Then, one by one, the frames began to render. He saw himself, asleep in his bed. He saw himself, walking to his PC. He saw himself, reaching for the mouse. He saw himself now , staring at the screen.
The Frame Counter
0.3 FPS.
Relief flooded him. He uninstalled RivaTuner. He deleted MSI Afterburner. He purged every registry key. He went to bed, vowing to play console games from now on, locked at a juddery 30 FPS where nothing could hide between the frames.
And Alex realized, with a slow, creeping horror, that he was no longer playing Destiny 2 .
Alex slammed the power button. The PC fans whirred down. He sat in the dark, his heart a jackhammer. After ten minutes, he rebooted. He didn't launch Destiny 2. He launched Notepad. Then his browser. Then Minesweeper . The RivaTuner overlay was gone.
0.2.
And in the final rendered frame, he saw the RivaTuner overlay again, but it was no longer on his monitor. It was stitched directly across his own vision, burned into his retinas.
And in the top-right corner, in that familiar, crisp yellow font:
He saw it on the third frame.
It read:
Just a black screen.
Just a blink. The monitor went black, then returned. But something was wrong. The RivaTuner overlay was still there—the tiny yellow font—but it was no longer displaying "141 FPS."
The counter began to drop.
He woke to sunlight and the soft hum of his idle PC. The monitor was dark. He reached for the mouse. As his fingers touched the plastic, the screen flickered to life.