The paper will propose a semiotic reflection on what is unexpected. I would like to confront few semiotic approaches to the future against the two different backgrounds: the background of human self, i.e. an individual subject, and the one of the system of culture. On the level of the subject I would like to discuss the Eero Tarasti’s “zemic model” and other selected issues from his concept of existential semiotics. The subject itself and its dynamic existence, which is deeply temporal, are the central points of Tarasti’s semiotics, especially the problem of being and doing, acts of affirmation and negation as well as the concept of four main modalities inscribed within the zemic model. That is why human’s existence is dynamic and what is even more important – is a result of subject’s choices. This leads us to the issue of (un)expected future: “in existential semiotics there is no return – what happens next is always unknown and unpredictable” (Tarasti 2015). It is the subject, particularly distinguished in existential semiotics, that also influences the environment by their various choices: “Yet, since these [surrounding] structures are essentially arbitrary and not dictated by nature, they can be changed, and it is the subject which has the power to change them! On this point – that the subject can make its own possibilities – biosemiotics and existential semiotics agree” (Tarasti 2015). When it comes to possibilities I would like to confront the existential semiotics with some particular concepts within biosemiotics, especially Franco Giorgi and Donald Favareau’s statements on the future and possibilities. Giorgi indicates that the future can be predicted in two ways, a scientific one, where, on the basis of research and experiments, we can expect certain events with a high probability, and by anticipation of the future as a sign, where a whole bundle of unpredictable possibilities emerges. This is an expression of “how the transition from a scientifically predictable world to a semiotically unexpected world opens a horizon of creativity and combines the novelty of the unprecedented with the usefulness of the nature’s availability” (Giorgi 2017). Favareau's focus on the future, which is from a semiotic perspective unpredictable, has also been noticed by another of his interpreters, i.e. Kalevi Kull. In his text What is the possibility?, he observes that possibilities do not concern the dead and those who do not interpret, and he calls this phenomenon “existence of choice or […] existence of semiosis” (Kull 2017). When thinking about the level of the whole culture as a sign system one can refer to Yuri Lotman’s concept of explosion and unpredictable workings of culture, where unpredictability is considered as a certain bunch of possibilities each of which seems equally probable. The future is a space for possible states that can occur. Taking all above-mentioned concepts together I would like to pose a question of how semiotic theory deals with what is yet to come.