Viscous Emergent Spacetime (VES) - A Thermodynamic Framework for Late-Time Cosmic Acceleration and S8 Resolution

We present a unified effective theory in which spacetime's bulk viscosity and torsion arise naturally from the second law of thermodynamics applied to a conserved informational current. This work extends the Viscous Emergent Spacetime (VES) framework by incorporating an antisymmetric contribution to entropy production, which uniquely generates a constrained torsion tensor. Torsion is not an independent field—it is a composite, non-propagating structure—and the theory propagates exactly two tensorial degrees of freedom, just as in general relativity. Cosmologically, the model yields a nonsingular bounce (replacing the Big Bang). Linear perturbations produce a scale-dependent modification of structure growth that reduces the \ (S₈\) tension by \ (5\) –\ (10\%\) without altering early-universe physics. Furthermore, the theory predicts a frequency-dependent phase shift in gravitational waves—a directly testable signature for LIGO, Virgo, and LISA. The complete set of equations and code are publicly available in Python, and we provide implementation guidelines for Boltzmann solvers (e. g. , CLASS).