Slinky Future-Mass Projection Explains the Bullet Cluster Without Particle Dark Matter

We present Slinky Future-Mass Projection (Slinky-FMP), a diffeomorphism-invariant exten- sion of General Relativity in which gravity couples to a short, causal projection of near-future baryonic matter via a bilocal kernel obeying finite horizon and zero DC offset (“Null-DC”). The construction preserves the GR tensor sector, PPN safety, and cGW = c, while produc- ing an effective, scale-selective enhancement in the Poisson and lensing sectors that mimics collisionless mass. We implement a damped oscillatory (“slinky”) scale response to gain mild morphological control without sacrificing the FMP guardrails. Using publicly available Chandra panels (five epochs) and a κ panel for 1E 0657−56 (the Bullet Cluster), we perform a registration-free morphology test: Slinky-FMP robustly reproduces the canonical bimodal lensing separation of ∼ 60′′ (≈ 265 kpc at z = 0.296) across all epochs, matches the pixel sep- aration in the κ panel (21 px), and yields near-flat radial ratio profiles R(b) = κobs/(A κFMP) using a pseudo-WCS calibration. We provide the field equations, the response kernel, and a two-channel (stars/gas) implementation suitable for joint rotation-curve and lensing analy- ses. Claim. With Slinky-FMP, the Bullet Cluster phenomenology is explained at ΛCDM level without particle dark matter, using only band-limited, causal coupling to baryons—a hypothesis that is falsifiable via the joint constancy of R(b) and PPN/GW constraints. We outline a dataset-complete test (FITS+noise) for head-to-head χ2/AIC comparison with dual-NFW.