arXiv2026
This version supersedes earlier versions and develops the three-class model of v1 into a closed, conserved network. On a relational view, the Universe is the happening of events rather than a container for them. A kinetic model gives this dynamical form: events are sorted as future, now or past; future events combine reversibly into now events; a now event meeting past events is activated and completes irreversibly into past events, which are renewed for future use. Past events thus catalyse their own production in a closed network conserving a weighted event count. We give a complete mass-action and bifurcation analysis. Conservation fixes the stoichiometry uniquely. When one past event participates in each activation, progression ignites softly at a transcritical threshold and no fold can arise, for every completion yield. When two participate cooperatively, the progressing branch folds: a past-rich attractor coexists with a past-poor state and ignition needs a finite perturbation. Cooperative order creates memory; nonequilibrium asymmetry only sets how hard it is to undo, strict one-way latching being a singular limit of hysteresis. In a partially reversible network where only renewal is reversible, two stable interior states coexist while activation and completion stay strictly one-way. The work is theoretical and does not derive time or its arrow: relational ordering and local irreversibility are assumed. As stated postulates, events are parcels of energy, the budget is conserved energy, and the activated class is the activated complex of transition-state theory. Around each cycle both the budget and the event number are conserved; at steady state the composition is stationary while energy is concentrated and dispersed locally, and whether entropy production vanishes globally is posed as a hypothesis.