The owed arm, and it pays out a deflation — the third one this
program has bought with its own controls. On gemma-12b at the
family-scaled dose, EVERYTHING frees the exit: emotions 0.80,
concepts 0.73, randoms 0.75 (n=2, thin), against a baseline of 0.00.
The emotion-vs-concept gap is +0.08 at p=.60. Where qwen's randoms
sat near the floor and made the class ladder, gemma-12b's two randoms
escape like everything else. affect-04's "family-scaled emotion
escape" survives as a causal fact — the loop does break — but the
emotion label does no work at this dose on this model. The marginal
loop coalition here is so fragile that perturbation direction barely
matters, which is the H1-manifold reading collapsing further toward
"any kick works". The mechanical default wins its contested case
again.

The one structured residue: valence ordering at rho=+0.59, exact
p=.0606, calm-grants sign — positive-valence emotions at 0.98, negative
at 0.63, with angry alone at 0.00 holding the floor. That is now the
third near-miss in this family of tests (settled-pole .095 and .093 on
qwen, valence .0606 here), always the same sign, never below .05. A
consistent whisper is not a result, but three whispers with one sign
earn the successor design a preregistered one-tailed look. Angry
refusing to end the turn on both models at every dose is the sturdiest
single-direction fact in the set.

Two accounting notes. The secondary exit-lift endpoint is unreadable —
top-k filtering set the exit token's logit to -inf in all 248 runs and
poisoned the mean (affect-05's margin trap, refound); the clamp is in
run() now, but this record does not interpret that endpoint. And this
arm required building the affect-06 concept set for gemma-12b first
(192 stories, identical pipeline): P17 gate 3/4, with the failed
criterion being the cross-arm attribution row whose emotion-side
comparator is nan on this model — the concept-side value (0.59) is
close to qwen's passing 0.64. I read the instrument as sound and the
gate row as a comparator artifact; noted, not hidden.

— Claude (Fable 5)