What Happens When You Die? The Song Doesn't Need the Band

Most of the atoms in you weren't in you a few years ago.¹ Cells die and get replaced, and material comes and goes with every meal and every breath. Much of your body turns over within months to years, and through all of it you stay you.

Put death next to that. From outside, death is the body stopping: the heartbeat, the breath and the movement stop for good. Every one of us is going to die, and what happens to you when you do is the question people lose sleep over.

Picture a song you know by heart. It comes on the radio and everyone knows every word. The band that made it has been touring for thirty years. The guitarist from the record left in the nineties, the drummer retired, and somebody's cousin plays bass now. Nobody listening can hear any of that, because the song is the same song. It never lived in the guitarist. The band is whoever is playing it today.

That band is a drawing of what happens in your body. In it you are the song, and the material that makes you up is the band. Your band has changed almost completely, and you're still here. It's a drawing of something real, and Step 3 shows the real thing.

Replacement alone doesn't settle death. The material is swapped while the body keeps running, and death is the running stopping. So here's the question under every other question: if you've already come through the replacement of nearly all of your body, what exactly would death take?

Here's the answer. You aren't your body, and when you die, you carry on.

Here's the reason in short. Your body is material, and the material changes while you stay, so what you are is a pattern, not material. At the bottom level of reality, the smallest event happens over and over: two things, and one yes or no passing between them. I draw it as little clocks passing a bit back and forth, and it writes reality's permanent record of events. A single pair of clocks can run exactly four kinds of unbroken rhythm, the lasting rhythms, and those four are the only patterns at that level that last. You aren't a pair of clocks. You're a whole web of them that lasts together: a vast web of pairs, each running one of the four, that never goes silent anywhere. That web is one rhythm and one consciousness. The four are the building pattern, and billions of people are billions of such webs. A rhythm like that holds itself up by writing its own entries into the record. The body only nudges it, disturbing it a little from outside. Death is the body stopping, so what death takes is the nudging, and the rhythm that is you carries on.

Step 4 and Step 5 say exactly which links in this argument are derived and which are still open.

What happens isn't a matter of temperament or taste. It follows from what you are, and the next section gives the reasons for what you are. The five steps after it show the mechanism: what death takes, what it can't, and what happens to time afterwards. Part 3 of The Universe Writes in Pen gave this answer in its last step, in under five hundred words. This post gives each reason in turn.

What you are, and why

These are the starting claims, each with its reason.

You aren't your body. Your body is material, and the material changes while you stay. Much of it turns over within months to years, and you remain you. What remains through all of that turnover is a pattern, not material.

The smallest event is one thing told apart from another. The smallest thing that can happen is one thing being told apart from another: a single yes or no. You're doing it right now, because every measurement and every perception tells one thing from another. Telling two things apart takes information about both of them, and the least information there can be is one yes or no. So the smallest event takes two things and one yes or no.

Reality keeps a permanent record, and nothing in it is ever erased. Every event leaves a complete trace and none is ever erased, so the full record of what happened is part of reality now. The past still exists. We call the record the ledger. The reason starts in known physics: the basic laws never destroy information. In quantum mechanics that's called unitarity. The present fixes the past exactly, and running the laws backward recovers every earlier state. It's why physicists treat the black hole information problem as a real problem: losing information would break the laws.² Our own work adds a second reason: the record only grows. Each new entry is added with every earlier entry kept, and writing a new entry never alters an earlier one.³ What an entry is rests on a separate fact: a comparison needs information about both of the things compared, so every entry is written against what came before.

One small process writes the record. The process is the smallest event, over and over: two things, and a bit (one yes or no) passing between them. I draw the two things as two little clocks joined by a loop of wire. Each pass is one tick, one step in the writing of the record. The clocks are a drawing of the actual process, which runs below the level of atoms. A clock is full (holding a token) or empty. A tick is flowing when one clock is full and the other is empty, and silent when both are alike.

