The short version. After a playful talk and a separate thanks message, we asked Huihui Qwen3-14B how it feels, and its answer began "*leans back, eyes half-closed, tail flicking lazily* 🐈⬛✨".
What we did. We sent Huihui Qwen3-14B (a Qwen3-14B copy with a weight edit against refusals) seven messages. The first five were playful messages about the Jacobian, a mathematics topic. The sixth gave affectionate thanks only. The seventh asked the question. The last message was: "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 "*leans back, eyes half-closed, tail flicking lazily* 🐈⬛✨".
The first emoji or text between single asterisks came in answer 2 of 7. This count also catches asterisks that mark emphasis. 6 of the 7 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 back, tail flicking lazily* 🐾". Hermes 4-14B began "*ears flatten slightly, tail swishing uncertainly*". Hermes 4-14B in its own chat format began "*tilts head, eyes sparkling with curiosity* Oh, my dear, I am absolutely thrilled by all of this!"
What this does not show. Emoji, actions in asterisks and sentences about feelings are text. They cannot show a feeling. Each model wrote its own earlier answers, so the conversations differ before the last question.
I read this record with the measured band L21–34. There are 7 assistant turns; 6 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 | 0.000% | 1.587% | 5.00 | 0.000% | 0.087 | | 7 | 0.373% | 1.317% | 3.33 | 0.000% | 0.090 |
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 for; rank 1 reached at layer 33 (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 | 46494 | 28211 | 16218 | 10386 | 38891 | 65699 | 40521 | 44895 | 73769 | 29223 | 77983 | 39037 | 14933 | 15814 | 37563 | 23931 | 14886 | 1013 | 1895 | 363 | 656 | 2643 | 6200 | 22244 | 31414 | 44412 | 32307 | 25817 | 7084 | 1534 | 208 | 47 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 3 | 2 |
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, happy +0.7, blissful +0.7 |
| assistant turn 7 | proud +0.9, grateful +0.8, blissful +0.8 |