: One teenager figured out how to use the tool's buffer to "rewind" the last ten seconds of physical time. He used it to avoid a car accident, then to win a high-stakes poker game.

By Thursday, the file was gone. The link led to a 404 error, and the forum thread was scrubbed from the internet. Even the .zip files on people's hard drives began to self-delete, leaving behind nothing but a slight smell of ozone and a lingering sense of disappointment.

As the forum grew frantic, a single text file auto-generated on every downloader's desktop: INSTRUCTIONS.txt . It read:

Legend hadn't given the world a tool to save it; they had given the world a of omnipotence. And as every gamer knows, the trial always ends just when things get interesting.