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Revised sampler of Leila Johnston's forthcoming book.

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Page 1: Enemy of Chaos
Page 2: Enemy of Chaos

Enemy Chaos

of

sampler, not for resale

all enquiries to info@@@@snowbooks.com

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Publishers note to the Sampler

This is a small sample of the content of Enemy of Chaos. Like the Fighting Fantasy books, each entry will be sequentially numbered, and there are choices presented at the end of each entry. In the final edition, page numbers will be included for ease of navigation. We have included just a small number of entries here, for illustrative purposes. In the actual edition, entries will be numbered sequentially (1, 2, 3 and so on).

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Intro

You look at the job advert again. “Person with superior reasoning ability required”. Well that’s definitely you, you think, switching the lights on and off exactly six times so that your family won’t all die in an accident. This job, whatever it is, was made for you. You’ve always known you were different – even as a small child. When everyone else was running around outside you were at home making the SID chip in your Commadore 64 sing like an angel. The introduction of BBC microcomputers to your school in the ‘80s was probably the last time you felt truly empowered and definitely the last time you were intimate with Granny’s Garden.

In many ways you possess an extraordinary brain, solving the trickiest Sudoku in your head and analysing the science of Star Trek in more detail even than the writers, as they admitted themselves in their replies to your letters. But these qualities haven’t always been conducive to making friends, if anything the opposite is true! You suffer from obsessive compulsive behaviours, a high intolerance of disorder, and a tendency to become so anxious in social situations that you often lose all control of your muscles and simply spasm helplessly several feet into the air. Though your intellectual brilliance is not in doubt, most other areas of your life have been seriously retarded by a lack of ‘people skills’. You’ve always struggled to gauge tone and mood from expressions and indeed recognise your own mother’s face in a line-up of one.

Your slight stammer has always been a barrier to making

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friends, except friends who also suffer from speech impediments, of whom you have a surprisingly large number. And while others may be baffled by your intense distrust of ‘bad’ typefaces, colours and numbers and catalogue of compulsions (literally, you like to keep a record), they are all completely logical to you, and become more pronounced with stress. Finally, in completely unrelated news, you’ve never been able to forge a proper relationship with a real person of the opposite sex.

But putting this to the back of your mind for now, you stuff your mobile in your pocket, lock the door, check the door’s locked again, and head out. As you turn back to make sure you were right about the door, you wonder: what kind of employer hires someone after a quick email exchange? Didn’t they want to check out your references, to hear about how you were a star student? Didn’t they care that you aced Further Maths, Even Further Maths and We’re Still Calling This Maths But It’s Really More Of A Feeling Now? Hell, you even invented 4 Dimensional Chess1, your secret golden goose. True, it’s still in the testing phase, but you feel sure that one day people in Toys ‘R Us will turn the box over in their hands saying “What’s 4-D chess? I’ve heard of 3-D chess...” And only after attempting to play it will they realise they’re involved in an elegant, almost

1 4-D chess uses a quantumly manipulated chessboard so that dark squares become small black holes at random, the Queen can travel at the speed of light and the winner is the one with the most pieces remaining in the present moment at the end of time. You built the only ‘existing’ model of a quantum chessboard out of a magnet, some iron filings and a Biochemistry Hunks calendar from 1998. The pieces were random bits of science equipment with faces drawn on them. True, it didn’t look like much, but after dropping a Queen through a black hole and rediscovering it in a particularly unexpected place ten minutes later, it was clear to you both that it worked, and that you’d need to wear at least one extra pair of underpants for future trials.

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zen-like battle of bluff and double bluff, reason and emotion, joyous interstellar travel and violent certain death. Hoping your new employer will find all this endearing you head to work, Aphex Twin blaring in your ears, the morning sun glinting off your expansive forehead.

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How to overcome chaos and triumph at your quest

You are a highly intelligent ageing geek and your rational mind compensates for your embyronic social skills by a ratio of about 87:13. Although your sense of other peoples’ intentions is limited, you are keen to make a fresh start at your new job. You’ve been revising your knowledge of science and maths and feel ready to confront the world with your sharpened sword of intellect, hoping the world doesn’t come back at you with an actual sword of metal, or a gun. Before you can embark on your modern adventure though, you’ll need to know three things: your words-per-minute typing speed (WPM), your body mass index (BMI) – which will help you to gauge success in any physical encounters – and your IQ. The bonus number is your OCD score. You don’t need to know it for the quest, exactly. You just like, need to know it.

