Inertia as an Information-Latency Cost: A Fisher-Geometric Derivation in Open Rendered Systems

This preprint develops the physical core of the MetaTime program by deriving inertia as an information-latency cost in an open rendered system. Using the Kullback–Leibler divergence between neighboring rendered states and its Fisher-metric expansion, the manuscript shows that sustained motion requires continuous rewriting of localized boundary records. This leads to an emergent inertial tensor proportional to the Fisher information metric and to a latency scale governing the thermodynamic cost of updating rendered structure. In this framework, mass is not treated as primitive, but as the effective cost of maintaining localized informational persistence under finite rewrite latency. The paper is written as a focused theoretical contribution in information geometry, open systems, and foundational physics, with explicit falsifiability at the level of effective dynamics.