Kernel Corridors and Schreier Waiting in Synchronizing Automata

This paper studies rank escape and rank-preserving waiting in synchronizing automata while retaining the transformation-kernel and permutation-orbit information that ordinary rank bounds discard. It separates pair-hitting distance, reachable packing, marked-kernel corridors, and fiber incidence as distinct exact objects. For every reachable image subset, the rank-escape time is characterized by pair hitting. Rank-preserving plateaus are characterized by persistence within one marked-kernel stratum, and reachable-unit packing is both the discrete inverse and the layer-cake representation of the unit waiting tail. The resulting fiber-incidence construction is an exact rankwise accounting interface, not a universal potential for the Cerny conjecture. When an inverse-closed permutation core controls a unit corridor, shortest plateau escape is bounded through a subset Schreier graph. For faithful elementary abelian permutation cores generated by commuting involutions, the declared class satisfies the Cerny threshold. In the binary clean specialization, every shortest normalized reset word has at most one genuine permutation wait, so the reset depth is either n minus one or n; the exact class extremal depth is n for every n at least three. These are class theorems under explicit defect-one, inverse-closure, simulation, commutativity, and clean-exit hypotheses. They do not prove the Cerny conjecture for arbitrary synchronizing automata. Exact finite censuses through four states, exhaustive binary-clean checks through six states, and a limited Lean formalization support the declared surfaces but do not replace the manuscript proofs. Local source-closure verification is not independent mathematical validation. Outside the Schreier-controlled setting, path-compatible mass and transport accounting remains open. Source repository: https://github.com/dooven-prime/rime-lite Paper XXIII of the Representation-Induced Mechanics and Evolution (RIME) program. Independent researcher; no institutional affiliation.