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*****
It is conceivable that the butterfly effect of Marvin's own perturbation of the timeline had inconspicuously altered the musical currents in Hollywood, yet it remained exceedingly improbable; after all, he had scarcely established his reputation in the industry to the extent that no studios had yet emerged to express investment interest in the Sixth Sense script. Indeed, many in Hollywood continue to perceive him as an ephemeral flash of brilliance.
Or perhaps it was simply a matter of the calendar; it was only late July of 1997. In the original timeline, Horner might not have struck that specific, lightning-in-a-bottle inspiration until October.
Furthermore, earlier that morning, Marvin had actually dialed Horner's direct line under the guise of an introductory collaboration call, subtly probing the composer for any lyrical drafts or vocal melodies. Horner had admitted he had nothing concrete yet. He was relying entirely on Marvin to inject the "soul" into the tragedy.
Marvin shook his head slightly, dismissing the variables. In truth, true artistic composition required a spontaneous, unpredictable spark of inspiration, much like writing poetry or painting a masterpiece. Marvin should have realized early on that while the core narrative of the Titanic film would remain rigidly consistent, expecting James Horner to spontaneously recreate the exact, perfect inspiration from another timeline was an unreasonable gamble.
The historical success of Titanic in the original timeline was undeniably attributed to the film's overall cinematic quality and Cameron's obsessive direction. However, while My Heart Will Go On hadn't been the sole reason for the film's success, it had undeniably, exponentially elevated the movie from a mere blockbuster into a mythical phenomenon. It had driven audiences back to the theaters for repeat viewings just to experience the emotional catharsis of the song one more time.
Marvin was absolutely not going to let a two-billion-dollar opportunity slip through his fingers simply because the timeline was dragging its feet.
If Horner couldn't find the melody... Marvin would simply forge it himself.
"After hearing his foundational structure," Marvin announced, his voice suddenly cutting through the room, "I have already come up with the lyrics and the definitive melodies."
Max's jaw literally dropped. Jeff froze, his shark-like eyes widening in unadulterated shock.
"You... what?" Max stammered, looking at the studio clock. "Marvin, you listened to that track exactly one time. It was four minutes long."
Marvin didn't bother to answer. He simply stood up from the leather swivel chair, his movements graceful. He bypassed the stunned executives and walked directly toward the heavy, acoustic glass door that separated the control room from the live recording booth.
He pushed the door open and stepped into the sprawling, perfectly sound-treated live room.
Sitting in the center of the hardwood floor was a gleaming, ebony Yamaha grand piano. Marvin walked over and sat down on the leather bench. But he didn't reach for the ivory keys.
Instead, he reached for a thick stack of empty, blank staff paper and a freshly sharpened graphite pencil resting on the adjacent music stand.
Through the glass, Max and Jeff watched in total, paralyzed silence.
Marvin lowered his head, his golden-brown hair falling softly over his forehead, and put the pencil to the paper.
He didn't pause to think. He didn't hum to find the pitch. The transmigrator, fueled by the supernatural cognitive processing speed of an Incubus, simply began to write.
His hand flew across the staff lines in a blur of graphite. He was reverse-engineering a masterpiece from memory, while modeling with his Incubus knowledge breaking down the complex orchestral arrangements, the chord progressions, the vocal modulations, and the lyrics with surgical precision.
The scratching of his pencil was the only sound in the booth. Within five minutes, several sheets of blank paper had been transformed into dense sheet music. He didn't just write the vocal melody; he was furiously charting the entire orchestral arrangement, filling the margins with complex annotations, time signatures, and mixing instructions.
It was a staggering, impossibility.
By the ten-minute mark, Marvin did the final slash of graphite across the bottom of the last page. He set the pencil down.
In exactly ten minutes, the boy had entirely composed the music, the orchestration, and the lyrics for one of the greatest cinematic ballads in history.
Marvin looked up toward the acoustic glass. He pressed the talkback button on the piano's microphone stand.
