XI: In Which Colin Struggles With The Existential

Colin pressed the Stop button on the Walkman, sighing with a mixture of relief and disappointment.  Side Two was totally blank.  No whispers in the background, no cryptic messages, just an unused side of an audio cassette.  Double checking with the audio-capture program confirmed it.  Side One had held no extra surprises, either.  Every song matched up with the studio versions on YouTube.  So, it basically boiled down to a really elaborate way of saying “Be at the appointed place at the appointed time.”

There were easier ways the message could have been passed, but this certainly grabbed everyone’s attention in a way something simpler wouldn’t have.  There was one big snag, however.  If Steve’s account of the timeline was right, this tape was planted in his glove box before Colin had put up the flier.

“Do You Believe In Magic?”

There was the question it all boiled down to.  Did he believe?  His own ability could possibly be explained as a form of synesthesia, some unknown cues being picked up by his unconscious mind and presented to him as a visual stimulus in a format shaped by popular culture.  It didn’t have to be ‘paranormal’ by the word’s current connotations.  The explanation had never felt right, but it was a plausible possibility.  Since meeting with the others, though, such logic was harder to swallow.

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Colin had accepted the truth of The Bard’s words long ago, that’s why he’d sought out and formed the ‘society’, wasn’t it?  So why was this one thing nagging at him?  Telepathy, dreams of the past, monsters under the bed, even Ronaldo’s magic - if it existed - none of that bothered him as much as this tape.  Why not?

Free Will.

That was the problem.  If the tape, intended for the Society, was made and delivered before the group was even formed, that implied precognition, further implying predestination, and therefore a static, unchangeable timeline.  If the future could be known in advance, then free will was merely an illusion and all of our choices were simply predictable reactions to stimuli and … and…

And f**k that s**t, as Steve would say.

Perhaps it was just human conceit, but Colin rejected the thought of his choices and actions being predetermined.  Whatever forces had allowed the sender to foresee the Society’s meeting need not be infallible.  One can make a reasonable prediction of the outcome of an event without needing one-hundred percent certainty.

So the question became; did the sender somehow know enough about them to deduce the formation of the Society, or did they have some fortune telling means that showed them the possible future?