Five Per Cent In, Six Per Cent Out: I Priced the Assumed Observational Error Beneath the 21 cm Forecast, and the Headline Precision Is the Assumption Read Back at One Redshift

Prices Queue-2 item Q2-21, arXiv:2509.05096 (Maity, emulator-based forecasting with 21 cm and density cross-correlations during EoR), on its verified abstract claim, the TSI store record, and the full text. The load-bearing assumed step is the 5% observational uncertainty combined with emulator error under a diagonal likelihood. On the paper's own Table 2: the <6% h headline is the half-width of a 95% interval 10.1% wide in full; doubling the assumed error widens h by only x1.57 because the emulator training scatter floors the budget, and the bias emulator that buys the sigma_8 claim is the weakest (R^2 = 0.92, used at 2 of 6 k bins); Omega_m is one-sided in all six columns; at Q_HI = 0.29 the h width grows x2.43 and sigma_8 collapses to one-sided. DERIVED-INDEPENDENT. Quantum gravity NOT SOLVED; vacuum catastrophe NOT SOLVED.