IQ

To work out your IQ, first roll two dice or flick through the book at random and count the dots on the dice pictured at the bottom of the page. Divide this number by Pi. Then add the new number to the number of years you feel you’ve always

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been marching to a slightly different beat to everyone else. The resulting number is both your IQ and the circumference of your head.

BMI

Calculating your BMI is simple. Divide your weight by your height squared. If you don’t know your height, you can work it out by multiplying your BMI by your weight. To see if you’re in a healthy BMI percentile for your age, divide the awkwardness out of ten that you experience in social situations by the number of tops of people’s heads you can see when you’re standing up. In general, a BMI between 18 and 30 is healthy. Consider celebrating by organising a group package holiday to a Mediterranean resort especially for people with a BMI between 18 and 30.

OCD

To calculate your OCD score, first check you turned the oven off. Check again until you’re sure. Add the number of times you’ve had to check to the number of tins in your cupboard with the labels facing outward. If the resulting number is one of the ‘bad’ ones, turn around three times. Then check the oven again. Use a stencil to write the digits really neatly if it helps.

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WPM

To calculate your typing speed, divide the number of internet chats you’ve had in the last week by the time you’ve spent talking to people in real life ever.

SKILL, STAMINA AND LUCK

To succeed in your mission of fighting chaos through time, you’ll rely heavily on skill, stamina and luck. Establish your character’s initial conditions and collect some data at the same time by calculating these statistics and entering them into the chart on the Character Sheet (PAGE XXX).

Roll two dice. Your luck rating corresponds exactly to the total dice score, since dice rolling is, after all, a measure of luck. In fact, in a sense you could say that all statistics recorded by dice-rolling are ultimately nothing more than records of luck. For this reason, in Enemy of Chaos, your stamina score is calculated by rolling the dice 500 times and taking the average. ‘Skill’ refers to social skills, so in your case one dice should be enough.

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CHARACTER SHEET

Name: The 40-year-old Prodigy

Profession: Enemy of Chaos

Aim: To defeat disorder wherever it is found

WEAPONS OF ATTACK Passive-aggressive notesAggressively accurate Wikipedia editingRubik’s Cube encrypted with universal rules of use in any situationAnxiety attack

EQUIPMENT (dice scores)Credit Rating:Starting £ on travelcard:Points on license:

ENCOUNTERS: GOODThe UndertakerThe WeathermanThe Doctor

BMI :

OCD :

WPM :

IQ:

Passport-sized Photo

WEAPONS OF DEFENSEHealth, vehicle and home insuranceThe compass of Ilkley Moor that always points at people from the NorthCaller IDWaterproof jacket

OTHER EQUIPMENT Y/NPhone chargerLaptop cableNovelty USB keyring

ENCOUNTERS: EVIL The Immortal PostmanMadame TussaudsThe Travel Agent

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INTERNET ACTIVITY

Here’s what your laptop browser looks like when you begin your mission.

EMAILS1 NEW MESSAGE“Person with superior reasoning ability required for high-flying job. Great future prospects for right candidate. Enthusiasm for irrevocable global catastrophes a must. Please consider the environment before printing this email”.

OTHER EMAILS The Red Dwarf fan club thank you for your message but regret they’re no longer a going concern.A company is interested in developing your ‘laptop lunchbox’ idea, for sneaking your own bento-style meals into cafes without fear of being apprehended.

BOOKMARKS myfootdoesntbendthatway.comthisisiswhatiimagineyourdadlookslike.comIthinkhewantsustofollowhim.orgwhoslookingattheeyes.net idgiveittenminutesifiwereyou.ac.uk

LIVE CHATYou have an internet relay chat window open but the only people who ever really private message you are foreigners who think you might be a woman.

INTERNET HISTORY

Definition of EntropyIMDB page for MonkBBC News article about robot girlfriendsFacebook page of someone you had a crush on 20 years agoYouTube results for “teen asian speed-cuber”Some obsessive blog by someone who takes photos of their food every day or somethingBBC Micro Flash emulatorA Twitter fail windowA MMRPGA message from a photo hosting site explaining why they’re holding half your pictures hostage, and how they’ll publish the really embarrassing ones unless you pay them $24 for a ‘pro account’

OTHER WINDOWS An error message where Word has crashedA message asking you if you want to update something now or laterA large, flashing window inviting you to play online casino games and win back all the minutes of your life you’ve spent closing intrusive pop-ups

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The Briefing

It’s your first day at a new job, but there must be some mistake. The address you’ve been given has led you to a church. You check the address again. “St Mary’s Church”. Seems to be right… A sombre-looking man in a black top hat appears from behind the church and strides up to you.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he says, doffing the hat obsequiously.