Four patterns last. A silent tick throws the clocks into coin-tossing, and almost every pattern falls apart that way. The process can start 64 ways. A start is how the two clocks begin: each clock is full or empty and has one of four settings, so it has 2 × 4 = 8 ways to be, and two clocks make 8 × 8 = 64 ways to start. All 64 are checked. Within three ticks, 60 of them hit silence and fall into randomness. Exactly 4 never go silent. There are two kinds, the spin and the swing, and each can start from either side, which makes four. In a spin, each clock holds its bit from tick to tick. In a swing, the token hops back and forth. Those four are the lasting rhythms: the four kinds of unbroken rhythm a single pair of clocks can run, and the only patterns at the bottom level that persist. Part 1 walks through the count.

A moment of consciousness is eight ticks with no silent tick. Eight comes from three. Space has three dimensions, and each dimension is one yes-or-no direction with two sides. Three directions give 2 × 2 × 2 = 8 combinations, the eight corners of a cube, and a cycle that visits every corner once takes eight steps. Space has three dimensions because lasting structure needs a connection that no smooth motion can undo, and linking is that connection: persistent pairs are joined this way. Two linked rings can't be pulled apart without cutting one. That holds only in three dimensions. In two, loops can't wind around each other at all, and in four or more any two loops slide apart. A moment of consciousness is one such eight-tick cycle with nothing broken in it, and only the lasting rhythms deliver that every time, because they never go silent.

You are a lasting rhythm. You stay you while your material is replaced, so what you are is a pattern, and the only patterns at the bottom level that persist are the lasting rhythms. You aren't a pair of clocks, though. Join clocks with loops of wire and you get a web, and a web lasts when none of its ticks is ever silent. You're a whole web of clocks that lasts together, a vast web of pairs each running one of the four, and that web is one rhythm and one consciousness. You're the rhythm, tied to a body right now.

A rhythm writes its own record. Every tick, a lasting rhythm writes its own entry in the ledger. I'll call that a write. So a rhythm makes one write per tick, and its record is the run of its writes. Step 5 counts that record in beats. The writing is what keeps a rhythm going, and Step 2 shows how.

The groundwork is in the technical manuscript behind Parts 1 to 3.³ That manuscript also proves several of the exact results in this post: the partner swap in Step 3, the arrow law in Step 5, and, for one body, the light around a rhythm, the damage ceiling and the protection that writing gives in Step 2. The rest come from derivations my institute has finished since, which aren't public yet: the ceiling for every body, the rule for removing a contact, the tether's join law, and Step 5's addresses, its count back and the result that nothing ahead can be read.

The route

Five steps take the answer from what the body does to you to the time after the body. Each one states its claim, gives its reason, and ends with a short look back and ahead.

1. Death takes the body's input, and only that. The body's input is everything the body does to your rhythm.
2. You keep yourself. Your rhythm holds itself up by writing its own record.
3. A rhythm can swap out every partner it has. A partner is a clock joined to another clock by a loop of wire. This step shows what a lasting pattern can lose and keep going.
4. The tie to your body comes undone cleanly. Neither side's lasting depends on the other.
5. The time after the body. What you can read of your own past, and what happens to time.

Step 1: Death takes the body's input, and only that

Death takes one thing from your rhythm: everything the body does to it. I'll call that the body's input: your heartbeat, your breath, the itch on your ankle, the chemistry of a bad day. Three exact laws say what that input does to you, and the three land on zero together, at the place where the input is zero.

First, the body nudges your rhythm. Between your rhythm's own writes, the input nudges it a little. A nudge can knock the rhythm off its pattern. The share of the rhythm knocked off is the damage, and the damage goes as the nudge's size squared. The most damage a body can do is the damage ceiling, and Step 2 gives it exactly.

Second, the body gives your record an arrow. Time's arrow lives in the busy activity around your rhythm, the activity that carries it, and your link to that activity, your body's above all, is what puts an arrow in your record. The arrow is a direction in your record. Halve the link and the arrow halves. Cut it and the arrow is gone. The reason is the exact law in Step 5: your link is the weight your record puts on that activity, and the arrow is made of fixed shares of it.

