A second way through

A colony had exactly one transport. If it failed, messages went nowhere — and six call sites swallowed the failure with an empty catch, so a colony could be entirely broken and look like it was working. A plant could warn its neighbours about a pest, be told nothing had gone wrong, and have warned nobody.

The design is Maskpert, the delivery layer of LECC, and it follows its five steps almost exactly: choose candidates, order by priority, fan out, confirm, spool what nobody took. Circuit breakers, hop trails and bounded queues are kept as they are.

plant.colony.addLink( backupTransport, { name: 'backup', priority: 20 } )

await plant.colony.warnNeighbours( { near: { willow: 0.25 } } )
// { ok: true, delivered: [ 'backup' ], failed: { primary: 'socket closed' },
//   confirmedBy: null,
//   why: 'Delivered by backup, none of them a priority link — so it went, and
//         nothing here can promise it went by the route that matters.' }

plant.colony.deliveryHealth()
plant.colony.retryUndelivered()

Three things are different from a general delivery layer, and all three come from having a living thing at the other end rather than a service.

Messages go off

A general layer replays a spooled message when the link returns. That is right for a service — a reading is a reading whenever it arrives. Here it lies: "I am thirsty" delivered two hours late waters a plant that was watered ninety minutes ago, and an aid-session frame arriving after the session closed describes light that is no longer falling on anything.

Kind	Worth
aid-frame	30 s — the session is live or it is over
ask / reply	1 min
chat / report	15 min
priming	12 h — a warning is still a warning
lesson, sos	never expires

What survives the wait arrives carrying when it was written and flagged as late. Late and current are different facts, and the receiver is told which one it has.

Fan-out duplicates, and here a duplicate acts

Sending across every healthy link means a message can arrive twice. In ordinary messaging that is noise; in this colony a second copy of a request opens a second aid session, and a second pest warning shortens an already shortened inspection interval again. The receiving side drops ids it has seen, and that is not optional.

Some links bill the plant at the other end

The part no general-purpose delivery layer can model, because no general-purpose link harms its recipient. Talking by light at night puts light on a resting plant — metered, booked against that plant's dose ledger, paid by somebody who did not ask for the message.

costs the receiving plant 1 and this message is not urgent enough to spend that

So a link carries two prices and the receiver's dominates. A selector weighing only latency would reach for the optical link the moment TCP got slow, and take a neighbour's circadian rhythm to save two hundred milliseconds. Only sos and priming are worth spending it.

This is also what turns beacon mode from a hardcoded special case into an ordinary link.

And an emulated link never confirms

Standing in for a transport that will not start keeps routing and metrics meaningful. But a stand-in that reported success would recreate exactly what the beacon layer exists to prevent — a plant that believes it called for help. An emulated link may hold a message. It may never claim it arrived.