Chapter Two: The Living

She placed her notebook on his desk. Five statements filled the page: the third eastern window was cracked; the lobby aquarium held seven fish; Shen Zhou used a blue mug; the guard was named Zhao; Shen Lan had died in 2014. The first four were false in the current world. The window was whole, the aquarium held nine fish, his flask was white, and the guard was named Chen. The last sentence stopped his breath. “You knew my mother?” “No. I knew the fact before it was modified.” Half an hour earlier, Perch's monitoring system had found an impossible object: one commit with two parents but no merge. As the tester on duty, Lin Wan had opened it and glimpsed another world for a few seconds. She wrote down the contradictions immediately.