The byte wasn't random. It was a timestamp. A counter. As if something inside the renderer was keeping time.
“Frame buffer empty. New host required.”
From the server room down the hall, a cooling fan spun down to silence. Then another. Then all of them.
The error wasn’t a bug. It was a wall.
Kael had rewritten the descriptor heaps twice. He’d stripped the shaders down to their bones. Nothing worked. The error was a hydra: fix one head, two more grew.
And the render device did not hang.