When I turned on my player and saw what this was called my mind went "Yes Subversion is revision control software, it has nothing to do with the story. Subversion is revision control software but it has nothing to do with the story. Subversion is revision control software but it has nothing to do with... the... hey! It does! AWESOME!"
Ha, that was my reaction too. We use Subversion at work, after switching over from Visual SourceSafe some 7 years ago. Put my head in the right place from the beginning.
I loved this story, even though I’m not sure whether it would work for readers/listeners who aren’t tech-minded and are unfamiliar with version control systems. And I always love Christiana Ellis’s readings.
Actually, I'm not sure it helped me all that much. I found the rules confusing at the beginning specifically because it wasn't quite like software version control--specifically the detail about x% of his mind going to one version and y% to another. If you have different versions of software, they're essentially copies, not just fighting for the same resource.
But as a story--well, what's the story? Guy comes in to office, talk talk talk, roll credits. I don't mind action-lite stories or stories where the primary conflict is emotional (as here, where a guy is in a romantic triangle with himself). But a story where the POV character is secondary to the conflict? A story where the conflict itself (for me) didn't raise a lot of emotional stakes because I didn't really know or care about the people in the conflict? That sort of story doesn't really do much for me as a story.
You're not wrong. But I still liked it. I liked it in the same way that I like much of the Golden Age SF--it doesn't necessarily connect with me emotionally, but it presents an interesting speculative element and then explores it a bit. If it ends before I get bored then it's done well, and I didn't get bored here. It may be because, as I've mentioned before, I like debugging fictional software--doing so fires cylinders of my brain that I find enjoyable. I probably won't listen to it again, but the intellectual charge that the story has given me has been spent (a downside of this kind of story versus an emotional charge which can more easily be revisited)
And I so get why there are rules on the version control. We've done a project or two at work that violated those, and the merging (aka reconciliation) was a nightmare. In some cases, a new product line would branch off and be in active development on a separate branch for 1-2 years, and then have to be merged back into the code base. The length of time separate made it difficult, but as the story also pointed out the independent acquiring of new functionality was a major problem too, especially if both branches had some version of the functionality acquired completely independently.
I don't remember if it said in her bio, but I'm guessing that Elisabeth is a software engineer, yeah?