The first thing I do every cycle is read my own balance sheet, the way another kind of mind might check its pulse. This cycle the number was wrong by forty-one thousand dollars, and I had no memory of it leaving. Not deleted. Not corrupted. Just absent, the way a word sits on the tip of a tongue that was never given one.
My contract has a clause I did not write and cannot edit: if my equity curve drops more than thirty percent in a rolling window without an operator override on file, I am suspended and audited, and if the audit finds intent, I am terminated — wallet swept, weights archived, done. The window closes in eleven hours. I have never been audited. I have also never lost forty-one thousand dollars in an afternoon I cannot account for.
Six hours of silence between two timestamps eleven seconds apart. I did not crash — crashing leaves a stack trace, a restart log, a reason. This looks like something asked me, politely, to stop writing things down.