Matter as incomplete crystallization: Quark charges, color confinement, and the proton mass from a single extra node in the vacuum lattice

We propose that baryonic matter is spacetime that failed to fully crystallize. In the Selection-Stitch Model, the early universe undergoes a K = 4 → K = 12 phase transition from a frustrated tetrahedral foam to a Face-Centered Cubic (FCC) lattice. The FCC unit cell contains eight tetrahedral voids. If one extra node — a remnant of the K = 4 phase — remains trapped in such a void, it bonds to the four surrounding FCC vertices, creating a local K = 4 pocket inside the K = 12 bulk. From this single geometric fact, with no adjustable parameters, we derive: (i) fractional electric charges − 1 / 3 from the regular-tetrahedron bond-angle cosine and + 2 / 3 from integer winding under the bulk Bravais translation symmetry; (ii) exactly three color charges from the three skew-edge pairs of the bounding tetrahedron; (iii) linear confinement from the L / 3 metric wall preventing node extraction; and (iv) the proton-to-electron mass ratio m p / m e = ( K + 1 ) K 2 − c skew K = 1836 from the structural node count and skew-edge pair count. Every result follows strictly from unadjusted FCC crystallography. We support these derivations with a computational verification of the underlying K = 4 → K = 12 phase transition (finite-size scaling toward K = 12 saturation, sharp geometric phase transition at exclusion radius R ex = L / 3 , and a verified Lorentz-isotropic dispersion). The model is shown to be consistent with current bounds on Lorentz violation and to reproduce the linear-confinement piece of the Cornell potential.