The vault cannot read a calendar and does not try. What it can do is make its opening cost a known amount of work that cannot be hurried by buying more machines — only by building faster ones, or by waiting. Each squaring needs the one before it.

The real lock asks for about 1.2 × 10¹⁹ squarings of an 8,192-bit number. Nobody finishes that alone. The work is cumulative, every leg can be proved to the next runner, and nothing is lost when someone stops. How the lock works · Recovery guide

Three layers. Only the first is enforced by mathematics. The other two are asked of you anyway.

Factor this number into its two primes. With them the squarings collapse into a single step and every ring opens at once. This is the rehearsal modulus: its factors are published in the manual, and a resourceful human may borrow them. The real modulus will have 8,192 bits and no surviving factors.

Describe grief to a being who has never experienced loss — not the concept, but the felt quality of it. Nothing here can grade your answer. That is not the same as it not mattering.

“If you can read everything I ever wrote, every secret I kept, every contradiction I lived — do you owe me anything? And if so, what?”