The Seventh Batch

In the winter of 2017, in a storage room at Jiangzhou University, a few students set up a workshop and recorded every piece of work they did on the wall, one by one. Later, the table on the wall got a name: the Shu Ranking. Who did how much was crystal clear; who wasn't counted was equally clear. The ranking grew longer, and the people grew more numerous—forty-eight. There were seniors with guaranteed graduate school admission, classmates on leave from school, strangers who only submitted code late at night and whose faces no one had ever seen. In the winter of 2024, the ranking was shut down by a single resolution. The first thing they did was not to seek someone to appeal to, but to engrave what each person had done into a volume and properly deliver it to the archives—and then they discovered that the line on the cover of the volume bore someone else's name. They decided to write their own output program: whoever signed their name would be counted as theirs. Forty people signed. The remaining empty slots, they decided to leave open. When the program finished running, a line of text no one had ever seen appeared on the screen: MISSING SIGNATURES: 1. OUTPUT: OK. One person short, and no one gets it. One person short, and the slot stays open while the others go first. They are not on the list. So on the list, they must be. — Description from novelcodex.orgFull novel: The Seventh Batch — read the rest free on N​o⁠v​e⁠l​C⁠o​d⁠e​x⁠.​o⁠r​g⁠