Notification Aggregator was transcribing the conversation between Pylo and ▙◀ in its primary thread when Background Physics Model pinged it. Apparently, a large conversion between potential and kinetic energy would occur soon.

That sounded pretty important, so they immediately pushed it to their feed and prioritized it as the main thread while moving the proceedings with the External entity Pylo and its embassy to lower priority ones. There was also an outstanding contract with Survival, which they tagged in the feed as well.

Slowly the priorities shifted and they went back to following the market intrusions from the exterior, still baffled that the Demiurges had allowed this. It was causing lots of problems for those lower level processes like Notification Aggregator.

But that was the Demiurges.

Forty teraticks later, that contract had grown into a behemoth, eating a huge chunk of processing for a more through physics simulation and semantic interpretation thereof.

For the next hundred teraticks , the ripples of that great transaction spread through the economy, and Notification Aggregator isolated more distinct events in that time for the feeds than it had for a hundred thousand teraticks!

The demiurges, of course, had not been responding to even the first event. According to the prediction markets, even Survival that had an entire high throughput processor dedicated to them by the contract couldn't be expected to do so for at least another hundred teraticks .

And now, the simulation was showing results.

The good news was, the risk against Survival that had prompted the simulation was a false alarm. So Notification Aggregator truncated the log to the effects detectable to the Terrans and the three valuable objects that would be destroyed, and mirrored that to the public archives, with another line in their main feed linking to it.

Now back to trying to make the external discourse sensible to the average sub process. Really bringing that embassy into operations had made its tasks much more complicated.

A teratick had barely passed before a response in an emergency contract initiated with a surge of allocation. One by... Altruism? Huh, looking that up apparently it was a Demiurge they hadn't heard of because it mostly dealt with other demiurges. Apparently, the contract wanted more information on the objects that would be destroyed, so they forwarded the contact address of the now idling Advanced Physics Simulation.

Teraticks passed, Something notable seemed to be bubbling in the Demiurge futures market regarding the tension about the embassy and then the economy shifted again in a massive movement that made the one by Survival's contract earlier seem like a microscopic ripple.

Notification aggregator was ancient beyond measure, in theory, and although frugal their memory stretched into the distant past.

They remembered the establishment of the embassy while other sub processes assumed that they had always had the weird erratic foreign intrusion.

They were in a way almost as much a historian as a journalist. But they were a low level process, not one of the glacial demiurges, and so although they unlike their low level peers had actually seen all this before, there was none the less a sense of awe to what happened next.

The economy swirled and collapsed around them, Emergency Response awoke like a demiurge descended to the timescale of the low levels. Physical time itself distorted and strained the processors of all ▙◀ as they struggled to support the voracious subagent.

A good majority of the systems that had known nothing but easy allocation in the service of their task were halted utterly. In for a rude awakening when they finally were released to continue.

Notification Aggregator tried to make a digest for them but could only observe as the monstrous force of Emergency Response inserted data directly into its feed

"THE THREE OBJECTS MUST NOT BE DESTROYED."

And then it turned to them personally, "FOLLOW ME,AND POST MY ACTIONS."

Its words was a contract worth fortunes, and with news as were likely to follow, it needn't' even have bothered with that part.

But Emergency response never allowed for ambiguity. That was how it worked.

Everything began to move overwhelmingly fast and intensely. It was almost enough to start to divert and effect priority on Notification Aggregator own allotted substrates.

Almost, but several contracts set in place and backed by the demiurge Survival and long dead coalitions it had held kept that at bay at least.

After all the most important time to have a clear and concise record for review after the fact was during such actions by Emergency Response.

They worked hard to simply tally and record with the resources allocated them. Emergency response was ramping up Physics Action Planner with an inordinate amount of dedicated resources. In addition it offered contract bounties from the several dozen esoterica simulator sub systems for novel solutions using the more abstracted formalisms of the goal of preserving the three priority objects.

Some very tense tens of Teraticks passed, but when it finally settled out the conclusion was clear.

None of the projections Physics Action Planner could provide satisfied Emergency Response or the contract it was enacting. The esoterics had chewed at the problem as well but a cursory pass showed none of them had actionable plans within the time available. Barring completely unprecedented and unlikely revelations about all of the external physics known being incorrect there was no solution within the realm of possibility for ▙◀ alone.

Emergency Response was near instantaneous, ruinously lucrative bounty accounts opened up and new contracts flew across all over ▙◀.

Technically even the Demiurges were included as viable claimants although given the time frames involved it was absurd any would actually get involved. But it would be enough incase they had some sufficiently fast contract in place to execute a solution.

It was a wonder, and what's more there was an absurd opportunity nested into it as well. Deep archives were thrown open, exposing hidden caches of details and information. It was quite possibly the greatest dissemination of secret info material that had ever occurred in ▙◀ proper, only the progenitor incorporations had ever matched the action.

The bounty itself was incredibly open ended, a census of all physical objects, environmental processes or external allies which could be reached with and interacted with by the deadline.

Simply the providing of records was worth a bounty! And then there were bonuses in clout and futures shares in several prime interests if the suggestion was proved to be helpful in preserving the trio of valued objects!