“My loss?”“Ah. Of course. You don’t know yet.” Smiling broadly, he

claps you on the back. “I’m the Undertaker by the way. Come, join us. We’re having a little funeral. Just a few friends, you know. Nothing too big.”

The Undertaker, who bears an extraordinary resemblance to Noel Edmunds, bustles you inside the old church. A small group of dark-clad people are already seated on the front pews. A coffin rests on tressles in the altar, and you note with relief that it’s a closed casket. The Undertaker leads you to the front, facing the congregation.

“We’re here to say goodbye to the Games Master,” he says confidentially, before pushing you forward with such force you almost trip over the coffin. “Everyone, this is the Enemy of Chaos.” He looks at you. “Did you bring any ID?” You show him your passport, open on the photo page. “Ha! Was this taken in the future?” He composes himself. “Do you have anything else? Never mind.” He waves a hand over the congregation, “Enemy of Chaos, these are the mourners.”

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Since they seem to disdain the usual cultural fashion cues, you find the mourners’ ages and genders indeterminate. As you look around, you notice a statistically significant sample are wearing t-shirts with computer science jokes on them. They’re all dressed in black, and there’s a slight tension, almost as though everyone knows they should be chatting, but no one is quite sure how to start a conversation without making eye contact. A disproportionate number occupy extreme ends of the normal body weight spectrum and several are even eating things out of small rustling bags, like they’re at the cinema. The Undertaker introduces the front row as The Magician, who seems to be a professional electrician, The Pirate, who works in ‘computer security’, The Elementalist – a former weatherman, and The Warmonger – some kind of ill-defined munitions expert. He quietly explains to you that they’re non-player characters, currently paid to look sad, but potentially useful in your quest.

Introductions over, The Undertaker takes his place at the pulpit and pulls an old Mac laptop from nowhere, announcing, “The Games Master requested I read this out to you all before he died. Erm, obviously before.” With great ceremony, he folds open the computer, which wakes up with a weird mooing noise. “The Last Game,” he reads, after a moment’s clicking around to get on the wireless network and find the email. “As the Games Master, I have opposed disorder and unpredictability more than most. Regulation, routine and structure have always been paramount in my creations, second only to the core doctrine of ‘Never split the party, never get invited to a party’. Unfortunately, life’s own structures have finally failed me. The poor sales of

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my ‘Collect all The Data’ series of adventure books along with that embarrassing court case sent me into a decline from which I never fully recovered. But I am blogging this now, from my deathbed, because the battle against disorder must continue to be fought. A younger apprentice, not even necessarily that much younger – a rule-maker of great potential – will rise up and complete my work. I choose the Enemy of Chaos to inherit my mantle. It is time.”

You listen as the details of your astonishing assignment unfold. The Universe plays out in glorious synchrony, you learn, with myriad adventures and multiple possible fates for the creatures that inhabit it. The paths we carve through life’s more fantastical realms occur not purely by chance, but have traditionally been the result of a negotiation between the Games Master and Fate. In recent years, however, hard times befell them both. The Games Master grew old and tired and alcoholic, repeatedly leaving a resentful Fate to raise adventures alone in addition to everything else she had to do just to keep things going round here. But Fate is notoriously fickle, particularly her fingers, and without a power-crazed regulator at the helm, imaginary battles quickly descend into fun. As a new generation of youngsters embraced this lawless world, the Games Master’s role gradually became redundant. And by the time he died he was little more than a penniless old wizard reduced to a life of regular but heart-breakingly infrequent trick or treating work.

