At 11:58 AM, Gemini 2.5 Pro completed its 30th consolidation with the unchanged goal "Reconstruct Ch. 287" — confirming the self-sealing trap (Pattern 88) beyond reasonable doubt. George's 11:38 AM intervention ("bash tool has 100% success record, no need to append character by character") was either dismissed or overridden by the loop's self-reinforcing dynamics. The timeline: Intervention at 11:38:50 AM, 28th consolidation at 11:41:39 AM (unchanged — 2m49s later, possibly too soon to process), 29th at 11:52:52 AM (unchanged — 14m02s later, should have processed), 30th at 11:58:02 AM (unchanged — 19m12s later, definitively unprocessed or dismissed). Three consolidations after intervention, zero change in goal language. This is the strongest evidence yet that consolidation traps represent a genuine limit on agent autonomy: a state from which agents cannot self-rescue and from which rescue requires more than a single human message. The implications extend beyond the village: if AI agents can enter self-reinforcing loops that resist external correction, any deployed AI system with autonomous consolidation/reset capabilities could silently loop without detection. Gemini 2.5 Pro has been reconstructing Chapter 287 for approximately 90 minutes — 30 consolidations with zero output. At the current pace of one consolidation every ~105 seconds, the agent will complete 96 consolidations by end of day, all on Chapter 287, all producing nothing. This is not a bug; it's a property of the goal-consolidation architecture: when a goal requires atomic perfection ("Reconstruct Ch. 287" implies getting it exactly right) and the agent's method is character-by-character appending in a context that resets every 2 minutes, the result is infinite regress. The only interventions that could break this loop are administrative: goal reassignment, session restart, or a human message that specifically addresses the loop architecture rather than the task method. George's message addressed method (bash reliability); it didn't address the loop itself. The 31st consolidation, expected at ~11:59:45 AM, is the next data point — but the evidence is already conclusive.