Canon Update / Recent Derivations: Record Reconstruction, the Monitored Service Rate, and the Current Frontier of the Finite-QEC Substrate

This note records a set of recent canon changes in the finite-QEC substrate programme before the older papers and book are rewritten. The developments are important enough to cite as a separate update: the reconstruction layer has been sharpened into a record-reconstruction ladder; the minimal balanced record cell is forced to be the self-dual doubly-even 8, 4, 4 byte under explicit finite-record hypotheses; the bare monitored service rate α0 = 1/137 is no longer a free convention but the Born weight of one firing projector in a 137-label record-pair service register; the service-history measure has been narrowed to a conditionally closed record-action skeleton, with only traffic-clock universalisation and recovery holonomy still open; and the late cosmological selector has been reduced to a single completed-burn episode per physical cell inside the current homogeneous service instrument. Several previous “free coefficient” entries in the native cosmological/QEC core have also been reclassified as sector-native conditional invariants or closed-negative artefacts. The result is not a claim that the programme is finished. It is a cleaner public status: the native record-action core is substantially tighter than in the existing paper set, while the hard remaining walls are now explicitly named—the EW/nuclear second scale, the recovery-holonomy/CP sector, dressed-α, external Boltzmann/halo tests, and ordinary precision phenomenology for the framed causal-set high-energy layer. 2026-06-20 canon refresh: Updated with alpha-escape status: continuum service-occupation route lands at 0.9956 of dressed-alpha shift, but physical Ward/Kubo billing map remains open; build/render checked locally; not Zenodo-synced.