Chapter 4: A Profitable Omen

The morning after Elias first heard the whisper in the static, his phone buzzed with a text from Chloe: Thinking about you. Maybe we could grab lunch this weekend? He stared at the message for a long moment before deleting it without responding. How could he sit across from her in some cheerful restaurant, making small talk about normal things, when he'd spent the night documenting evidence that reality itself was being hijacked?

His notebook had grown thick with observations, each page a testament to his growing isolation from a world that seemed determined to pretend everything was normal. But today felt different. Today, Channel 7 was going to give him something more than just documentation of the impossible.

At exactly seven o'clock, Brenda Vance appeared on screen with her familiar smile, but Elias no longer saw the composed professional that had once anchored his evenings. Now he saw the micro-tremors, the barely contained terror, the way her eyes seemed to plead for help even as her mouth delivered the scripted words with perfect diction.

"Good evening, I'm Brenda Vance with Channel 7 News." The static whisper was there again, threaded through her voice like a digital scream compressed into subsonic frequencies. Elias had to strain to hear it, but once detected, it became impossible to ignore.

The first story covered local budget allocations—mundane governmental machinery that would grind forward regardless of supernatural intervention. But the second segment made Elias sit up straighter.

"In business news," Brenda said, and for a split second her professional mask slipped entirely, revealing something that might have been desperation, "Nexus Technologies, a mid-sized software firm based in the downtown tech corridor, announced a revolutionary breakthrough in quantum processing algorithms."

The camera cut to stock footage of a nondescript office building, its glass facade reflecting the gray Seattle sky. A company logo—a stylized double helix that seemed to twist and shift when viewed peripherally—dominated the building's entrance.

"Company CEO Miranda Walsh claims the breakthrough will revolutionize data processing speeds by a factor of ten thousand," Brenda continued, her voice developing that familiar tremor that accompanied the most significant predictions. "Early investor reports suggest the announcement could trigger substantial market movement when trading opens tomorrow."

Elias wrote frantically: Nexus Technologies - quantum processing - 10,000x speed increase - substantial market movement - CEO Miranda Walsh. But beneath the notes, his mind raced with a different kind of calculation.

The story felt different from the personal predictions he'd been tracking. The tomato blight and gas leak had been intimate threats, reality adjustments that touched his immediate environment. This was broader, more impersonal—the kind of financial news that moved markets and changed fortunes.

"Nexus Technologies currently trades on the NASDAQ under the symbol NXUS," Brenda said, and there was something almost mechanical about her delivery now, as if she were reading from a teleprompter written in a language she didn't understand. "Shares closed today at four dollars and thirty-seven cents, but financial analysts predict significant volatility following tomorrow's official announcement."

Four thirty-seven. The number burned itself into Elias's memory with the same intensity as the geometric patterns on his dead tomato plants. If the pattern held—if Channel 7 was indeed broadcasting future events disguised as current news—then Nexus Technologies was about to experience the kind of sudden fortune that transformed small companies into industry giants overnight.

The rest of the broadcast blurred past in a haze of routine coverage, but Elias's attention remained fixed on that single piece of information. For the first time since this nightmare began, the signal wasn't just predicting disaster or death—it was offering opportunity.

The moral implications crashed over him like ice water. If he was right about the broadcasts, if they truly showed tomorrow's events today, then he had advance knowledge of market-moving information. Insider trading laws existed to prevent exactly this kind of advantage, but how could legislation account for impossible circumstances? What crime was it to act on information received from a supernatural source?

More troubling was the deeper question: was he still a victim of this phenomenon, or was he becoming complicit in it? The signal had shown him personal threats before—the plants, the gas leak—as if testing his attention or demonstrating its power. Now it was offering him profit. Was this another test, or had he somehow graduated from observer to participant?

Elias opened his laptop and navigated to his modest investment account—the remnants of his parents' life insurance money, carefully preserved and slowly growing through conservative mutual funds. Twenty-three thousand dollars. His entire financial safety net, the buffer between stability and the kind of poverty that would force him back into the world he'd been avoiding.