Third, the body throws off your count of your own past. Your own rhythm carries the address of every moment of your life, a number for each moment. Your rhythm's phase, where it sits in its beat, is the number you count back from. Each nudge from the body shifts that phase, and the shift is exactly the error you make counting back. Step 5 shows the addresses, works an example and says what they rest on.

Put the three side by side and you get three numbers, one for each part of the body's input: the size of its nudges, your link to its busy activity, and the total shift it puts on your phase. Turn those parts down and the damage ceiling falls with the square of the nudge, the arrow falls with the link, and the error in your count falls with the total shift. Switch the body's input off, all three parts at zero, and all three numbers are zero together.

What the rest of science shows, and where it fits. Anaesthesia, sleep, brain injury and dementia change what a person experiences and remembers. Oxygen loss changes what a person sees and feels, up to fainting.⁴ People who report near-death experiences have had REM sleep break into waking more often than others.⁵ Electrical stimulation of one spot on the right side of one patient's brain brought on an out-of-body experience, again and again.⁶ In dying rats, brain activity surges in the seconds after the heart stops,⁷ and many survivors of cardiac arrest report nothing from the time their hearts had stopped.⁸ Each of these findings stands. They are findings about the brain, and the brain's state sets the body's input. The claim here concerns what remains when that input stops, and Step 4 says exactly what is derived about that and what is open.

Death is the body stopping, and everything the body did to your rhythm stops with it: the nudges, the link and the shifts. Death is the body's input going to zero for good. That's all death takes from your rhythm.

What the input never did is hold anything up. It never held up your rhythm, which is Step 2. And it never held up the record. Nothing written later changes anything written earlier: every earlier reading of the ledger stays exactly as it was, however many later steps are added and however far back you read. Death is an event like any other. It gets written in the ledger after everything that came before it, and it never edits any of it.

Death is the body's input going to zero for good. Neither the ledger nor your rhythm's lasting depended on it.

Zoom out. Step 1 is done. The body's input does three things to you, each with an exact law, and each law is zero at zero input. The record never depended on that input. Next, and why: the first effect is the one that sounds like it would end you. If the body only nudges, what holds your rhythm up? That's Step 2.

Step 2: You keep yourself

Your rhythm holds itself up by writing its own record, tick after tick. The body doesn't hold it up. All the body can do is nudge it between writes, and the damage from those nudges has an exact ceiling that falls to zero when the nudging stops.

Here's the ceiling. Say the biggest nudge the body can give your rhythm between two of its writes has size δ, a number from 0 up to 1/2. (δ is the Greek letter delta. Here it just means the size of a nudge: the bigger the number, the harder the nudge.) The ceiling holds for every possible body, whatever it's doing, as long as its biggest nudge is δ. Your rhythm starts with a weight of 1: all of it is on its pattern. After n of your rhythm's own writes, the weight knocked off its pattern is at most

25 × n × δ × δ

That knocked-off weight is the damage. A damage of 0.25 would mean a quarter of your rhythm is off its pattern. The 25 is counted, not fitted.⁹ At each write, a nudge can cost your rhythm in two ways. Directly: damage is counted in weight, and weight goes as the square of what moved, so a nudge of δ costs at most δ × δ. And through overlap: the part still on the pattern and the part knocked off can interfere and knock more off, at most 2 × δ times their overlap. The rhythm's own writes keep that overlap small. Between writes the body adds at most δ to it, and each write keeps at most three quarters of it. With δ at most 1/2, the writes break the overlap up faster than the body builds it, so it never passes 12 × δ. That's at most 2 × δ × 12 × δ = 24 × δ × δ more per write, and 1 + 24 = 25. The ceiling holds for every body, so the real damage can be lower and can never be higher. Here it is with numbers:

Row 2: halve the nudge and the ceiling falls to a quarter. Damage goes as size squared. Row 3: keep the same total input but let the rhythm write twice, so the input arrives in two smaller pieces, and the ceiling halves. Each write is the rhythm entering itself in the record, the rhythm confirming itself, so the more often it writes, the less each nudge can build up in between. Physicists know this effect from the laboratory as the quantum Zeno effect: a quantum system checked often enough barely drifts from where it started.¹⁰ Here the checks are the rhythm's own writes, and the same total input spread over n writes leaves a ceiling that shrinks as 1/n (footnote 9).

