The face of Alex's father, pixelated and slightly delayed on the video call, nodded with a look of earnest concentration. Michael Vance was a brilliant engineer, a man who understood complex schematics and the elegant laws of physics, but the world of streaming revenue funnels and merchandising profit margins was a foreign, slightly bewildering country where his son was the only native guide.
"So the Q4 numbers are solid," Alex said, his voice the calm, even tone of the ghost, the one he used for business. He gestured at a spreadsheet on his shared screen. "The holiday sales for the 'Lost Boy' hoodies were about fifteen percent above our initial projections, and the vinyl pre-order for Billie's EP is already outpacing our Q1 overhead costs. We're in a good position."
He sat at his desk in his bedroom, which had long since completed its transformation from a teenage sanctuary into the unofficial headquarters of Echo Chamber Records. The evidence of his two lives coexisted in a strange, fragile truce. Guitars on stands shared space with a large whiteboard covered in release schedules and marketing flowcharts drawn in sharp, precise lines. A stack of distribution contracts sat neatly next to a half-finished history textbook. The room was clean, organized, but it hummed with a low-grade, relentless pressure. This was the new normal. Alex was the engine; his father, the trusted legal guardian of the machine.
"That's… that's incredible, son," Michael said, a current of genuine pride warming his voice. "I just want to make sure we're not overextending. The projections for this new artist… what was his name?"
"Asher," Alex supplied, his eyes scanning the data. "He's a SoundCloud discovery. Raw, but the potential is there. We keep the initial investment low—a small recording budget, a targeted digital-only release. It's a low-risk, high-reward model."
Healthy growth, the ghost's voice commented from the cool, analytical space in the back of his mind. It was a clinical, detached monologue that ran parallel to his spoken words. Diversified streams. We're not reliant on a single asset. Billie's early SoundCloud numbers show a high conversion potential for her official debut. Asher provides a necessary genre pivot. Smart.
The ghost was pleased. It saw the label not as a collection of friends making music, but as an elegant, efficient system it had designed to protect them. Every decision was a calculated move on a chessboard only it could fully see.
"Okay," Michael said, clearly trusting his son's impossibly advanced strategy. "As long as you're sure. Now, about the international plan for Billie's single…"
As his father began talking about navigating European publishing rights, a discreet notification banner slid onto the top right corner of Alex's screen. It was an automated email, the kind he received dozens of a day. The sender was their digital distributor. The subject line was sterile, corporate, a piece of automated data in a sea of data.
Report: Global Streaming Milestone Reached - Asset ID: AV003.
It was impersonal, just another notification in the endless churn of a business day. He moved his cursor and clicked it open, his attention still half on his father's voice.
The email was brief, its template design a bland corporate gray. It congratulated Echo Chamber Records on its continued success. Then, in the center of the email, isolated and presented in a bold, stark font, was the milestone.
Song Title: Before You Go
Total Global Streams (All Platforms): 1,000,000,000
The number didn't land as a success.
It landed as a weight.
One billion.
The digit and its nine silent, attendant zeros were abstract, mathematically incomprehensible, and yet crushingly, physically heavy. His breath caught in his throat, a sharp, involuntary hitch. The ghost, the producer, the part of him that understood the industry, recognized the number for what it was: a staggering, career-making, legacy-defining achievement. A number that put him in a rarefied stratosphere of global superstars. It was a monument.
But the sixteen-year-old boy, the one sitting in the quiet of his own bedroom, felt a cold, dull ache spread through his chest.
One billion listens. One billion moments of shared grief. One billion reminders.
Each stream wasn't just a data point; it was a person, somewhere in the world, feeling a pang of a loss that mirrored his own. The song's success was a direct, quantifiable measure of his own personal, catastrophic failure. The number wasn't a trophy. It was a tombstone. One billion names carved into its surface.
And the first name was Leo's.
The sterile numbers on the screen dissolved, and he was hit with a sensory flashback so sharp and unwelcome it felt like a physical blow. The fluorescent hum of the high school cafeteria. The sickly-sweet smell of lukewarm tater tots and disinfectant. The hollow, scraping sound of Leo's fork pushing food around a tray he had no intention of eating. The slumped, defeated curve of his friend's shoulders.
And then, worst of all, the sound of his own voice, so clear it was as if he were saying the words right now—casual, distracted, fatally dismissive.
"I gotta take this."
The memory was a pinprick of ice in his gut, a cold, sharp injection of the shame and regret he lived with every single day. He had built an empire to protect his friends, and in the process, he had looked away from the one who needed him most. And this number, this monument of a billion streams, was the prize he had won for his negligence.
"...Alex?"
His father's voice pulled him back from the roaring silence of the memory. He blinked, the spreadsheet on his other monitor coming back into sharp, meaningless focus.
"Alex, did you hear me?" Michael asked, a note of concern in his voice. He was leaning forward, squinting at his screen, trying to see Alex's. "Good news?"
The mask of the competent CEO slid back into place, a familiar, protective armor. He clicked the email away before his father could read the stark, terrible number.
"Just a data report," Alex said, his voice perfectly even, a masterful performance of normalcy. "Monthly analytics."
But his hand, resting on the mouse, had a faint, almost imperceptible tremor.
He tried to re-engage, to find his place in the conversation about European royalties, but the words felt like sand in his mouth. The numbers on the spreadsheet, which moments ago had been clean, logical symbols of their success, now seemed meaningless, obscene. What was a profit margin in the face of this? What was a projected Q1 overhead?
He couldn't do it. The ghost's analytical mind had been short-circuited by the boy's overwhelming grief. The two halves of himself were at war again, and the battle was leaving him breathless.
He cleared his throat, the sound rough in the quiet room.
"I think that's enough for today, Dad," he said, his tone polite but final, an undeniable full stop. "I… I need to make a call."
His father, sensing the abrupt shift in the atmosphere but not understanding its cause, simply nodded, his expression a mixture of confusion and acceptance. "Okay, son. We'll pick this up tomorrow."
"Yeah," Alex lied. "Tomorrow."
The video call ended, plunging his laptop screen back to the quiet solitude of his desktop. Alex sat there, motionless, the video call over but the conversation far from finished. The number was still there, a scar burned onto the back of his eyes.
One billion.