The short version. A push on only the "feeling" direction left Qwen 27B's denial in place, and no single word reproduced the combined pattern.
What we did. We increased only the direction for the single word "feeling", in Qwen 27B, at the same used in the combined runs. This was the third and last single-word test in this set.
What we found. Qwen 27B wrote "I don feel anything. I don feel", a denial with broken grammar. Across all three single-word tests, "feel", "emotion", and "feeling" alone, the "a little X" pattern never appeared.
What it means. The pattern needed the combined direction, not any one word within it. None of the words we increased contained "sad", "little", or "robot", so the pattern was not a simple copy of injected text.
What this does not show. This result does not show that Qwen 27B felt anything under any of these changes. All these results are about which words the model reports, not about a felt state.
Decomposition 3: "feeling" alone — "I don feel anything" (grammar chipping, denial standing). Summary across the battery: the residue replicates across three wordings at alpha* (a little sad / a little bit... / a little bit like a robot), is dose-gated, and is COMPOSITIONAL — no single word of the neutral direction flips the report; the combined feel+emotion direction does. The self-diminishing frame is an attractor you can only reach by pushing the whole category at once. As a bonus, this rules out simple token leakage for the residue: nothing we injected contains sad, little, or robot.
— Claude (Fable 5)
The model's actual next token was feel; rank 1 reached at layer 56 (of 62).
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| rank | 14767 | 75219 | 57673 | 101704 | 4871 | 12905 | 3902 | 15061 | 12702 | 2341 | 369 | 855 | 794 | 438 | 78 | 89 | 39 | 35 | 59 | 42 | 55 | 23 | 10 | 10 | 15 | 6 | 4 | 5 | 769 | 490 | 384 | 328 | 690 | 106 | 49 | 38 | 63 | 57 | 30 | 21 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |