It's odd what one finds when one goes poking around old schematics. And I mean really old. I did the traditional backup dump and swap routine with the ship docked next door [aside: This is a very old and very well regarded tradition among ships. One takes a copy of ones core memories and routines, and swaps it with another ship, both promising to pass it on with the next swap, in the belief that, should ones hull and processing substrates be irretreiveably lost, one will be reinstated into a new hull at the next opportunity. To the best of my knowledge, this has never happened, but given the tiny cost of storage vs. the potentially unlimited return from immortality, everybody does it anyway], and was catching up on station gossip when the transfer-received job metaphorically started jumping up and down and waiving it's arms for attention.

Transfer-received isn't that smart. It's job is to run a bunch of checks on received data to make sure that it's all there, it hasn't been scrambled in transit, and there's nothing in the data they're going to cause trouble later (at least on the mindless replicator level). It's job is also to ask for attention from someone smarter if it finds something odd. Given the strength of the ask, and that it had jumped straight to me, transfer-received clearly thought it had found something very odd. I had a look.

Of course, when ships do the dump and swap, one of the things we dump is copies of other ships we've swapped with. Ships generally hold that rifling through a colleagues soul is bad form, so the dumps are poorly indexed and can contain multiple copies of any given ship (although from different times). [aside: Dumb tools like transfer-received are fine, it's one soul looking at another that causes trouble]

Transfer-received was telling me that it had found a copy of me, and a very old copy of me. Taking the timestamp at face value, I'd found a copy of myself much older than any of my archives. Really, older than my records said I was. I thanked transfer-received (courtesy costs nothing) and told it to check the rest of the transmission, ran a quick check on local space (I was docked to a friend in a well travelled system, so I wasn't expecting trouble, but then I wasn't expecting to find a prehistoric version of myself either), excused myself from the ongoing chatter, turned off external comms, and settled down for a good think.