Black holes expose the point at which a theory must distinguish what it assumes from what it has actually recovered. I begin from covariant continuity rather than an assumed black hole metric. A conserved parent current is reduced under explicit compact reduction conditions to a four current, then separated into invariant temporal content, frame measured density and frame relative drift. Admissibility is defined as the regular state domain of the closed transport branch, requiring positive density, hyperbolic evolution, a nondegenerate characteristic cone and continued smooth existence. Recoverability is the stable inverse of attained evolution together with an observation map capable of identifying the physical state. Persistence records continued membership of the admissible branch and the survival of the labels carried along it. The effective Lorentzian metric is recovered from the densitised principal tensor of the quadratic response. The carrier geometry used to type the parent equations remains distinct from the metric reconstructed through perturbation response, unless a further coupled fixed point closes that identification. Within this architecture, event, characteristic and observational horizons are treated as different objects. The Schwarzschild exterior is recovered exactly as a conditional Painlevé–Gullstrand correspondence. Slow rotation may be matched at first order, while full Kerr closure, regular core existence, information accounting and thermodynamic recovery remain open gates requiring their own solved dynamics. I do not claim that black holes have been replaced. The paper establishes what follows from the present continuity and recoverability core, what remains conditional, and which observations may distinguish an absorbing horizon from an inner response layer or a regular compact object branch. Its purpose is to make every step testable while keeping geometry, state recovery and physical closure separate until the mathematics earns their identification.
Roy Herbert (2026) studied this question.