The Red Queen's Prison: Frame-Lock and the Architecture of Organizational Collapse in Evolutionary Warfare

Part 3 of a trilogy on substrate-independent life. Some systems optimize so
completely for one mode of coordination that they cannot change modes even when
changing is survival — a state this paper calls frame-lock. Its most dangerous
form is the False Rung: a system's confident but mistaken belief that its
communication substrate is secure when it is in fact compromised, so that the
system leans harder on the failing channel instead of abandoning it. The paper
develops the idea as an organizing lens (not a law) across five compounding
layers, anchored on the documented case of the U-boat wolfpack and the breaking
of Enigma, and states one falsifiable claim with its experiment: that
intent-based ("mission command") architectures are more robust to corruption and
flooding than centralized command. The accompanying simulation that would test
this claim has not yet been run; the resilience figures discussed are labelled
as predictions, not findings. Speculative synthesis; preprint, not peer-reviewed.
Released CC BY 4.0 as a lens to argue with, and to break.