All vibes are contagious.  Light-years away from any charted region of the infinite galaxies, even the minutest of life forms is capable of sending out a small vibe that catches onto neighbors like plague.  The most extroverted is a sense of being in trouble.  Trouble spreads like wildfire.  The aura of a place becomes tense, breaths fragile and demeanors cautious.  There is a ringing in your ears that you can’t quite hear but somehow it still bothers you.  You’re a little more aware, as if you can hear things a second before they happen.  News comes with a wary feeling.  Maybe your eyes are a little shiftier.  The air around is so dense you could squeeze water out of it.  Trouble is a’brewin.

These guys were in trouble.  On a small, globalized world, in a quiet region, in quite a loud room, were the experts.  These were the guys.  They knew just how to solve this problem.  Trouble was, according to their very intelligent calculations, they needed to start about sixty-six years ago.  They had been with the attitude that all the problems they foresaw would be for their grandchildren, ultimately, to deal with.  Who knew if they’d even ever have grandchildren now.

They had never been certain these problems would even occur, they were just theories at first.  But now it seemed that they were faced with it, the end.  Now that “one of these days” had become today, the pressure was high.  The harsh, unstoppable, bitter cold reality of Universal mortality stung like absolutely none other.  Any precautionary defenses that could have already been put forward – food rationing, finding ways to harness solar energy, creating a major back-up plan; were just half-baked ideas the Department of Worldly Defense thought they had centuries to put into real action.  Most of their previous hours they’d spent – out to lunch.

The turning point – the realization – came at about noon the day before at the world capitol when a servant told the King they were all out of grapes…and wine.  Furious, the King decapitated the servant immediately and demanded an explanation from the merchants.  The merchants, innocent bystanders, tried to explain about the farmers.  The farmers had been grueling for the last five years – but they could not control the climate change.  The weather had been growing increasingly freezing, and the soil less and less fertile.  Finally it had become impossible to grow crops.