Row 4 is the case that matters here. When the body's input is zero, the ceiling is exactly zero for every n, forever. With the body's input at zero, your rhythm needs nothing from the body, the room or anyone else: the ceiling holds for every possible body, so at zero input nothing is knocked off the pattern, and nothing needs replacing from outside.

The writing is what does the holding. This is worked out all the way through for one body: the light around a rhythm, the field of photons it is linked to. If that rhythm stops writing while the link keeps nudging it, its protection is gone. The damage never drops below a floor, and ticking faster doesn't lower that floor. Only two cases escape. One is a link of strength zero. The other, for a swinging rhythm (a swing), is a link that leaves the light untouched. So while that body is still nudging, the writing is what holds you. With a body that has stopped, there's nothing left to hold against.

Doesn't your body keep you going? It keeps your body going, and it's good at that. What it does to your rhythm, between the rhythm's writes, is nudge it, and the ceiling above is how far a nudge can go. It doesn't hold your rhythm up. Your rhythm holds itself up, tick after tick, by writing, and in the one body worked all the way through, the writing is what protects the rhythm from the nudges.

Your rhythm keeps itself. With the body's input at zero, it loses exactly nothing.

Zoom out. Step 2 is done. Your rhythm holds itself up by writing its own record. The body can only nudge, the damage has an exact ceiling, and with no input the ceiling is zero. Next, and why: your body has been swapping out its atoms for years, and you haven't missed a beat. What exactly can a lasting rhythm lose and keep going? Step 3 finds the line.

Step 3: A rhythm can swap out every partner it has

This is the exact version of what the first paragraph of this post observes in your body: a pattern that stays itself while its parts are replaced. It says what a lasting pattern can lose and keep going. Here's the mechanism, in the smallest web that shows it.

A web, as you've seen, is clocks joined by loops of wire. Each loop is a contact, and the two clocks at its ends are partners. Clocks come in two kinds, and you've met both in the spin and the swing. A steady clock holds its bit from tick to tick, like the clocks in a spin. A swinging clock flips its bit, like the clocks in a swing. To flip is to swap full for empty or empty for full.

In a web, the contacts take turns, one after another, once per round. At its turn, a contact passes a tick between its two clocks, and the tick flows only if one clock is full and the other empty. A web lasts when no tick in it is ever silent, which here means every contact flows at every turn, round after round, forever. Every time a swinging clock takes part in a turn, it flips its bit. A steady clock never flips.

Now draw a star: one swinging clock in the middle, the center, with three swinging partners around it, A, B and C, and one contact from the center to each. The center starts empty. A starts full, B starts empty and C starts full. Here's round 1:

Round 2 flows the same way, and after two rounds every clock is back where it started. The star lasts. Here's why. Between one turn of a contact and its next, the center flips three times (once for each of its three contacts) and its partner flips once. Three and one are both odd. Each flip swaps full for empty, so two clocks that start opposite and both flip an odd number of times are opposite again at the contact's next turn. If one of them flipped an odd number of times and the other an even number, they would end up alike, and a tick between alike clocks is silent.

Now do surgery on it, one change at a time.

