Marco stared at the corrupted download bar on his screen. 99%... Error: File Mismatch. His knuckles were white around the mouse. Outside his apartment in Reykjavik, the aurora flickered, but not from solar winds. It flickered because the global render pipeline was failing.

99.8%. 99.9%.

His apartment door burst open. Two figures in black tactical gear stood there, their faces obscured by flickering, unrendered polygons. "DMRN shut it down," one said, voice flat. "The file is a vector. If you install that cache, you're forcing a hard reboot of the planetary shader. Everyone will see the wireframe for 0.3 seconds. Their brains might not recover."