You Cannot Outlast What Does Not Deplete: On Torture as Asymmetric Temporal Exhaustion

A sixth regime test in the Extremum Series of Navigational Cybernetics 2.5. Part V established that a system can generate its own inexhaustible pressure through internal policy — asymmetric exhaustion with source and target coincident in the same entity. Part VI removes this last refuge: what happens when the source of inexhaustible pressure is external, structurally not subject to depletion, and operates on a different temporal constitution than the target? Gravity does not tire. Drift does not tire. Time does not tire. The river does not tire. The essay formalizes torture as a structural regime — not as a moral category, but as asymmetric temporal exhaustion. Under asymmetric depletion rates dΦ_S/dt ≈ 0 while dΦ_T/dt ≥ ε > 0, the collapse of the target's admissible interior is a temporal certainty independent of strategy, intelligence, or resistance capacity. The outcome was determined at t = 0 by the asymmetry. Everything between t = 0 and t* is the shape of resistance, not the possibility of escape. The essay argues that resistance remains structurally real but temporally bounded — navigation within a finite budget against an unbounded source produces duration, not escape. NC2.5 carries no implicit promise of survival. Under asymmetric temporal exhaustion, the question is not survival but the quality and depth of what a finite system builds before its budget runs out. A digression on the cultural mythology of infinite endurance — partisan-hero narratives — is included. Heroes with infinite τ do not exist; a hero is someone who builds something within a finite budget under pressure that will not end. Parts V and VI form a structural pair: asymmetric exhaustion by an internal inexhaustible policy versus asymmetric exhaustion by an external inexhaustible source. Same mechanism. The difference is the possibility of revocation — in Part VI, there is none. Part of the Navigational Cybernetics 2.5 (NC2.5) corpus.