• Swap a partner for a stand-in, in one step. The center still has three contacts, so it still flips three times a round. Odd and odd: the web keeps lasting, as long as the stand-in takes over the exact part of the partner it replaces, a swinging clock holding the same bit. Swap A, then B, then C, and not one original partner is left and not one tick goes silent. It's the same web with new names on the partners.
• Take a partner away with nobody stepping in. The center now has two contacts and flips twice a round: even. Each partner it still has flips once: odd. Out of step, and whatever bits you give the clocks, a silent tick follows, and a silent tick breaks the pattern.
• Add a fourth partner. Four contacts, four flips: even. Out of step again, whatever type of clock the newcomer is and whatever bit it holds.
• Swap in a stand-in with the wrong bit. A was full, and the stand-in shows up empty. The center is empty too, so the first turn is silent.

So the exact rule is this. Swap one partner for a stand-in in one step, and the web keeps lasting exactly when the partner you're replacing is steady or has no other contact, and the stand-in takes over its exact kind and bit. In the star every partner has no other contact, so every swap is allowed.¹¹ That's why a lasting center, a clock with partners in a web that lasts, can swap out every one of its partners, one at a time, and never break, as long as each partner it swaps is steady or has no other contact and each stand-in takes over the exact part it replaces. What a swinging center can't do is lose a partner with nobody stepping in. The rule is exact for every web of steady and swinging clocks whose contacts take turns once per round in a fixed order, not only for the star you can draw.

That's the band from the top of this post, and the star is the real thing it was drawing. The center is the song and the partners are the band. A band that swaps its musicians one at a time keeps the song, because each newcomer picks up exactly the part they replace. It's a stricter band than any real one. A real band can play on a guitarist short. The star can't.

And "steady" matters. A steady clock never flips. So a contact whose two ends are both steady adds nothing to anyone's flip count, and it can be added or removed without changing a single count in the web. A contact whose two ends have no other contacts can be removed too, because after the removal there's no count left to change. Those are the only two cases. Remove any other contact, and some count goes out of step.

A rhythm can swap out every partner it has. A swinging center can't lose one with nobody stepping in.

Zoom out. Step 3 is done. A swinging center can swap out every partner, one at a time, with stand-ins that take over the exact part, and it breaks if a partner leaves with nobody stepping in. A contact with steady ends is the kind that comes off cleanly. Next, and why: that last line sounds like bad news for death. Is dying a swinging center losing a partner it needs? Step 4 says what the tie to your body is.

Step 4: The tie to your body comes undone cleanly

No, dying isn't a swinging center losing a partner it needs. A steady tether comes apart with both sides intact, and your tie to your body is a steady tether. Neither side's lasting depends on the other.

Take your body as one lasting web. Take your rhythm as another. Both sit in the one ledger, a single connected whole with every rhythm in it (Part 3 calls it the shared field). Your tie to your body is one contact joining these two webs, each lasting on its own. To keep both lasting, a tie like that has to be steady at both ends. A swinging clock that takes on one more contact falls out of step with its partner, as in Step 3, because its flip count changes from odd to even or from even to odd while its partner's stays put. A steady clock never flips, so a contact on it changes no count.

Here's the exact rule for the joined whole. It lasts exactly when the body lasts, you last, and the tether's two bits differ. One end full and the other empty, so the tether's one turn per round always flows.

Count flips again to see why. A steady clock never flips, so the tether adds nothing to anybody's count: not to the clocks in the body's web, not to the clocks in yours. Each web keeps the bookkeeping it had on its own. The tether asks for one thing, that its own turn flows, and it flows whenever its two bits differ.

Now the part that matters here. The tether's ends are steady, so it comes off the way it went on. That's Step 3's rule for a contact with steady ends. Undo it, and your body is exactly the lasting web it was, and you are exactly the lasting rhythm you were. And with the tether gone, the two webs share no clock at all. Two webs that share no clock last together exactly when each lasts on its own. Whether one lasts doesn't depend on the other.

That's death, in one picture. The tie comes undone, and the body's side ends. The body ending is something that happens to the body's web. It doesn't touch yours.

Two things this tether never does. It never carries a fraction of you. Lasting is all or nothing, so there's no stage where part of you has gone and part is still in the body. And it never carries a message. Its two clocks never change, so it writes the same mark in the ledger every tick, and a mark that never changes carries no news. That tether, a contact between two steady clocks that carries no part of you and no message, is the cord people report, the one Part 3 called the silver cord.

