I Exploit Rule Loopholes and Create Bugs to Take Down the Commissioner

This city has ten thousand rules, and every day my job is to patch their loopholes.

I'm the lowest-ranking clerk in the Rules Repair Department, employee number 9527, responsible for patching a city governed by rules.

Rooms you must not enter, rooms you must enter, hallways where you must not linger, hallways where you must linger...

Every rule is perfectly self-consistent. Every rule kills anyone who fails to obey it.

Then one day, I found a countdown in an abandoned server.

In seventy-two hours, the logic of every rule in the city would deadlock, and forty million people would vanish.

I reported it. No one believed me.

I reported it again. I was called in for questioning.

I reported it a third time, and the person questioning me disappeared.

That was when I understood: the rules wouldn't break, but I would.

So I did something no repairman had ever dared to do.

I stopped fixing bugs. I made them.

"The room that must not be entered must be entered by someone."

One paradox devoured the entire building's rule against entry.