The room was colder than usual, but no one said anything. The players sat huddled around the great table as they finished installing their settings into the game. They had already chosen the type of world it would be. Now they were choosing the settings for their markers, which was the most time consuming of all the set-up procedures. Each player had a large number of markers that had to be programmed with an equally large number of variables. It’s what made the game so interesting. The almost infinite possible combinations were so, well, almost infinite that even the game maker recommended setting some variables for groups, then forming new groups for the next variable, and so on. This would insure the largest difference of variables per marker in the shortest amount of time. After all, one wants to play right? There were also a plethora of objectives to choose from, but the most popular by far was “Rule the World”, which no one objected to tonight. The location and start time for the game was also an option and this evening, since the room was already strangely cold, they quickly agreed to begin in a region on the chosen world that was experiencing a cyclical period of below average temperatures. With a quick double check that all was ready the start button was pushed.

Somewhere in Alaska a man and his wife woke to the alarm clock and got up to start the day. He turned on the morning news as she started the coffee pot, noticing that it had begun to snow outside. The news anchor reported matter-of-factly, “ …as the war in Iraq drags on into its 15^th year, there is alarming news coming from Russia. It appears that some of its nuclear weapons have been brought to the surface and are being redirected towards”      “Hon, I’m having another one of those damn déjà vu feelings. What did you say you thought that was caused by?”