The client had brought both photographs. Poren looked at them for a long time. They were dated the same day, the same hour, authenticated independently: one at a transit hub in the north, one at a harbor in the south. The client in both images was wearing the same coat and carrying the same bag. Her expression in both photographs was unreadable in the same way. The client sitting across from Poren had no memory of either location, no memory of that day at all beyond waking up at home and going to sleep at home and a gap of twelve hours in between.
"It's real, " Poren said. "The authentication is clean. You don't need me to tell you that."
"I need someone to tell me what to do with it."
Poren had heard this many times. The Verification Gap Registry existed for cases like this: personal SCVs, documented simultaneously, formally verified. Registration created a record, gave the case a number, placed it in the archive alongside the seventeen other verified personal SCVs currently on file. It did not explain anything. It did not resolve the paradox. It meant the paradox was official.
"What does registration give me?" the client asked.
"A formal record. Other practitioners can access it for research, with your permission. If another case resembles yours, the archive helps make connections. Mostly it means what happened to you is documented in a way that persists outside of you."
"And if I don't register?"
"Then it stays here." Poren gestured at the space between them. "In the gap between verified and public. You know it happened. I know it happened, under confidentiality. The photographs exist. But the world doesn't know."
The client looked at the photographs. She had been looking at them for weeks, Poren could tell. The particular blankness of someone who has looked at a thing until looking no longer produces new information.
"What does that mean? Not registering?"
"It means it's yours, " Poren said. "No one else needs to verify it."
The client was quiet for a long time. She said she would think about it. She took the photographs and put them back in the envelope and put the envelope in her bag. She said she would call.
After she left, Poren sat at her desk. In the bottom drawer there was a file she had put there eight years ago and not opened since. Her own case, documented before she had known this work existed, before she had known there was a registry or a name for what had happened to her. She had built the whole practice, in part, around the question of what to do with it.
She had not decided yet.
She closed the drawer and went back to work.