The Silent Merge

The pull request looked innocent enough. Three files changed, fourteen lines added, two removed. The automated tests passed. The code review approved. The merge button clicked.

Nobody noticed that the timestamp on the commit was wrong.

Two weeks later, the quarterly audit revealed the discrepancy. Transactions from March appeared in February's books. User registrations that should have existed didn't. The data wasn't corrupted — it was rewritten.

The investigation led back to that single merge. A git rebase gone wrong, compounded by a CI pipeline that trusted timestamps implicitly. The silent merge had rewritten three months of history.

They called in the forensics team. They rebuilt the timeline. They found the ghost commits — changes that existed and then didn't, Schrödinger's code living in the space between pushed and merged.

In the end, recovery took six weeks. The spell to undo the damage filled seventeen pages of the grimoire, each line a careful incantation to restore what was lost without breaking what remained.