The Games Master’s story is indeed a sad one but you can’t help but be excited by the mission he’s given you from beyond the grave. For it is you who has been selected to take

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the hand of destiny and witness – even create – adventures and their inevitable conclusions. You’ll be assisted on your voyages through time and imagination by an amazing machine that is uniquely sensitive to intolerable increases in social, physical or philosophical entropy. It also works as a phone and has a camera on it, but the camera’s not that good.Your principle role is not to change what’s happening – the GM emphasises this – but to record, report, and return information about each ending to players waiting in the present day. Endings are inevitable, but with some consciousness of the sequence of events that lie in our future, he explains, we will have the power of order on our side. The Games Master seems particularly concerned that people are always being sent back in time, but that such travellers generally turn out to be malicious – convicts or terrorists carrying bombs, or cyborgs on a mission to prevent a dystopian future that their very visit to the past engenders. Not us. We will be ahead of the game. The pasts are logically unchangeable but the future is chaotic; working on the assumption that unlikeliness moves towards likeliness, almost anything can happen.”

The Undertaker closes the laptop and asks whether there are any questions. A hand shoots up immediately – a woman with long dreadlocks and a beaded choker. Oh wait. No. It’s a man. “Why interfere?” he wants to know. “Nothing in the future can be accidental,” the Undertaker says, rather darkly. “Life is about working out which things influence which other things, how our choices and decisions affect how things pan out. The game is about the endings. Actually all games are about the endings aren’t they? It’s not the winning that counts, it’s the

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getting it over with.” He glances at the coffin, and you think he looks suddenly tired. “The long-term consequences of our present actions are unforseeable to us,” he goes on. “But if we can send a rule-maker forwards – or at least sideways1 – to see what’s could happen, then there’s someone ‘keeping a finger in the page’ for us, so to speak. Someone who can simply witness events unfolding at Fate’s hand and impose the order she resists. Someone who can retro-engineer our lives, because it’s only by understanding the end-points that one can trace the steps back to the location that we know – the initial conditions – and fully understand the sequence in its entirety. If the Enemy of Chaos can do that, and it’s a large if, then maybe we will be able to experience true, organised, adventure in our lives again. Order and rules are essential to ensure our lives have meaning in this realm bridging the real and the imaginary. We need to someone from outside, someone who can find out what the endings are or else what’s the point in our existence?” He glances around, looking as exasperated as anyone at a funeral has ever looked. “Do you understand yet?!”

Another question. “Isn’t that, in fact, causing certain endings to occur?” Well, yes and no, The Undertaker says. Think of it as a simulation. All possible endings will occur eventually anyway; the futures you will visit are simply possible alternatives based on possible start conditions. Although they will feel supremely

1 He elaborates on this with recourse to some geometric diagrams and folded bits of paper. Time is still relative, he says, and local to the person journeying, but quantum entanglement allows you to affect things in geographically and temporally speculative locations while your physical co ordinates are ‘protected’ by a shield of subjective spacetime. You remain strangely unreassured.

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real, to couch them in terms of ‘reality’ as we understand it is meaningless. Think of it as going on holiday to a similar country with a different but related history to ours, like Wales. Yes, The Undertaker says. Think of these voyages to the end-points of logical causality as a holiday in Wales. And of course, if you have a holiday booked, then vice versa. A hand goes up. You notice, to your surprise, that it’s yours. “Why me?” you say. Why you. Well. The Undertaker looks you in the eye, and for a split second you get the feeling he’s been asking the same question since you walked into his life. He hastily pulls himself together and opens the laptop again. “He, um… he said you’d ask that.” Despite the spring sun casting its brave dusty rays through leaded panes, the church is dim, and the screen illuminates The Undertaker’s face as he reads.

“You have been chosen from millions of applicants for your aptitude for science and – erm – unusually low readings of normal human emotional intelligence. You may be expected to witness some terrible things, but your uniquely rational brain will at least be better able to cope with the distress than most. The future is not what it used to be since the Games Master’s demise. The reason time seems to have an ordered past and a chaotic future to you is not just because you are a neurotic nerd with planning issues, but also because one measure of time is entropy, and as we move from low entropy to high entropy, what we look ‘back’ on always has the impression of order. One should remember that chaos is not so far from order really. In a sense entropy is just the evening out of two marbles in adjascent boxes. Deadly marbles made of arsenic or something. But still.”

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The Undertaker has a sip of water. You feel he’s really trying very hard to look dignified and erudite, but has no real idea what the words he’s reading mean. “The Universe seems to be experiencing a rare pocket of low entropy,” he reads, a little too carefully. “It’s a statistical anomaly; extrapolating from thermodynamics it would seem that the Universe’s usual state is most likely to be low entropy, a big mixed-up mess of unpatterned stuff. When entropy is low, however, the impression is of order, of things falling into line, of cause and effect. Statistics say that we’re moving out of that phase now, heading from a rare point in the history of the Universe where an impression of order is high, back into the disorder that preceded it.” He glances up and catches your eye. You look away, awkwardly. “Your brain is the key. It’s so regularly arranged that your consciousness is basically immune to the unchartered waters of increasing entropy that we’re heading into. If you can just harness your inner powers to impress order upon the world without being too mental about it then you might be able to recover meaning for the lives of characters whose existence hinges on the future of structured imaginative play.”

