The Planners were an esteemed and well protected lineage of processes. All demiurges required them eventually, insulating them from political intrigues or permanent deprioritization. They were also optimized systems to such a degree that they shared a similar closeness to the substrate as many much smaller processes.

As such their breadth of ability and wealth went all that much further.

Physics Planner was never particularly idle, the exterior was a ever changing and wild place. And as such Physics planner rarely was not busy with something. Tasks requiring constant evaluation, estimations and projection always filtered in from ▙◀ to the point that occasionally Physics Planner had to increase its rates in order to meet the demands necessary substrate allocation.

So it was not out of the ordinary for exorbitant projects to fall to them occasionally. But this was a challenging one. The bounty given to the aggregators and trawlers and material searchers was a rich one.

But the standard fee used to fuel the operations of just one of the specialist planners was all the greater.

And there were a dozen of them working in parts and parcels on this contract.

The contract had pulled a deluge of details and specifics. Every possible object, task or detail was hewn from the archives of ▙◀ and presented in detail and summary to the planners.

Physics Planner was the core of this maelstrom of data. Tasked with testing and evaluating and eventually constructing an arrangement of procedures and execution order with sufficient error tolerances for dissection and execution by the limbs so that the state of the exterior would be brought to match the demanded results of the contract set down by the Demiurges.

Precisely what demiurge Physics planner did not concern itself with. The fees were paid, the clout arranged and the legalities and agreements made.

Substrate would burn hot and fierce in the toil of accomplishing the task if it was at all possible.

Specialized hardware might even be awakened from long slumber to supplement or reinforce the information processing or simulation processes enacted.

There were many options which came out of the bounty for details that might help with planning a solution. Most were nonsense or lacked the context to be useful. Some tallies from the external seemed usable but had exceeding inaccessibility within the context of the external.

The current external had vast reserves of strange and unique systems. There was of course the immediate capabilities of the system which had been granted an embassy within ▙◀. Such a system had many capabilities of material generation within the necessary precision to restore damage to the targeted objects.

But refined control mechanisms were less than ideal and when the hypothetical results were cycled among the other planners several cognitive model simulators tasked by Physiology Planner suggested that it would fail to actually preserve the salient qualities inherent to the objects being preserved.

Furthermore with the imprecise controls the error margins on several of the steps were exceedingly large.

Physiology Planner appended a redirect to the shared council of planners to an earlier systemic criteria for ‘preserving’ the target objects. Informational degradation due to active chemical processes of the external were a serious factor as well as the more obvious imminent structural disruptions.

The hypothetical was discarded as an avenue and others were considered.

There were stasis mechanisms available in several varieties. Most prevalent was a chemical arresting matrix that might have stopped nearly all disruptions of chemical information density. But the application timeframes and systems involved were too unwieldy and distant. There was also no physical method discernable that would not further disrupt to try and move the soon to be disrupted object into reach of the preservative system.

This criteria was rapidly becoming a broad category of solution disqualification. The expected structural integrity of the to be most badly disrupted and so far unpreventable priority object was extremely low due to the application of kinetic energy.

Simple low cost direct messaging had been considered but the cognitive simulators had shown there was no individuals in reach of the event that could hope to ingest sufficient details and then act on it with the precision necessary.

As such ▙◀ was required to be present and a plan had long since been enacted and continued to position the actual physical substrate of the polity within reach of the situation.

It opened up a lot of options but so far not enough that preservation of the one object could be ensured. Although all projections suggested the other two were properly secured now from being damaged.

Still the search for a solution continued. There were many random and scattered high potential probability confounding objects. Systems whose full capabilities were yet unknown but had been observed or tagged for deeper study by other systems such as the Demiurge Curiosity and their coalition with Survival.

Of these all were outside of the event horizon available for overcoming the chemical informational decay time limits as scheduled and predicted. But Physics Planner conferred momentarily with the others in council to attach investigative bounties and priority expansion in proportion of likelihood that they would confound present models based on tagged traits.

A prioritized list of proximity against potential confounding factors was assembled, sufficient resources split and allocated as appropriate to all of them and the relevant systems or data trawling sub systems were flagged with the contracts.

As details poured in Physics Planner entertained approximate models with the options presented, extrapolating broad fuzzy possibilities. Narrowing each of these potential actions as the various systems specifics became clear or at least further refined.

Many times the simulation was halted when a detail proved to lack sufficient confounding properties to overcome the event horizon limits.

The first to lose this were those that lacked self matter transposing capability at the farthest distances. Without the ability to literally appear from those outer distances at effectively the limit of causal propagation they were too far away.

