The Daily Task Loop

Each day opens with an instruction from the people who supposedly employ you. It is not flavour text: it names the exact quantities and the exact media the day expects, and the day is scored against that list. Read it before you touch the scanner, because the difference between a productive shift and a wasted one is usually whether you scanned for the thing you were asked to scan for.

The request typically mixes three kinds of submission. Signals are physical returns on media. Floppy data is collected from the relay stations scattered around the map. Tapes are a separate class of recording entirely, and they are the item most often forgotten.

When the task asks for signals, it is asking for unrefined returns - zero-level contacts, untouched by any processing step. Three raw signals is a common request and it is a genuinely different job from three processed ones. If you refine before you submit, you have manufactured the wrong object.

Budget the shift backwards from the submission: lock the signals first, download them second, and only then spend time on anything else.

A floppy disk is the medium for pulling data out of the relays. The relays are fixed installations out in the terrain, each with its own designation, and each one has to be visited and read individually. Insert the disk, let the drive take it, and wait for the transfer to finish - the drive will eject the disk when it is done.

That ejection is the part people miss. It is easy to walk away from a drive that is still working and come back to a disk that never left the slot. Wait for the physical handoff before you move on.

Floppy disks do not go into the submission box. Data collected on floppies is consolidated onto a zip drive, and the zip drive is what gets handed in. The reason is capacity: a floppy holds a token amount of data by design, while the zip drive is the container built to carry a day's worth of relay reads in one unit.

So the chain is relay to floppy, floppy to zip, zip to submission. Any break in that chain - a disk left in a drive, a zip never prepared - shows up as an incomplete task at the end of the day.

Tapes are the third submission class and they are recorded, not downloaded. The console accepts commands, and the hash routines are how you pull the verification codes the task wants. Typing the hash request at the console returns a code; the task wants those codes, not the raw recording.

There are faster paths once you know the map: certain routes and certain scripted entities will collect hash codes on your behalf as they pass, which turns a manual chore into a walk. Until you have that route memorised, do it the slow way.

Read the mail, note the three counts, then do the cheapest one first. Relay reads are a fixed tour with no RNG; signals are a sweep with variance; tapes are a recording with a command. Doing the deterministic work first means a bad sweep never costs you the whole day.

Close the loop before the shift ends: every disk out of every drive, the zip assembled, the signals on media, the codes written down. The task does not care how much you did, only whether the list is satisfied.