The Mirror and the Hinge: Why There Is Matter Rather Than Nothing, and Why CP Violation Is Maximal

One axiom. One operation. Zero free parameters. The universe is made of matter with almost no antimatter, yet the laws are nearly symmetric — the Big Bang should have annihilated everything to light. This paper forces the surviving imbalance from the axiom itself. Antimatter is the Mirror, the fold reflection x ↔ 1−x. Perfect symmetry would leave a residue of exactly zero — and a zero is forbidden by the no-zero axiom. So the residue cannot vanish: it is forced to the positive half-One, its own antipode, folding back to the whole. Something survives because nothing is forbidden. The hinge that sets the imbalance is the CP phase at the unique self-antipodal point, the half-One, giving maximal CP violation. Quantitatively: baryon-to-photon ratio ≈ 5×10⁻¹⁰ (measured ≈ 6×10⁻¹⁰), Jarlskog ≈ 3×10⁻⁵, strong-CP aligned (no axion). Machine-checked; reproduces from one command. A standalone result within the Smithian Fold Theory of Everything (SFTOE). Full corpus, code, and the run-it-yourself VERIFY.md protocol: https://github.com/MettaMazza/Smithian-Fold-Theory