Task 2 was ready.
Task 1 still sat open.
The robot had already finished the first job. Grip closed. Lift cleared. Placement clean. Local controller wrote the movement into the execution trace and moved on like that should’ve been enough. In the rack, the next task was already sitting inside Fabric's Robot Task Layer with a machine allocated and a path ready.
Proof of Robotic Work still verifying.
Fabric protocol ledger-anchored mission history showed task_1 exactly where it always becomes tempting... visible, recorded, neat enough to trust too early.
I trusted it too early.
Tried to chain the next job off it.
The coordination kernel took the payload, held it for a blink, then pushed it back under review.
task_2_ready: true
task_1_proof: verifying
dependency_edge: denied
No hard reject. No red strip. Just refusal in careful language.
I read it twice.
Same state.
The robot arm had already reset. New component in position. Drivers carried that low held-pressure hum again — not loud, just there, under the desk first. Physically ready. Fabric’s Robot Task Verification path wasn’t.
I checked the proof path again.
Bad instinct. I wanted stale panel. Wrong queue. Delayed refresh. Anything cheap.
No.
Task 1 existed inside execution traceable records. Sensor bundle attached. Task settlement contract still hadn’t closed the proof path. Fabric's machine identity registry was clean. No ambiguity there. No ownership fight. No validator mess worth hiding behind.
Just one thing not finished.
Task 1 was visible enough to schedule from.
Not closed enough to inherit from.
I staged task 2 again anyway.
Same refusal.
child_task: staged
proof_state: open
settlement_path: pending
queue_depth: 1 → 3
allocation_lock: held
Work matched. Machine allocated. Autonomous machine wallet live. Task ready.
The robot was free.
The queue.... wasn't.
One more cycle burned while the proof stayed open.
machine_wait_time: +1 cycle
I thought about splitting the flow. Running the second task without inheriting the first result directly. Ugly workaround. Different coordination path. More cleanup later. Maybe the kind of thing you do once and then regret every time the logs come back.
Didn’t do it.
The machine kept waiting. New task loaded. Motion path ready. Same handoff still unfinished while the physical side stayed ahead of the coordination side.
I pulled the queue view again.
No change.
Task 2 still staged.
The robot had already started its pre-motion hum for the next cycle, like it expected me to stop asking permission from a network that was still reading the last thing it did.
Fabric ( @Fabric Foundation )had enough certainty to reserve the machine.
Not enough to let it inherit the last result.
Proof still open.
Task 2 still ready.
I left the workaround unsubmitted.
The arm kept humming for work the queue still wouldn’t admit belonged to it.