“Fates Warning” is a song about “determinism”, or more correctly “predeterminism”. Predeterminism is the idea that all events are determined in advance and this means that all events of history, past, present and future, have been already decided or are already known (by God, fate, or some other superior force), including human actions.

The subject of the song is therefore about this discussion: are our experiences simply a string of coincidences, or are our lives already laid out for us?