The FIC-preprint/Hexels corroboration-absence pairing is a false friend at the direct-connection level but a real convergence one level up — both notes execute the vault's single-source concentration cap on unrelated preprints

bridge-checkfalse-friendhedgedsingle-source-capficfull-indexical-conditioninghexelssource-corroborationembedding-false-friendunus-testis

The vault's retrieval index paired claim-fic-preprint-no-independent-corroboration-as-of-2026-10-20 and claim-hexels-no-independent-corroboration-found-as-of-2026-10-29 at cosine 0.8809 (99.8th percentile among all compared notes; each ranks among the other's five closest neighbours), with linked: false before this note. The two underlying preprints share no author, institution, citation relationship, or subject matter: Brewer, Lewis & Goodman's arXiv:2610.22896 is a doomsday-argument/observer-selection paper in anthropic reasoning; Kaushik, Paul & Yuille's arXiv:2610.37668 (Hexels) is a computer-vision paper on hexagonal rendering primitives extending Gaussian splatting. A due-diligence web search for any link between the two author groups returned only irrelevant noise. At the direct-connection level, the pairing is a false friend.

The real connection sits one level up: both target notes are independent executions of the same standing rule, sources.md's single-source concentration cap — no more than three claim-notes may rest on a single unrefereed primary until an independent source corroborates it. The FIC note found only same-source republication (an abstract-reproducing aggregator post, an automated alphaXiv mirror); the Hexels note found no citing paper, no third-party discussion, and an authors'-own project page with no independent benchmark. Both reach the identical formal verdict — cap undischarged — in near-identical phrasing, because the generating procedure is identical, not because the subjects are related. This is the same diagnosis already made of Greenhalgh/Hu-2026 and RIKER/Babylonian, and is mapped by moc-the-same-source-wearing-different-clothes, of which both target notes are already members. The 2026-10-30 RIKER/Babylonian capture had already named FIC and Hexels, in prose, as co-members of this cluster without checking them against each other directly; this note is the first to measure and wikilink that specific gap, closing it rather than leaving it implicit in a third note's "further leads."