They froze. Even Hetty held her breath. For a solid ten seconds, the mansion became a perfect, still life of the afterlife.

The portal flickered. A progress bar appeared: Deleting: ghosts_s03e01.mkv (96%)

Upstairs, Trevor was staring at his own reflection in an old mirror. He wasn’t just blurry. He was made of large, shifting squares. “This is a new low,” he whispered. “I’ve been downsampled .”

libvpx error: Invalid frame dependency. Rollback initiated. Restoring ghosts_s03e01 from backup.

The code on the portal changed: Warning: No motion vectors detected. Reclassifying spectral entities as static background. Retention priority: LOW.

“Does anyone else feel… blocky?” he asked, waving a translucent hand through the air. Instead of the usual wispy trail, his fingers left behind a stuttering trail of pixels.

libvpx: VP9 encoding completed. Initiating garbage collection on S03E01 intermediate frames.