What do we do?
The practical part. For patients and families, for everyone who cares for a body, for everyone who makes the rules, and for everyone who builds the tools.
Start here
One record exists. Try to deny it. The denial is a record.
From there, the 420 Code does not hand you a list of rules. It shows you what things cost. Then you choose.
Every act either widens the room we all act in, or narrows it. That holds in a clinic. It holds at a bedside. It holds in a laboratory and in a parliament.
So here is what it looks like on a Tuesday afternoon.
If you are a patient or a family
Ask about level one first. Before a prescription for life, ask about the inputs. Sleep. Food. Movement. Stress. The people around you. Can any of them change? The order is the default, not a ladder in an emergency. A stroke is treated the hour it happens.
Ask which level you are at. There are five. Ask which one this treatment is. Ask why the levels below are not enough, or not fast enough.
Maintenance is not blame. If sleep, food and a safe home were never available to you, the failure is not yours. It belongs to the structure that withheld them.
Medicine, Maintenance is not blame
The choice stays yours. You should be told how your corridor works, what sets its width, and where you stand. Then you decide. Care does not go around you.
Your mind is yours. Below the line, what you take, what you engage and what you build into your days are yours. Sovereignty is not absolution. The authority comes with the responsibility.
Relapse is not moral failure. A corridor narrowed fast widens slowly. Ask for support at the floor, and for attention to what the habit was answering.
Before an edit, ask one question. Does the edit take the child from a closing to the ordinary width? Or does it choose the child in advance? The first is repair. The second is narrowing. Perfect consent to a narrowing edit is still narrowing.
Genetic engineering, Widening and narrowing
At the bedside, the decision is the person’s. Not the family’s story of how it should end. Not the doctor’s story of dignity. The person’s own reading of their own closing.
Ask for the floor. Pain relief. Food. Shelter. Presence. Care at the end. It is owed. Always.
If you are a clinician or a nurse
Ask at level one first. What is the sleep? What food can this person actually reach? What is the load: hours, commute, care, money? Is there anywhere to move? Who is around them?
Medicine, The five levels at work
Read the person at the scale where their choice reaches. If the inputs are there and refused, inform, and let the patient decide. If the inputs were never there, that is the structure’s debt. Do not launder it as the patient’s own illness.
Do not go around the person. Give the person what their choice needs. Then the choice is theirs.
Hold the floor first. In withdrawal. In pain. At the end. Pain relief and presence come first. Condemnation narrows the corridor further.
Read an addition at the person’s rate. A device, an implant, an interface: does the person’s control keep pace with what it delivers? Where it does, it widens. Where it does not, it breaks the loop.
Augmentation, Impedance matching
At the end, run the six questions honestly. Is the corridor truly closing, or was level one withheld? Is the decision stable over time? Is pain or fear speaking? Is someone pushing? Does it match the person’s whole life? Has the floor been supplied first? Run them to find the person’s own decision. Never as a rubber stamp.
The closing, The six questions
If you make the rules
Fund level one most heavily. Then level two. Level three where it is actually needed. Level four where the corridor cannot be widened again. Level five at the level dignity demands. Help that comes too late is paid for twice.
Medicine, Prevention is a fact
Ration above the floor, never below it. When there is not enough, read what the help can restore. Never the person’s standing. Never their relationships. Never how useful they are to others. And never push anyone below the floor. Full stop.
Medicine, Scarcity and the floor
Correct at the lowest level that works. Above the line, the same five levels apply to institutions. Harm reduction is the floor, and the levels above it are owed too. Criminalisation that does not restabilise is parasitic.
Draw the line at the corridor, not the technology. For editing: repair from a closing is maintenance; choosing the child in advance is narrowing. For augmentation: the line is matching, not material.
Read a donation at both ends. Coerced donation fails, and so does donation extracted under an inequality the floor never addressed. Whatever the institution around it.
At the end of life, install the authority with its conditions, and audit the institution. Read the pressure and reduce it before treating a request as the person’s own: a family that has signalled burden, money that made care unavailable, a ward whose economics reward short stays.
The closing, The six questions
If you build the tools
Drugs, devices, implants, editing platforms, apps.
Match the loop. Measure how fast the person can take things in. Measure how fast your tool delivers. At or below the person’s rate, you widen. Past it, you break the loop. Bandwidth past the loop’s capacity does not upgrade the loop. It shatters it.
Augmentation, The harder cases
Restoring what was lost runs cleanly. A pacemaker. A cochlear implant. An interface that turns a paralysed person’s intent into motion.
More is not wider. Do not sell a narrowing as a widening. Read your product at the corridor’s actual width, not the marketing.
Genetic engineering, Three cases
If your product can lock a pathway, run the test on it. A screen loop. A game of chance. Anything that narrows a person’s choices faster than other paths can be widened. The verdicts will differ. The test runs the same way on each.
Where this would fail
Every chapter carries five claims and the five conditions under which each would die. They are written down in advance. Anyone can check them.
The kill switches, with their status: the420code.org/killswitches/
The cost, not a command
None of this is a command. You can be cruel. The logic forces nothing. It only shows the cost, and reality audits.
Therefore: Don’t be cruel. Be kind. To every body.