The Future-Telling Sketchbook

Matt Sullivan headed home after work at the Sugar Factory in downtown New York City. On his walk to the subway, unexpectedly, he stumbled onto a sketchbook laying on the street next to the gutter. Being the curious man he was, Matt bent down to pick it up.  Matt looked inside the sketchbook and saw a bird’s eye view picture of an earthquake dividing the continent in half. Matt thought the sketch was interesting, but he wondered what the picture meant. He decided to put the sketchbook in his backpack. He got onto the subway like he did every day. Today he was especially tired because he worked a long shift last night. Finding his seat, he laid his head against the divider to take short nap on his 25-minute ride home.

                  Matt got up from his seat after waking up from his nap. He walked off the subway train and headed up the stairs to the street level. Feeling hungry, Matt headed down South Park Street toward Tom’s Restaurant before he got home.

While eating his pizza, everything started to shake off his table. Then, suddenly, Matt’s cell phone went off with a loud screeching sound alerting him that there was a big news story coming out. He learned that the continent had just split in half with a massive earthquake. Matt pulled out the sketchbook from his work backpack and flipped to the page with the picture of the earthquake. He thought it was crazy that this just happened.

After eating, Matt walked the last four blocks home from the restaurant. He opened the sketchbook again to look though more pages. Matt saw a sketch of three aliens dancing on the planet Mars. The land they stood on was dry and dusty. The aliens looked happy. They had small eyes on small heads, but the rest of their body looked tall and narrow like a pencil. Matt thought that it was kind of a funny picture, but he was also feeling kind of worried because he just saw an earthquake picture and then it happened. He wondered what would happen next.

Suddenly his cell phone went off with a screeching sound again. He looked at the news story and saw that aliens had just landed on Mars. The world was getting this news from satellite images. The news report stated there were dancing aliens on Mars. Matt threw his phone out of shock! He couldn’t believe this was happening to him.

Matt picked up his phone from the ground and called his friend Cob to tell him that he had a magic sketchbook that was telling him through the drawings what will happen just before it happens. Cob was always interested in art, so Matt thought he would show him this sketchbook. Cob invited him over.

Matt and Cob sat down at Cob’s house to look through the rest of the sketches. The next picture they saw was robots welcoming people into a place they had never seen before. It was futuristic looking with tall buildings and AI bots motioning them to come in for safety. When Matt picked up his phone, he tried to use it, but it wouldn’t work. An AI face popped up on his phone and told him to go to the AI city. Again, Matt could not process what was going on. He told Cob to grab a bag of what was important, and Matt put his backpack on to be sure it got along. He told Cob to follow him to the AI city.

As soon as they got outside, a robot grabbed both of them and started running with them. The robot was strong and put both men on his back. In a blur, they were in the AI city.

Matt opened up the sketchbook to the next page and saw a sketch of a bomb dropping on the old city. This explained why the robots were trying to grab as many people as they could. Matt felt very stressed out with all these news events happening right after he looked at the sketchbook.

Matt talked to Cob and told him that when he opens up the sketchbook and flips to another page, what he sees happens. Cob was surprised with the story Matt told him. Cob was trying to find out how this was happening to him. Matt told Cob how he found the sketchbook. Cob wasn’t surprised that Matt picked up a random sketchbook from the gutters because he knows his friend was a curious guy.

The friends sat down on a nearby bench. Feeling very tired, Matt leaned back and rested his head on the bench. Suddenly he heard a loud beep that woke him up. He looked around and saw people on the subway with him and Cob was nowhere around. The sketchbook was sitting on his lap. He woke up very slowly. His vision was very blurry and as he was waking up he heard a loud beep again. Matt looked around. He realized he was sitting on the subway seat and not on the park bench. Matt couldn’t believe it. None of the Sketchbook predictions were real. It was all a dream. Suddenly, his cell phone beeped loudly again with an emergency alert. He looked at the sketchbook in his lap. It was all a dream, wasn’t it?