Sam tried to draw his SC-20K rifle, but the frame rate dropped to three frames per second. Every time he moved, a trail of "ghost" Sams followed behind him. He wasn't sneaking through shadows; he was sneaking through literal dead pixels.
"Fisher," a crackling text box appeared at the bottom of his vision. "We’ve successfully compressed your molecular structure to fit into a Game Boy Color BIOS. Your mission is to infiltrate the 'Recycle Bin' and recover the lost DLL files."
He approached a guard—a flickering sprite that looked vaguely like a Russian mercenary but mostly like a squashed grape. Sam went for a stealth takedown, but because of the high compression, the "Physics Engine" had been replaced by a single line of code that just said: IF TOUCH GUARD THEN GUARD = GONE .
Sam Fisher didn't feel like a miracle. He felt thin. Extremely thin.