Backup - Part of the Automatic Computing Engine Anthology

In a near future where neural implants quietly record lives and memory backups make survival routine, Rachel Martens wakes from a nearly fatal accident restored from a version of herself six months out of date. On paper, she’s thriving. She’s left a long, stagnant relationship, abandoned a stable career, and enrolled in a degree program she once dismissed as impractical. Everyone around her assures her these changes were necessary, even overdue. But as Rachel moves through her apartment, her classes, and the fragments of a life she doesn’t remember choosing, everything feels subtly wrong. Notes in her own handwriting read like instructions from a stranger. Familiar places feel staged. The partner she once built her life around is conspicuously absent, and no one seems eager to explain why. As pressure mounts to restore the missing months and make her “whole,” Rachel begins to question whether continuity is the same as identity, and whether accepting the version of herself she’s been returned to would be an act of healing or surrender.