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 Speculative synthesis; preprint, not peer-reviewed.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.