One axiom. One operation. Zero free parameters. Underground experiments have hunted dark matter by nuclear recoil for decades and found nothing. This paper explains the failure and forces the right strategy. The dark-matter particle is the lightest Smithion, gauge-inert to electromagnetism and the strong force — it carries only the new charge and gravity. So a direct-detection recoil can proceed only through the feeble (confined) new force or gravity, making the cross-section structurally tiny. That is why the recoil searches keep coming up empty, and it forces the search to move to gravitational and cosmological signatures. At colliders, each new sector has p²−1 massless self-confining carriers (24, 48), so pair-produced Smithions hadronize into neutral bound states — a new confining-sector jet plus missing energy. The ladder is sealed at 7: a confining signature beyond prime 7 would falsify the framework. Machine-checked; reproduces from one command. A standalone result within the Smithian Fold Theory of Everything (SFTOE). Full corpus, code, and the run-it-yourself VERIFY.md protocol: https://github.com/MettaMazza/Smithian-Fold-Theory
Maria Smith (Mon,) studied this question.