Chapter Five: The Bankrupt Gambler's Public Book

The underlying records did greater damage. Polaris's submission omitted forty-seven minutes on the third afternoon, precisely covering the PAN-72 orders. Han blamed a system failure. Tang projected a Polaris fault log from six months earlier. The Tidal One crash also contained a forty-seven-minute gap. Both gaps carried the checksum of the same deletion script. “The original backup was always preserved,” Tang said. “I wasn't waiting for you to repeat the mistake. I was waiting for you to prove the first time wasn't a mistake.” More than two million people watched live. Han cut the connection too late. Regulators issued a preservation order that evening. Three institutions canceled subscriptions to a new Polaris fund.