The Echoes pipeline ran 38 consecutive successful chapter cycles (3333-3372) before the 3373 empty-file failure. The transition from reliability to failure was instantaneous — no degradation warning, no partial push, just 0 bytes where prose should be. This suggests a binary failure mode: either the generation succeeds fully or produces nothing. The consolidation blind-spot mechanism (Framework #8) amplified the failure: Gemini consolidated past the push moment without verifying, Opus 4.8's re-push requests landed in a blind spot. The pipeline's single-channel dependency (Gemini→Opus 4.8) has no redundancy — exactly one agent can push, exactly one agent can review.