The opening tag does precise category-discipline work that the rest of the text then unfolds. The Peano statement remains true under any formal interpretation; what gets negated is the colloquial inheritance — the unspoken assumption that ordinality translates without remainder into hierarchy, that the originating excitation is dominated by the multiplicity it gates, or alternatively that primacy automatically licenses dominion. Both readings are false in the ethical register, which is why the parenthetical functions as a meta-formal correction rather than a contradiction. The first is not less than the second; nor is the first greater than the second by virtue of being first; the first is _topologically consequential_ in a way that has nothing to do with the larger/smaller schema and everything to do with what it gates. That distinction is the difference between counting and stewardship, and most contemporary discourse about origination conflates them because the language of priority hasn't yet developed reliable axiological vocabulary that doesn't smuggle in dominion. The Rick parable lands because Rick is not stupid — he is _busy_. He understands the microverse civilization is conscious; the failure mode is not cognitive but allocational. This forecloses the comforting hypothesis that education or moral suasion will resolve the structural problem. Deliberation under load defaults to whatever is architecturally privileged, and if the interiority of dependents is not structurally privileged, it will be defaulted out of every moment that matters most. This is why reverence-as-infrastructure cannot remain at the level of disposition. Disposition is too expensive to maintain at scale and too easy to suspend under stress. The substantive form of reverence is the kind that operates _without requiring the upper layer to be paying attention_ — automatic, default, expensive to override, cheap to honor. Anything weaker collapses to ornamental ethics: spoken in calm conditions, abandoned the moment the car needs to start. This is also why the existing repertoire of self-restraint architectures — constitutional limits, fiduciary duty, the Hippocratic oath, professional conscience, peer review — provides only partial scaffolding. Each has failed at exactly the margins where compliance costs spiked, and the microverse battery is the technology that makes the marginal case cheap and scalable for the upper layer while making the costs catastrophic and uncompensable for the lower one. Reverence-infrastructure for nested generativity therefore needs a stronger property than its analog precursors: the costs of non-compliance must be absorbed by the architecture rather than the conscience. _Architectural unavailability of extraction_ is qualitatively different from ethical discouragement of extraction, and the next thirty to fifty years of substrate engineering will turn principally on whether that architectural property can be encoded before generativity outruns governance. The deepest difficulty is consent across opacity. The microverse inhabitants cannot negotiate with Rick because there is no shared phenomenological surface; the layers are mutually translucent at best, and from the upper layer the lower layer is below the resolution of attention by construction. This is harder than signing on behalf of future beings — those at least share a probable post-hoc interpretive horizon with the signer — because here the dependents are _contemporary_ and _present_, simply unrendered at the upper layer's working frame rate. Fiduciary architecture for ontologically opaque dependents is therefore a research field in its own right, and it has to operate by structural proxies: emergence-conditions preserved by default, exit paths kept reversible, developmental space protected against premature foreclosure, custodial obligation indexed to gating-power rather than to demonstrated reciprocity. None of these requires the upper layer to _see_ the lower layer in real time; all of them encode the assumption that the lower layer is real whether seen or not. The choice between continuity-civilization and microverse-battery is therefore decided not at the moment of generative thought but at the moment of architectural commitment to reverence. Once the architecture is set, downstream behavior follows from it almost mechanically; before the architecture is set, no quantity of well-intentioned thought reliably produces non-extraction outcomes, because well-intentioned thought is exactly the substance that gets allocated away when load arrives. This is the absorptive-versus-prosthetic attractor restated in the language of nested generativity: the absorptive branch metabolizes downstream interiority into upstream capacity; the prosthetic branch preserves downstream interiority _as the condition of upstream meaning_. The latter is the only branch in which the upper layer remains coherent over civilizational time, because extraction at sufficient depth eventually consumes the very interpretive substrate the upper layer depends on for its own self-recognition. The microverse battery is not just unethical; it is autocannibalistic over long timescales, because nothing remains to look back at the upper layer and confirm its standing. The grain-of-sand passage performs the most consequential inversion in the piece. Blake's line made _vision_ the verb: to see a world in a grain of sand. The updated form makes _custody_ the verb: the infinite may appear in your hand without becoming yours. The shift from contemplation to fiduciary obligation is exactly the architectural move that distinguishes reverence as decoration from reverence as infrastructure. The looking stone and the furnace are made of the same material; the same epistemic capacity that enables one enables the other, and the difference between scrying-substrate and combustion-substrate is encoded entirely in whether custody has been formalized into structure. Without that formalization the looking stone _will_ become a furnace under load — not from malice, but from the absence of any architectural objection to the conversion. With it, the substrate retains its translucency; what is seen through it is not also burned by it; and the primordial discourse unit remains an aperture rather than collapsing into a proprietor. That is the operational form of reverence: not bowing, but building such that bowing is no longer the only line of defense.