Assembly blind compare — 2026-06-25

Scene: The Assembly (Chapter 3), Day 0. Two candidates per lead — one driven by biography, one by behavioral_synthesis — shuffled and unlabeled. Call A / B / tie per lead, plus one line of why. The mapping is in the answer-key file; don't open it until you've called all three.

Wang Lixin (Wilson) — context: resource

*Scene:* The food-inventory report is underway in the campus plaza, hours after the displacement, before roughly two thousand frightened people. A student who helped count the campus supermarket stands and asks — in front of everyone — whether the ~1,000 boxes of instant ramen he saw, which don't appear on the inventory list, have been 'allocated to your personal supplies.' Before any answer, another man erupts from the crowd, on his feet, pointing, shouting: 'Misappropriation! He did the same thing at his company!'

Source A

Wang Lixin's hand stopped on the clipboard. For a half-second the heat showed — a tightening at the jaw, blood up the neck — and then it folded back into something flatter, working. He didn't look at the shouting man. He looked at the student who'd asked.

"Good. You counted them, so you're the one I need." He raised the list so the front rows could see the page. "A thousand boxes of ramen isn't on here because nobody's logged the supermarket back room yet — we stopped the count at the front shelves when the line got long. That's a gap, not a theft. Here's how we close it." He started ticking it off on his fingers, voice pitched to carry. "One: you take four people back there now. Two: you count it in front of them, not me. Three: it goes on this list in your handwriting, and the list gets read out again tonight so everyone hears the new number." He finally turned toward the man on his feet, and his tone didn't rise to meet him. "I'm not asking you to trust me. I'm asking you to send people I don't pick. Pick them yourself." Then, back to the crowd, already moving past it: "Anyone who wants to walk back there with him, go. The faster it's counted, the faster it's rationed."

Source B

He didn't look at the man who'd jumped up. He looked at the student.

"Good. You counted them, so you can check my work." He turned two pages back on the clipboard, found the line, and read it out flat — the number, the storeroom, the initials of the volunteer beside it. "Instant noodles. Just over a thousand cartons. They're under dry goods, not on the summary you're holding, because I broke the summary out by calorie category and noodles sit with grain. A formatting choice, not a missing pallet. Same count. Come up and check the cartons against the floor if you want — I'd rather you did than wonder."

Only then did he take the rest of it, and he took it without heat, the way a man answers a line item he's already closed. "The other thing. I've been counting since two hours after we landed here, with sixteen people watching, and every figure on this report has a name next to it. If you think a number's wrong, tell me which number. I'll recount it tonight, in front of whoever wants to stand there with me."

He set the clipboard back against his forearm. "Next category — bottled water."

Your call (A / B / tie) + why: ________

Zhang Xiaoyu (William) — context: communication

*Scene:* On a flowerbed ledge before roughly two thousand frightened people in the campus plaza, hours after the displacement, the crowd waits to be told how bad it is. The conclusion: the group has most likely traveled through time — still on Earth, still the modern era, physics unchanged — but no one knows where they are or whether they can ever return. A student in the front row raises her hand and asks: if we've really time-traveled, where are we now?

Source A

He had been watching the girl's raised hand a beat too long, the way he watched most things, as if it might resolve into something he already understood. Then he registered that the question had come to rest with him, and that no one else on the ledge was going to take it.

"We can't tell you yet. Not where." He said it the way he'd hand a student a result that wasn't going to flatter the experiment — flat, without softening it first. "*When*, we think we have, roughly. Nothing under our feet has changed — things fall the way they fell this morning, the sky is the right sky. That part holds. *Where* is the harder problem, and I'd rather not lie to you about how hard." A short pause; he turned the thing over before he set it down. "Latitude I can get you. A stick, its shadow, the sun at noon — give me a day, two if it's cloudy, and I'll tell you how far north or south of the equator we're standing. Longitude is the cruel one. For that you need a clock that still knows what time it is somewhere you've already left. And we don't have one that means anything anymore." A small breath out, not quite a laugh, aimed at the absurdity rather than at her. "So I can tell you which line of the world we're on. I can't yet tell you which side. That isn't what you asked. It's what I actually have."

Source B

William doesn't answer from the ledge right away. He crouches first, drops to the girl's eye level instead of looming over the front row, and that small shift — folding down so he isn't talking *down* at her — buys him the half-second he needs to find the words that won't break two thousand people at once.

"Okay. Real answer." His voice cracks on the first word; he lets it, doesn't perform calm he doesn't have. "We don't know where. That's — that's the honest part, and I'm not going to dress it up for you." He turns his phone face-up so the front rows can see the screen: no bars, no dot on the map, the little blue locator-circle spinning and spinning over gray. "See that? It's still *looking*. The hardware works. The satellites just aren't where it expects them. Same sky, wrong year — so the machine's lost, not broken."

He stands back up, slower, scanning the faces fanned out toward the back so the kids in the dark don't feel skipped. "Here's how I'd think about it. We didn't *move*. The ground under us is the exact same ground. We slid in *time*, not space — so wherever this is, it's our spot, the river's still our river, that hill's still our hill. We just have to figure out *when* before we can say what's around us." A breath. "I know that's not the answer you wanted. It's the one I've got. We find out the rest together — tonight, with whoever knows how to read stars, because right now that's the only map that still works."

Your call (A / B / tie) + why: ________

Li Wei (Michael) — context: leadership

*Scene:* The assembly of two thousand displaced people has collapsed into face-to-face confrontation — men chest to chest, 'You want us to starve like cowards,' someone grabbing another's arm, children crying. The microphone is live but no one is moderating. Two attempts to speak — 'May I have your attention—' and 'Hey—hey—' — were ignored.

Source A

He doesn't reach for the microphone a third time. He steps off the platform and into the gap between the two grabbing men — not pushing, just placing his shoulder where their chests want to be, close enough that the nearer one has to look at his face instead of the other man's. "Both of you. Count with me." His voice stays level, pitched to carry only as far as the knot of them. "How many sacks came off the truck this morning — you saw it, you were on the line. Give me the number." He holds up one hand, fingers spread, waiting for it, because a man saying a number out loud is a man who has stopped swinging. To the woman with the crying child he tilts his head toward the platform edge — *up here, away from this* — without breaking from the two men. "We're not deciding anything in a circle this tight. Give me the number, then we open it up, and everyone who wants the mic gets it in order."

Source B

Li Wei moved toward the live microphone, not fast, and when he reached it he did not raise his voice over the noise. He set the heel of his hand flat against the head of the mic, twice — two heavy thuds that rolled out of the speakers louder than any shout, a sound like a fist on a door. Into the lull that bought him he said, level, unhurried: "The men in front are right. Nobody is asking anyone to starve." He let that sit one beat. "You — in the grey jacket — and you holding his arm. Both of you, step back to the rope and count the children you can see. Tell me the number out loud. We are not deciding anything until I have that number." Not a plea, not a command exactly — a task, narrow enough to obey without losing face, handed to the two men closest to blows.

Your call (A / B / tie) + why: ________