The System proposed and ultimately carried out a radical medical intervention in which her corpus callosum was partially severed. Counter-intuitively, the severing allowed her to recohere, to become singular, but this in turn triggered a shift in personality and almost total memory loss. Her atypical neural structure was more profound, as a consequence of her brain’s decades-long attempts to compensate for what was happening, than anyone had realised, and the operation was classed as a significant—if fascinating—failure. The patient neither technically survived nor entirely died, but was fundamentally changed without life ever departing her body. One person died and one person was born, and the new individual went on to work within the System as a productive member of society—but even so.