The City, The Coffee, and The Book

It was raining one afternoon in a particular city where that sort of thing was always a welcome surprise. It seemed to suit the place surprisingly well.

The neat gardens lining the river that split the city in half were taking the change of weather in their stride, using the opportunity to impress everyone with a painfully beautiful vibrant emerald hue. Contrasted against a sky made from twisting sheets of silver clouds streaked with the sunset’s orange flames, the whole scene looked somewhere between “breathtaking” and “divine.”

They had no way of knowing for certain, but the people on the six-fifteen train into the heart of the city probably had the best view of everything. The sound of a dozen people taking a photo of the city’s sunset-skyline at the exact same time was pretty good evidence that most of the passengers on that train knew exactly how special the view was.

If one of those passengers had a decent pair of binoculars - and didn’t mind getting some strange looks - they might have had a chance to catch a glimpse of the most interesting thing in the entire city. That was a bold claim, of course. Cities were full of people doing interesting things, after all - but this one was particularly exceptional.

For two-tenths of a second, one of the windows on that train aligned perfectly with the window next to table four in a tiny coffee shop almost two kilometers away. There was a swaying tower of empty cups on that table, and the man responsible for drinking them all was about to finish writing a book that could tell the future.

His name was Oscar, and as the six-fifteen train disappeared from sight, he raised his hand and ordered his eighth double-espresso.

He smiled politely when it arrived at his table, deliberately ignoring the look of concern on the waiter’s face. She was starting to worry for his liver. That much coffee was probably going to make his blood… crunchy or something.

She decided that she wasn’t going to give him any more. There had to be some law stopping her from letting someone poison themselves.

Right?

Oscar threw the entire drink down his throat in one go, and carefully added the cup to the steadily growing tower. Then he turned back to his notebook. The hard, black cover was exactly nine centimeters wide and fourteen centimeters tall, and almost every single page inside it was completely full of almost unreadable handwriting.

This was the book that could tell the future.

Oscar had explained what it was to a few people already, but they always responded with strange looks and uncomfortable shrugs. It wasn’t fair.

The book didn’t have any magical powers, it wasn’t blessed by any particular god, and Oscar wasn’t a visitor from the future. There was nothing supernatural about it. It was just science.

Or possible pure mathematics. Or a logic puzzle.

That was it - the book was nothing more than a really difficult sudoku.

For the last four years, Oscar had been obsessed with journaling. He wrote everything about himself down in minute detail, and it had been an incredibly useful tool for him. By recording what he did, he had taken back control of his time. He lived efficiently, but that hadn’t turned him into a robot.

Instead, by becoming so much more organised, he was able to spend more time than ever enjoying, creating, and appreciating all types of music, and art, and poetry, and…

...But the more he used this tool, he started to become aware of its limitations - all of its painful flaws and shortcomings.

By writing down everything about himself, he could start predicting what he would do in the future. He could analyse patterns and begin to take advantage of them. In some small way, it was like seeing the future.

But it always failed for some reason or another. Some outside interference would crash into his life and throw all of his beautiful plans into chaos.

There was nothing more he could do.

At least, not if he only wrote about himself.

The idea had come to him in the shower one afternoon a few months ago. He knew how to predict the future - he just needed to keep track of a few more people. An entire city should be enough.

Oscar bought the black notebook later that night, and, starting the next morning, he started spending hours in that coffee shop every day, recording the movement of everyone who walked past the window.

Blue-Shoes-Glasses: Leaves apartment, travels to work - 9:05am

White-Bowtie-Tall: Eats lunch at ramen place - 1:23pm*

Long-Hair-Dress: Walks from start of street to end of street. Reason unknown - 11:38am

Those entries, written in the smallest handwriting Oscar could manage, filled every page of the notebook, occasionally interrupted by his own activities. They were usually a bit more detailed.

Now, as he sat in that coffee shop with his tower of empty cups, the book that could tell the future was finally finished. There wasn’t a single square centimeter free of ink.

He would need to set aside some time later to properly analyse the whole thing, but he was confident that there was nothing that would interrupt him until then. How could there be? The book was finished. Oscar knew what everyone in the city was doing at every moment in time.

He stood up from his table. His vision blurred for a second, and the world seemed to be tilted slightly to one side.

“Hey- are you okay?”

The waiter’s voice cut through to Oscar’s brain and reset everything. The weirdness was gone. He smiled again and waved to show that he was fine.

He probably just drank a bit too much coffee.

Oscar opened the door, stepped out into the street, and breathed in the delicious air of a clean city just after a sunset rainshower.

He stood there for a while, satisfied with himself and all of his hard work, then started on his way back to his apartment just across the road.

The Archer family had been out of town for a few months on a long-deserved holiday and were just arriving back in the city after a four-hour drive. The road was wet, and they weren’t expecting someone to just wander into traffic without looking first.

---

Oscar woke up in a hospital feeling much more sober that he had been in a long time. He asked himself where it had all gone wrong, but he already knew the answer.

Where did it go wrong? Probably right when he ruined his sleep schedule, had a weird idea in the shower, and started trying to write down what everyone in an entire city was doing all at once. The double-espresso blood-poisoning didn’t exactly help either.

Later, after a few conversations with a therapist and a few more weeks in a wheelchair, Oscar bought a new notebook.

It was the exact same type as the old one, but this time the only person he was writing about was himself. It was good for that sort of thing.