PLAYING GOD: THE USER’S GUIDE

Dallas, 2030. A violent storm is nothing unusual—until the weather radar begins to show the inside of a computer hard drive. For graduate student Mara Vale and four friends, investigating the impossible is supposed to mean checking instruments and following evidence. Instead, records change, familiar places become dangerous, and a stranger offers Mara something she cannot bear to want. Their world is somebody else’s entertainment. Its wealthy players can purchase disasters, manipulate lives, and erase the people who ask too many questions. With a restoration deadline approaching, the students must find a way to shut the players out without shutting humanity down. But escaping a game is one thing. Keeping an entire world alive—and refusing to become its next gods—is another.