Ore-Stage Veins at the Sigma Orogenic Gold Deposit Are Spatially Clustered, Not Stress-Shadow Repulsive: a Drill-Core Test, and Why Declustering Fabricates GOE (Val-d'Or, Abitibi, Canada)

Version 2. Tests whether ore-stage extensional veins at the Sigma orogenic gold deposit (Val-d'Or, Canada) show stress-shadow spatial repulsion. Using 235 quartz-carbonate vein intercepts from four diamond drill holes (public report GM 69917), and applying no declustering (which would act as an artificial hard core, truncating P(s->0) and forcing <r> toward GOE), the along-hole vein spacing is clustered, not repulsive: pooled <r>=0.344, CV=1.45; a permutation test gives <r>_shuf=0.33 (obs ~ shuf), so the clustering is a marginal property of the broad vein-corridor spacing distribution, not sequential memory; GOE rejected at p<1e-4. Corroborated by an independent fracture network and published vein arrays. The note also demonstrates that minimum-separation declustering fabricates spurious GOE statistics from random points. CHANGES FROM v1 (ERRATUM): the spatial analysis is unchanged. The temporal framing is corrected. v1 described orogenic-gold mineralization timing as "temporal level repulsion (GOE)" and framed the paper as a "time-space asymmetry". Per a subsequent audit (10.5281/zenodo.20980670), a charge-and-release source is a relaxation oscillator whose timing is a narrow scalar clock (high but shuffle-invariant <r>, no spectral rigidity, unresolvable given age errors), not level repulsion; genuine Wigner-Dyson statistics require a chaotic, strongly-mixed spectrum. v2 reframes the result as "temporal scalar clock + spatial clustering". The superposition-to-Poisson principle underlying the spatial argument is unaffected.