The best-ranged laboratory in existence carries unpaid items: the AU's reported secular increase of 15 meters per century (retired by redefinition, never explained), the flyby anomalies' millimeter-per-second jumps, and the empirical secular terms ephemerides fit without deriving. Each is small against the system, enormous against the meter-level precision, and the standard framework offers no mechanism by which the local gravitational environment could secularly evolve at all.
The model's solar system is dynamically closed: known masses, known tides, solar mass loss, and otherwise a static local metric. Secular residuals therefore have no permitted physical origin, so they are administratively absorbed, redefined, bookkept, or deferred, rather than read.
SCT's expansion mechanism does not switch off inside bound systems; it weakens into a calculable whisper. The same mesh dissipation that drives cosmic acceleration operates at every hierarchical level (P14, P16), with the solar-scale decay rate registered at alpha near 2 × 10⁻¹² per year, anchored by lunar laser ranging, the canonical chain that Paper 7, From Chaos To Cosmic Expansion, runs explicitly from tidal recession to cosmic acceleration as one recursive mechanism. Bound orbits in a slowly dissipating mesh acquire secular drift terms at exactly the scale of the ledger's items: an AU-class drift of meters per century is the predicted order of the solar-scale mesh signature, and the empirical secular terms ephemerides keep fitting are, on this reading, the bookkeeping shadow of physics the closed-system assumption excludes (P17 at its smallest scale).
The unification is the framework's signature economy inverted: instead of explaining a cosmic anomaly with local physics, the cosmic mechanism descends to its local floor, one premise family spanning twelve orders of magnitude in scale, from lunar ranging to the Hubble flow, with the registered rates linking the floors. Flyby anomalies remain honestly unclaimed: frame-tree corrections (P10) supply candidate structure, but no derived rate is registered, so they stay listed as open rather than absorbed.
The local floor is the most falsifiable place the mechanism lives: next-generation ranging (BepiColombo-class radio science, advanced LLR) constraining secular drift rates below the registered alpha of 2 × 10⁻¹² per year would cut the mesh-decay chain at its anchor, severing the tidal-to-cosmic recursion of Paper 7. Conversely, drift rates confirmed at the registered scale with the predicted hierarchy-level dependence would be the mechanism's cleanest laboratory verification.