His apartment lights dimmed. The hum of the mini-fridge shifted pitch. Outside, the streetlamp flickered and died. And then, from his speakers—not a voice, but a sensation, like subwoofer feedback from hell—a sound. It wasn't human. It was the roar of a render farm, the whisper of a cache purge, the scream of a corrupted TIFF.

Leo froze. The cursor moved on its own—a perfect, fluid arc, drawing a mask around his own face on the live webcam feed. The mask turned red.

“That reality is just a timeline waiting to be overwritten.”

“Fourteen minutes,” Flame said. “A car bomb in a parking structure. A news anchor reading a teleprompter that doesn’t exist. A stock market dip timed to a specific frame rate. You can stop it. You can recomposite it. Just drag. Drop. Render.”

The webcam light blinked on. He hadn’t touched it.

“What truth?”

But Leo’s?

The first node he dropped was a Blur. The second, a Key. The third, a Tracker. The satellite feed shifted—just a fraction of a pixel. The bomb car rerouted. The news anchor’s script changed from “explosion at city hall” to “unexpected parade.”