Author: Dr. Nagireddy R Sreenath

The notification appeared at 3:47 AM: FINAL CONSCIOUSNESS BACKUP COMPLETE.

Amara stared at her phone, hands trembling. Tomorrow—today, technically—she will undergo the procedure. Her biological brain, riddled with an inoperable tumor, would be replaced with a neural substrate. The doctors promised it would be seamless. She’d wake up still being Amara, just in a different medium.

But which Amara?

She’d spent the last month with her previous backups, courtesy of NeuroSync’s Premium Continuity Package. Meeting yourself is stranger than any mirror.
Backup-23, from three weeks ago, still had hope the experimental treatment might work. She cried when Amara told her it hadn’t. Real tears on a real face, salt-taste and red eyes—except the face was a rental body, the tears manufactured by borrowed glands, and Backup-23 would be deleted within forty-eight hours of successful substrate integration.

“I don’t want to stop existing,” Backup-23 had whispered before leaving, fingers tight around Amara’s wrist. “I know that’s what happens to us. Redundant data. But I’m me, Amara. I feel as real as you do.”

Amara had reported it. Standard existential crisis, NeuroSync assured her. Common in 40% of backup interactions. The backups would be humanely terminated. They wouldn’t feel a thing.

Backup-19, from before the diagnosis, was worse. She laughed too easily, made plans for a hiking trip next spring, couldn’t understand why Amara kept staring at her with such desperate envy. Amara had wanted to warn her—get screened earlier, push for the MRI, change something—but the NeuroSync tech stopped her. “Paradox protocols,” he said, not apologetically enough.

Each backup had her memories, her mannerisms, her irrational fear of moths. Each one insisted she was the real Amara.

Now Amara understood what Backup-23 had meant. Tomorrow, she would die. Something would wake up claiming to be Maya, with all her memories intact, believing it had survived the procedure. But would it be her? Or would it be Backup-32, wearing her identity like a stolen coat while the real Amara simply… ended?

She thought about running. The tumor was accelerating—two weeks of cognitive function left, three if she was lucky. At least the substrate would give her decades. At least someone who loved her family would continue existing.

At least there would still be an Amara.

She opened the backup interface. Thirty-two previous versions of herself, stored in NeuroSync’s servers. Thirty-two Amaras who had each believed they were the original.
Her finger hovered over the termination protocol for Backups 1 through 31.
They were already gone, really. Discontinued instances. But somewhere in those server farms, thirty-one versions of her were frozen mid-thought, mid-breath, still believing they were real. Still believing they would wake up tomorrow.

She initiated the deletion.

Backup-32 would wake up tomorrow believing it had survived. It didn’t need to know about the others. It didn’t need to carry the weight of being a copy of a copy of a copy.

It could just be Amara.