The film opens in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1959,
where a competition is held among the students
of a new elementary school to celebrate its opening.
The winning plan, from student Lucinda Embry
a seemingly mental disorder/mentally disturbed
girl,is to bury a time capsule containing the students'
drawings of the future to be opened 50 years later in 2009.
She is prevented from finishing her image,
which is actually a series of seemingly random
numbers, and goes missing during the ceremony.
Her teacher later finds her in a gym closet,
frantically scratching the remaining numbers into the door.
Fifty years later, the time capsule is opened
and the pictures are handed down to the new
generation of students. Caleb, the son of MIT
professor and astrophysics|astrophysicist John Koestler,
receives Lucinda's envelope.
Initially dismissing them as random numbers,
John notices a single random number sequence,
911012996,
which contains the date of the
September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks|World Trade Center
attacks as well as the death toll of the attack.
Further research leads John to realise the numbers
are a list contain the dates and death tolls
of every major disaster, natural and man made,
that has happened over the past 50 years,
with three that have not occurred yet. When a commercial
plane crash kills 81, the legitimacy of the
list of numbers is confirmed and leading
John to believe that Lucinda had an ability to
prognosticate since childhood until she died.