The Omniscrolls

Everyone here is born with a birth tattoo on their wrist foretelling how they will die, but mine just read “Immortality”. This puzzled everyone. In school, some children considered me superhuman, while others thought of me as a freak. Some were even scared, fearing I’d bring about the end of our species. I didn’t know what to believe. Death and Immortality could not be anymore withdrawn from each other, so where did I fit in this paradox? The fear of loss held me back in forming external relationships, and the one person I had feelings for died in a car crash when we were still in our twenties. I eventually lived through the deaths of not just my parents, but also of my older and younger siblings, their children, and even their children. The only respite I had was my studies. It was the only thing I could bury myself in. I learned every language, all types of art, and every field of science. Three and a half centuries into my life, however, a strange phenomenon began to occur: a signif...

I never felt like I belonged, no matter where I was. I had kind friends, and parents that saw to my every need, so I couldn’t fathom why I felt that way. The feeling never went away, even when I got older. While we were still children, my best friend Leela often said I was strange for feeling the way I did, and that she wouldn’t have even cared if her parents passed away if it meant she could be adopted by my parents. I found her thoughts to be stranger than mine. Once I became an adult, however, I started to notice things. I could see and hear things that others could not. I feared my mental health was deteriorating, but I soon learned that it was not the case. I quickly found out that my abilities extended beyond heightened senses—I could manipulate the world around me. Wanting to figure out the extent of my powers, I decided to infuse it into my work. I had joined a software company after completing my degree and was a month into developing a new social media app. As a side project,...

I had just finished the latest chapter of my ongoing novel and was getting ready for bed early because I needed to leave the house by 5:00 a.m. to visit my parents for the weekend. It was a four-hour drive out of town to their place, but I made it a point to meet them at least once a month. It was the least I could do since they adopted me when I was just a newborn dropped off at their doorstep with nothing but a sheet wrapped around me. However, things took a strange turn when I was woken up around 2:00 a.m. to the ringing of the doorbell. Looking through the peephole, I was dumbfounded to find a woman carrying a backpack, whose resemblance was eerily similar to the protagonist of my book. She kept a vigilant eye on her surroundings and whispered into the door. “Please let me in. This is an emergency.” Seeing the fear on her face, I unlocked the door and asked the mysterious woman to come inside. She thanked me and rushed to the sofa. I took one more look outside and then locked the d...