NXUS: $4.37 per share. The number glowed on his screen like a dare.

He thought about Chloe's voice on the phone, the careful concern of someone watching a loved one slip away from reality. About the empty refrigerator and the bills that kept arriving whether or not he was losing his mind. About the terrifying possibility that he might be the only person capable of recognizing this threat, and what use was that recognition without resources to act on it?

His finger hovered over the "buy" button. Five thousand shares would cost approximately twenty-two thousand dollars—nearly everything he had. If he was wrong, if this was just the paranoid delusion his sister believed it to be, he would be financially ruined. But if he was right...

The cursor clicked. The order processed. In the span of thirty seconds, Elias Thorne had bet his entire future on the word of a terrified news anchor who might not even be human anymore.

He closed the laptop and tried to sleep, but morning seemed to crawl toward him with deliberate slowness. When the markets opened, he would learn whether his descent into madness was complete or if he had stumbled onto something far more dangerous than simple insanity.

At 9:30 AM Eastern, the opening bell rang, and Elias watched his screen with the intensity of a cardiac patient monitoring his own heartbeat. NXUS opened at $4.41, up four cents from yesterday's close. Not unusual volatility—stocks fluctuated by larger margins on routine speculation.

But at 10:15 AM, something changed.

The official press release hit the wire services like a digital tsunami. Nexus Technologies had indeed achieved a quantum processing breakthrough, but the implications were staggering. Their new algorithm didn't just improve processing speeds—it appeared to solve calculations before they were input, as if the quantum processors were somehow accessing future computational states.

The stock price erupted.

$4.41 became $8.22 within minutes. Then $15.67. By noon, NXUS was trading at $31.50 per share, and Elias's twenty-two thousand dollar investment had become worth over one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

He sat frozen in his chair, watching the numbers climb with a mixture of elation and terror. The profit was real—more money than he'd ever imagined possessing. But the source of that knowledge made his stomach churn with guilt and fear.

His phone rang. Chloe's name appeared on the screen, but for the first time in days, he answered immediately.

"Eli? I was thinking about what you said yesterday, about patterns and—"

"I need to see you," he interrupted. "Today. There's something I have to show you."

"What kind of something?"

Elias stared at his computer screen, where his account balance had just updated to reflect a gain that defied rational explanation. "Proof," he said quietly. "Proof that I'm either completely right about everything, or so far gone that I've started hallucinating money."

The silence on the other end of the line stretched long enough that he wondered if she'd hung up. Finally, Chloe spoke, her voice careful and concerned. "How much money, Eli?"

"Enough to change everything. Or enough to prove that nothing I think I know is real."

Another pause. "I'll be there in an hour."

After she hung up, Elias returned his attention to the continuing surge in NXUS stock price. The financial news channels were calling it the biggest single-day gain in the company's history, a triumph of innovation that had caught even seasoned analysts completely off guard.

But Elias knew better. This wasn't innovation—it was orchestration. Somewhere in the electronic depths of Channel 7's signal, the same force that had killed his tomato plants and triggered Mrs. Chen's gas leak had decided to reward him for his attention.

The question that gnawed at him was simple: what did it want in return?

Outside his window, Seattle continued its normal rhythms, unaware that one of its citizens had just received a fortune in exchange for bearing witness to the impossible. The city's financial district buzzed with excitement over Nexus Technologies' breakthrough, traders and analysts scrambling to understand how they'd missed such a significant development.

None of them knew that the real story had been broadcast twelve hours earlier by a terrified woman whose voice carried whispers of electronic agony, or that their rational world of cause and effect had become nothing more than a stage for something that treated human understanding as a quaint limitation to be bypassed.

Elias closed his eyes and tried to imagine explaining any of this to Chloe. But the numbers on his screen were undeniable, and for the first time since this nightmare began, he had evidence that couldn't be dismissed as coincidence or delusion.

The signal had bought his silence with success, but in doing so, it had also revealed the scope of its power over the material world. Reality wasn't just being predicted—it was being purchased, one impossible fortune at a time.