talanum52 said:
For this to be the mechanism for explaining how new mass distorts space, one has to substitute for the stress-energy tensor a step function (Cu(x)).
You are misunderstanding what a GR spacetime model is. It is a model of
spacetime. It already includes all "time variation" of everything in a self-consistent way. It is a global description of an entire history of a physical system (such as the universe). It is not a "snapshot" at an instant of time that then has to be evolved in time.
Note that you cannot just put a "new mass" into such a model; it won't be consistent. Mass cannot just appear out of nowhere. It has to be conserved. So if the only way for you to find a "mechanism" is to magically make a mass appear out of nowhere and then see what happens, you will never find any such mechanism in GR. Sorry.
If you insist on some kind of "time evolution" model in the context of GR, you would want to look at the ADM formalism, which
@Dale mentioned in an earlier post. This is a way of generating a full spacetime model (the kind described above) by starting with conditions on a particular spacelike hypersurface ("space" at an instant of "time"), and then evolving things in time. But any result you obtain this way can also be obtained the "global" way, with a full spacetime model as described above. And any result you obtain this way still has to satisfy the conservation law I described above. The spacelike hypersurface on which you define your starting conditions has to be evolved
backwards in time as well as forwards, in order to obtain a complete self-consistent solution.
Whether the ADM formalism would satisfy your definition of a "mechanism" is a matter of your personal preferences, not physics.