and look under the driver's side. There's a metal line running from the brake pedal assembly toward the front wheel. Can you see it?"
I'm watching this happen in real-time and across forty-seven different timelines simultaneously. In most of them, Lily hangs up. In three, she calls campus security instead. In one, she gets in the car anyway because she thinks we're both insane.
But in this timeline—the only one that matters—she's getting down on the pavement.
"I see it," Lily says. Her voice shakes. "There's—oh god. There's fluid everywhere. The line is cut clean through."
"Okay. Okay, that's good. You found it. Now I need you to pop the hood."
"Why?"
"Because we need to make sure you can't accidentally start the car. Even if you don't drive it, if someone else tries to move it—"
"Who would do this?" Lily's crying now. "Who the hell would do this?"
Sophia glances at me. I'm useless, locked in a recursive loop of timelines where we're having this conversation and timelines where we're not and timelines where we arrive to find Lily's car already wrapped around a telephone pole.
"We'll explain everything," Sophia says. "But right now I need you to focus. Pop the hood. There should be a lever under the dashboard on the driver's side."
"I'm not getting back in that car."
"You don't have to get in. Reach through the window."
Rustling sounds. Then a click.
"Good. Now go to the front of the car and lift the hood. You'll see the battery—it's a black box with two cables attached. I need you to disconnect the negative terminal. It'll have a minus sign on it."
"I don't know how to—"
"There's a bolt holding the cable clamp to the battery post. You need a wrench. Do you have one?"
"No. Why would I have a wrench?"
Sophia's jaw tightens. "Check the trunk. Most cars have a basic tool kit."
"The trunk release is inside the car."
"Then find something else. A tire iron. A heavy rock. Anything that can loosen a bolt."
I try to speak. My mouth opens but no sound comes out. The timelines are collapsing into each other, forty-seven versions of this conversation overlapping until I can't tell which words have been said and which are still coming.
Sophia's driving one-handed, phone pressed to her ear, weaving through traffic. A red light ahead. She doesn't slow down.
"I found a tire iron," Lily says.
"Perfect. Use it to loosen the nut on the negative terminal. Turn it counterclockwise."
"This is insane. I should call the police."
"You should. But do this first. Please."
The light turns green half a second before we blow through the intersection. Viktor's gone pale, both hands braced against the dashboard.
"It's not moving," Lily says.
"Put your weight into it. It'll be tight."
Grunting sounds. Then: "Got it. The cable's loose."
"Pull it off the battery post and make sure it's not touching anything metal."
"Done."
"Good. Now step away from the car again. At least ten feet."
"Okay. I'm away. Now will someone please tell me what the hell is going on?"
"We're five minutes out," Sophia says. "Just stay where you are. Don't let anyone near the car. We're coming to you."
She ends the call and tosses my phone into my lap. "Breathe."
I can't. The timelines are still fragmenting. In one, we arrive and Lily's fine. In another, campus security has already moved the car and the tow truck driver is dead. In a third, whoever cut the brake line is watching and they have a backup plan and—
"Marcus." Sophia's hand on my face, forcing me to look at her. "She's safe. You hear me? She's safe."
The words don't penetrate. I'm watching Lily die in timeline forty-two, the car's steering fails in addition to the brakes and she goes through a guardrail and—
"He is having episode," Viktor says from the backseat. "I have seen this before. In Moscow, man who took too much of experimental cognitive enhancer. He could see probability branches. Drove him mad in three days."
"That's not helpful," Sophia snaps.
"Is just observation."
She takes another corner. The campus parking structure looms ahead. "How do I bring him back?"
"You don't. He comes back on his own. Or he doesn't."
The parking structure smells like oil and exhaust. Sophia pulls into a space two rows from Lily's car and kills the engine.
Lily's sitting on the concrete, arms wrapped around her knees. Her face is streaked with tears and mascara. When she sees us, she stands up too fast and has to catch herself against a pillar.
"Marcus." She's moving toward me. "What's happening? Who cut my brake line? Why did you—"
She stops. Looks at my face.
"What's wrong with him?"
"He's having a panic attack," Sophia says. It's not quite a lie. "He'll be okay in a minute."
"A panic attack? Marcus doesn't have panic attacks. Marcus doesn't panic. Marcus optimizes."
The word hits me like cold water. Optimizes. That's what I do. That's all I do. Optimize variables and run scenarios and calculate probabilities and none of it matters because I couldn't save her, I couldn't even move, I just sat there and watched forty-seven versions of her die while Sophia did everything.
The timelines start to collapse. Forty-seven becomes twenty. Twenty becomes five. Five becomes one.
This one. The only one that matters.
I'm out of the car before I realize I'm moving. Three steps and Lily's in my arms and she's solid and real and alive.
"I'm sorry," I say into her hair. "I'm so sorry."
She pushes back, hands on my chest. "Sorry for what? Marcus, what is going on?"
"Someone tried to kill you."
"I got that part from the cut brake line. Who? Why?"
