# n158 — charge quantization, third assault: the Alice route
# (2026-07-11. The first assault read structure without quantization
#  (n90); the second died with winding-as-charge (headstone 32). The
#  third uses two organs that did not exist before this week: the
#  bipartite discipline and the C-structure's sublattice swap.)

## The two exact facts (both one-liners, both structural)
F1. The staggered sector's holonomy around a cycle of length L is
    (-1)^L: AN ODD CYCLE IS A Z2 MONOPOLE of the staggered (EM)
    sector — flux pi, exact. (The same discipline that constrained
    handle bridges in n134, now read as defect physics.)
F2. C-conjugation IS the sublattice swap (the framework's antimatter,
    standing since the C/P/T card). Transport around an odd cycle
    swaps sublattices: A CHARGE CARRIED AROUND AN ODD CYCLE RETURNS
    AS ITS ANTIPARTICLE. That is the defining property of an ALICE
    STRING (Schwarz 1982): the framework's odd cycles are Alice
    defects of charge conjugation.

## The quantization (Dirac's argument, transplanted; one declared input)
DECLARED NORMALIZATION: a charge-q pattern's billing phase winds as
e^{i q phi} (the compact de Broglie counter, n102 — the unit charge
defines the unit winding).
Around an Alice defect of flux pi, single-valuedness on the double
cover demands q*pi in pi*Z:  q IN INTEGERS. And Dirac's counting
transplants whole: ONE odd cycle anywhere in the causal past
suffices — and the surgery epoch (n117 baryogenesis) generically
made them. CHARGE IS QUANTIZED BECAUSE THE EARLY UNIVERSE DID
TOPOLOGY SURGERY, AND SURGERY MAKES ODD CYCLES.
Class: [A-structural] for F1-F2; [B] for the quantization given the
declared normalization. The millicharge-floor bet gains its
mechanism: a millicharge is Alice-inconsistent, not just unobserved.

## The unexpected bonus, flagged [C]: fractional charge must confine
A FREE q = 1/3 object is Alice-inconsistent (q*pi not in pi*Z): it
cannot exist as an isolated single-valued pattern. But an INTEGER
composite of fractional constituents is consistent. That is the
observed phenomenology of quarks — free: never; confined into
integers: always. The framework's confinement attempt died at
headstone 25 (budget bounds cannot confine); the Alice route offers
a different mechanism entirely: CONFINEMENT AS CONSISTENCY — the
strong sector's silence may end where the quantization argument
begins. Flagged, not built; the strong sector remains officially
silent.

## Kill conditions
- A confirmed free millicharged (or fractional) particle kills the
  Alice quantization outright (and prediction 14's floor with it).
- A demonstration that the substrate CANNOT support odd cycles
  (bipartiteness as an axiom rather than a generic state) would
  gut the mechanism — the substrate's cycle parity is now a live
  structural question, promoted from bookkeeping to load-bearing.