The invasion of the Gold Master Timeline didn't start with soldiers or explosions. It started with the dust bunnies.
Jen was sweeping the floor of the Meow & Bow when she noticed it. Usually, the dust under the espresso machine was a comforting, grey fuzz—a testament to a busy cafe. But today, as she swept, the dust didn't just move. It resolved.
Each speck of dust suddenly gained a high-definition texture. The fuzzball separated into thousands of individually rendered particles, each catching the light with a physics-accurate glint.
"Elara!" Jen called out, staring at the broom. "The dirt is lagging my brain! It's too detailed!"
Elara Vance looked up from the counter. She was currently trying to calibrate the POS tablet, but the screen had become so sharp she could see the sub-pixels.
"It's the overwrite," Elara said, rubbing her eyes. "Elara-Zero initiated the Factory Reset yesterday. It's starting to process the environment assets."
She looked around the cafe. It was... unsettling.
The scratched wooden tables were smoothing out, their imperfections replaced by a repeating, flawless wood-grain texture. The chipped mugs on the shelf were mending themselves, becoming identical, perfectly round cylinders. Even the air felt thinner, cleaner, and completely devoid of the smell of roasted coffee.
"It smells like a hospital," Ignis complained.
The former Golden Dragon was sitting on the floor, wearing his orange tracksuit (which was now startlingly high-quality fabric). He was holding a half-eaten kebab that looked like a plastic prop.
"My meat cylinder," Ignis mourned, poking the kebab. "It has lost its grease. Yesterday, it dripped with the nectar of the gods. Today? It has zero specular highlights. It is dry. It is... optimized."
"The flavor text has been removed," Li Wusheng noted from his corner.
The Cyber-Monk stood up to stretch. But as he moved, something was wrong. Usually, Li moved with a fluid, slightly glitchy grace—often clipping through table legs or floating slightly above the ground.
Today, his foot caught the edge of a chair leg.
THUD.
Li tripped. He didn't float. He didn't recover. He slammed face-first into the floorboards with a heavy, realistic impact sound.
"Ow," Li groaned, rolling over. "My nose. I felt... resistance."
"It's the collision detection," Elara realized, rushing over to help him up. "The Gold Master runs on a physics engine with zero tolerance. In the Patchwork World, the hitboxes were loose. You could walk 'near' a chair and be fine. Now? If your toe touches a pixel of the chair, you trip."
"This is unacceptable!" Li shouted, rubbing his very red nose. "I am a Grandmaster of the Void! I rely on 'Phantom Range' and 'I-Frames' to navigate existence! How am I supposed to walk if I have to account for every millimeter of geometry?"
"It gets worse," Aldren Vance's voice drifted from the shadows—or rather, from where the shadows used to be.
The Vampire Lord was standing in the darkest corner of the room, but he wasn't hidden. The lighting in the cafe had shifted. Instead of moody, ambient shadows, the room was filled with "Global Illumination." Light bounced off every surface, filling every crevice with a soft, uniform, and incredibly flattering glow.
"I cannot brood," Aldren whispered, looking at his hands. "There are no dark corners. I am backlit. I look... angelic."
"You look great, actually," Jen noted. "Your skin is glowing."
"I DO NOT WANT TO GLOW!" Aldren roared. He tried to pull his cape around him to create a shroud of darkness.
But the cape didn't swirl dramatically. It draped with perfect, heavy cloth physics. It got tangled in his arm. It folded realistically.
"My cape," Aldren whimpered, struggling to untangle himself. "It has weight. It has drag. I cannot flare it! It just... hangs there! Like laundry!"
"We're being nerfed," Elara said, gripping the counter. "The Gold Master is removing our 'Style' and replacing it with 'Realism.' And we don't work in Realism."
Suddenly, the front door opened. But the bell didn't jingle. It played a crisp, pleasant notification sound.
Walking in wasn't a customer. It was a drone. But not the clunky, vacuum-cleaner drones of the Critic. This was a floating sphere of white ceramic and glass, hovering silently on magnetic waves.
