But if you sample the physical evidence of this woman’s life, the algorithm generates a completely different profile for who she should have been: a pattern of splashing out on vintage Westwood pieces, buying McQueen at auction and high-grade sample items from pop-up boutiques, sourced by word of mouth and highly prized. Shopping was a challenge and an art—even a game. The software posits a bric-a-brac house full of curiosities gathered over decades, a wayward impulse purchaser of the strange and unique. If you take the library and the art into consideration, the jagged mismatch is even stronger: there’s no gradient in it at all, no recollection of a life lived in the median. Even the fairly cursory connectome analysis of Hunter’s home available on the commercial server says firmly that the woman was who she had always been. There’s no fracture line in her. There is pain and change, but it never undoes her. It only changes her direction of travel.