The Bridge-Contract Criterion: A Form Audit for Transport Arguments, with an Instantiation in the abc Literature

The abc Gap Series: Part 2 — draft the contract DRAFT / work in progress. This is a versioned working paper of an ongoing research programme; newer versions supersede older ones. No claim about the truth of the abc conjecture, the correctness of IUT, or the correctness of the ATS series is made. Some proof claims resist line-by-line review not because individual steps are opaque, but because their load-bearing core is a transport: a quantity migrates between theoretical frameworks, and the claim's numerical content rests on the admissibility of that migration. A related class rests on global-only statements: assertions available only after summation over all places, with no place-wise access. This paper proposes a seven-component bridge contract and a versioned ledger audit. It reports a retrospective two-case feasibility illustration of the frozen v1-T transport ledger — the 1993 Fermat announcement as a retrospective known-gap case and an accepted volume-formula transport step as control — and one substantive selected-rows instantiation of the criterion in the abc literature, with a comparative discrimination case (the v1-F rows exercised there are named; the full-matrix coding of all rows is deferred). The paper contains no RH-side verdict; RH uniformity and global-only positivity claims are retained as an explicitly untested outlook. The criterion judges contract form, not mathematical truth: a served ledger is necessary, not sufficient, and the auditor tests the presence and addressability of an obligation, never its mathematical validity. Its value is that failures localize — the audit names the missing clause at a stated row instead of a diffuse doubt. ─────── ✦ ───────seriesdirectory (each part lists the whole series; planned parts are updated with title and DOI upon publication): ✔ Part 1: The Gap in IUTchIII, Corollary 3.12 — DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19960781 (latest version) ☞ Part 2: The Bridge-Contract Criterion: A Form Audit for Transport Arguments, with an Instantiation in the abc Literature — DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21960476 (latest version) ↳ Part 3: The Bridge Certificate — DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21925803 (latest version) Part 4: The Bridge Certificate Applied to the Joshi ATS Series: A Ledger Audit — DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21951155 (latest version) Part 5: The Joshi ATS Series under the Bridge-Certificate Standard: A Targeted Substance Audit and an All-Place Rigidity Classification of Effective Normalization Weights — DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21956398 (latest version) Part 6: Repairing the ATS Chain? A Rigidity Theorem for Product-Formula Weights and an Effective-Weight Test for the Height Subchain — DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21952486 (latest version) ↳ coming soon - Part 7: The bridge certificate applied to our own programme (self-application; working title) — (planned; appears in sync with the landscape paper) ✎ Tool supplement: The Global Normalization Contract Lemma — DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21924253 (latest version) ℹ Companion (meta) paper: From Landscape to Atlas: Multi-Route Cartography of an Ongoing Expedition Toward the abc Conjecture (formerly: The abc Landscape) — DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21916900 (latest version). The atlas paper is the complete memory of all routes; the series parts and capsule papers present selected results as independently citable units.