For years, emergent gravity programs have been able to reproduce gravity-like behaviour—Newtonian attraction, geodesic motion, horizon thermodynamics—yet still leave one awkward question unanswered: why does gravity have to be Einsteinian? Why isn’t the long-range response just a scalar field, a vector force, or some other “effective” interaction that only mimics GR in special cases? This paper closes that loophole. It shows that if any emergent theory satisfies four extremely weak and widely accepted infrared requirements—locality, Lorentz symmetry, conserved stress-energy, and universal coupling—then the long-range mediator is forced to be a massless spin-2 field with the same gauge redundancy as linearized diffeomorphisms. And once you require that this field also gravitates (because it carries energy), the self-coupling bootstraps uniquely to the Einstein–Hilbert action (with a possible cosmological constant) as the inevitable two-derivative fixed point. In plain language: gravity isn’t “one option among many”—under these conditions, gravity couldn’t have been any other way.
That result matters for VERSF because it closes the last serious structural gap: VERSF already argues that spacetime, time’s arrow, and gravitational phenomenology emerge from information-theoretic constraints on a low-entropy void substrate—but critics could still say, “even if something gravity-like emerges, why must it have the full tensor gauge structure of GR?” This paper answers: it must, provided VERSF’s infrared limit really is local, Lorentz-symmetric, stress-energy conserving, and universally coupled—as the framework claims. The burden shifts from “derive Einstein’s spin-2 structure from scratch” to the more focused—and more VERSF-specific—task of explaining the microscopic mechanism by which void-scale information dynamics produces that A1–A4 infrared fixed point, and of predicting the sizes of higher-derivative corrections (the EFT coefficients) in terms of VERSF parameters. In other words, VERSF no longer needs to assume Einstein gravity or re-derive it as a separate postulate: once the framework’s universality and conservation principles are in place, Einstein’s structure follows as a mathematical consequence.