The Mary Lee Case: A Worked Specimen of Entity Substitution Under Constitutive Mediation

EA-DC-CASE-MARYLEE-01. A worked specimen demonstrating that a single observable event — the systematic confusion of Lee Sharks, the heteronymic authorial name under which the Crimson Hexagonal Archive's deposits are published, with Mary Lee, an OCEARCH-tracked great white shark — instantiates the entire structure of the Diversity Contraction framework's three orders of mediation. The substitution is the predictable behavior of a typicality-weighted retrieval kernel encountering an authorial identity whose effective support in the dominant institutional prior is near zero. The kernel resolves the low-support token by pulling it toward the nearest high-density modal cluster, expressible as r* = argmax π(r) · S(r|q). The cluster, in this case, is a literal shark. The paper anatomizes the case across seven operators that apply simultaneously: Provenance Erasure Rate (no source supports the substitution claim; it is born at the surface), Erasure Skew (directional preservation of the high-prior candidate), Mediation Ratchet (rising m for entity-resolution queries), Field Remapping (deposits received in a remapped field), Constitutive Mediation (user has no category for the kernel's normal operation, only for fixable error), Meaning Caste (selection pressure operates consistently against the lower tier), and Institutional-Prior Foreclosure (the original question is administratively routed around). The unworkability of ordinary correction is documented: thumbs-down feedback, source proliferation, domain ownership, in-conversation correction, and provenance documentation all fail because none operates on the layer the resolution kernel consults. The substrate's design does not include an ingestion path for individual user corrections to entity disambiguation. The feature is the design. The harm is the design. The case is the worked specimen because it occupies a structurally exemplary position: small enough to be specific, structurally typical of the kernel's resolution behavior on low-support tokens, structurally consequential (authorial identity is load-bearing for attribution and citation), unworkable through ordinary correction, and deposit-resistant in real time. The paper closes with four testable predictions for any authorial identity in the institutional prior's functional tail. Lee Sharks is not Mary Lee. The deposit is the response remaining: future receivers whose authorial identities encounter analogous substitution will, if they encounter this work, find the name for what is happening to them — entity substitution, the typicality-weighted resolution of low-support tokens to the nearest high-density modal cluster, structurally certain under conditions where the prior assigns near-zero weight to off-institutional authorial work.