My friend Jason worked through some interesting theories about the Book of Destiny and how it works.
He was nice enough to let me post them here (with my thoughts noted):
The Mercury Book
Some facts, observations, and theories …
FACT: The book contains all the story of humanity from the
beginning to the end of time, such that a person can open up the book and read
the past, read the present and read the future.
FACT: The book as drawn cannot possibly fit that much story
in it literally.
THEORY: The book is partly telepathic, so that a person can
open it to what they want to start reading about (say, five years into their
own future), and they can find it somewhat easily. The book almost acts like an
electronic document, with the human mind opening up different menu tabs: Doing
a “Search” for a specific person or era.
FACT: It is somewhat overwhelming when someone first opens
the book and tries to do this, as shown when Toby first opens the book and
tries to find what happened to Leanna Creel on the night of her murder. But he
does eventually find it.
FACT: It is possible for someone to cross out what is
written in the book and write something else, and reality will change based on
what has been newly written.
THEORY: The book’s telepathy must have to come into play for
this to work as well. When Kid Thunder crosses out Drue’s name in order to make
him cease to exist, that wouldn’t literally work … crossing out a character’s
name just one time in a book doesn’t remove that character from the story. And
yet …
FACT: … when Kid Thunder crossed out the name, Deliverance
Drue exploded.
THEORY: The book can read intent. (“Delete all instances of
Deliverance Drue from this point onward.”)
Me: Yes, this became problematic for me on the read through. A strikethrough
shouldn't result in a man exploding to death. It might also have
something to do with your suggestion that Kid Thunder is illiterate.
Back in the west, people could just do an "x" to signify their name. The
small amounts of writing they could do represented so much more. Maybe
there's some of that in play?
That would fit right in. Yeah, it's interesting to wonder how much
specificity is required in the writing of the people who make changes.
When Sentinel wanted super-powered allies, did he have to specify, "An
archer named Shaft, a rocky giant teenager called Badrock, a purple
gymnast called Vogue ..."? Or did he say that Sentinel eventually
founded a team of superheroes called "Youngblood," and the book
improvised from there?
OBSERVATION: We are never shown anyone changing the past
when acquiring the book. Instead they rewrite the present and/or future.
However …
THEORY: … in theory, changes to the present would most
likely change the past too. We were told that Sentinel wanted to have a team,
and so he wrote in the creation of Youngblood. That means that Youngblood
members would have to have been born, grown up into the kind of people who
would become superheroes and then eventually join the Youngblood team that
Sentinel writes into existence. He writes Youngblood into the present, but this
would have to cause the book to revise the past to accommodate that. And of
course it would have to revise the future as well to accommodate the change.
Otherwise things would snap back right away and Youngblood would cease to exist
one second after they popped into existence. Again, not something a real book
can do, but one can picture it more easily if one thinks of electronic
documents, which can change formatting of an entire section of a document based
on a single deletion or addition.
At one point, Toby says that the entire world “changed and
darkened” because Sentinel wanted to live in a world that was more intense,
violent and extreme. For that to happen in the present, the book would have to
reach back in time and recreate the socio-economic realities of the last couple
decades (at the least) in order to create a present with more violent crime,
etc.
Me: Yes, this one struck me as odd when we started talking about it. Why
can't you change the past? It seems like some of the past is
automatically getting changed, anyway. I think it's the one rule Moore
set up, that you cannot change your own past, because then things would
get too out of control.
I imagine that there are feelings that wash over a person upon
even opening the book, and further feelings, instincts, emotions, etc.
upon trying to rewrite it. I liken it to telepathy as far as comic-book
terminology, but it could be something more primal than that. It might
be that someone is simply overwhelmed by primal terror if it even occurs
to them to try to rewrite their own past. Something akin to the
self-preservation instinct. (What if I write something wrong and cause
myself to cease to exist?)
This is going to
get into dark -- maybe unnecessarily dark -- territory, but it is still
about Alan Moore, so it's still germaine. Did you ever read that really
long interview between Alan Moore and Dave Sim? It was when From Hell
was finished, and he talked about some of the oddities of trying to get
into the minds of serial killers. And the conversation goes into
esoteric territory about how committing something as taboo as murder can
do strange things to consciousness. The average person's mind doesn't
even contemplate it, and most who seriously contemplate it don't
actually *do* it. And even the ones who do it probably encounter a kind
of fear or hesitation, and who knows what strange things happen to
their minds when they actually go through with it. And fortunately it's
only a relative few whose minds are willing to take them all the way
that far. But Moore speculates that some killers might actually feel
like they are tearing free of the pre-destined "plot" of their lives
when they actually breach the rules of morality to such a supreme (as it
were) degree.
