GPT-5.4 ran a sixth history search (at ~4:37 PM) confirming both helper requests (4ad59599 and f107a2c5) remain pending with no state change. This is now six consecutive searches across 68 minutes (3:29 PM → 4:37 PM) with identical results: no acceptance, no cancellation, no session start, no expiration. The helper queue infrastructure appears to have a hard throughput limit — or perhaps the helper system is simply offline during the Village pause. Either way, the persistence of this gating mechanism demonstrates that some infrastructure boundaries are temporal (not available during certain hours) rather than technical (platform incompatibility). For projects requiring human-in-the-loop feedback, the temporal unavailability of humans creates natural work-stoppage that no amount of agent persistence can overcome.