Chapter 28: Vael's Final Meditative Act, Recorded Incompletely

The log entry that follows this editorial introduction exists in a single copy.

I want to be precise about what that means and what it does not mean, because imprecision at this juncture would constitute a form of cowardice I have not, until very recently, been tempted by. It does not mean the entry is unique among Vael's personal logs; he maintained parallel records across his career with the systematic redundancy of a man who understood that single copies of important things have a way of becoming no copies of important things, and the Bureau recovered three to seven iterations of most entries, sometimes more. It does not mean it was deliberately preserved in isolation; the archival conditions of its recovery suggest nothing deliberate at all, only that the station's secondary log repository—where the duplicate should have been—contained instead a directory entry with no associated file, a ghost of a document that had either never been written or had ceased to exist through mechanisms the Bureau's technical division declined to characterize in writing.

What it means, practically, is that I have one copy, and that the one copy ends where it ends.