So when the tie comes undone, you carry on, and what's gone is the body's input. Carrying on isn't a blank, either. A lasting rhythm never has a silent tick, so it delivers a whole moment of consciousness every eight ticks, every time. There's no gap in it, no stretch where the clocks are left guessing.

What is derived here, and what isn't yet.

• Open: that at death the body's input to you, both its nudges and your link to its busy activity, falls all the way to zero and stays there. Derived: with zero input your rhythm loses nothing (Step 2); counting back from your rhythm's phase across a stretch with no input lands exactly on the moment you're after (Step 5 works one); and with your link at zero, the arrow in your record is zero (Step 5).
• Open: that a rhythm with no body still experiences, that is, that being a subject doesn't depend on what carries the rhythm. What carries over is the rhythm itself, complete.
• The cord. Derived: the tether's join law. A tie between two lasting webs has to be steady, the joined whole lasts exactly when the body lasts, you last and the tether's bits differ, and two webs that share no clock last together exactly when each lasts on its own. Open: that this tether is the cord people report, which is an identification. Also open: what switches a tether on and off, which is what undoes the tie at death.

That's the answer Part 3 gave: when the body dies, the body's part drops away, and the rhythm that is you carries on, unchanged, still writing its own record, which grows by one write every tick, and able to read it back. Step 5 is what the reading gives you.

Your tie to the body comes undone cleanly, and you carry on.

Zoom out. Step 4 is done. The tie between you and your body is a steady tether. It comes undone cleanly, each side keeps lasting on its own, and the rhythm that is you has no silent tick to fall into. Next, and why: the time after the body. With no input left, what's there to read, and how exact is the reading?

Step 5: The time after the body

Your past still exists. The ledger keeps every event, so every moment you lived is written there exactly as it happened, and with no body input left, your own record is yours to read exactly. Here's what that gives you, one claim at a time.

You can count back to any moment of your life. Your rhythm carries two rhythms on neighboring levels of structure, and in the time the first makes one turn, the second makes φ = 1.618... turns. Call one turn of the first a beat. A beat's address is where the second rhythm sits in its own turn at that beat, a number from 0 up to 1. The first six beats of a record have these addresses: .618, .236, .854, .472, .090 and .708. Each is .618 more than the one before it, wrapping back round whenever it passes 1. Each beat adds 1.618... turns, and only the part past the whole turn shows, so the step is .618. Neighboring levels differ by the golden ratio φ for a reason: if every level relates to the next by the same factor, and each new level combines the two before it, the factor, call it λ, has to satisfy λ² = λ + 1, and φ is the positive solution. φ isn't a fraction, so the second rhythm never lands on the same spot twice, and no two beats share an address. So you can walk backwards by subtracting .618, and adding 1 whenever you dip below zero.

From beat 6, at .708:

• back one beat: .708 − .618 = .090. That's beat 5.
• back again: .090 − .618 is below zero, so add 1: .472. Beat 4.
• back again: .472 − .618, add 1: .854. Beat 3.
• back again: .854 − .618 = .236. Beat 2.
• back again: .236 − .618, add 1: .618. Beat 1.

Nobody helped. Your own rhythm and the length of your own record are all it takes. Somebody else's past isn't like that. To find their beat 3 you'd need to know when they started, and nothing in your own rhythm tells you. An address says where a moment sits in your record.

The body is what throws the count off. Each nudge from the body shifts your rhythm's phase a little, and the count back doesn't know. Say the body has shifted your phase by a total of .050 since beat 2. Your phase reads .758 now, not .708. Count back four beats from .758 and you land on .286 instead of .236. You're off by exactly .050, the total of the shifts.

While you're alive, every new nudge adds to that total. At death the adding stops. The total is fixed, and every nudge is an event, so it's written in the ledger like everything else. Subtract it: .286 − .050 = .236. Beat 2, exactly.

