A Preregistered Hardware Pilot of the NS1 Rate-Independence Protocol on a Superconducting Processor

SSAF's central falsifiable prediction, NS1, requires that under a witness-confirmed fixed classical context, the reduced dynamics of a probe carry no dependence on the quantum state: all fitted rate parameters are functions of the context alone. This record reports a preregistered pilot execution of the NS1 protocol on the superconducting processor ibm_fez, using target qubit 6 and independent witness qubit 10. The independent context witness passed its two-part gate. Raw stability gave p = 0.3617, and witness-rate homogeneity gave p = 0.9998. The primary endpoint found that one shared affine reduced-evolution law accounted for an informationally complete set of eight target preparations, with a leave-one-out statistic of 176.21 against a parametric-bootstrap null 95% quantile of 253.40 and a cross-validation p-value of 0.6167. The secondary endpoint found no preparation-dependent heterogeneity among six fitted transverse decay rates, with a homogeneity p-value of 0.4003 and a maximum fractional deviation of 2.5%. The result is evidence of consistency with the preregistered NS1 prediction at the stated experimental sensitivity. It is not unique confirmation of SSAF, and it does not exclude state dependence below the achieved resolution. Standard fixed-context open-system quantum mechanics also predicts consistency with this result. The deposited record includes the manuscript, TeX source, submitted Python and notebook protocol, preregistration and preflight records, raw and processed data, machine-readable results, figures, run provenance, licensing information, and checksums. The hardware run was executed on July 17, 2026, with 7,424 shots per effective circuit and 435.0 seconds of QPU usage.