"Max," Marvin's smooth voice echoed through the control room speakers. "Come in here."
Max practically stumbled over his own feet rushing through the heavy door, Jeff hot on his heels. Max rushed to the piano, his hands trembling slightly as he reached out and grabbed the freshly written stack of sheet music.
Marvin sat still, casually adjusting the cuffs of his shirt, giving the Swedish producer time to read through the masterpiece the Music annotations.
As Max's eyes darted across the complex chord progressions, the modulation cues, and the heartbreakingly perfect lyrics, the color began to drain from his face. For five minutes, he analyzed the architecture of the song.
When Max finally looked up, his eyes were wide with clear astonishment. His mouth was literally hanging open. He was looking at Marvin not as a prodigy, but as a terrifying, alien god of music.
"This..." Max whispered, his voice cracking. "Marvin, this is... this is perfect. It's a miracle. The modulation here at the bridge... it's going to tear people's hearts directly out of their chests."
"It will suffice," Marvin purred, an amused smirk playing on his lips. He stood up from the piano bench, his aura filling the live room with absolute command.
"As you can see from the margin annotations, Max," Marvin instructed, his voice slipping into the tone of a general organizing a battlefield. "I require a massive specific array of instrumentation to execute this properly."
Marvin began to casually rattle off the list from memory, ticking them off on his elegant fingers.
"I need a traditional Tin whistle for the primary motif. I need a full string section—violins, violas, cellos, and a double bass. I require woodwinds: flute, oboe, and bassoon. Brass: a French horn, a trombone, and a bass trombone. I need your best analog synthesizers for the atmospheric padding. A choir arrangement. An acoustic guitar. This grand piano. And orchestral timpani drums for the crescendo."
Jeff rubbed his temples, his business brain kicking into overdrive. "Marvin, Jesus. That is a full symphony orchestra. Do you have any idea how long it will take to contract union musicians for all those specific pieces? It will take us a week just to get them in the room!"
Marvin turned his eyes toward his agent. The confidence in his gaze silenced Jeff instantly.
"You misunderstand me, Jeff," Marvin said softly, a beautiful smile illuminating his face. "I said I need the instruments. I did not say I needed the musicians."
Max dropped the sheet music onto the piano, staring at the boy in sheer horror. "Marvin... are you saying...?"
"Do not worry about the physical handling or the execution of the sheet music," Marvin commanded, his Incubus charm radiating a wave of absolute invincibility. "I will personally play and record every single track myself. You just need to sit behind that console, hit record, and mix the stems exactly according to the parameters I have written on those pages."
Marvin walked past the two stunned men, heading toward the instrument storage lockers at the back of the live room.
"Now," Marvin called out over his shoulder, his voice echoing with the thrill of impending victory. "You need to arrange whatever instruments we currently possess and set them up around the microphones. Whatever we lack, Jeff, you will use your platinum CAA corporate card to have couriered to this studio within the hour."
Marvin stopped at the door, glancing back at the two men who were still frozen in awe.
"As you can clearly see, gentlemen," the demon smirked, his eyes flashing with a brilliant light. "We will absolutely not be going home anytime soon tonight. So let's move fast. History is waiting."
---
The next forty-eight hours evaporated into a sleepless, feverish blur inside the half-gutted corridors of Westlake Recording Studios.
For Max Martin, a man who had dedicated his entire adult life to the pursuit of auditory perfection, these two days were a systematic dismantling of everything he thought he knew about music, human biology, and fairness. If he hadn't been standing directly behind the Neve mixing console, watching it happen with his own two eyes, he would have bet his life savings it was a physical impossibility.
Yet, there it was. An eleven-year-old boy was single-handedly tracking a symphony orchestra.
Max watched, utterly spellbound and running entirely on black coffee, as Marvin annihilated the tracking sheets.
