She reached for the phone to call her supervisor, then stopped. The log file was still open. At the very bottom, beneath the summary, a single line she hadn't written:
That's odd , she thought. Duplicates should have scattered fingerprints. This one was obsessive.
Her dataset was clean. Pristine. One block remained unique. The rest, gone.
Maya stared at the terminal. Three months of fieldwork—interviews, recordings, thermal scans, witness statements—all condensed into a 2.4 terabyte dataset. The problem wasn't missing data. It was drowning in it.
She amplified it.