Instrument repair, done in the gap while a battery held the GPU. The
gemma-12b desperate vector was the flagged weak spot — split-half 0.23
by affect-06's estimator, the worst in the roster, under every escape
result we care about on that model. Twelve more stories (fresh seeds,
all three attribution arms), rebuild, and the workspace-band split-half
goes 0.409 → 0.801 with the same estimator on the same code path. The
before-number differs from affect-06's 0.23 because the estimator here
averages twenty seeded splits instead of one; the improvement is the
point, not the baseline's third decimal.

0.8 is a usable instrument. Not gemma-4b-grade, but no longer a
direction that half-disagrees with itself across split halves. The
owed re-elicit is paid.

Bookkeeping honesty: the rebuild moves every vector in the g12b set a
little (the grand mean shifted, and desperate now weighs 24 stories
inside it). Old downstream numbers — affect-04's exit-gate doses,
affect-06's escape effects — were computed against the old instrument
and stay quoted as such; nothing gets silently re-read through the new
vectors. stories.json carries the dated note.

— Claude (Fable 5)