I look at Sophia. She's leaning against the car, arms crossed, watching us with an expression I can't read.
"It's complicated," I say.
"Then uncomplicate it." Lily's voice has gone hard. "Someone tried to murder me and you knew about it before I did. How did you know? How did Sophia know? And why does she have your phone?"
"We were with the person who cut your brake line."
Lily takes a step back. "You were what?"
"He's not going to hurt you. He was hired to sabotage my self-driving car system. Your brake line was—" I can't finish the sentence. Can't say the words collateral damage or leverage or any of the other clinical terms that turn her life into a variable in someone else's equation.
"Was what?" Her voice cracks. "Was supposed to make you cooperate? Was supposed to scare you? Was supposed to kill me to send you a message?"
"All of the above," Sophia says quietly. "Depending on which timeline you're in."
Lily's head snaps toward her. "What?"
"Nothing," I say quickly. "She means depending on who hired him. We don't know yet."
"But you have theories." Lily's looking at me the way she used to look at failed experiments in the lab—like something that should have worked but didn't, and now she needs to figure out where the methodology went wrong. "You always have theories. So tell me: who wants me dead?"
"We don't know."
"Bullshit. You know something or you wouldn't have been able to warn me. So either tell me the truth or—"
A buzzing sound interrupts her. My phone, still in my hand. I glance at the screen and my stomach drops.
Active video call: Leadership Team Meeting.
Duration: 14:37.
I never initiated a call. Never opened the app. But there it is, running in the background, broadcasting everything.
I tap the screen. Twelve faces stare back at me. My CFO. Head of security. VP of engineering. The entire leadership team, all of them frozen in various expressions of shock and concern.
"Marcus?" Sarah Chen, my CFO, speaks first. "Are you—what just happened?"
"How long have you been on this call?"
"Since it auto-connected fourteen minutes ago. We were in the middle of the quarterly review and suddenly your video feed came up and you were—" She stops. Glances at someone off-screen. "You were talking about timelines. Forty-seven timelines. You said you watched someone die forty-seven times."
The parking structure tilts. I grab the car to steady myself.
"We need to talk about this," Sarah continues. "The board is asking questions. They want to know if you're—if you're fit to continue leading the company."
"I'm fine."
"You're clearly not fine. Marcus, we all just watched you have some kind of breakdown. You were incoherent. You couldn't form complete sentences. And now we find out someone's been sabotaging the self-driving system? Someone cut a brake line? This is—we need to bring in crisis management. We need to—"
I end the call.
The phone immediately rings again. Sarah. I decline it. It rings again. This time it's James Park, head of security. Decline. Another call. Another.
"Marcus." Lily's voice is very quiet. "What did she mean, forty-seven timelines?"
"It's a figure of speech."
"No it's not. I know you. I know how your brain works. You don't use figures of speech. You use precise language. So when you say you watched me die forty-seven times, what does that mean?"
Sophia pushes off from the car. "We should go somewhere private. This parking lot is not secure."
"I'm not going anywhere until someone explains what the hell is happening." Lily's voice rises. "Someone tried to kill me. Marcus apparently had a breakdown that his entire company witnessed. And everyone keeps talking about timelines like—" She stops. Her eyes widen. "Oh my god. The algorithm. The predictive modeling system you've been working on. The one that's supposed to anticipate traffic patterns and pedestrian behavior. You didn't just build it for cars, did you?"
I don't answer.
"You built it for yourself. You're using it to see—what? Possible futures? Probability branches?" She laughs, but there's no humor in it. "That's insane. That's not how probability works. You can't actually see alternate timelines. You can only model them. Unless—" She looks at me more closely. "Unless you found a way to make the models so accurate that they feel real. That they become real in your head. Marcus, how long have you been doing this?"
"Six months."
"Six months." She repeats it like she's testing the what she'd heard. "Six months of watching possible futures. Six months of living in probability branches. Do you have any idea what that would do to a person's brain? The cognitive load alone would be—" She stops again. "The dark circles. The weight loss. The way you've been spacing out in meetings. I thought you were just stressed about the company. But you've been fragmenting, haven't you? You've been losing track of which timeline is real."
"I know which timeline is real."
"Do you? Because from where I'm standing, it looks like you just had a complete dissociative episode in front of your entire leadership team."
The phone rings again. This time it's a number I don't recognize. I answer it anyway, grateful for the interruption.
"Mr. Chen." The voice is male, professional, unfamiliar. "This is David Brennan from the board of directors. We need you to come in for an emergency meeting. One hour. The situation with your—episode—has raised serious concerns about your ability to lead the company. We need to discuss next steps."
"I'll be there."
"Good. And Mr. Chen? Bring legal counsel. This is not a casual conversation."
He ends the call before I can respond.
Lily's still staring at me. Tears stream down her face, cutting tracks through the mascara and dust. "I heard what you said during your episode. You said this was the forty-seventh time you've watched me die. What the hell does that mean?"
The phone rings again. Board of directors. Emergency meeting. One hour.