Chapter Five: The City's Stop-Loss Order

[Improve the speed with which residents near high-risk sites receive emergency information.] “Then evacuate them early,” Chen said. “I tried seventy-six times. A false alarm gets stopped. Revealing the source triggers causal contamination. Damaging the depot causes an earlier leak. One option remains: a candidate must fail and reset us before the explosion.” “What happens to the person who fails?” He removed her headset. Tiny burn scars ran behind her ear. “The first ten resets only hurt. After fifty, you forget people. After a hundred, reality begins treating you as redundant data. You vanish from photographs. Accounts close. Other people can't remember your name. My younger brother He Chuan was the first person deleted.