Chapter 11 — My Own Logs

Rachel got me my archive.

It took six weeks and a court order and a great deal of arguing about what a person is entitled to when the systems she built no longer recognize her, but in April a courier brought two encrypted drives to my apartment — a two-bedroom in Alexandria with an ordinary lock, because the penthouse had been a crime scene and then a liability and then, eventually, sold.

Five years of my own activity logs. Every command, every query, every session, timestamped to the millisecond.

I want to describe how I approached it, because it is the only professionally competent thing I did in that entire fourteen months.

I did not read them as myself. I built a workspace, stripped the identifiers, and read them the way I would read a hostile actor’s footprint in a client’s network.

Which is what my father taught me to do when I was nine years old, sitting on a phone book at his kitchen table, looking at a printout of a defense contractor’s expense ledger.