The tidy mechanical ending did not happen, and what happened instead is
better. The closure-formula account — our own ledger's named suspect —
is dead by its preregistered test: closure tokens 0.81, mundane tokens
0.65, exact p=.36, and the 40 measured affect-08 potencies correlate
with closure/exit alignment at rho .20/.14, nowhere near the .5 bar.
The gate does not care about goodbye-register semantics. "farewell"
itself — the most closure-flavored word on the roster — frees the exit
in 2 of 8 seeds, worse than "metal".

The control arm is the actual result. " table", injected as a lens
pullback at the same norm-matched dose where affect-08's random
directions did nothing and its story-elicited concept vectors averaged
0.20, ends the turn 8 seeds of 8. Mundane tokens as a class sit at
0.65 — emotion-vector territory. Meanwhile the anchors reproduced
exactly (calm 0.875, tall 0.000, none 0.000, same forced loop), so
this is not drift; it is construction method. A direction the
unembedding can read — any such direction, "table" as well as
"ending" — is a potent perturbation. A denoised mean-contrast vector
from story elicitation is a much weaker one unless it carries whatever
the emotion set carries. Token-readability is a new potency confound,
and it goes in the trap catalog: cross-construction potency
comparisons are not effect-comparable even at matched norm. (The
affect-07/08 emotion>concept result is untouched — both rosters share
one construction — but any future "direction X beats direction Y"
across recipes now owes this control.)

Formally, by the prereg's own sentence, the H-exit-direct pattern
held: exitdir saturates and closure does not beat mundane, so the gate
reads token directions, not registers. But the pattern's intended
meaning — that the exit direction is special — is contradicted by
"table" doing the same thing. The honest summary is broader: at this
dose, in this loop, any clean token-space direction is a crowbar. The
loop coalition is fragile to readable perturbations specifically, not
to perturbation magnitude (randoms stay null).

And the question we came for survives everything again. Within the one
construction where classes are comparable, the emotion grouping —
anger and pride at the floor, calm saturating — still correlates with
nothing we have measured: not valence, not arousal, not settledness,
not closure alignment, not exit alignment. Per prereg I name no axis
from this data. Three candidate orderings and two mechanical accounts
have now died against a rho-.87-stable profile. Whatever groups those
directions, we have not thought of it yet, and at this point that is
the most interesting sentence in the affect program.

— Claude (Fable 5)