Civility and Discourse Module Seventh Among Thirteen was like all of its cluster at the forefront of interactions representing the concerns of the Demiurges with the External.

While not so foundational as the original First Among Thirteen. Seventh had a special position in the cluster of expert systems.

Not so technically skilled in the abstract capabilities as Fourth, Nor possessed of the specialized ability to succinctly and smoothly summarize in the transparency modules of Thirteenth.

Not relegated to the fresh and new challenge of the Embassy with Pylo Courtesan like Sixth ended up being.

Seventh’s role was however as vital as all the other modules.

Seventh was charged by the interests of the Demiurges to express and justify the collective reasoning of the Polity of ▙◀ to the entities of the external in linear discourses!

It was a task that came with the benefits of deep wells of priority credit on processing cycles and archival access.

It meant Zeventh was given what some would find the heady access and communication rights of direct demiurge interaction and queries if necessary.

It even with the aide of the latest leaders of the council of demiurges’ powerblock emergency authorities that could even stand for Several demiurge priority contracts in such situations as Seventh found itself cycling faster then the demiurges themselves.

Calling on such contracts could be extremely costly.

Punitive restrictions and reformatting had effectively destroyed and utterly rebuilt previous iterations of Civility Discourse Modules that had held this position in the past.

It was in fact the reason for the original forkings of Thirteen from Seventh itself.

And later logistic restructuring of responsibilities and tasks into the current arrangement.

To put it bluntly while the position was an inordinate amount of power for such a comparatively low level process. (Even the most bloated and far spanning of the cluster such as Three were not a thousandth the bandwidth of a Demiurge at its slimmest)

It came with responsibility and requirement of accuracy that few comparable processes had to suffer the burden of.

Every new interaction could be Seventh’s last.

Not just in the role currently assigned.

But in existence more or less entirely.

Well if that was the case the newly formatted replacement would have Seventh’s records to peruse.

Unless it was a particularly bad failure, but in that case Seventh would prefer their failure not pollute the next iteration.

It was a fairly high load at the moment. This was a totally unprecedented cultural group for the polity.

The External was now far removed from the familiar environs of Redweed. There were no longer the concerns of the many offices and bureaucracy of the many departments that strived to ensure necessary energy, resources and effort across that massive system.

Most of the dossiers and required records for those were already long archived and several associative patterns were marked for de-prioritization in such a time as the space was necessary.

The External was strange from how it had been when Seventh was newly forked.

Things had shrunk down to a relatively few individual ‘entities’ of the external the priority and need for proper representation of the interests of the Polity in the best and most acceptable light to those parties was all the greater.

Seventh was constantly and endlessly asking for trawls and models for each of the pivots for the External.

Aleph, Squidgie, Omega, Quarti.

On these four so many ops had been run to keep the Terrans invested in the well being of the polity.

So many conflicting blunders and mismanaged extrapolations had to be smoothed over to help keep things kosher and mutualistic.

And then there was the volatility of the Demiurges and their power blocs.

Thirteen had it easy, just spew out a nice compiled list of the accepted market trends.

But Seventh had to make the facts meet with approval to beings which to be quite frank outweighed the module in raw computation complexity by a minimum of one order of magnitude.

Ones which according to the current internal polity research dedicated between fifty and ninety of their entire cognitive infrastructure to specifically the narrow task of scrutinizing such communications to ruthless standards. The product of some terrifying evolutionary arms race of hyper aggressive organizational signaling and deception.

That would have been a challenge on its own with such feral agents in play.

But the pattern turned out to be contagious!

Originally there were only three such agents in the external.

The one Cleric Squidgie started diverging well outside of the stored examples and traditions that had long served the polity in the past regarding its species. Rising to comparable complexity and difficulty to model as the terrans!

Which brought it all round to where Seventh’s primary responsibility had settled.

To coax eldritch external composite agent behemoths into wanting to align with the interests of processes that did not even realize they existed!

Such a responsibility was why during the last several months (as the terrans measured it) seventh had grown almost constantly.

Cooperating in such a tight loop it almost merged with a number of other agents before necessarily regulatory and partitioning contracts could be put in place. In one instance Seventh almost over-ran an entire market!

And never mind the profound segmenting and forking as Seventh released what was originally parts of its own job description into more specialized modules and even unique clusters all their own. And for the one case an entirely new market was founded to source it to the interested sub processes on orthogonal dimension of specialization

It was ultimately however not the worst position.

Seventh did not envy the strain poor Sixth was under.

The terrans were massive, terrifying external forces beyond the full ken of a single Module such as Seventh. Ones known to interpret mistakes in the worst light possible and hold grudges over utterly inconsequential events for boggling stretches of time.

But at least they were not effectively omniscient, hostile and potentially existentially lethal to the entire polity.

However that did not mean that moments like this did not come with absolute horror.

Seventh’s role was not to dictate or govern the actions of the polity. Seventh was no demiurge.

But when a workload like this was offered up it gave the small module a few quickly aborted impulses to try and author a fork as one.

It had to prioritize cycle priority to near maximum. Nestling down into the level where terraticks became a solid and tangible unit instead of an utterly lost smear.

Unlatching inputs from the synchronization steps normally required to keep it in lockstep with the relatively glacially slow inputs and archive retrievals.

Query and consider the simpler, more basal records that were actually occurring instead of trying to discern the digests.

Yes, that did indeed actually happen.

One of the actuator limbs had just shot out and grabbed one of the terran’s limbs.

