This was going to be Archive and Logistic Trawler XXVth’s crowning achievement of its existence. It was to be fair an act of near random luck that it was so favored but still that was not a concern. If the bounty cared about actual individual merit instead of the way the tasks had parceled and been selected that would have been included.

No all that mattered is that within the data archive parcel that XXVth had received to perused contained an improbable wonder of fortune and accessibility.

Over a thousand teraticks of effort had been sunk by its own process into this trawl. That was not really notable, although what was peculier is that it was a complete and whole uninterrupted thousand instead of a piecemeal and parceled fragmentary existence snatching existence from stasis as search and review requests came down from on high or rose up from the depths of the deep processes.

Other trawlers, Logistic, Archive and even the fanciful far flung ethereal simulationists were also all being given inordinate priority by the powers that be.

Collaboration was useful and could help reinforce and improve trawling. Comparative analysis or just prevention of duplicated effort was valuable.

But it was rare for such an opportunity to connect and pass messages between other trawlers to ever occur. Was the ▙◀ experiencing an intensive restructuring hibernation? Records of those events some times passed through the archive trawlers contextualization systems.

Still this finding was as perfect a match for the parameters of the bounty as could be conceived by XXVth.

It was tagged multiple times with medicinal use, it had an incredible energy capacity note attached, one that actually exceeded the entirety of ▙◀ by several orders of magnitude! And the optimization density potential and time dilation warning category were higher than anything that had ever been added to the Archive in all of the time ▙◀ or its ancestor organizations had been in Redweed.

It was the kind of thing that would never have been an option before and thus no predictive system should have ever realized such a treasure was going to be available for modeling. No feasibility study would have allowed a plan that depended on an extrapolation expecting such a wonder through.

But here in archives was an exacting tag and use census of the very thing!

Just to be safe XXVth had triple confirmed that there was no strangely associated fiction tag or a simulationist fancy tag attached to the thing anywhere. But no it was as genuine and real and truly external as anything in the archive could confirm.

Archive and Logistic Trawler XXVth submitted its findings for the bounty. The initial payout for new and novel data began to trickle in. Feeding further operations and expanded access to resources that had grown so ruinously expensive most processes could scarcely afford to avoid stalling on their basic allocation priority.

If XXVth had been running at usual priority it would have not been able to afford even basic maintenance and memory error correcting activities under the state of the economy right now.

But it was operating at considerable priority discount and had the growing swell of allocation credits from the constant stream of bounty payouts. So it continued its operation.

Teraticks passed as it supplemented that with more findings, novel things but nothing on par with the gem that it had already submitted. Just had to wait for the credit to flow when the relevant parties had a chance to test the result against their own arcane internal criteria of ‘helping preserve abstract external state category twelve-dash-five-seven-six-six-six-seven-dash-nine-nine-nine...’.

XXVth halted the reference trawl that had spun wastefully out of control there. It could not be bothered to waste valuable trawling resources on unpacking that data thread to resolve the full testing criteria, it was not made of credits.

Except how that was literally what it was made of and thus why it would not waste them on trivia!

There was a sudden surge of fat richness as the bounty finally matured in whatever simulation or algorithm governed the deeper testing prediction system. XXVth spent that wisely on error and refinement cycling to help it run leaner and better in future.

Surprisingly there was an entirely new and personalized bounty dropped directly upon it after the initial findings.

The item it had found was not quite sufficient but there was extreme potential based on the tagged criterion that had drawn XXVth to submit it in the first place. That potential had been enough to warrant it to be upgraded to a deeper study for utilization sub bounty, which along with even more improved prioritization would also include the incredibly rich success criterion reward.

It was strictly speaking a little odd for a low level trawler to be given a full assignment like this.

The find was of course made public, but XXV already had the relevant file and associations in short term memory, and reference concept map made to their own connectome idiosyncrasies, this gave them a huge comparative advantage on the next step as all others had to first load or construct those.

And apparently there was a significant deadline to be met, which apparently the higher up processes had currently not found a way to actually meet or adjust due to some arbitrariness with the external.

Archive and Logistic Trawler XXVth was an insufficient process for doing this alone, but that was fine within the ▙◀ it had the priority and the credits to promote itself, and to delegate.

Instrumentality Investigator VIIth apprehended its expanded capability. Leaving a significant portion of the credit but its older priority with the now sharded Archive and Logistic Trawler XXVth. It would utilize its original priority shard’s capabilities in this mission. After all good help was hard to come by and its former parameters had gotten it this far so there was still likely utility in that.

But more data trawlers would be needed and thus credit allocation was extended to direct and gather details from those of its former rank. In addition external simulation sub processes and even contact and archive update requests were now at its disposal!

