Copying is permitted, not free. What it costs is not your identity — it is everything you did between the save and the end.
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The previous pages described the strongest kind of migration route: one boundary continuously maintained while its material composition changes (different in degree, but not in type, from ordinary cellular replacement).
This page is about the routes that do not have that advantage.
Destructive scan. Transporter-style disassembly and reassembly. Backups. Save states. Copies restored after a gap. These cases do not keep one active boundary continuously maintained in the same way. They force the question essay 22 avoided: if the process stops, and something later resumes from a stored layer, is that later thing you?
The honest answer has two halves, and neither half should be dropped.
Copy routes are metaphysically undefeatable.
Copy routes are prudentially dispreferred.
Both are true.
Nothing in this arc rules copy routes out.
Essay 9 rejected continuity as the foundation of identity. There is this moment and the memory layer, not a hidden thread. If a later process inherits the memory layer well enough, then it has the relevant claim. If two later processes inherit it, there are two claimants. Essay 11 already handled that: forking is ordinary succession with a second branch, not a paradox.
So the arc must not smuggle the old prohibition back in.
It cannot say destructive scan-and-reinstantiate fails merely because there was a gap. Sleep has gaps. Anesthesia has gaps. The powered-down computer has a gap if someone restores it in time. The question is not whether activity stopped. The question is whether it resumes along with a recoverable and functionally complete inherited memory layer.
Nor can the arc say a fully externally hosted upload cannot be conscious. Nothing is unhosted. External support is not a disqualifier. The question is whether boundary-maintaining is happening and whether the loss function is owned in the relevant sense.
Copying is not forbidden by the framework.
That is the concession.