Unwritten

Chapter 1 Part 2 - Dabbling With Destiny

"Drink?" he asked casually as we entered his flat.

It disturbed me how quickly he had accepted today's event as normal while I was still trying to grasp and understand what I had seen. I looked up when I felt his eyes, carried by a bemused smile were watching me. Suddenly I realised that I hadn't answered him.

"Sure."

He poured a whiskey for me and himself and collapsed into his three-seater and crossed his leg. I had never been in David's flat before. Last I had seen him was before the start of his Gap year back when we both stayed in dorms. While I had decided to stay on in University, David had made the decision to take some time off to see the world and work for his Godfather, neither of which had seemed to have happened. The flat was clean and sparse to a fault, but then again David was never one for clutter.

"I thought you were going to work for your Godfather? In research, wasn't it?"

"Yes, I did for a couple of days. I tired of it pretty quick and decided it wasn't for me."

"In other words, you managed to piss him off."

"You know me better than anyone," he said with his wry smile.

"So, where do we start?"

"Start what?" his irritating smiled spread further across his beaker-nosed face.

"You know what."

"Fine, fine. Enough games I suppose," he pulled a face of a child who had just been told not to play with his food.

"Suppose, I told you, everything you ever knew about free will was a myth. Imagine if you found out everything you ever did in life was predestined and no action or inaction would stray you from its course, how would you feel?"

"Like a puppet or an actor playing his part in the story, I guess, but we do have free will, I make choices all the time."

"Do you make choices? Or are they simply a series of reactions to preceding events or conditions placed upon you."

"What, do you mean?" I asked, not really expecting a high-level 'meaning of life' discussion nor mentally prepared for one.

David sat up excitedly, incensed by the current one-way philosophical debate.

"Take for instance this, what if I asked what takeaway you wanted to order, how would you decide that?"

"I don't know, maybe I would just think about what I haven't had in a while and go for that."

"Exactly, all your choices are predetermined by prior events, like a domino effect. You had Chinese two days ago, so fancied an Indian as something different. This is the simplistic example, but it demonstrates my point. If I wanted to demonstrate it in further I would ask what profession you were looking to go into and then analyse the series of events/conditions which led to your overall decision.

"Are we talking about the Nature/Nurture debate?"

"Hmm, yes in a way, in fact, one could even argue that it was a series of preconditions in your parents' lives which dictated your current DNA structure."

"Oh right, so what does this have to do with what happened earlier."

"Everything."

I exhaled. This was going to be a long night, I could feel it. The discussion had carried on for what felt like at least an hour as he posed more theories on free will versus destiny. Leading the debate to become more circular and his face all the more punchable as the night drew on until finally I received a straight answer from him.

His tone changed, suddenly serious and shrank to whisper, "I found a book, Atticus."

"Congratulations, shall I notify Waterstones?" I retorted sarcastically.

"It's not just any book," He scowled, "It's the book of everything. Everybody's timelines. A list of people's actions and their consequences."

"You can't be serious!"

"I'll prove it, think of a number from 1 to a million and write it down on a piece of paper."

He took two pens and scraps of paper from the coffee table in front of us and passed one set to me.

We both wrote our numbers on a piece of paper, folded it in half and swapped them over.

"How?" I was amazed to see my number '9,246,789' which was deliberately chosen outside the parameters he set. I looked around desperately for some sort of camera which could have recorded the number I had written, but saw none about the room. I ruled out the use of miniature spy cam's while David came from a wealthy family, even he wasn't someone who would waste extravagant amounts of money for the purpose of a joke.

David didn't answer but instead, pushed the panel on the side of his three-seater, producing a single 'click' revealing a secret compartment. He got out of the chair and pulled out large tome which looked as large as an encyclopaedia. Whilst it was big, I knew it couldn't possibly contain all the actions of all the people on the planet and still be small enough to fit on the coffee table. The more I thought about the population of the planet multiplied by their individual actions, even a book the size of a fleet of buses would probably be deemed too small for its contents.

"Isn't it a bit small?"

"I see you're a size matters kind of guy," He said with a wink, "Try it out if you don't believe me," he said motioning towards it.

I picked up the book with both arms, finding it was about as heavy as I had anticipated. The book had a reddish-brown leather cover with patterns and symbols that I could not recognise. The book was definitely old, it had a pungent musty aroma which quickly invaded my nostrils. Gently and tentatively I opened the book. The paper may have been papyrus, due to its deep yellow tint and thickness of the pages. Slowly I turned each page but found each one to be blank.

I looked up at David perplexed.

"You need to close the book and think about what you want to know and then open the book and your answer will appear."

"Why didn't you just tell me that in the first place?"

"And miss that look on your face, not a chance."

I closed the book as instructed and thought of a childhood friend, Gracey. I always wondered what became of her after she moved. Often, I thought about looking for her on the internet but never found the courage. At least now 'Destiny' was giving me a reason and a chance to check up on her.

I opened the book, and the pages were still empty at first until black blotches of ink began to form on the page and took the form of characters. The text was foreign to me but yet oddly familiar, the more I stared at the books contents, the more I knew I could understand it.

"I don't know this language, yet I can read it. How is this possible?" I said only briefly shifting my glance to David and returning to the book.

"Hmm, good question. In fact, I am not 100 percent sure myself but I have hypothesized, it is the original language. Possibly the language of the architects of this world, it must be encoded in our DNA to read it."

As I read the text, it began to lift off the page and float in the air before spinning around my head at an exceptional speed. My eyes automatically tried to follow the words but the more they tried, the more I felt like I was going to vomit. I made a conscious effort to close my eyes, but my eyelids refused to co-operate. Additional text swarmed around me until it completely filled my vision. Eventually, my only source of light was from the gaps between the characters but even that began to dim until my vision shot to black.