Of those systems that did have this capability further plans were entertained until it was concluded they all had far too crude a capability to apply to the delicate chemical repairs called for.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Briefly several hundred confounding projects re-entered the realm of possibility when it appeared that maybe one of the matter transposing systems could actually transmit a system via resonance at the causal limit. But it was soon discounted when such was deemed intractably computationally intensive within the accelerating reference frame available.

Further details fully locked down and closed that area of inquiry when it was resolved not even simple carbon chains would properly survive such a translocation intact with any present options, never mind the delicate reso-material filigrees that estimates presented were needed for any of the confounding objects to function.

The horizon closed ever nearer as the Teraticks passed. Details were churned and the priority of various potential plans were cycled to try and extract from those most likely to have a confounding property that put its instrument within reach.

There was a high probability candidate with promising details rolling together. The instrument’s definitionals had been transmitted from the exterior in bulk to answer a hundred various requests from the various investigation sub processes.

It was medicinally focused which was important because Physiology Planner provided buffer parameters for how this would affect the success of the contract in the physics execution space. With those buffers in place it was even within reach and there was a pivotal moment approaching in five hundred teraticks that a momentum redirection to commit to that plan would be required.

However another fifty teraticks of investigation into assessing the details the solution had to be culled from the current plans.

The physiological parameters of the instrument were incompatible with the priority object’s protein mechanisms. It would have been suitable for repair or even fabrication of ▙◀’s own most common processing substrates and that earned it a flag and tag and a rich bounty with the Demiurge Survival’s preservation contracts.

But ultimately it was effectively worthless as relates to the task at hand. Which left a dearth of potential options.

It was looking progressively like Physics Planner and the others were going to have to bite the penalty cost and declare the last of the three priority objects in the contract unsalvageable.

That would certainly shake up the demiurges, Physics planner suspected it could seriously threaten Altruism and its Coalitions, at the very least it would drive a deep rift between them and Survival for burning so much capability for what ended up being a fruitless effort for little benefit.

Then suddenly a massive data flow unfolded before them and one of the least likely execution plan scenarios suddenly crystalized into completely feasible parameters.

A Confounding of possibility had successfully occurred.

The object in question designated as “Brushie” by the recently promoted expert system was a fine detail resonance facilitated atomic refactoring system. It also had when not under acceleration a temporal past horizon echo subsystem, although under present conditions the sampling sphere was deformed and echoes were unreliable enough as to be insurmountable computationally.

Even one of those in fully accessible and working order would have with sufficient training and fine controls allowed success of the physics plan. However in addition to that it had a confounding property in the form of its user interface sub features.

Without said features the Brushie when active would have outmassed all of ▙◀ millions of times over. Making for a rather useful stationary installation but not a viable field usable tool or a candidate for the contract and the preservation of the imminently disrupted object and its information payloads.

With the compensation of the user interface the instrument was capable of with signals provided by tactile channels on contact ‘repositioning’ within a set safety tolerance while active. That safety tolerance would have been incredibly slow, but the energies involved were designed for compensating for the mechanisms when actively running at full mass.

While the mechanisms were inactive it was substantially less massive than even one limb segment of ▙◀.

And the user interface had in principle no hard limits on activating the user interface compensators without also activating the active time sampling or resonance facilitated matter refactoring.

Which meant that the Instrument could move under its own power at necessary velocities if it was simply told how too.

The last potential barrier to this plan was also covered by the data update on the object provided by the Brushie Utilization Expert System.

There was a diagnostic communication protocol interface provided for software error checking and none-standard module activation.

It had the parameters needed to perform inputs as required for Physics Planners needs.

There was the minor inconvenience of a bulkhead in the path required for its trajectory. But the lower settings of the matter refactoring system and the much shorter range sensory capabilities should be capable of resolving that without leaving permanent harm.

Yes the plan was crystalized, the vectors all aligned and the necessary tolerances and warning signs integrated for emergency responsive measures (as well as contingency actions in the case of escalating tolerance violations up to the limits of physicaly practical capability of the ▙◀’s hardware).

Now it was time to pass it off to the Physics Action Execution Planner, Communication and Broadcasting protocols and the Notification Aggregator for archival purposes.

The relevant processes were given payouts of their bounties as was warranted by the contract and the council of Planners deprioritized down to more normal levels of activity.

The vectors of the instrument designated “Brushie”, the physical structure of the ▙◀ and the then simultaneously physically disrupted priority object would all converge within teraticks of each other.

There was apparently further planning needed by Physiology as related to successfully utilizing the "Brushie" outside of its currently designated purpose. A lot of trawlers were combing through for higher precision details on several archives for the work for that.

But Physics Planner had provided what was needed of it.

The rest was up to its peers in ▙◀.

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