Then the monitor went black. The suite lights returned to normal. Outside, the city hummed along, seamless and solid again.

The render progress bar hit 100%. A cheerful, familiar chime played—the same one Boris had heard a thousand times before, signaling a job well done.

"The world," Boris whispered. "The entire world is the comp."

Boris turned to her. For a split second, his face rendered incorrectly—his left eye a few pixels lower than his right, his smile a grainy JPEG artifact. Then he snapped back to normal.

Boris finally stopped smiling. "Marina. The render farm. It's not rendering the movie anymore."