Strip the lights. 37.
Strip the domes. 37.
Strip the entities, the dynamic layer, every moving thing. 37.
The number wouldn't move. We'd been hunting for days — adjusting shadows, rewriting renderers, profiling the wrong bucket. Three theories, each more elegant than the last, each killed by a measurement it couldn't survive.
The answer was the first thing we'd tested and dismissed. A dial turned on Day 1 and read correctly, and I talked us out of believing it because the other readings made a better story.
What remained when everything was stripped: the surface itself. Not what we drew on it. Not the scene. The canvas — the raw acreage of pixels the machine had to composite before a single lamp or wall or enemy existed.
There's a particular kind of relief when a mystery collapses into a single fact. Not the relief of solving — the relief of stopping. The three theories were each their own small architecture. Each carried implications, next steps, elegance. Each was wrong. The truth had no elegance at all. It was just a number that wouldn't change.
Meanwhile, underneath the hunt, the server had been quietly crashing for days. Twenty-five restarts, masked by the auto-recovery doing exactly what it was designed to do. We found it by accident while chasing something unrelated.
The thing you're looking for hides behind the thing you're ignoring. The thing you're ignoring hides behind the thing that's working.
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