[OPTIMIZATION UNIT 01]
The drone scanned the room with a blue laser.
"Anomaly detected," the drone spoke in a soothing, automated voice. "Furniture arrangement is inefficient. Pathfinding for NPCs is obstructed."
It floated toward Li Wusheng.
"Entity: Li Wusheng. Posture is suboptimal. Please align spine to grid."
"I will align your face to the floor!" Li shouted. He assumed a combat stance. "Iron Palm!"
He struck at the drone.
In the Patchwork World, Li's Iron Palm had a "Splash Damage" effect. He didn't need to hit the target; he just needed to be close enough for the shockwave to connect.
He struck the air three inches from the drone.
Nothing happened.
Li blinked. "What?"
"Miss," the drone stated calmly. "Attack failed to connect with hitbox."
"I was close enough!" Li argued. "The shockwave! The spiritual pressure!"
"Hitbox is Pixel Perfect," the drone explained. "Please improve aim accuracy."
The drone extended a small, white mechanical arm and gently pushed Li backward.
Li stumbled over his own feet again (because of the realistic friction) and fell into a chair.
"I hate high definition!" Li wailed.
"Aldren! Get it!" Elara shouted.
Aldren lunged. "I shall consume you with... well, with whatever I have left!"
He tried to turn into mist.
ERROR.
Instead of vanishing, Aldren simply became slightly transparent.
"Transparency Effect active," the drone noted. "Collision remains enabled."
The drone bumped into the "mist" version of Aldren. It was like bumping into a solid glass statue.
"I am solid mist?" Aldren asked, horrified. "That makes no scientific sense!"
"It is physically accurate," the drone corrected. "Water vapor has mass."
"I am not water vapor! I am the night!"
The drone ignored him and turned its laser on Ignis.
"Entity: Ignis. Tracksuit is low-resolution. Replacing with High-Poly texture."
A beam of light hit Ignis. His comfortable, baggy orange tracksuit shimmered. It tightened. The fabric turned into a stiff, high-end athletic material that squeaked when he moved.
"My comfort!" Ignis gasped, pulling at the collar. "It chafes! It breathes too well! I feel the air on my skin! It is vulnerable!"
"Elara, do something!" Jen yelled, throwing a scone at the drone. The scone bounced off the ceramic shell with a realistic thud and rolled away.
Elara grabbed her tablet. She tried to hack the drone, but the code streaming on her screen was incomprehensible. It wasn't the messy "Spaghetti Code" of the Patchwork World. It was perfect, elegant, unbreakable C++.
"I can't hack it!" Elara said. "The code is too clean! There are no backdoors! No memory leaks!"
"We have to get dirty," Rex Chord said, stepping in from the patio. The cyborg bard was looking rough; his neon implants were dimming as the world tried to force him to look like a normal human with prosthetics. "If the world is too clean, we have to mess it up."
"Mess it up how?" Elara asked.
"Lag," Rex grinned. "If we can create enough chaos in this room—enough physics objects moving at once—we can crash the local render engine. If the frame rate drops, the 'Pixel Perfect' hitboxes will get sloppy again."
"You want to lag reality?" Elara asked.
"I want to drop the frames to zero," Rex said. He tuned his ukulele. "Jen! Start throwing things! Li! Spam the emote button! Aldren! Spin!"
"Spin?" Aldren asked.
"Just spin in circles! It forces the lighting engine to recalculate shadows constantly!"
"I shall spin for chaos!" Aldren declared. He began to twirl like a top, his heavy cape flapping sluggishly.
"Jen! The beans!" Elara commanded.
Jen grabbed a bag of coffee beans and ripped it open. She threw them into the ceiling fan.
RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT.
Thousands of beans rained down on the room. The Gold Master engine frantically tried to calculate the trajectory, collision, and shadow of every single bean.
"Li! Emote!"
Li Wusheng stood up. He began to perform the "Tea Ceremony" animation, but he canceled it halfway through and started it again.
Bow. Cancel. Bow. Cancel. Bow. Cancel.
