Page 51 of Matteo

I blink, frozen for a few seconds.

“My teeth!” Irene cries, getting agitated, but luckily Arthur is soon at her side.

He shakes his head at me. “She’s taken her dentures out again and forgotten where she put them.”

“What the hell is going on?” Matteo asks.

But I’m too fixated on the commotion around me, and trying not to laugh. “We’ll find them, Irene. Don’t worry.”

“I hope so,” she says, entirely serious. “I rather liked them.”

“Just give me a minute,” I say to Arthur, before returning to my phone call. “Sorry about that.” I'm not sure if Matteo heard all that, but I step into the hallway, away from all the chatter.

“What was that all about?” he asks, sounding incredulous.

“Irene, my neighbor, has misplaced her dentures again.”

“What?” he cries. Then, “Where are you?”

“I’ll explain later. Tell me what happened?”

“We've got another backup discrepancy.”

“It’s the weekend. Do people come into the lab at the weekend?”

“No one but me, but people can access it.”

“What kind of discrepancy?”

He exhales. “The backup completed successfully, but the numbers don't line up. I thought it was a reporting error. It's not.”

“What's not lining up?” It's difficult for me to comment without being there. “I need to see it.”

“Okay, wait up,” he says, then, a few seconds later, “I’ve emailed you some screenshots.”

I pull the file up on my phone and scroll through it quickly, looking for something odd, a break in pattern. Entries stream past. Backup jobs. File counts. Verification reports. The usual stuff.

And then I see something that looks odd. I scroll back and look again.

The backup reports 1,248,322 files copied successfully.

The live system shows 1,248,117 files.

I check the previous report and see the discrepancy there, too.

Different numbers. Almost the same gap.

“That is odd,” I say slowly.

“Told you. What does that mean?”

“It means the backup thinks it copied data that the live system says doesn't exist.”

We fall silent again, each of us mystified.

“Could it be a software glitch?” he asks.

“Maybe.” I scroll through the report again. “But glitches are usually irregular. This is consistent.”