Cause of Death: Unknown

"Cause of death: unknown"

At least, that's what's on his death certificate. It's a commonly believed lie that my father died, of course it's not true; he isn't dead. On the rare occurrence that a much loved (young) family member mysteriously disappears without a trace then the most logical explanation would be death. However, I'm the only one that knows the truth; when I was questioned about his mysterious disappearance and recalled the incident as it happened, I soon found myself talking to a Dr. Psycho who claimed that I was in distress over my father's death. After a long two and a half months, I was starting to tell myself the very same thing; until I found something important, something significant, something that could once and for all fully explain his disappearance: My father's journal.

I discovered it a few months after his funeral, but at the time was too young to understand it as my father was an intelligent man and used words far bigger than anything I could interpret! It wasn't until recently that it had become of some use when I had grown older and more mature, 12 years later and now aged 20, when I can no longer be classed as a teenager. My father recorded everything from the age of 12 up until his "death" aged 43 in regards to his latest and greatest discovery to date.

1st May 1967: I was looking through mother's drawers today and I didn't find anything of interest, but I did find an extraordinary piece of blue paper under the chest of drawers. It seems to be written in a strange and bizarre language, not one of this reality it would seem. It looks like blue-prints of some sort....a robot maybe? The diagrams are much too complicated for me to even begin to wonder what they could possibly construct and the unclear, unknown language the instructions used to label them did nothing to aid me in the understanding of this discovery. The more I looked and pondered, the more curious I got and eager to decipher the code and possibly even construct this most wondrous technology, as it is obvious the designer was a real genius and had knowledge mere mortals could only dream of. Whatever this "thing" may be, I will make it my life goal to find out the true meaning of this, my greatest discovery of my 12 year existence.

My father was a man of his word; he studied those blue-prints religiously. He developed a serious interest in electronics, mechanics and most of all, robotics. He went onto college and university and studied in the things he loved most and later went onto becoming a university lecturer in those very subjects. This was where he met my mother; she was a lecturer in bio-science and they would often bump into each other as they underwent their everyday lives. It was a 5 year relationship before they finally tied the knot, 1 year later they celebrated the birth of their first and only child, me, Isabelle Anne Engelman. Content with his newly formed family he went back to the blue-prints he found in his youth and investigated it once again with his far more advanced knowledge.

17th September 1991: This language still continues to baffle me, it is not one I have come across or one that has been recently discovered; It follows no trend with any other known language! I have even compared it to languages that have been lost to the cruel hand of time, but there is still no link. I will continue with this research and pray that the answer will soon become apparent.

22nd December 1993: I have done it! It is English, but the letters are constructed of a series of shapes and lines dependent of what order they are in the alphabet. I have no-one but my young three year old daughter to thank for this, who is learning to write and read; she was reciting the alphabet using her fingers as an aid and cleverly pointed out the various shapes in the script. I have managed to translate the first opening paragraph at the top and it began to worry me greatly, it reads

"Robert? Robert Engelman? Oh, I'm sorry; I forgot you're a professor now aren't you. Yes, I know who you are and I know where you live too, but that's not the point. I left this in your care because I know you're one of the few humans whose IQ is similar to mine and you're a university lecturer in mechanics and robotics so you should have this thing built in no time!"

How on earth can this person know who I am?! If this was written at least 30 years ago, how did they know what profession I would take and where I live? This only confirms my suspicion that this person is far more intelligent that anyone I know and that this person, or thing, cannot possibly be from this universe. I continued reading the bewildering text and this intellectual being still manages to impress me, many of the components are inside the electrical appliances found in my very household and I was given detailed instructions; almost as if this individual was in the room with me, guiding me through my own house with all the knowledge of each item I would encounter and even in some cases where I obtained the desired object.

One of my earliest memories of my Father was him running around the house, picking up random things and breaking them apart before running back to his study. He reminded me of those documentaries we used to watch about the monkeys of the Amazonian rainforest as they danced around looking for food. Unaware at the time but he had a lot more attention than he realised, it wasn't just me who noticed his strange behaviour, he was under close monitoring by a private organisation as they had heard reports many years ago of a young lad studying mysterious blue prints in classes; the teacher never managed to provide a sufficient description of the manual, only that they were strange instructions for a machine of some sort. From that day the organisation had tried relentlessly to discover the true definition of the plans, very much like my father.

Unaware to them both; the countdown had already started and they were running out of time.