ResultOffline gate: calibrated top-two near-tie override of fair D4 by the frozen afterstate model

The calibrated top-two near-tie override of fair D4 by the frozen iteration-3 afterstate model FAILED its frozen gate by a narrow margin, with genuinely positive signal. On 2,689 fresh held-out roots, 1,030 (38.3%) were near-tied at the frozen 500-point threshold and the override fired on 37.0% of those. On eligible roots the override reduced mean normalized regret versus unchanged D4 in both half-folds (half1 0.2484 vs 0.2835, +0.0351; half2 0.2343 vs 0.2418, +0.0075; pooled +0.0214), but the frozen criterion required at least +0.01 in EACH half-fold, and half2 fell short. On the 84 decisive eligible roots the improvement was larger (+0.0426: 0.0880 vs 0.1306). Label stability passed (decisive Spearman 0.814), model quantile calibration passed (0.861), the gate is deterministic (byte-identical repeated reports), and the corpus is successor-closed. Interpretation: the conservative-override MECHANISM works as designed (fires often, calibrated, positive in both halves) and this is the first preregistered held-out test in this repository where a learned model's intervention improved on fair D4 at all; the CHECKPOINT's ranking quality is the bottleneck, consistent with the model being undertrained (11 of 20 epochs) and trained on a weak D1-continuation teacher. Per the frozen failure action, no further override variants of this same checkpoint are opened; a retry requires new evidence such as a fully trained or stronger-teacher model under the same frozen rule.