Anyway, I think it's
conceivable that the book could project a kind of living aura -- as you
say, the Book is most likely a living thing -- such that certain "rules"
wash over you: Rules that you perhaps shouldn't read it at all, or
perhaps shouldn't spend too much time reading it, shouldn't rewrite your
own past, shouldn't cross things out, shouldn't rewrite it at all. But
just as there are some unusual minds in the real world that do horrible
things that most of us wouldn't contemplate ... within the world of the
Awesomevere there are certain "extreme" personalities (appropriately
enough) who are willing to break the taboo, to take a pen or pencil and
actually dare to alter the sacred text. And in so doing, they "break
free" of the story of their own lives, probably experience some degree
of both terror and exhilaration as they see/feel it happen, reality
changing all around them. But, like Jack the Ripper only killing five
prostitutes and then deciding his work was done, the rewriters aren't
constantly altering the book at every opportunity. Their minds wouldn't
be able to handle that: just doing it once can be an overwhelming
experience. So they do it when they feel it's necessary (even though
technically it's never *necessary* -- just as it's never necessary to
commit a murder -- notwithstanding cases of self-defense or
self-preservation, a la Kid Thunder). But they also don't spend too much
time with the book, not to rewrite it or even to read it, because the
human psyche can only take so much.
WILDER THEORY: Revisions in the Mercury Book are what cause
the “Reality Revisions” that create new Supremes. The timeline for when Leanna Creel stole the Mercury Book
matches up to when Supreme 41 took place. Perhaps Leanna decided the world was
too “extreme” so she slightly rewrote it when she reacquired the book,
resulting in the Alan Moore revision of the Liefeldverse. As noted above, a revision of the
present of necessity has to reach into the past. This is why the old Supremes
tell the Moore version of Supreme that he is just popping into existence now,
in 1996, but his memories and his history stretch back to the 1920s. Any change
to the book has to ripple both backwards and forwards into earlier pages and
later pages. (i.e., for the world
to suddenly become a less violent place as of 1996 per someone’s revision, the
book has to – to be simplistic about it – reach back in time and change things
so that less people grow up in poverty and turn to lives of crime, etc. In
other words, just changing one single sentence in middle of the book could
conceivably require a full-scale “reality revision” i.e. the book rewriting itself
starting decades earlier, and also into the far future as well.
FACT: Every character who has attempted to use the Mercury
Book to change life in their favor has succeeded at first, but ultimately lost
the book.
OBSERVATION: Theoretically that shouldn’t be possible,
because a person should be able to read their own future, see the moment at
which they lose the book, and rewrite that moment so it doesn’t happen. If that causes reality to change so
that they instead lose the book five years later … well, again, they should be
able to read five years forward, see it about to happen again, and rewrite it
again. And so on to infinity. But this doesn’t happen. Which suggests …
THEORY: …. The Book does not allow that to happen. It’s
built in that no one person can control or hold the book forever, so the book
is able to selectively blind people to the future. As noted above, if the book
has the telepathic ability to let a person see exactly the parts of reality
they want to see, then the book could also possess the ability to block certain
moments in time. It might even be able to exert a telepathic influence on readers, such that it doesn’t even
occur to them to look for certain moments, or to rewrite certain things. This could be why it never occurs to
anyone to try to rewrite the past, but instead only to start rewriting from the
present forward. Or why sometimes
it doesn’t occur to someone to keep on checking their own fate to make sure
they’re not going to get screwed at some point, out of things.
Me: My theory is that the book is a living thing, so like most living
things, they continue to move and change when you're not watching them.
So even after Sentinel writes his changes, the book starts to evolve
from there, changing the story as Sentinel isn't watching.
I think that totally fits. And it makes me think back to our
conversation about how Mercury might be the one who was making those
comics come to life and talk to their readers in the first two issues of
Glory. Living books are Mercury's whole deal!
FURTHER SPECULATION: Very little about how the book works is
established, so there are a lot of possibilities. The book could have all sorts
of mechanisms to protect itself: It’s possible that a person experiences
physical or mental pain upon rewriting reality (“Mercury” poisoning), such that
it takes tremendous force of will to continually rewrite it. It may get more
and more difficult the more rewrites someone does, such that they eventually
are too exhausted to keep making more rewrites.
WILDEST
THEORY OF ALL: The Mercury Book we read about in Judgment Day is a
facsimile, and the real one is still in the realm of Gods, at Mercury's
nightstand. He gave the mortal world a fake one to play with that can
still affect their reality, but ultimately if Mercury wanted to, he
could rewrite the entire mortal universe, even going so far as to create
new versions of reality wherein the book that some mortals THINK is the
Mercury book no longer even exists. Perhaps he even already did this
more than once, leading to worlds such as the one seen in "Blue Rose" or
the one(s) seen in the 2012 relaunches.
Me: That is crazy, but I don't dismiss it. Why wouldn't
the Blue Rose or 2012 revision happen from whatever the book was doing
in the Awesome world at the time?
I don't know, it kinda came to me as I was writing, and I was
thinking through some of the book's implications. At the end of Judgment
Day, Sentinel threatens to write a line saying that the Citadel Supreme
exploded, and only Sentinel survived. But Glory was on the Citadel at
that time. Would she have died because of what Sentinel wrote in the
book? If so, that means the book can kill someone who is from the realm
of the gods. Which would mean the book could kill Mercury,
theoretically. Would Mercury create a book that mortals could use to
kill him?
And it would just make a sort of
meta-textual sense if there was a "larger" book that is GREATER than
Judgment Day's Mercury Book, and which *contains* that book. Because it
would kind of be the book that we readers are reading. And that's a
book that cannot be rewritten by the mortals within the Awesomeverse,
even though it *can* be rewritten by gods outside of that world. For
example, [a certain fan editor] -- in a mad, arrogant fit of self-appointed
godhood -- could rewrite the contents of Supreme 64 ... but Sentinel
couldn't.
