<p>Although the Records Life Cycle model has faced extensive criticism in theory, many archival settings still assume a linear timeline in practice, treating records as items that move step by step from current administrative use to long-term preservation In digital settings where machines act in very short time frames and record care is shared across many parties, a linear view does not reflect what a record is in practice. The article introduces Archival Time Simultaneity (ATS) as a framework for thinking about the archival record not as a biological entity that decays over time, but as a hyper-temporal node within a Block Universe. Using ideas from the physics of time and the graph-based ontology in Records in Contexts (RiC), ATS argues that evidential, administrative, and memory values should not be treated as stages that follow one another. Instead, they exist at the same time as different dimensions that come into play depending on context through metadata. On this view, each time a record’s value is activated in a given setting, the record is interpreted in a new way, and its meaning is reshaped (Ketelaar, Arch Sci 1:131–141, 2001). By treating the record as something that exists in multiple states at the same time, rather than as something that develops along a single line, ATS can serve as a theoretical basis for postcustodial stewardship. This view allows records to be activated in context where they are held, without requiring physical transfer or a final point of closure.</p>