Future Access Without Presence (FAWP): Operational Prediction Without Leverage in the Volumetric Time Model

I report the discovery and formalization of Future Access Without Presence (FAWP): a measurable regime in which an agent obtains nontrivial predictive information about future variables while lacking actionable access to the moment where intervention would meaningfully alter those variables. FAWP names an increasingly common condition in forecasting, automation, and decision pipelines: prediction persists while usable leverage collapses under latency, noise growth, and bottlenecked control channels. FAWP is formalized within the Volumetric Time Model (VTM) as constrained inference under an explicit access filtration (existence ≠ operational access). The core operational separation is expressed in information-theoretic terms by distinguishing (i) predictive coupling between present-accessible data and a future variable and (ii) steering coupling between an action and a delayed observation along an intervention channel. I define a no-leverage FAWP regime in which predictive mutual information remains above threshold while steering mutual information falls below detection, and I introduce the Leverage Gap as a quantitative measure of this separation. This record accompanies a reproducible evidence package spanning E1–E8. Experiments E1–E7 establish the Agency Horizon scaling under latency-dependent noise growth, estimator convergence, robustness beyond Gaussian assumptions, a saturating-noise information floor, coupling-capacity shrinkage under quantization/dropout, a delayed-feedback “control cliff” where viability collapses while mutual information remains nontrivial, and a Bell–CHSH consistency check demonstrating correlation without controllable transfer while preserving no-signaling. E8 provides a direct confirmation of FAWP across delay grids using pooled vs stratified mutual information, shuffle/shift null controls, bootstrap confidence intervals, event-based mutual information controls, and explicit leverage-gap visualization showing prediction persisting after control collapses. FAWP is presented as an operational science of agency under delayed information (not as a new fundamental physical law): it formalizes when forecasting remains statistically strong while actionable influence is no longer available. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18673949