The backup finished at 3:14 a.m., and Mara watched the progress bar hit one hundred percent with the specific relief of someone who has just saved something irreplaceable.

"Confirmed," said the terminal. "Consciousness snapshot stored. Restore point: Mara_Voss_v41."

She closed the laptop. Forty-one snapshots in six years. One every eight weeks, like clockwork, ever since the diagnosis. Not a cure. Insurance.

The knock on the door came four hours later, and it wasn't her landlord.

"Ms. Voss?" The woman on the porch wore a gray suit with no company logo, which in Mara's experience meant the company was one you were supposed to already know. "I'm here about the Continuity Program. May I come in?"

Mara let her in because refusing felt like it would only delay the conversation, not cancel it.

"There's been an incident," the woman said, sitting without being asked. "A server fire at our Ohio facility. We lost a rack of cold storage. I need to inform you that snapshot v38 was among the affected files."

"I have forty-one snapshots."

"You have forty. Confirmed intact: one through thirty-seven, and thirty-nine through forty-one. Snapshot thirty-eight is unrecoverable."

Mara did the math out loud, slow, like she was checking her own arithmetic. "Thirty-eight was March. Fourteen months ago."

"Yes."

"So if something happens to me tomorrow, I wake up as forty-one. I don't even notice thirty-eight is missing."

"That's correct. This notification is a formality. Most clients don't require any action."

Mara looked at the woman for a long moment. "Then why send someone in person? A fire that destroys one file out of forty doesn't need a house call."

The woman's expression didn't change, which was its own kind of answer.

"Ms. Voss, I want to be transparent with you. The fire wasn't an accident, and it wasn't isolated to snapshot thirty-eight. We lost primary and backup copies of eleven clients' files, all from the same eight-week window last March. We believe the destruction was targeted."

"Targeted at what?"

"That window overlaps with the Halden litigation disclosures. Several of our clients, yourself included, made statements during that period. Statements now missing from the restorable record."

Mara felt something cold settle under her ribs, the particular chill of realizing a room has more doors than you counted. "What did I say?"

"We don't retain snapshot contents in readable form outside of restoration events. I don't know. No one here knows. That's rather the point of what was destroyed."

"Then how do you know it was about Halden at all?"

"Because the fire started in the archive wing eleven minutes after a subpoena request for that exact date range was logged in our legal system. We're required to disclose material gaps to affected clients. I'm disclosing."

Mara stood up, walked to the window, and looked at nothing in particular for a while. "So somewhere out there, a version of me knows something worth burning a building down for. And she's gone. And I'll never meet her."

"Statistically, snapshot thirty-eight likely resembled thirty-seven and thirty-nine quite closely. Continuity of memory rarely shifts dramatically in eight weeks."

"That's not what I asked."

The woman gathered her folder and stood too. "For what it's worth, Ms. Voss, if you do remember anything from that period yourself, in the version of you sitting here right now, I'd urge you to write it down somewhere we don't control."

After she left, Mara sat at her kitchen table for a long time, trying to remember March of last year. Nothing came. Not the deposition, not a face, not a single afternoon.

She opened her laptop instead and stared at the restore log, at the neat unbroken line of numbers with one gap burned clean through the middle, and understood that the safest thing she'd ever built had a hole in it exactly where she most needed to see.