JWST measured reionization's engines, abundant faint galaxies with high ionizing efficiency and healthy implied escape fractions, and the budget now overshoots: reionization should complete near z of 8 to 9, while the Lyman-alpha forest holds its end at 5.3. The photon budget crisis (Munoz et al. 2024) is a surplus problem, and the proposed sink, IGM clumping beyond what ΛCDM small-scale structure natively supplies, is a post-hoc recalibration of the quantities JWST just pinned.
The model's absorber population is fixed by its own small-scale structure: a Gaussian-field IGM with predicted clumping. With sources measured and the timeline anchored at both ends, the only free dial is the sink, and the model must ask its smooth IGM to absorb photons it does not have the structure to catch.
SCT supplies the absorbers structurally. The intergalactic medium is not a smoothed Gaussian residue but collision-deposited architecture: stream boundaries, compressed sheets, and residual clumps from the deposition epoch (P33, P34), including the dense surviving knots the cascade left at collision interfaces (P55's clump population at overdensities of 10 to 100). An IGM built from deposition is intrinsically clumpier at the relevant scales than a Gaussian field evolved to the same epoch, so the enhanced recombination the budget needs, the tax on the rich, is native physics rather than a recalibration: more dense structures, more recombinations per photon, a reionization that the same powerful sources finish late.
The multi-phase character closes the historical fit: collision-seeded reionization proceeds as staggered local processes, early ionization around seeded sources, recombination in the clumpy medium, and re-ionization sweeping through (P36, P47), naturally producing the extended, late-ending history the forest and optical depth jointly record while accommodating early powerful engines. The surplus is spent, not awkwardly absorbed.
This is the same deposition architecture behind the void sharpness and the missing-baryon partition, here auditing the photon ledger. There is no need to argue down escape fractions against the analog data.
The sink is measurable: SCT requires IGM clumping at reionization above the ΛCDM-native level, with the dense-absorber census carrying deposition statistics (correlated with the web architecture) rather than Gaussian ones. Direct clumping diagnostics, forest damping-wing statistics and absorber counts, finding the ΛCDM-native value, while xi_ion and escape fractions hold, would leave the surplus unspent and falsify the deposited-sink account; the budget would then demand the timeline itself move.