Every Q2 substrate choice — Matter, Mind, Information, Mathematical, Relational, Brute Primitive — carried through all 12 tree levels. At each node: can this substrate answer the question? Published theories embedded at each step. The tree isn't rigged. Watch where each choice breaks on its own terms.
Whatever you choose at Q2 becomes your substrate. That substrate must answer every subsequent question — Q3 through Q12 — without contradiction. Where it can't answer, that's a blank. Where it contradicts itself, that's a death. Where it answers only by borrowing from another substrate's vocabulary, that's strain. The accumulated cost of "strain" positions becomes unsustainable — typically by Q6–Q8.
At each node, published secular theories are embedded — showing what physics already proved and what questions it left front and center. Those open questions converge on the same shape: the form of the boundary conditions (BC1–BC8).