Structured Vacuum Field Theory: The Early Black-Hole Revision

This paper is a constraint-based audit of Structured Vacuum Field Theory and Early Black Hole Seeding: A Case Study of GN-z11 (Hunter 2025, https://zenodo.org/records/17209078), executed forward and blind, with comparison to data last. The audit withdraws five registered claims and reassigns a sixth; nothing registered in 2025 survives at registered strength. The wreckage is productive: a forced relation binds seeding probability and formation mass to one free number; the seeds reclassify as an inert compact relic, with eighty-seven percent of the natural-mass window excluded by overclosure arithmetic and one uncontested microlensing bound; an exact propagation gate yields an inverse persistence-time bound reaching eighteen orders beyond any laboratory limit; and the one number the framework cannot derive is declared a datum, its single conditional reopening named. The audit's central mathematical product is the finite-tree pinch theorem, an exact framework-free result for stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds: for any finite binary merger tree, the summed chirp functional that sets the background energy density is bracketed two-sidedly by the tree's endpoints alone, between the sharp constants 3/5 and 0.6756 — at fixed endpoints, the merger-assembled background is confined to an 11.2 percent energy-density spread regardless of assembly history. The statement, proofs, sharpness constructions, and a dated priority search are self-contained and require no other part of the paper. Every number is reproduced by the deposited verification script (deterministic, numpy/scipy only), whose SHA-256 checksums are embedded in the paper. Drafted, computed, and adversarially reviewed in collaboration among the author and three AI systems (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT), under the standing rule that reviewer agreement is not verification — the script and the proofs are.