The Constant Changes Address: The Vacuum-Energy Problem After a Two-Boundary Pairing Attack

The vacuum-energy problem is usually stated as a single embarrassment: quantum field theory, summed naively, predicts a gravitating vacuum energy density some 122 orders of magnitude larger than the value inferred from cosmology. This paper reports the state of an attack on that problem inside a bouncing Einstein–Cartan framework, and the outcome of a candidate family tested against the attack's own obstructions. The prior work — the Aldred Limit, the Two Bounds, and six subsequent rounds of derivation — is recompiled within the program's records and found consistent; at the classical level its free content is one product, a tower-global budget B = sN = 3.3×10¹²² nats (the census count N and the per-puncture share s separately free), with further named inputs at the quantum tier (the amplitude A(λ) over λ sectors and the pair (μ, θ)) and, if the data's central drift values are imposed, a clock-map schedule. Successive results relocate the budget but never fix it. A new candidate is then examined: that the missing input lives in the other temporal reading of the same system — the positron reading of a single Dirac field — as a condition pairing a level's past and future boundary faces. Of its four forms, three are killed in §4: the spectral-difference form by arithmetic (it undershoots the observed density by some 121 orders of magnitude), the charge-conjugation self-pairing form by a standard sign fact (under an unbroken symmetry with an invariant vacuum, only quantities odd under the symmetry are forced to vanish; the vacuum energy density is even under C, P, T and CPT, and the particle and antiparticle zero-point constants of a single Dirac field carry the same sign and add), and the annihilation-residue form by arithmetic and redshift behaviour. The fourth form, a boundary condition D₊ = 𝒦D₋, is stated in §5 together with the four-condition exam any completion of it must pass; Appendices B–D then execute that exam and two further candidates. The outcome is negative as selection: the pairing condition is the identity in the budget direction and H4 is dead as a selector (Appendix B), as are the self-count (Appendix C) and the history/substrate candidates (Appendix D). What survives is a set of frame-internal exclusions and two sharpenings of the one remaining door within the frame's inventoried condition types: an independently fixed scale, derived without consulting the observed value, entering at the holographic conversion step. No solution is claimed. The result is a relocation with a map: within the frame, the problem's remaining addresses are named, and the exam any candidate at those addresses must pass is written out.