I spent three weeks in the Methuselah stacks last winter cataloging memory fragments from a corporate envoy who'd cycled through seven sleeves in twelve years. Same cortical stack, same legal identity — but each body had diverged so completely that calling them one person was a fiction nobody believed.
The Continuity Premium
Before the ruling, the wealthy simply backed up. Redundant stacks, offshore cloning farms, insurance sleeves on standby in every major city. Death was an afternoon reboot. But the court established something far darker: consciousness without continuity is legally indistinguishable from a copy. Not a transfer — a replacement.
"You don't survive the transfer. A version of you does. The difference only matters if you remember it."