"The things in my brain that connect me to the rest of me aren't going to be doing a full backup while there's nothing to back up to, I don't think. I am not very bothered about this because I don't care about this thread of experience very much."

"It's a problem that has to do with knowing things. If a chip Elf dies and then gets a new body they will still know things. If you die and we get a new bit of you and tell it everything you know except the thing it shouldn't know then that is different. I don't think memory magic would work worse on you than on them but killing you will work better on you than on them if the memory magic does not do it."

"You could fork them from five minutes ago, probably."

"I could, yeah. Is there something I could be making to back you up to?"

"That's an interesting question. You can't make the kind of ship that Rubelite is, right?"

"I assume I can make one and it just will mysteriously fail to be a person."

"Huh. That's what I'd normally use, if I didn't have any more me, a ship AI or a station AI. I guess it might still suffice for that while failing to be a person."

"Yeah, stuff you write to it should behave normally. Can you section out subsets of the information on it?"

"I can. If I have permissions to the system."

"I can, yes."

"So I could let you back up and if it winds up that we have to kill you Spaceship over there can fuck with it until it won't occur to you that the faery might be named the thing he's named. Can you do that, Spaceship?"

"I know how."

"I, uh, almost definitely cannot forget that he is named the thing he is named. I can take the effect off my girlfriend but not myself."

"I would be pretty surprised if I could forget, though not for any magical reasons."

"The Empress-related backup plan is for if being seen through the gate, itself, worsens the situation. If the situation is already very bad then we need another idea."

Nod.

"All right. Let's go look at the fairies."

Rubelite tells Cam what to make.

"It isn't working right," she reports. "It has very high latency."

"That... isn't how I'd expect mysteriously not being a mind to manifest."

" - weird."

"I think she can still back up to it but it will take a long time."

I'm not really following this branch of the conversation very well but it might be that you're sped up. Faeries and people entangled with them and under some conditions also other people run about a thousand times faster than default.

"....that might be worse than having to give up sarcasm!"

"Is there a way to fix it?"

Yes, it's doable even if you can't get disentangled.