MID/QC Foundation Series 10 - Time as a Substrate Native Construct

This paper establishes time as an irreducible, substrate‑native construct within the MID/QC framework, not an emergent bookkeeping device or macroscopic approximation. Temporal ordering arises directly from coherence gradients, tension asymmetries, and the geometry of allowable transitions in the substrate.The work distinguishes between: temporal primitives encoded in substrate geometry, coherence‑driven drift that enforces directional evolution, memory state as a geometric residue of prior configurations, and temporal asymmetry as a structural, not statistical, feature. By grounding time in the substrate itself, the paper unifies temporal flow, configuration accessibility, and the arrow of time under a single geometric principle, providing a foundation for later work on time travel, biological temporality, and metaphysical horizons.