Once upon a relative spacetime, there was a universe. In this universe, there was a planet. This planet resembled our planet, except that it had only one continent, which was about the size of Australia.

On this one-continent planet, there lived relatively-intelligent organic beings. These beings looked just like the people here on this planet, in this universe, so that is why I will refer to these beings as "people."

Now, quite remarkably, these people spoke a language that sounded just like modern American English, with a slight Midwestern tinge. Yet this was all just a matter of chance, and there's no need for you, dear reader, to worry about it.

As to how these people organized themselves, they had a democratic government. However, unlike the situation on our planet, there was only one government, corresponding to the one and only nation. Now this fair, democratic government regularly scheduled morbid “games” in order to thin out the population, thereby increasing per capita resources.

In the most recently-devised game, the government would randomly select, and then imprison, one hundred people. Then that evening, each prisoner would put his or her name into a hat. Then the prison administrator, a man named Harold, would draw a name from the hat. The corresponding prisoner would be taken aside, and then the prison guards would execute the remaining 99 prisoners. Then the following morning, the government would randomly select 99 more individuals, to bring the total number of prisoners back to one hundred. This game would be played for one thousand days, and would thereby eliminate 99,000 people, while providing suspenseful, yet wholesome, entertainment for the rest of the society.

Now in this society, there lived a man named “Adam," and as luck would have it, on the very first day of the game, Adam was selected to be one of the first one hundred prisoners. Of course both Adam and his wife knew that Adam would not survive until the end of the game, and they crumpled into each other while weeping and gasping.

Yet when the truck arrived, Adam got into it willingly. He did not struggle, because he knew that doing so would make the situation all that much more painful for his wife, whom he loved more than himself.

That evening, as the prisoners waited to find out whose name would be drawn from th...

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