Consistency Without a Global Clock

This paper develops a distributed-systems reading of causal order, locality, and the formation of facts in a relativistic universe. It extends the interpretive framework of The Universe as a Consistency-Constrained Information History, in which physical reality is redescribed as a causally consistent history of information updates rather than as a collection of objects independently existing within spacetime. The paper asks what kind of consistency structure such a history can possess if it has no privileged global clock, no instantaneous long-distance coordination, and no external coordinator. The answer is not that the universe literally runs a distributed protocol. Rather, distributed systems provide a structural vocabulary for clarifying three features of known physics: the absence of a global present, the unavailability of frame-independent global linearizability, and the formation of stable facts through decoherence, thermodynamic irreversibility, and redundant environmental recording. The main positive contribution is the Causal Consistency Convergence Argument. The privileged element is not bare causal consistency by itself, since distributed storage systems often require convergence mechanisms, object semantics, or causal+ conflict handling in addition to causal dependency preservation. What is privileged here is the causal-ordering discipline: causal predecessors must be preserved, while spacelike or otherwise concurrent events must not be forced into a privileged total order. The argument is intentionally asymmetric. Its lower bound is structural: a continuable history must preserve causal dependencies. Its upper bound is methodological: a framework that treats Lorentz invariance as a core admissibility constraint, and rejects hidden preferred foliations, must not require a privileged arbitration order over spacelike or otherwise concurrent events. Under that stated commitment, causal ordering is structurally privileged because it matches the ordering part of the physical causal structure. Nonlocal quantum correlations are treated separately as correlation constraints, not as hidden order relations. The resulting picture is neither globally serialized nor incoherent: reality is a causally ordered, locally available, and physically finalized information history. This paper is an interpretive and conceptual discussion. It does not propose a new established physical theory and makes no independent empirical prediction.