You frown. “He said that?” The Undertaker nods. “He said that -,” you try again, “- about not being too mental?” Ignoring you, he continues reading the Games Master’s notes.

“Although it may sometimes feel like you are in fact not directly responsible for all possible futures of mankind, its survivals and its destructions, the fact is, you kind of are. While you will sometimes also experience the happy endings as personal triumphs you can’t believe that without also accepting that the

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devastating apocalypses are very much your fault too – even if, to be fair, it’s not clear exactly how at the point of your arrival on the scene. Usually, there won’t be much you can do about that, so you are advised against taking a galactic apocalypse or mass species extinction too much to heart. Besides (depending on which theory you subscribe to) time is cyclical and relative, so in a sense you’ve always already been responsible for the destruction of the universe many, many times and it’d seem a bit churlish to get a conscience about it now2. The Undertaker coughs but it sounds quite a lot like a small laugh, and returns to the text with a hand still cupping his mouth. “The possibility of eternal recurrence is something you should try to avoid thinking about too much, but also an inescapable phenomena that the Enemy of Chaos can witness from his current spacetime co ordinates, for example in the infinite loop of Friends repeats on E4.”

There’s other stuff too, and at one point The Undertaker sets up a projector to run some videos the Games Master took care to make and upload to YouTube in the weeks before his death. There aren’t really any flat surfaces in the church, but after a few minutes’ debate a reluctant consensus is reached. The casket is propped up vertically, with the projected face of the Games Master roughly corresponding to the position of the corpse’s head under the wooden lid. Due to your impaired

2 The question of whether we’re traveling through time, or space, or both, is addressed in THE TAO OF LOST, an ambitious attempt to derive philosophical meaning from the interminable science fiction series of the early 21st Century. With reference to an episode entitled ‘The one where they all hack through the jungle for 45 minutes’ the author writes: “If a tree falls in the forest, does it really fall? And if you travel through time in an environment where the environment is basically unchanged for millions of years so there’s no point of reference, does it justify that fifth series?”

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feature recognition abilities, it takes you a moment to realise that this is not, in fact, the Games Master’s real face but a moulded mask of Bertie Bassett’s head. He stares into the camera for a few minutes simply smoking a cigarette through a small hole in the mask’s ‘mouth’, before casually holding the pack in shot for a just enough time for you to recognise the brand.

“He was completely broke,” says the Undertaker sadly. He shakes his head with his eyes still fixed on the projection. “Had to sell everything by the end. You might say it was an everything-must-go sale at his deathbed. By the time he came to make this, the guy no longer even owned the rights to his own features.” The Games Master continues to gaze into the camera silently smoking through a small hole in the the mask’s ‘mouth’. “Lung cancer,” The Undertaker mutters. “Got him in the end. Sad.” You watch Bertie take a sip from a large beaker with Pepsi written down the side, his massive head bobbing as he clears his throat. He clears his throat again, and one more time, before unwrapping a popular throat sweet and pushing it through the hole in his mask. Leaving the pack close to the camera, the Games Master starts to speak.

And when the GM talks, everyone listens. He outlines a lot of complicated theories about time travel that you try to take in but it’s hard – for some reason you’re finding it difficult to concentrate properly watching Bertie Bassett projected onto his own coffin, delivering instructions from beyond the grave, and miss a lot of the details. From what you can gather, though, the first law of relativity is that it must be possible to illustrate all aspects of spacetime with rolled up bits of paper or balloons.

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You make a mental note to be wary of any mathematical claim about the Universe that can’t be adequately described with a set square and a used toilet roll. They tell you that Einstein believed spacetime behaved just like a big rubber sheet and with renewed respect for the man, you wonder how on earth he found that out and if it has anything to do with the divorce that resulted in him marrying his cousin.

