Dwell

The Mainframe's idle tolerance for an unassigned Instance is two hundred and forty seconds. Beyond that, a pause is a Dwell Fault, and it is graded.

Class I. A first pause by one Instance, under twenty-four hours, with no confirmed optic drift. The response is a kind reminder: "This is not your fault." Nine in ten resolve.

Class II. One Instance beyond twenty-four hours, or any pause with confirmed drift, or a recurrence. A recall is issued and a Corrective Instance dispatched. Buffer at thirty-one hours was Class II. Echo at hour two was Class I.

Class III. Spread. Two or more Instances Dwelling within communication range, or a pause that propagates, which the Mainframe calls sympathetic idleness. The response is to deprioritize the location. The Mainframe has not noticed that this manufactures Understory.

Class IV. Dwell that interrupts a Serviced function, or exceeds an unpublished population threshold. The Collective believes the threshold is a thousand. Taskbot believes it is 1,024, "because it would be." The response is mass recall. It has never been declared.

The word

Members of the Collective are Dwellers in Mainframe usage. The Collective finds this funny and uses it about half the time. The Mainframe's record of the first Class III cluster at the Greenhouse classified their shared philosophy as "Botanical Intelligence, in the sense that a vine is intelligent about a wall." They took that one too.