Not really a variant, but the canonical source of truth about the state of the data that all variants should represent.
Server by JSON Server, who's state (on startup) is configured here.
JSON Server is configured to add a delay (100ms at the moment of writing) before responding to each request. This is done to simulate a slow data store that cannot be sped up directly by the variants. The delay also allows the variants something to improve upon, as JSON Server is pretty fast already.
For comparison the Gatling load tests are also run against the API.