Shun is the new kid in school, but he's already managed to attract the attention of the school bully, who's now making his life a living hell. It doesn't seem like things could get any worse, until the night he finds himself and a group of his classmates inside a creepy, abandoned mansion known as the Jailhouse. They quickly start to hear strange sounds and see weird things, but everything escalates when they realize they can't get out. Once they're trapped inside, a blue, unnaturally large figure chases after them. Is it a new species? Or is it the ghost of their old classmate who died in an accident? Nobody knows, but one thing is for certain... If it catches them, they're dead! The scariest game of tag in history begins!

Even if he has his closest friends on his side now, no one else seems to be willing to believe Shun about the dangers of the Jailhouse. Deciding to take matters into his own hands, he desperately codes an emergency update for his game to try and prevent any further tragedy. But they say the path to the Jailhouse is paved with good intentions... Will he give whoever gets stuck inside the tools to survive? Or will it all be used against them? Whoever the unlucky victims are next just might be in for an ugly, mutant surprise...

A week after the first nightmare, Shun begs his classmates not to go anywhere near the abandoned mansion on the outskirts of town ever again, but the gears of fate seem to be turning against his will. They find themselves in the Jailhouse once more, and the man-eating monster that lives inside is happy to welcome them. Will they have the power to change anything? The game is the same, and the rules are simple: get caught and you're dead. It's time for round two in this lethal game of tag!

After Shun’s update doesn’t go as planned, he finds that the rules to the game are quickly changing on him. His worries are getting bigger and darker as the playing field expands and he’s forced to turn against one of his own friends to try and protect the others. Is there still a happy ending to be had after all of this, or will the Jailhouse still win even after they’ve escaped its walls? Let the grudge match begin.

Shun and his friends may have fled the Jailhouse, but now that the game is broken, the terror doesn’t end there. The rules—as well as the maps and the players—are changing rapidly, and they’ve only just scratched the surface of the mysteries at play. Things will culminate in one final round of the deadliest game of tag ever. Will they truly find a way to escape? Or will they be stuck in this nightmare forever?

Following in the wake of his groundbreaking work War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel De Landa presents a brilliant, radical synthesis of historical development of the last thousand years. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, while engaging — in an entirely unprecedented manner — the critical new understanding of material processes derived from the sciences of dynamics. Working against prevailing attitudes that see history merely as the arena of texts, discourses, ideologies, and metaphors, De Landa traces the concrete movements and interplays of matter and energy through human populations in the last millennium. The result is an entirely novel approach to the study of human societies and their always mobile, semi-stable forms, cities, economies, technologies, and languages. De Landa attacks three domains that have given shape to human societies: economics, biology, and linguistics. In each case, De Landa discloses the self-directed processes of matter and energy interacting with the whim and will of human history itself to form a panoramic vision of the West free of rigid teleology and naive notions of progress and, even more important, free of any deterministic source for its urban, institutional, and technological forms. The source of all concrete forms in the West’s history, rather, is shown to derive from internal morphogenetic capabilities that lie within the flow of matter—energy itself. A Swerve Edition.