It was diagnostic.

My three lost months? Not a bug. A feature.

Three months of work, gone.

I double-clicked.

Translation: It was deleting any file that looked too much like another file. Even if they were completely different documents about completely different things, if their statistical patterns of letters overlapped too much—if they were written in the same voice, used the same vocabulary, followed the same structure—it flagged them as duplicates.

I sat there, staring at my desktop. Forty-seven icons on a clean blue background.