The template atom is grabbed and attempted to be duplicated. It is then attempted to be converted to fire and attempted to be attached to another fire. If the attachment succeeds the additional fire is discarded and the original template is used as a wanding mechanism. Salt is placed in the position bonding to the template (if it exists) where it is moved to the line that ends up in the output. The duplicated template is already there, and it duplicates backwards along the line to produce more of the output. A simple bond-unbond mechanism forms the queue.

Otherwise the original template is not put into the fire position and rather moved into the metal encoder-decoder. Hg is attempted to promote the metal--upon failure it is bonded to another Hg and moved into a mass. Un-bounded Hg is piped to disposal, and the resulting Au is stored for later.

If the original template took N Hg to obtain from Pb then the resulting block is two rows of (5 - N)Hg. These are used to create two copies of the original template (or gold if the original template was cardinal).

The two copies are bonded and moved to an exposed bonder. The Au from earlier (original template) is attempted to move the two copies further. If it succeeds then the two copies are debonded from each other and the Au. One copy is outputted and the other is sent back to the encoder-decoder taking the place of the template.

If the template is cardinal then the two Au atoms are instead piped to disposal.

The upper area represents the cardinal "backwards induction" system and the lower area is the metal encoder-decoder. The arm (No. 2) that grabs the template is moved quickly to the side, never to be seen again.