The Ratchet That Telescopes: Driven Defect Protocols Mint No Net Nieh–Yan Charge

In my corpus, topological (Nieh–Yan) charge is an event phenomenon: static defects carry none (paper #10), and a defect-creation event mints it at an exact rate, Q = b·L, charge b times the line created (paper #11). A later computation (paper #133) showed that a fluctuating defect network averages to nothing: its time-averaged Nieh–Yan census is zero. That left one door open, and it is the door every ratchet in physics walks through: drive the network. Quench it, cycle it, make creation and annihilation asymmetric — different rates, different duty cycles, a preferred handedness — and perhaps the cancellations fail and a directed charge accumulates, cycle after cycle. This paper closes that door for the whole protocol class, with the accounting shown. I extend the census of #133 in two layers. In the census layer, driven fluctuation protocols — periodically quenched amplitudes and correlation times, skewed fluctuations, asymmetric jump statistics, an asymmetric duty-cycle waveform — all return a time-averaged density of zero within their error bars, while a control protocol that injects a sustained mean returns exactly the nonzero value predicted, so the machinery provably can see rectification when rectification is fed in. In the event layer, the reason is exposed as an exact identity, verified in rational arithmetic and in simulation at residuals below 10⁻¹²: the charge minted over any window equals the change in the network's weighted inventory, Q = ΔW, where W is the sum over living links of b·L. A protocol whose inventory returns to where it started — any true cycle, however asymmetric inside — mints exactly zero. A protocol that drifts mints only its drift, and its lifetime total is bounded by the inventory it can hold: apparent rectification is the discharge of a stored stock, and it saturates and stops, demonstrated here in a handedness-swap protocol that mints steadily while opposite-handed stock lasts and then falls silent at exactly the predicted total. One loophole survives, and I print it in full rather than let a reader find it: if the coefficient b itself could be modulated in phase with the drive, as an ambient property rather than a property each link carries, a nonzero average of −0.032 (checker units) appears in the corresponding toy. But a floating b is precisely what paper #60 already found underived, so that door is not a ratchet inside the charge law — it is the separate, named question of whether b can be pinned, and it reopens only when that question is answered. Let me also be plain about what was never on the table: this is the mathematics of a charge law in a toy defect network, tested the way analog systems test a law's form. It claims no coupling of the analog charge to real spacetime torsion, no thrust, and no work extracted from anything. The ratchet dies in arithmetic. Grade: VANISHES BY ACCOUNTING IDENTITY — Q = ΔW FOR EVERY PROTOCOL IN THE CLASS; THE ONE LOOPHOLE IS THE UNPINNED COEFFICIENT, PRICED. Keywords: Nieh–Yan charge; torsion; defect networks; creation events; ratchet; Kibble–Zurek quenches; time-averaged density.