The Echo of Tomorrow

The world didn't end with a bang — it ended with a whisper. And I heard it in a song.

Ten years after my sister vanished without a trace, I found her again. Not in the flesh. Not in this timeline. But in a memory — one that wasn’t mine.

The Chrono Mirror project was buried beneath layers of government silence and classified dust, a failed experiment to view past timelines for no more than sixty seconds. Most saw it as a gimmick. A trick of light and neurology. But I knew it was more.

I was a sound engineer by day and a cellist by night — a ghost in the music halls, playing to empty seats and echoing grief. When the Mirror was quietly auctioned off and forgotten, I bought its remains with the money left from my sister’s life insurance. Everyone thought I was insane. Maybe I was.

I rebuilt it in my studio, beneath cracked acoustics and under the weight of memories. It hummed quietly, like a distant breath caught between dimensions. One night, after finishing a composition I'd titled “Silence No. 1,” I activated the mirror.

The world didn’t shift. Time didn’t warp. But the studio changed.

There, in the center of the room, appeared a hazy image — flickering like old film. My sister, Mira, sitting on my beat-up piano stool, playing a melody I’d never heard before. Her face was younger, freer. She looked over her shoulder, as if sensing something, someone. Then — the image cut.

The mirror shut off. The timer blinked: 00:59.

My breath caught. I hadn’t imagined it.

Over the following weeks, I experimented. Sixty-second fragments. Different songs triggered different moments — all from our old life. Some were harmless. Laughing on the fire escape. Her running through the rain. But others were… strange. She was meeting with someone I didn’t recognize — a woman in a black coat who always appeared just as the timer ran out. And Mira looked scared.

I began to suspect what I was seeing wasn’t the past I remembered. These weren’t echoes of my timeline. They were glimpses into parallel versions — variations of what might’ve been. The Mirror didn’t just show the past. It pulled from the multiverse of memory.

The final straw came when Mira looked directly at me.

"I know you're watching," she said. Her voice was like wind through broken glass. “Please. Don’t trust her. Don’t trust—"

The image cut off.

00:00.

I collapsed. My ears rang with silence.

That night, I didn’t sleep. I sat in front of the mirror, headphones resting around my neck, my cello lying across my lap like a sleeping beast. I began to play the song she had played — slowly, note by note, like calling into a canyon. As the last note rang out, the mirror responded.

This time, the image was clearer. Mira stood in a different version of my studio, older, weary. Her hands trembled as she placed something — a small silver device — into the hands of a younger version of me. A different me. The other me looked afraid.

“They’re watching timelines,” Mira said. “Trying to stop people from fixing what was broken. They think it’ll unravel things.”

The younger me nodded. “But you still think music can find them?”

“It’s memory, right? It carries more than we know. Emotion bends time. Sound anchors it.”

And then she said something that shattered me: “In your world, I’m already gone, aren’t I?”

My voice cracked. “Yes.”

She turned, just slightly — as if sensing me, like before.

“But you never stopped listening,” she whispered.

The mirror shut off.

That was two nights ago. Since then, I’ve been recording The Echo of Tomorrow — a symphony made of her fragments, my grief, and a melody that doesn’t exist in any known key. I don’t know what it’ll do. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.

But I know she’s still out there, between timelines. Between silence and memory.

Maybe I can’t bring her back. But maybe, just maybe — I can help the versions of us that still have a chance.

Maybe the future isn’t set. Maybe it echoes backward.

And maybe the only way to hear it…

...is to play it first.