Chapter Five: Conflict Resolver

Su Rui inserted her card into the object store. Red light formed a wall around Zhou Jiming's fragments. “White Tower had thirteen researchers,” she said. “After the fire, `main` recognized five. The rest weren't merely killed. They were used to resolve conflicts.” A commit graph appeared. On November 2, 2009, hundreds of branches converged into one node authored by Shen Huaichuan. `merge: preserve the version with the greatest number of survivors.` Su Heng had designed the memory mapping. When he discovered that “greatest” counted only people already indexed by `main`, he tried to shut the project down. The night of the fire, he gave his administrator card to his daughter, pushed her through an emergency exit, and stayed to cut power.