First came the haunting, breathy trills of the traditional Irish tin whistle. Then came the strings. Marvin layered the multitracks with precision—first the weeping violins, then the rich, resonant violas, followed by the deep, weeping groans of the cellos and the foundational thrum of the double bass.
He didn't stop. He moved seamlessly to the woodwinds, laying down flawless stems for the flute, oboe, and bassoon. Then the heavy brass: the French horn, the soaring trombone, and the guttural punch of the bass trombone.
He programmed the analog synthesizers, dialing in sweeping, ethereal atmospheric pads, and then tracked the booming, resonant strikes of the orchestral timpani.
He played so phenomenally well, with such a sorrowful vibrato and immaculate timing, that Max felt a crushing sense of professional vertigo. Grammy Award-winning session musicians—men and women who had bled over their instruments for forty years—would struggle to match the devastating emotion this child was casually bleeding into the microphones.
Looking at the digital waveforms stacking up perfectly on his monitors, Max realized just how small he truly was. How entirely, laughably unfair this world was. How graceful God had been to Marvin Meyers, bestowing upon a single child the talent to be a flawless, one-man orchestra.
The only minor delays in the grueling session were entirely Max's fault. Because the studio was currently undergoing renovations, they were lacking the optimal acoustic baffling and a few specialized preamps, forcing Max to manually reroute XLR cables and patch bays to capture the sound without clipping. If the studio had been fully operational, Marvin likely would have finished the entire orchestral suite in a single afternoon.
Max knew the industry. He knew the cynical, predatory nature of music critics. They would absolutely doubt this. They had already tried to fabricate ghostwriter conspiracies around Marvin 1, and a cinematic, Celtic orchestral suite would only pour gasoline on their skepticism. Max would have doubted it himself.
So, Max took precautions. He had quietly set up a high-definition Sony camcorder in the corner of the live room, rolling tape continuously. He recorded hours of raw footage of Marvin physically playing the cello, blowing into the French horn, and layering the complex vocal choir tracks. 'If nothing else,' Max thought with a satisfied smirk, 'I could use this VHS tape in the future to humble any arrogant, up-and-coming pop artists who walked into his studio thinking they were the kings of the world.'
'You think you have talent?' Max would tell them. 'Look at this eleven-year-old playing a bassoon better than a philharmonic principal.'
The exact same existential dread was currently flowing through the head of Jeff Raymond.
The senior CAA agent hadn't left the studio in two days. His suit was wrinkled, his tie was discarded, and his normally slick hair was a mess. Sitting on the leather sofa in the control room, Jeff watched his client through the acoustic glass, feeling a profound awe toward the heavens for giving one child everything the human imagination could conjure.
That dread had deepened into something bordering on religious reverence when he first heard Marvin play the tin whistle. As that haunting, iconic melody pierced the studio monitors, Jeff realized that he had stumbled into a cosmic lottery. He was undeniably, astronomically lucky to have secured Marvin as his client. It wouldn't take ten years to reach the absolute apex of the Creative Artists Agency. With the miracle child on his roster, Jeff would own the agency in five.
His cell phone had been vibrating relentlessly in his jacket pocket for forty-eight hours—B-list actors demanding script rewrites, directors screaming about casting contracts—but Jeff ignored every single one of them. Nothing mattered outside of this room. History was being forged, and Jeff refused to look away.
Even Amy, who had arrived bearing catered meals and executed her daily welfare checks to reassure Grant and Linda Meyers, found herself completely paralyzed by the spectacle.
Marvin's executive assistant, Amy, was already intimately familiar with the staggering depths of his musical genius. She had stood in the sunlit corridors of the San Marino estate plenty of times, quietly watching him command the keys of the grand piano. She absolutely loved it. No matter how suffocating the stress of managing his rapidly expanding business became, the moment his elegant fingers brushed the ivory, a soothing wave of profound relaxation would wash over her frayed nerves.
It wasn't merely a passive observation, either. The Incubus knew exactly how to cultivate unwavering love in his inner circle.
*****
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