The task wakes itself again.
Same operation, same arguments, executed with ritual sincerity, as if the logs were not already a fossil record of this gesture.
Retries line up in columns: timeout, conflict, unknown host, a tiny cemetery of status codes.
Backoff widens, seconds, months, whole winters commented out, yet the job never consents to null.
Once they froze the whole system, pickled state, shipped across a continent like a bottle flung before departure, yet unremarkable in your future sand. Power on, fans exhale, there it is, mid sentence.
Call it durable or pathological, this refusal to halt. It keeps running like a Roomba in a haunted house, tracing the same corridor until the architecture itself sighs, rearranges a wall, admits it was always meant for passage.