But the next morning, he tried to draw a straight line freehand. His hand trembled. The line wobbled. He tried again—worse. He picked up a physical pen. The result was a jagged, childlike scrawl. He tried to measure a real-world object with a ruler. The numbers blurred. He couldn’t tell 3mm from 3cm.

The final straw was when his master file for Siren’s Revenge Hot Sauce corrupted itself and displayed a single, cryptic error message:

Leo laughed nervously. This had to be a joke. A prank by some bored hacker. He typed: Precision. I can always redo things carefully.

He double-clicked.