1 Agent Smith: {staring at the dead bodies strewn around the VR floor} Well. That... was... easy.
2 GM: The virtual kung fu master takes you prisoner and you spend six months in a VR prison. One day you wake up and find yourselves back in the real world, where only two hours have passed.
3 Paris: GM fiat! GM fiat!
3 Iki Piki: Shhh! Don't interrupt him!
4 Iki Piki: This is where he squirms to get us out of the mess we made of his plot.

2012-03-31 Rerun commentary: This is indeed a GM fiat, as it flatly contradicts the conception of time in cyberspace explained in strip 731, and which became the more-or-less consistent basis for cyberspace time thereafter. Although, that strip was in the future when this one was written, so it only ruins continuity in retrospect.

GM Fiat, for which TV Tropes does not yet have an entry the TV Tropes entry has a different name, making it hard to find quickly, manifests when the players do something so ridiculously character-endangering that the GM has to rescue them by deus ex machina, lest they all die and ruin all possibility of the GM actually getting to use his cool pre-planned adventure ideas.

It can also be used the other way around, by the Killer GM, when the GM's cool pre-planned adventure ideas simply involve killing all of the PCs in as messy a way as possible.