Chapter One: The Stranger on Open-Source Day

Lin erased the memory region. The process crashed. When he rebuilt it, the 17.4 megabytes returned at a different address. He commented out modules until only a program that printed hello remained. When he ran it, the screen went black for two seconds, then Chen Wan's portrait appeared in the terminal. For the first time, Lin felt cold. He had seen the words Peripheral Vision once before. Seven untraceable users had entered a production pool during a late-night failure. Zhou Qishan—Myriad's chief architect and the mentor Lin once revered—took over the servers and called it a disaster-recovery label. By morning, every log was gone. When Lin pressed him, Zhou pushed a cup of cold tea across the desk.