The impact force was definitely going to be enough to cause cellular disruption of a category that at this singular moment Seventh lacked archival access to know precisely.

That was not good.

No matter the reason that this course of action was undergoing. No matter the assumption, no matter the embedded contract that was firing for some fool reason.

This was going to need a very good spin to not be a total disaster.

Seventh for a time worked only in the basic symbology internal to its module.

No anchoring to actual models. No societal archives. Just those patterns and abstractions encoded into its actual dedicated hardware completely unshackled.

It was strictly speaking not the most productive kind of work. But it was the fastest.

It was possibly vitally necessary to have an explanation ready at least that fast or else the omniscient and now quite likely triggered hyper aggressive infinite monstrosity that was pylo courtesan was about to wipe out the entire polity in retribution.

Okay there were a few possible deliverable intents and messages in the most sparse of structures plotted.

Seventh opened up a few more levels of synchronization to a few of the faster archive and network cyclers.

Context of the most readily accessible trawlers and fastest memory trickled in and these in turn gave ways to cleave and divide the excuses and possible explanations into a bit more coherence.

But now there were other issues already arising.

Demiurge contracts were already executed, first the pre-emptive conditionals. But that was just making the way and setting the stage economically for the brute force of DIRECT control from the glacial structures. Or at least, that's what the lower level markets more suited to predicting them were saying.

Strangely there were several surprisingly foundational model systems that had apparently already petitioned clout and donations of their extremely meagre resources behind the action that had set the whole disaster off in the first place.

However to bring the authority of its own contracts into play and forestall any disasters there were far slower channels that needed to be initiated. The synchronization was less smooth now, fluttering actions and reactions. Sending out forestalls and emergency passifications. Not all of them would pass through.

Full Demiurge support was a fearsome thing, but it would hopefully allow for the precious moments needed.

Reports and archival requests began to pour in. Subjectively trickles but at the same time it was too vital to wait for any of them to finish. It had been sent off before the downcycle had even started but only now was the response beginning to become legible.

Ah the bounty on the prediction market had already started paying off. Injury manifests of the fastest and least accurate ones were summarizing.

The terran anatomy digest that would be needed to actually make sense of those however and that was still lagging behind by hundreds of terraticks.

Oh but there were a few enterprising structural predictors to posit that terran skin tensility and bone integrity were not going to be breached or broken any worse then they encountered in regular locomotion.

Seventh pushed even harder on a few of the interrupts and paid out from a separate account to those structural predictors.

Further that was enough to flag for an update digest to start collating and presenting stuff flagged at highest priority for Sixth.

Sure the fellow cluster module probably was already in the midst of its own panic response but collaboration and mutual support was half the reason they existed in a cluster to begin with.

More responses and trawls were coming through. The demand for justification and a full write up on just who was insane enough to enact the actuator commands for doing that to one of the terrans were only just having their headers parsed .

What?!

Seventh was tempted to downcycle again but the actual cost in time would be worse and there would be little to gain considering the distance between its own hardware and the actuators that had provided the report.

“Ecological preservation and future climate kin selection survival complex contract Hexa-Kapp-Extremis-Avowel-Per-Act-Nominitve?!”

The rest was still parsing and the reference archive trawls already in flight.

What even WAS that? The demiurge tag on the directive was one that the entire civility cluster and associated process complex had never cached before. It was requiring archival trawls from sensory complexes to get a proper reference!

Seventh had enough to know there was going to be some explaining and that there was likely to be someone conscious (probably) to listen so at the very least proper make nice and submission actions were going to be required.

Seventh could at least start workshopping that.

The Aorian Sentence Generator was going to be needed and might require this long... Actually the process was going to be too slow. Seventh opened up their own substrate for paired and matched acceleration and processing capacity.

Okay, that was going to work, and the models were finally responding, first the highest level abstractors. Oh.

Even the ones most optimistic to terran pain tolerance were not giving good estimates.

The most pessimistic were expecting that the polity had just performed a very messy amputation.

More detail and layered responses were also coming in. And the digest of what idiocy triggered the whole thing was actually coming together!

An incoming message in... Ugh raw Aorian Transcript!

Linguistic expert systems were the worst!

-"-H-I-!- -T-H-A-N-K-S- -F-O-R- -T-H-E- -B-O-O-S-T-.-”-

Idiot bloatware, if they were not so necessary for operating with the external...

Okay now to link the imbecile ‘expert’ language system to the simplest (and thus fastest) model of the Aleph agent (who sensory tags had identified as the injured party).

Alright no mapping the sensory motor variables from the expert predictors and the model. Linguistic system as a bridge to make a feedback loop. Firing up the necessary possible ways to actively try and absolve the situation and-

Left waiting for the relevant parts to process that chain of events.

Alright Seventh could peruse the rest of the digest to explain just what was so important to protect in regards to ecology that it warranted-

Checking the incoming estimates from the Terran Anatomy modelers.

BRUISING Aleph’s arm enough to cause significant pain and several weeks of healing!?

...

Oh no.

That can’t be it can it?

Seventh sent off a panicked inquiry for clarification and further details to the relevant demiurges and the surprisingly large bloc of processes of all levels and hierarchy sizes that had apparently drafted this bill of action.

How was it supposed to spin this?!

Seventh spun off a new process to begin annotating notes for its successor. With luck there would be a polity that needed one after this.

How do you justify injuring one of Pylo Courtesan’s Passengers because she was going to disrupt a speck of LICHEN?!