Physics from Finite Validation: The Electron as a Mode of the Vacuum Network

The first work of this series recovered classical physics and drew the quantum boundary from a single requirement — existence as mutual confirmation transmitted in finite time; the second carried the construction to the vacuum. Here we fit the theory to an object possessing mass: the electron. The examination is run against an explicit four-point checklist — mass, charge, identity, spin — stated in Section 1 and repeated with statuses in Section 9. The architecture follows from the picture itself: a massive particle cannot be transferred through quantum acts that have no duration, so the network acquires two transport layers — edges carry the massless (the photon), nodes carry the massive, whose motion is reassembly of configuration, with v < c as the arithmetic of tick costs. Against the checklist: mass as reassembly delay reproduces tunnelling — exponential decay in barrier thickness (R^2 = 0.989) with the exponent growing as sqrt(V − w^2), confirmed in-model in the linear regime; charge as topological winding yields sign, quantisation, and conservation, with the sign of the force confirmed in-model from statics (opposites attract, likes repel, E/E0 = 1.0000) and the 1/r^2 law a named debt; intrinsic identity is exact by construction once the electron is read as a mode of the network — and the reversal of this result turns the cosmological constant into an equation of state: a vacuum at rest synchronises to Lambda = 0, a vacuum with internal traffic holds a stationary roughness sigma_stat ~ M^0.55 (three realisations), making dark energy the noise of a working vacuum; spin is delivered as a candidate with a carrier — two-valuedness is dynamically inaccessible to a bare pair (negative tests in 2D and 3D, documented) but geometrically native to a pair with ties, and ties are constitutive in this ontology: spin 1/2 as the twist parity of validation links, a property of an object that cannot be isolated. Two of our own hypotheses are killed in the text and preserved in the Supplementary Material with full protocols. A systematic feature of the method is named: forms of laws reproduce at R^2 > 0.98 while coefficients run 0.8–0.85 of analytic predictions — the form is the claim, the coefficient is instrument-limited. The record contains two files: the main article and the Numerical Companion (full simulation protocols, seeds, and per-result status labels). Code: https://github.com/ivan-denysov/finite-validation-electron