DQIS — Distributed Quorum-Based Independent Immune Surveillance: A Theoretical Framework for Byzantine Fault Tolerance for Multi-Channel Immune Surveillance

Abstract

DQIS — Distributed Quorum-Based Independent Immune Surveillance. Consolidated Framework (V39, August 2026). The question. Can Byzantine fault tolerance — building reliable systems from unreliable, independently-failing parts — be made useful to tumour immune surveillance? The claim is parametric and deliberately narrow: given N detection channels with per-channel error p and measured dependence θ, a k-of-N quorum reduces evasion by a factor F(p, k, N, θ). We demonstrate this in principle and measure θ on real human tumours. We do not demonstrate a device: designing the receptor, measuring true error rates in a living system, delivery, a per-organ false-positive budget and six-input logic in one vector all require a laboratory we do not have. They are recorded as declared limits, not as work in progress. This version is a quarter the length of the previous one because that engineering layer was removed rather than left standing without evidence. The panel. Six channels, each reading a surface or secreted proxy — never an internal state, which is physically unreadable from outside. Five read a presence: membrane Hsp70, exposed phosphatidylserine, cell-surface free thiols, chromosomal instability via cGAS-STING, Warburg metabolism. One reads an absence: loss of MHC-I. Decision rule: a plain k-of-N quorum at k = 2, one vote each, no weighting and no veto. To escape it a tumour must silence h = N − k + 1 = 5 channels together, so the cost scales as μ⁵. Independence is measured, not assumed. Pairwise Kendall τ-b within each tumour, on melanoma (GSE72056), glioblastoma (GSE131928) and pancreas (GSE155698): 44 of 45 pairs fall below |τ| < 0.20, mean 0.077; the exception is PS↔T-δ in the pancreas at 0.228. Read that channel as inferred aneuploidy rather than as the mRNA of its sensor and the same pair measures 0.093, with all 45 passing — we keep the worse number as canonical and state the better one rather than choosing it. Two qualifications travel with the result: the gate is a threshold we set, justified but not validated; and on the pancreas independence is visible only after a standard correction for cell complexity, without which 14 of 15 pairs sit above. The negative result, and it is about our own metric. At the same measured τ, the escape probability moves across seven orders of magnitude depending on the assumed shape of the dependence — from 12–17× reduction under the worst structure we could construct to 1.7×10⁷× under pure independence. τ constrains the centre of the distribution; escape lives in the tail. We therefore measured the tail directly: the frequency with which five of six channels sit in the low tail together exceeds independence by 1.5× at the median and 4× at the lower quartile, growing monotonically deeper into the tail. The absolute escape figure is model output, cited as a declared edge of a band; the ordering of the three tumours, which never changes, is measurement. What does not work, stated as such. Every independence figure is computed on RNA while every channel reads the membrane, and on paired data the transcript accounts for only 7–18% of surface protein typically. Two channel pairs are coupled by mechanism in a way the correlation cannot see. False positives are not solved. The memory imprint the absence channel needs must span 24–48 hours; the best measured in vivo lasts 4–6. The encounter rate that is the exponent of every escape figure has never been measured in a human solid tumour. Reproducibility and companions. Every number comes from a script in the repository, and every load-bearing number is reproduced by a second independent implementation; the 163 citations were read at the source one by one. The Objections Register (V38) is a live adversarial audit of 58 objections, of which only 6 have an evidential answer. The Addendum I (V23) carries the tail-dependence formalism. Origin. Developed by an independent researcher with no academic affiliation, on a laptop, on public data, with artificial intelligence used for literature verification and mathematics — as an instrument, not a co-author. No wet-lab validation is claimed. A prior-art deposit and an invitation to falsification, not clinical guidance. The most transferable finding is not the framework: in any multi-sensor scheme the mean correlation between sensors does not bound the risk, and what decides is not how many channels there are but which ones. Terminological note. From v22.0 DQIS expands as "Distributed Quorum-Based Independent Immune Surveillance"; earlier versions used "Quantum-Inspired". The bioelectric channel T-γ*, the balanced quorum, the adaptive quorum with a Ki-67 gate, the ~104-tumour table and every fold-reduction figure derived from them are superseded; Chapter 9 lists what was removed and why, marking the removals that weaken the argument. Contact: dqis.research@proton.meCompanion documents (current versions): Scientific Objections Register v35; Addendum I — Temporal Stratification of Tail Dependence Risk v20. Released under CC BY 4.0. Contact: dqis.research@proton.me Related documents: - Register of Scientific Objections v35.0: https://zenodo.org/records/21128725 - Addendum I — Temporal Stratification of Tail Dependence Risk v20: https://zenodo.org/records/21128894