This paper develops the concept of Universal Care Income (UCI) as an ontological alternative to income- and distribution-based models of social security. UCI is not understood as a transfer payment or a social-policy instrument, but as an infrastructural condition under which world-sustaining (i.e. socially and ecologically reproductive) work can exist at all.The point of departure is the diagnosis that modern economic systems recognize work only when its effects are immediately visible, completed, and translatable into value form. Forms of work whose efficacy is relational, time-delayed, regenerative, or epistemic—such as care work, social stabilization, ecological regeneration, artistic practice, or neurodivergent modes of work—remain structurally invisible under these conditions or are damaged by permanent output and efficiency demands.Universal Care Income addresses this problem not at the level of distribution, but at the level of the boundary conditions of work. It decouples existential security from immediate visibility and thereby creates a space in which work can unfold its effects without having to be continuously translated into secondary-economic performance formats. UCI does not aim to accelerate or optimize processes of unfolding, but to recognize their temporal, relational, and regenerative character as a precondition of productive efficacy.In contrast to models of an unconditional basic income, which primarily distribute purchasing power within existing value orders, UCI shifts the question of the conditions under which work can be considered legitimate in the first place. In conclusion, UCI is discussed as a temporal and relational infrastructure that reduces the structural extraction pressure on world-sustaining work without abolishing markets or income. UCI thus appears not as a social-policy add-on, but as a necessary precondition for sustainable work in complex social and ecological systems.This contribution is an interface text within a broader operator-based research program. Core concepts are employed here in application rather than re-derived. The underlying research corpus operates in a non-linear, rhythmically recursive mode of structural analysis that cannot be fully rendered in standardized academic English without loss of epistemic resolution. The author’s primary research practice is grounded in an autistic mode of structural perception; the present text provides an interface translation of this work for academic contexts.Unfolding