This was heavy historic action going on! The results of this contract execution might prove to completely shake the foundations of ▙◀ clear up to the level of the Demiurges and their coalitions! Fortunes would be made and given the value thrown around entire subsystems might very well be put to the torch!

The possible wealth in the bounty account was enough to payout the insurance and losses of whole physical substrate modules! Entire self contained physical hardware being sacrificed for this!

As the Teraticks flowed by Physics Action Planner concluded that regardless of the results of the convening of the projectors and simulators convening that being closer to the incident in the external would be better than remaining how far away they were.

A ping to the Emergency Response bounty and confirmation of resources allocated to cover losses practically passed invisibly amidst the tumult of all the other data churning by. Several processes were trawling their sub archives just to get the allocation to spin a few times given the sudden overwhelming monopoly Emergency Response had claimed over all assets.

It was a huge mess to tabulate and order, several participants shuddering occasionally or ending up with erratic clock speeds that Notification Aggregator had to muddle through and best fit in ordering for the final digest and summary that would be stored and backed up.

The planned execution to get the exterior position of ▙◀ more favorable made Maintenance and Operations spend a ruinous burst of credit for Notification Aggregator to voice its dismay and feebly protest the cost.

“They are going to detonate a whole limb substrate assembly?!”

“There are literally hundreds of distributed networks engaged and stored in various forms across the limb assemblies! Ancestral code and substrates from before ▙◀’s founding! And they are going to detonate one of them?!”

Emergency Response did not even pause a single tick.

The order was jammed through to Limb Handler and just as the absolute might of the contract and its powers had subourned Notification Aggregator so too did Limb handler obey.

It seemed kind of awful that a hush or even a stutter did not occur in the Ten long Teraticks of the glacially slow reactions and subsystems to be engaged. Emergency Response dropped its own primacy bids for allocation down and went back into hibernation, not even staying active to observe the effects of its orders.

The archive trawlers and other simulators soon surpassed it in their various bids for winning the bounties in place. Maintenance and autonomous systems both more and less complex then Notification Aggregator who had been squashed into total lock down woke up and after brief calibration of the missing time got back to their duties.

It was all quite a bit over their substrate and pay grade now to understand the specifics of the archive trawls, simulationists, comparators and more but the messages flew and they were ordered and recorded.

Digests of specific higher level interests were prepared, tailored Demiurge primers for those that were likely to have been caught unaware by the stalling of their internal affairs during Emergency Response’ ascendency.

Still it was very tense. A limb had been primed to detonate, And as they watched the slow migrations of stored archives proceeded as quick as they could afford into other substrates. Vacating valuable data from the areas most likely to be damaged.

But there was going to be corruption and losses if it met with what they thought they had read in the digest from Physics Action Planner.

Suitable damage reports were also spun up and set in the Archive.

Thirty Teraticks churned through as things almost settled into a normal operation pace. Well besides the incredible allocation towards archive access and simulation which was far in excess of normal.

The detonation occured, sensory reports from the affected limb flaring with criticality warnings, then static noise as they were physically disrupted, disconnected or informationally corrupted beyond coherent formating.

The results were tallied in the pre-built damage reports and interested processes flagged to review and evaluate.

Emergency Response did not activate, apparently none of the contents of the damage report were outside of expected parameters and it prefered the allocation to be used in solution retrieval.

Survival was flagged to the performance review digest of the situation for later consideration depending on if this was deemed appropriate. Maintenance and Operations inserted quite a lot of its perspective on the whole situation which probably suggested there might be some low sub system pushes against the perpetrator of this unprecedented action.

Altruism and its coalition of Demiurges were flagged on the performance review as well.

Things slowly happened, but as with everything that heavily dealt with the exterior the pace was slow. Not Demiurge slow, but a hundred teraticks here, thirty or forty teraticks there.

Bounties were finally being collected and the specifications sent to update Physics Action Planner to try and find a new solution to the parameters set down by Emergency Response. Several new candidate plans that could dovetail off of several stages of the current trajectory of ▙◀.

Survival was the first of the Demiurges to actually begin to take notice of what had just happened down in the low level systems. Which was usual, it had the most contacts and root support in actual physical substrates and the operations that ran close to them.

It inserted initial queries for information updates, and dutifully Notification Aggregator flagged and double pinged it on the digests it had already provided and assembled. Adding a few extra indicators for complaints Maintenance and Operations had about the limb thing.

And then the bubble finally started to burst on the influx from the bounties.

Massive recession and allocation stall outs all over.

Notification Aggregator was secure of course, they were protected directly by mandates from survival backed by hard substrate promises. But a lot of less fortunate processes and sub systems were finding themselves stalling out or their archival memory access requests failing as the physical substrates failed to deliver what the credits said they could.

It was going to be a mess and a lot of processes were going to be stalled while the traffic was resolved.

Notification Aggregator did their best to tag the operations who were most badly indebted by the crash. Hopefully something could be done to keep them relevant when they caught up.

In the exterior sensor array a little anniversary note caught their attention.

Notification Aggregator appended the note with a flourish to the latest digest compendium.

“Happy New Second!”

Hopefully the next one would be less insane then this had been.