A shadow fell over Frank. A human hand.
"No!" Frank screamed, but his voice was just a 128kbps audio stream.
"Frank!" Ryely screamed, rolling down a hill of crumbled Oreo dust. "We only have forty-seven minutes left! Then… the End Credits."
The neon glow of the "h264" compression artifact flickered across the sky of Foodtopia, a glitch in the simulation that the residents had come to call "The Shimmer." It was the digital ghost of the old human world, and it was the only thing keeping their fragile civilization alive.