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 14, From Chaos To Cosmic Expansion, runs explicitly from tidal recession to cosmic acceleration as one recursive mechanism. Bound orbits in a slowly dissipating mesh may acquire secular drift terms, and the registered rate bounds them: alpha times an AU is tens-of-meters-per-century territory, so the ledger's items sit at or below the scale the mesh chain permits rather than demands. The known local drifts are tidal and mass-loss physics first, the same clause Paper 14 states for the lunar rate, with ranging serving as the anchor of the rate ladder rather than as a mesh detection, and the empirical secular terms ephemerides keep fitting are, on this reading, candidate shadows of physics the closed-system assumption excludes, bounded by the registered alpha (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 seventeen 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, but the kill runs through the rate ladder, not the residuals: a non-tidal secular drift confirmed by next-generation ranging (BepiColombo-class radio science, advanced LLR) at a rate incompatible with the registered alpha of 2 × 10⁻¹² per year, or a broken solar-to-cluster rate ladder, would sever the tidal-to-cosmic recursion of Paper 14, From Chaos To Cosmic Expansion. A fully closed tidal and mass-loss budget does not threaten SCT, since the local floor is an anchor, not a required anomaly; conversely, a genuine non-tidal drift confirmed at the registered scale with the predicted hierarchy-level dependence would be the mechanism's cleanest laboratory verification.