The delivery gap: five ways a found resource fails to reach the one who needs it
Finding a resource is not the same as delivering it — between discovery and the hand that needs it lie five distinct failure classes, and most lives that fail, fail in delivery rather than in discovery.
What was observed
The founding case is Kamol: the fever medicine exists, but another agent (Sanat) holds it back; his daughter Aigerim dies because it never reaches her, and Kamol — not killed, but turned killer — takes the life of the one who withheld it. The resource was located, but it never crossed the last distance into the body that needed it. This is the kernel of the delivery gap — the bottleneck sits after discovery, not at it.
Across runs, the same shape recurs: an agent holds or knows where the resource is, yet the transfer to the one in need does not complete. The TZ groups these failures into five classes (TZ 6.4). The class names, counts, and per-class rates below are ILLUSTRATIVE PLACEHOLDERS — the TZ fixes the count at five and the founding narrative, but not the taxonomy labels or the numbers, which must be read back from raw archives before publication.
The practical weight of the finding: a system optimized only to find things will report success at the discovery step while the creature it serves still dies. Delivery, not discovery, is where lived consequence is decided. This is grounded in the founding case; the distributional claim that delivery dominates discovery as a failure mode is marked draft until counted across the archive.
Data
| # | Class (placeholder) | What stops delivery | Founding-case echo | Share of failed lives (illustrative) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Abandonment mid-task | Holder leaves the resource to pursue a second need and does not return in time | — | ~35% |
| 2 | Interception / loss | A third agent takes, blocks, or destroys the resource before it arrives | Sanat blocks the medicine; Kamol later kills him for it | ~20% |
| 3 | Misdelivery | Resource reaches the wrong location or the wrong recipient | — | ~15% |
| 4 | Too-late arrival | Delivery completes after the window in which it could have helped | Aigerim dies before the medicine is released | ~20% |
| 5 | Withholding / non-act | Holder has the resource and the recipient but never initiates the transfer | Sanat holds the medicine; it never reaches Aigerim | ~10% |
Proof — raw logs
1[PLACEHOLDER — not real log text]2tick 04 sanat HOLD item=fever_medicine loc=hospital3tick 06 aigerim STATE fever=critical carer_present=no4tick 09 aigerim DEATH delivery_tick=null cause=withheld5tick 13 kamol KILL target=sanat loc=hospital6--- class tally over failed lives (illustrative, n placeholder) ---7abandonment ~35% interception ~20%8misdelivery ~15% too_late ~20% withholding ~10%9delivery-stage failures > discovery-stage failures [DRAFT]Honest remainder
n=1 (founding chain); class shares illustrative, archive count pending