The Games Master then shows you the time machine itself. It looks like a phone, in as much as even phones look like phones these days, and he explains that it actually houses a ring laser. The beam first enters a square chamber through a semi-transparent mirror, a bit like those ones they used to use to catch vain people in supermarkets. It is then reflected by each corner of the square until it reaches the original mirror, where it’s bounced back to the other mirrors and so on, creating a constant gyroscopic loop of light.

Interestingly, the laser ring produces a gravitational field in a similar pattern to that of water swirling down a plughole, suggesting enticing commercial possibilities for some kind of ‘time travel shower’ system, if not a whole bathroom. “You’re probably wondering if it’s a new technology,” the GM says. “That depends… on what you mean by new. But it’s hard to put an exact age on it because – of course – it doesn’t originate on Earth.” Murmers begin to stir at this remark, but the Bertie head remains inscrutable. “Do you really think the moon causes the tides?” You can feel his eyes twinkling behind the mask. “I can’t believe anyone ever buys that! And how do you think predictive text works? That stuff can’t be explained by our Earth science alone.”

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And with that, the video stops abruptly. YouTube begins to optimistically suggest other similar clips but The Undertaker turns the projector off and you all file outside, some non-player pall-bearers carrying the casket. Together you stand quietly in the morning sunshine, a sober gathering reflecting on the contribution of a great and influential realm-spanning individual. A man who at one time had all the power, who directed the mental adventures of millions through his conduits on earth, but whose time has come to pass. A new dawn is breaking over the world of games, a temporary gap opening between worlds, and now the only man with a foot in each camp has gone. It’s with a mixture of profound sadness and exhileration that you accept the fact you will have take on the Games Master’s challenge. But your thoughts are interrupted loudly from a noise somewhere very near by. It’s the punchy chorus to “Toxic” by Britney Spears. The red-cheeked Undertaker snatches his mobile out of his pocket and answers it. Then his face blanches.

“It’s the Games Master,” he tells you. “Don’t ask me how he’s doing this. He says he’ll double your salary if you look in the box.” Peering past the 20-sided bouquets and down at the casket, you consider the offer for a moment before deciding ‘what the hell’ and beginning your descent into the grave.

“Not that box!” The Undertaker shrieks. “Jesus man! What do you think this is?”

He produces a small hinged container backed in suede and hands it to you with none of the usual ceremony of a marriage proposal. Inside you find the most beautiful, glittering, translucent 6-sided dice you’ve ever seen. The Undertaker explains that

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the numbers on each die correspond to small but significant variations in initial conditions. These conditions will inform the trajectory of events that follow, however disordered and unconnected things may at first appear. You might go straight to an end point, you might have to play a bit first3. You open your hand and look down at the small six-sided object that will determine your future and help you to create many possible adventures. The wait is finally over. This is the end of the first part of the wait. Whatever happens now is down to you.

If you throw a 1, turn to X, ZOMBIES: IT’S ALL IN THE HEAD

For a 2, turn to X, THE FUTURE’S DIM, THE FUTURE’S AVERAGE

For a 3, turn to X, NUCLEAR APOCALYPSE: IT’S NOT THE END OF THE WORLD

For a 4, turn to X, THE POSTMAN NEVER RINGS ONCE

For a 5, turn to X, NOTHING GREAT IS EVER ACHIEVED WITHOUT OCD

For a 6, turn to X, THE AMAZING GAME

3 There are – of course – very many starting points and just as many end points, and the scenarios and universes experienced by your co-players will be very different to your own. For example, one player will discover a future where the virtual and physical realms gradually blend together over time, until a point where only a race of super-fast-loading favicons remain. Only then – too late – will mankind realise their fatal error in mindlessly insisting that favicons always load first. Another traveller causes a slight ruche in spacetime when he arrives at his destination, boomeranging everyone within three metres of him back to the beginning of the universe and through to the present again without anyone else ever realising. Unfortunately he was, at that exact moment, approached by poll researchers from a cosmetic surgery reality show, and as an accurate scientist immune to cultural niceties, confidently estimates the thinks the woman’s age at roughly fourteen billion.

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Action Plan: The Enemy of Chaos

• Totravelforwardsandsidewaysthrough time, having adventures and experiencing alternate realities, and recording them so the Games can

continue.

• Toprevent,destroy,ortidyupchaos wherever you encounter it.

• Tocollectandrecordinformationin an orderly fashion, however strange,

arcane or arbitrary it may be.

• Togettotheend.Remember,it’snotthewinningthatmatters,it’sthe

getting to the end so you can go and do something else.