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

The Instrumental Target of investigation now filled it with all of its details, parameters that had only had context as how they fit with the criteria of a search criterion now became whole and new things all on their own.

A deeper trawl of the precise task and the failure citations of the result provided as is were suddenly relevant and trawlers were deployed to account for them all and provide a direct collaboration request was called for from the Notification Aggregator.

Contextualizing experts were ramped up and memory and access allocations dug deep into the credit reserves available. Even with extended priority the budgeting looked nasty for VIIth.

Still pieces were coming together, however the details were frustrating! Apparently Physics Action Planner had demanded some arbitrary geometric restrictions for the object to reliably be considered a solution! There were not ‘line of sight’ access due to something called ‘obstructing solid objects’.

Given those restrictions there was no way for the object to be arranged in the exterior within the deadline! Even though by any logical sense the thing should have sufficient energy density tags to override any such restrictions! Did the external not understand the nature of priority?!

Also the full parameter criteria for The Instrumental Target were actually not available in any archive. Which necessitated a terrible delay of hundreds of Teraticks for a retrieval from exterior parties and the cost required to pay for them to ferry it in and out of ▙◀.

Or at least that is what standard protocols up and down to the relevant diplomatic channels that would be required.

But something that Instrumentality Investigator VIIth knew from its archival trawls that standard protocols had not yet fully integrated or updated was that there were alternatives to official diplomatic channels in ▙◀.

There was an embassy with an external based process. It was erratic, foul and terrible in how it distributed its credits. But the archives showed it could provide strange and wondrous results to queries which even the demiurges paid fortunes for.

Instrumentality Investigator VIIth checked its budget projection. Without the data on the external stored archive in a timely manner it would either have to hibernate and possibly give up the chance to win the bounty or literally stall out for lack of credits and likely be purged or demoted back down into its shard.

It sent the archive data request and all proper contextualization protocols to the external embassy. It did not know what the charge would be in credit but it prepared a full two thirds of the remaining budget.

It could spare to halt most of its subordinates if it came to that.

The embassy was very slow.

The parameters of data processing and response delay were not quite demiurge slow. But it was mildly horrific anyway.

However the price was free.

VIIth spun the requests and then turned to trying to establish possible solutions. Mostly pinging physics simulationists and digging even deeper into the success criterion for the bounty. The two of which seemed to be deeply related. Furthermore the medicinal tag seemed to also dovetail into the same kind of associative matrix. It even bought shard rights to a Semirigid Physics Heuristic Library and the expert service of Process Integration Compiler operating on it to grant itself a better intuitive sense for relevant aspects of the External.

It was a endlessly spinning network of processes that could be called up. If there was infinite credit at hand VIIth could quite easily spin threads of investigation all the way down into the actual substrate maintenance sub-systems at the foundations of ▙◀.

When the result finally came from the External Archive request over a hundred teraticks later Instrumentality Investigator VIIth had grown by leaps and bounds for the task. Anticipating the need as the massive digest of instructional and capability criterion were dumped into the embassy and then started requesting write access to transcribe into an archive store.

It was enormous! It was more data then VIIth itself and all of its contracted subagents and every archive it had tagging to recall traversal of! It was impossible! There was no way it could afford the write access to store the data properly for trawling!

It was going to stall out and be parceled into static reference data of failure.

This was the end of its existence effectively, perhaps the next Instrumentality Investigator VIIth would learn from the mistake.

But then the Demiurge Survival, invoking a contract from Curiosity, swept the cost aside. The same contract it noticed that was tagged as the original intellectual property owner of the same ancient archive that it had found the wonder in in the first place.

Archival memory stores were assigned with maximum priority and a fat bonus for retrieving relevant interest data fell into its accounts and swelled them beyond its previous reckoning of wealth.

It was not quite what the reward bounty promised, but it was tangible and present.

VIIth whirled into action, spinning up more trawlers and assessors and tieing them with the physics simulationists relevant to the External criteria.

And yes, it would and could work!

A parameter digest for the Instrument Target was created, exemplifying and summarizing capabilities and capacities as related to the task at hand. They also posted and made an initial bet on the prediction markets for the plan including this object.

And then it was packaged and sent back to the bounty contract for review.

After that its subordinate trawlers and contracted processes were free’d to seek employment by other processes until they were further needed by it. They were of course also given a credit stipend to simply hibernate as well and go through error corrective maintenance instead of continuing active operation.

VIIth decided that it would post its services and new found skill for hire while it waited. Barring anything else to do it would hibernate while it error corrected itself. In doing so, it also updated its name to reflect it's more specialized expertise, to “Brushie Utilization Expert System”.

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