Tov is 67. She built the machine when she was 44 and began the sessions the following year. She is methodical. The record began with entry one, dated and brief: Erased: unified self. Notes: no detectable change in function. No subjective sensation of loss. Continued.
There are now 311 entries. Some run to several pages. Some are three lines. The list she gave herself at the start had 318 items. She is now at item 312.
Item 312 is: the belief that the order of operations was correct rather than arbitrary.
She has been skipping this entry for three years. She has run sessions on items 313 through 318 in the interim, building up a deficit the record now shows clearly if you look at the item numbers. She did not consider this avoidance worth hiding. Several entries read: skipped item 312 again. Logged. The last such entry is from four months ago.
She told herself it was a methodological question. Whether to remove a belief about the method while still inside the method. She wrote a paper on this question twelve years ago. She knows the answer. She has known it since before she asked.
On a Tuesday in March she sets the parameters, confirms the target, and runs the session. Four minutes.
Afterward she sits at her desk. She opens the record to entry 312. She writes: Erased: the belief that the order of operations was correct rather than arbitrary.
She looks at her hands.
She writes: Notes: no detectable change in the record. The 311 preceding entries are still what they are. Nothing has been retroactively altered.
She writes: Continued.