What a Mark Alters: How Far a Relation Carries

Sixth and concluding paper in the Not Less, But Other series. What a Mark Alters asks how far the consequence of a relation can carry after the relation itself has ended. Building on the preceding account of trace-affect, it distinguishes the mark—the singular event of identification—from the measure-affected alteration the event leaves in a participant's exchange-relevant configuration. The paper separates three features of consequential carry: refresh as the presently established maintenance architecture, historical position as the location of an alteration within a register's formation-history, and structural reach as the extent to which altered configuration enters subsequent exchange. These features may interact, but the argument supplies no privileged scalar magnitude of trace and does not combine them into a single measure. The account is conditionally extended beyond an individual register. Where the framework's premises are independently licensed at another grain, transmission and communal practice are proposed as routes of re-installation without requiring an intact trace-token or a collective subject. Across an actual lineage, what carries is successor formation through already-altered registers. At sufficient recomposition, formation-dependence may outlast separate legibility or reconstructable provenance. The paper also distinguishes ordinary consequential alteration from threshold reconfiguration, where the conditions through which subsequent formation proceeds are themselves changed. A bounded formal result addresses non-recovery of formation-history under a non-injective present-state description, while stronger claims about complete historical reconstruction remain open. As the capstone of the six-paper series, the paper brings the series' structure-first discipline to the question of persistence itself: what remains consequential after a relation ends need not be a surviving thing. An alteration may cease to be separately legible while remaining implicated in what later formation has become. Derived results, applications, candidates, speculative implications, and open questions are distinguished throughout, and no verdict on consciousness, experience, or presence is issued at any grain.