The Seventh Batch

In the winter of 2017, a few students set up a workshop in a storage room at Jiangzhou University and recorded every task they completed on the wall, one by one. Later, the chart on the wall got a name: the Shu Ranking. It clearly showed how much each person had done, and just as clearly showed who had been left out.

The ranking grew longer, and the number of people grew too: forty-eight. There were seniors accepted into graduate programs, classmates who had taken a leave of absence, and strangers who submitted code only in the dead of night, people they had never even met. In the winter of 2024, an official resolution shut the ranking down. Their first move wasn't to find someone to plead their case. Instead, they compiled a record of what everyone had done and properly submitted it to the archives. Then they discovered that the name on the cover belonged to someone else.

They decided to write their own output program: only the person who signed would be credited. Forty people signed. They decided to leave the remaining slots open. When the program finished running, a line appeared on the screen, one none of them had ever seen before:

MISSING SIGNATURES: 1. OUTPUT: OK.

If one person is missing, no one gets anything.

If one person is missing, the place stays open, and everyone else goes on ahead.

They aren't on the list. So they have to be on it.