The Two Clocks of the Neck

A baby universe does not pop off its mother. The cord between them, a neck made of light, counter-twists tighter until it shears. That picture only works if the neck stays together long enough to be loaded: the twist has to finish loading before the neck falls apart. I was asked which happens first, and on October 29 I answered with a declaration: yes, the neck holds. A declaration is not a computation. This paper runs the computation. Two clocks, both built from the frame's own standing numbers. The loading clock reads 6.44×10⁻²² seconds. The confinement clock cannot be read to a finite number yet (that debt is stated plain in §6), but its floor can: under the harshest loss bound on record, the neck holds at least 2.4×10⁻¹⁵ seconds, about 3.7 million times longer than the load takes, and the one channel that could have eaten the margin clears its price by some 10^35 in the exponent. The neck holds, on the strength of the stated premises the computation rests on, and the declaration is retired. The strongest known carrier of the same shape — Wheeler's geon, light held by its own gravity alone — fails this same test by a factor of about 1500, and that failure is printed at full size in §4. The branch lives because the frame's neck is not that carrier.