Definitions

The leak, the shed. What a held configuration loses per tick to the strain of being held. Not a substance; a fraction. The shed is per-site: it happens wherever traffic moves.

The tick. The electron’s own time, τ_C = ħ/(mₑc²). The corpus reads the grain as the electron; the tick is the grain’s time.

The pixel. One spatial grain per tick, ξ = c·τ_C — a definition licensed by Axiom C; it does no work in the chain.

Faces and gates. AP28’s twenty-one channels: eighteen face-projections, on which something actualized exists to shed from; three actualization gates, which are the now itself and hold nothing to shed. The faces bleed; the gates open and close.

The duty. Eighteen twenty-firsts: the faces’ share of the full service-cycle that paces all twenty-one.

The cycle. One full escape through the eighteen, at the duty: (21/18)·α⁻¹⁸ ticks.

Intrinsic and effective. The leak’s own equation of state is intrinsic. What a survey infers by fitting a non-interacting model to a sourced, settling sky is effective. This paper’s stance is about the first; AP42’s KS-42.4 is about the second; they are not in competition.

The settled limit. The state after the hold has locked over all twenty-one and the storm’s tail has died: the beat alone.

The arena-blink identification. The Snap, the Blink, and the Stretch as one event at three scales — the arena’s, the particle’s, the sky’s. Ruled 16 August 2026.