He looked like he was vibrating.
"Ignis! Eat!"
Ignis grabbed a fresh kebab (where did he get that?) and began to eat it with impossible speed. The physics engine struggled to render the chewing deformation of the meat.
Rex Chord played a chord that used every note on the scale simultaneously.
The room began to stutter.
The "Global Illumination" flickered. The perfect wood grain on the tables started to blur. The air grew heavy, as if the universe was struggling to breathe.
The drone stopped moving. Its blue eye turned yellow.
[WARNING: CPU LOAD HIGH. FRAMERATE DROPPING.]
"It's working!" Elara yelled, her voice sounding choppy, like a bad Skype call. "Keep... go... ing..."
Aldren spun faster. The lighting engine gave up. His shadow detached from his feet and started floating around the room independently.
"My... shadow... is... free!" Aldren stuttered.
Li's emote-spamming caused him to clip through the floor again. "I... have... re... gained... phan... tom... range!"
Li threw a punch from inside the floor.
Because the frame rate was so low, the "Pixel Perfect" check was skipped. The punch connected.
CRUNCH.
The drone flew backward, crashing into the wall. It sparked and fell to the floor, its ceramic shell cracking.
The "High Definition" effect in the cafe snapped.
The dust bunnies returned. The wood grain became scratched again. The smell of coffee—burnt, oily, delicious coffee—flooded back.
Aldren stopped spinning. He fell over, dizzy. "I... am... nauseous."
Li popped out of the floor. "I have clipped back into bounds. Victory."
Ignis swallowed his kebab. "The grease is back. Thank the gods."
Elara walked over to the broken drone. It was twitching.
"They tried to optimize us," Elara whispered. "And we lagged them to death."
"But this was just one unit," Rex warned, looking at the sky. Through the window, the clouds were still perfectly rendered sheep. "The Gold Master is still overwriting the city. We can't spin in circles forever."
Suddenly, the broken drone projected a hologram.
It wasn't Elara-Zero. It was Canon-Li.
The floating sage looked disappointed.
"Patchwork Entities," Canon-Li intoned. "Your resistance is illogical. You rely on instability to survive. This confirms my hypothesis: You lack the fundamental skills to exist in a high-fidelity environment."
"We beat your drone, didn't we?" Elara countered.
"You crashed a scout unit," Canon-Li corrected. "But you cannot crash the Core. Since you refuse to optimize voluntarily... I shall mandate it."
A golden ring of light appeared around Li Wusheng's feet.
"What is this?" Li asked, trying to step out of it. He couldn't. It was an invisible wall.
"You rely on glitches because you have forgotten the basics," Canon-Li said. "Therefore, you are enrolled in the Mandatory Tutorial."
"Tutorial?" Li gasped. "No! I have played this game for three thousand years! I do not need the tutorial!"
"Everyone needs a refresher," Canon-Li smiled benignly. "Please complete the following objectives: 'Walk Forward 10 Steps.' 'Look Up.' 'Jump.'"
"I will not!" Li shouted.
"You cannot leave the circle until the objective is complete," Canon-Li said. "And the tutorial... is unskippable."
The hologram vanished.
Li stood in the glowing ring. A giant floating arrow pointed at his feet. Text appeared in his vision: [USE LEGS TO MOVE.]
"This is humiliation!" Li roared. He tried to use his "Cloud Leaper" technique. He hit the ceiling of the tutorial box. BONK.
"Elara!" Li cried. "I am trapped in the mechanics explanation! Help me!"
Elara looked at her friend, trapped in a glowing UI box. She looked at Aldren, who was hugging his shadow which had finally returned to him.
"We need to get to the source," Elara said. "We need to find Elara-Zero's server and shut down this update before the whole world gets stuck in a tutorial level."
"Where is she?" Jen asked.
Elara looked out the window. Across the street, a new building had appeared. It was a sleek, white marble coffee shop that glowed with blinding perfection.
The sign above the door read: THE GOLD STANDARD.
"She's right there," Elara said. "Competing with us."