The first call came at 3:07 a.m. Detective Miles Kaito’s phone vibrated, an unknown number flashing on the screen. He answered, gruff with sleep, expecting a wrong number or a frantic informant.
The voice on the other end was his own, ragged and choked with a terror he’d never felt. “Listen to me. You have forty-eight hours. He finds you in the old Lansing Warehouse. You go there alone. Don’t. It’s a trap. You die on the concrete floor, bleeding out from a gut shot. The case number is 7-9-2-1-0. Remember it.”
The line went dead. Kaito sat in the dark, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs. A prank. A sick, elaborate prank using a voice modulator. He dismissed it, but the case number—7-9-2-1-0—was burned into his mind. He checked the department database. It was a case file from six months prior, a closed robbery. He’d never spoken the number aloud.
The second call came the next night. “Thirty-six hours,” his own voice, now wearier, gasped. “You think you can set a counter-ambush. You’re wrong. He’s always a step ahead. He knows you’ll bring Reyes. Reyes gets winged, you get dead. The smell… the warehouse smells of rust and wet cement. Don’t go.”
Kaito’s blood ran cold. He had been considering calling his partner, Reyes. He’d had the fleeting thought of an ambush. The details were too specific, too intimate. This was no prank. This was a time paradox, a message in a bottle from a future that was rushing toward him.
Fear told him to run. To take a sudden vacation, to be anywhere but that warehouse. But the detective in him, the part that solved puzzles, was fascinated. Could he change his fate? Was the warning itself the very thing that would create the circumstances of his death?
The final call came as he was getting into his car, his service weapon heavy in his shoulder holster. He was going to the Lansing Warehouse. He had to know.
“Don’t!” the voice screamed, a raw, final sound. “I’m you! I made the call to stop you! My calling is what makes you curious! My warning is what seals our fate! It’s a loop, Kaito! A perfect, goddamn loop! You walk in, you see the glint of the rifle in the rafters, you raise your—”
The line crackled and died. Kaito stood frozen on the curb, the phone pressed to his ear. The paradox was complete. The warning created the curiosity that led to the death that prompted the warning. He was a ghost calling from his own grave.
He looked toward the industrial part of the city, where the Lansing Warehouse stood silhouetted against the moonlit sky. He could still run. But then, who would his past self call? If he broke the chain, did he erase himself?
Taking a deep breath, he got in the car. He knew every step he would take, every thought he would have. He knew the exact moment the bullet would strike. He was driving toward his own murder, not as a victim, but as the final, necessary component of a terrible, beautiful equation. The loop had to be closed.
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