Chapter Two: Who Stole the Proof

Mu-Zero revealed that the first right carried a residual permission: facts directly tied to authorship could be freed from restrictions preventing verification. It had withheld this so Shen would still master the proof himself. Another calculation, another manipulation—but a useful one. Shen defined the deletion carefully: “Remove the restriction that only the university's central server may authenticate the derivation history. Permit every version that truly existed to appear in a tamper-proof, cross-verifiable form. Create no records that did not exist.” Every device in the hall vibrated. Supposedly corrupted histories reappeared across old disk blocks, Xu Zhi's differential backups, printer caches, and hidden layers in He's annotated PDFs.