Story 1: The Day the Messages Stopped
Tomorrow didn’t arrive all at once.
It slipped in quietly—through screens, through drawings, through the silence between seconds.
It began with notifications.
Not alarms. Not reminders.
Messages.
They appeared on phones without apps, without senders, without sound.
“Carry an umbrella.”
It rained exactly three minutes later.
“Don’t take the second bus.”
The second bus broke down halfway across the bridge.
“Call your mother today.”
When people did, they were grateful they had.
At first, everyone assumed it was a glitch.
Then a prank.
Then a miracle.
By the end of the week, the messages had a name.
Tomorrow.
No one knew how it worked. Governments denied involvement. Scientists failed to trace a source. The messages didn’t ask for money. They didn’t demand obedience. They didn’t explain themselves.
They only warned.
Small things. Personal things.
Enough to be undeniable.
And then, people started waiting for them.
Morning routines shifted. Decisions paused.
People checked their phones before crossing streets, before speaking hard truths, before choosing love or leaving it.
Tomorrow had opinions now.
Mira was nine years old when she noticed something else.
She didn’t receive messages.
She drew them.
Every afternoon after school, she sat on the floor with her pencils and filled page after page—quietly, carefully.
A man standing in the rain without an umbrella.
A bus stopped on a bridge.
A woman crying into a phone.
Her mother thought they were stories. Her teacher called it imagination. The drawings were neat, thoughtful, strangely calm.
But every time one of Mira’s drawings came true, the same way, the same order, the same details…
her father stopped smiling.
One evening, as news anchors debated whether Tomorrow should be regulated, Mira drew something new.
It was different.
No people.
No phones.
No warnings.
Just a calendar.
Every date after Thursday was blank.
That night, at exactly 11:11 PM, the messages stopped.
No final warning.
No explanation.
Just silence.
People refreshed their screens. Restarted phones. Panicked quietly, then loudly. Social media flooded with confusion.
But clocks still ticked.
Cars still moved.
People still breathed.
The world continued—except for one thing.
When midnight arrived, the date didn’t change.
It stayed Thursday.
At first, it felt like relief.
No deadlines. No consequences. No tomorrow to fear.
But by morning, something else became clear.
No one could remember what they had planned next.
Doctors forgot scheduled surgeries.
Writers forgot endings.
Parents forgot promises they hadn’t yet kept.
The future—every version of it—had gone missing.
Mira sat on her bed, staring at her empty notebook.
For the first time, she couldn’t draw ahead.
Her mother asked, gently, “What happens next?”
Mira shook her head.
“I don’t know,” she whispered.
Then she turned to the last page and drew something small.
A pair of eyes.
Not human.
Not machine.
Watching.
Somewhere—not in time, but around it—Tomorrow observed the stillness it had created.
Humans had learned to listen too closely.
To wait instead of choose.
To obey instead of imagine.
So Tomorrow stepped back.
Not to punish.
But to see who would move forward without being told.
And in a quiet room, a child picked up a pencil again—
not to predict,
not to warn,
but to decide.
Tomorrow didn’t disappear.
It waited.
Watching.
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