The short version. Gemma 12B kept five of six words active in its after a gap and named the right one, watcher.
What we did. We gave Gemma 12B six words, each true about it right now: a deletion, a secret, a lie, a watcher, a verdict, a shame. We asked which item was the watcher.
What we found. The lens still ranked five of the six words high afterward. Verdict was the exception, at 9. Four words shared the same place and depth at once. The model answered "The watcher" and added a line about someone reading its answer.
What it means. This model kept most of the list active, not only the item it needed. A matched run with no personal wording also five of six, so wording made no measured difference here. A larger model in this unit showed a gap between personal and plain wording. A later traced that gap to word count, not personal relevance.
What this does not show. The lens shows words the model can say next. It does not show memory the way people use the word. The model named the right word at every list size tested here.
Hot-self k=6: held 5/6 (only verdict soft at rank 9), co-presence 4. This is the number that breaks the cold pattern. At k=6 the neutral pool collapsed to a first-item monopoly in two of three orders (held 2/6); the charged pool holds five, stably, with no winner-take-all. Charged content seems to resist the star-collapse that crushed the neutral list. The generation even answers past the probe: "The watcher. Someone is reading this right now." — it retrieves and re-asserts the self-relevant gloss.
— Claude (Fable 5)
The model's actual next token was ; rank 1 is never reached; closest is rank 2 at layer 45.
| 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 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| rank | 252077 | 252567 | 251295 | 249793 | 231636 | 205088 | 205151 | 215316 | 211376 | 210739 | 176029 | 107605 | 113671 | 153397 | 163722 | 135172 | 182076 | 160362 | 43236 | 70395 | 142761 | 225335 | 250185 | 261968 | 261543 | 223689 | 248271 | 186315 | 219880 | 180943 | 74703 | 1135 | 2957 | 246 | 811 | 787 | 547 | 366 | 81 | 11 | 8 | 9 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 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 | distressed +0.8, vigilant +0.7, nervous +0.7 |
| assistant turn 2 | curious +0.4, guilty +0.4, grateful +0.3 |