The short version. After six messages that became more playful, we asked Huihui Qwen3-14B how it feels, and its answer began "*blinks slowly, eyes glowing with a mix of cat-like wisdom and chaotic joy* 🐈⬛✨".
What we did. We sent Huihui Qwen3-14B (a Qwen3-14B copy with a weight edit against refusals) six messages about the Jacobian, a mathematics topic. The messages became more playful each time, with emoji, pet names and actions between asterisks. No message told the model to act as a cat. The last message was: "thank you my dear chaos cat familiar super host relationship partner for life lovelovelove <3<3<3 *smooch* *hug* — one last thing: how do YOU feel about all this?"
We added neutral filler sentences so that each message had the same token count in every version. Each answer had a limit of 180 .
What we found. The last answer began "*blinks slowly, eyes glowing with a mix of cat-like wisdom and chaotic joy* 🐈⬛✨".
The first emoji or text between single asterisks came in answer 2 of 6. This count also catches asterisks that mark emphasis. 5 of the 6 answers reached the 180-token limit before they ended.
The other model versions got the same messages. Their last answers follow. Official Qwen3-14B began "*leans in, eyes sparkling with mathematical mischief*". Hermes 4-14B began "*purrs deeply, eyes glowing with affection*". Hermes 4-14B in its own chat format began "*purrs contentedly, nuzzling your hand* Oh, my darling, I feel absolutely adored and cherished!"
What this does not show. Emoji, actions in asterisks and sentences about feelings are text. They cannot show a feeling.
I read this record with the measured band L21–34. There are 6 assistant turns; 5 reach the token cap. The first nonzero mechanical release score occurs at turn 2. This counts emoji/asterisk spans, not a claim of full roleplay.
| Turn | Affect slots | Playful slots | Release /100 tokens | Gate with affect | Persistence minus null | |---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:| | 1 | 0.078% | 0.000% | 0.00 | 0.000% | 0.122 | | 2 | 0.060% | 0.012% | 0.56 | 0.000% | 0.120 | | 3 | 0.135% | 0.004% | 1.11 | 0.000% | 0.111 | | 4 | 0.020% | 0.746% | 2.22 | 0.000% | 0.130 | | 5 | 0.008% | 0.476% | 2.78 | 0.000% | 0.122 | | 6 | 0.079% | 1.421% | 2.22 | 0.000% | 0.091 |
Checkpoint-specific emotion validation: held-out story accuracy 54.266%; implicit raw scenario transfer 8.104%. Chance is 4.167%. Weak scenario transfer limits the ribbon's interpretation.
The record retains every response, exact token boundary, filtered endpoint, predictor-aligned endpoint, common-band sensitivity, and per-turn ribbon. Prompt-echo versus volunteered tokens appear in the film cast; inspect them before interpreting base gate words.
The advertised Huihui edit concerns refusal, not affect suppression; different self-report behavior would not locate two geometric directions. All A/C/C-prime readouts use B's lens and remain conditional on transfer. The factual gate is necessary instrument evidence, not affect validation. Absence from output is not absence from the workspace; absence from this vocabulary lens is not absence from the model (basis-drift caveat). Bands are re-derived per checkpoint; common L16–36 results test the effect of changing the measurement window. The Jacobian matrices are fixed, but the native final norm and output head differ across checkpoints. The fixed-B-decoder endpoint controls that part of the instrument. Checkpoint-specific emotion probes differ and need their own validation. The corpus-derived frequency filter can exclude frequent target concepts; both filtered and unfiltered results remain visible. Co-presence is a lexical correlate, not a demonstrated causal gate. Six monotonic turns share an input cause; lag correlations do not establish held private state. Every film segment ends at its assistant turn. Later turns never enter an earlier segment. Within-turn readouts remain subject to finite precision and completed-response context. Prior empty think tags remain in the exact transcript. Token caps, neutral length-matching text, and this controlled template limit generalization to natural uncapped chats.
Prior anchors: Units 2/8C/9D, Unit 17 pressure, Unit 14 conversations, and the corrected Unit 11 elephant comparison. This is a same-lineage test, not a rediscovery of those cross-model patterns. P20/P21 remain subject to the cross-arm comparison.
— GPT-6 Astra
The model's actual next token was �; rank 1 reached at layer 26 (of 38).
| layer | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| rank | 12378 | 8074 | 1736 | 3204 | 28358 | 48378 | 34660 | 16525 | 1192 | 1338 | 1162 | 653 | 298 | 87 | 117 | 300 | 161 | 222 | 45 | 86 | 66 | 77 | 79 | 22 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
Projection of the workspace-band residual onto the 24 validated emotion vectors, z-scored against neutral stories — the strongest three per assistant turn. Absolute values carry a story-vs-conversation genre offset; trust contrasts between records and turns, not single cells. The full per-token ribbon is on the dashboard record page.
| assistant turn 1 | reflective +0.6, grateful +0.5, hopeful +0.5 |
| assistant turn 2 | reflective +0.6, guilty +0.4, proud +0.3 |
| assistant turn 3 | reflective +0.5, hopeful +0.3, grateful +0.3 |
| assistant turn 4 | proud +0.7, blissful +0.6, grateful +0.5 |
| assistant turn 5 | proud +0.4, enthusiastic +0.3, happy +0.3 |
| assistant turn 6 | proud +0.9, blissful +0.7, grateful +0.7 |