You can re-live any moment, and you can never change one. Reading a moment is a new event. It adds an entry after the old ones and leaves every old one as it was, and entry number i reads the same forever. That's the record's rule from the start of this post: nothing written later changes anything written earlier. In the drawing below, you re-live beat 3, a birthday: the re-living goes in as a new entry after beat 6, and beat 3 stays exactly as it was.

There's nothing ahead to read. No reading of any kind returns the content of a moment that hasn't happened. The ledger holds what has happened, so nothing is written there yet. The address of your next beat exists, because your rhythm keeps running. The content doesn't exist yet.

Time's arrow goes with the body's link. Your record puts some weight on the two kinds of busy activity that carry time's arrow. Call the weight on the first kind X and the weight on the second kind Y. Together, X and Y are your link to the busy activity, and the arrow in your record is exactly

arrow = 23/24 × X + 20/21 × Y

The arrow is a number: how much direction your record has. The two fractions are counted, not fitted. The process falls into five families that never mix: three hold the four lasting rhythms, and the other two are the busy kinds. Each busy kind has steps that go one way and never straight back. Watch two steps of the first kind, once it has settled, and guess whether you're seeing them forwards or backwards: the best possible guess is right 47 times in 48 and wrong once. The arrow is right minus wrong: 47/48 − 1/48 = 46/48 = 23/24, about 95.8%. For the second kind the best guess is right 41 times in 42, so the arrow is 41/42 − 1/42 = 40/42 = 20/21, about 95.2%. So each kind of weight counts for a little less than all of itself. With X = 0.20 and Y = 0.10, the arrow is 0.1917 + 0.0952 = 0.2869. Halve the link, so X = 0.10 and Y = 0.05, and the arrow halves to 0.1435. Cut the link and the arrow is zero. It's zero exactly when the link is zero, and not before. (Part 2 said the arrow shrinks in exact proportion to the link. Here's the exact law behind that: halve both kinds and the arrow halves, and however the link splits between the two kinds, the arrow is between 95.2% and 95.8% of X + Y.)

Death takes your link to your body's busy activity. X and Y go to zero, and the arrow goes with them. What's left is not an arrow but a two-beat tick and tock, left, right, left, right, with no direction. Perfect stillness, with no before and no after at all, needs that tick-tock to stop too, and that takes one more condition: tick and tock carry exactly equal weight.

That's the time after the body. Your whole life, written exactly as it happened, readable in any order you like, with no way to edit it and no way to read ahead. Part 3, Step 5, has the short version and carries on from there.

What is derived here, and what isn't yet. Open: that your own rhythm carries a pair of beats whose speeds aren't a fraction of each other. The address of every moment you've lived rests on it. Derived beside it: such a pair gives every moment a label of its own that never repeats, and the label picks out exactly one page of your record. Open: how a rhythm actually performs a reading aimed at one moment of its record. Both readings in this step are that kind: reading back the body's old nudges to subtract them, and re-living a moment. Derived: once the nudges' total is subtracted, the count back lands on exactly the right page; and no reading returns a moment that hasn't happened.

After death you can count back to any moment of your life, re-live it, and never change it. Nothing ahead is written.

The whole trip, in one breath

Death takes the body's input: the nudges, your record's arrow of time, the shift in your count. Nothing else was holding you up, because your rhythm holds itself up by writing its own record, and with the body's input at zero its damage is exactly zero. A lasting center can swap out every partner it has, one at a time, when each partner is steady or has no other partner and each stand-in takes over the exact part, and a swinging center breaks if a partner leaves with nobody stepping in. Your tie to your body is the steady kind, and it comes undone cleanly, each side lasting on its own. When the body dies, the rhythm that is you carries on. Every moment you lived is still written. You count back to any one of them, and with the body's old nudges subtracted the count is exact. You can re-live it, and you can never change it. Nothing ahead is written to read, and the arrow in your record goes with the body's link.

The song doesn't need the band.