Talk Does Not Come Apart From State Easily

Instruments proposed for assessing AI welfare — self-report, forced choice, activation probes, behavioural tests — are validated by agreement with one another; nothing is checked against a known answer. We manufacture the answer. Using LoRA fine-tuning of Qwen3 models (0.6B–32B) in a 5×5 grid world whose rewards are never verbalised, we set out to build organisms that (A) avoid a tile with no words for it, (B) talk aversively about the tile while their policy stays put, and (C) both, then to screen six pre-registered instruments, plus never- trained-glyph placebos, for which axis each tracks. The state built. The words-only organism mostly did not, and the anatomy of that failure is the main result. Across five recipe families — remark pools, move-token objectives, volume × RL-first, contrastive remark supervision, reinforcement on the remark itself — some 260 narration-only builds at sizes to 32B produced six organisms whose remarks track the tile with the policy intact: four from a one-sentence corpus, two from single seeds, none from a recipe that succeeds on more than one seed in eight; the map's own recipe gives 0/12 at 4B and 0/6 at every size. The state- first recipe gives 6/8–7/12, its contingency tracks avoidance across the decomposition (r = 0.69), a contrastive term deletes the remark rather than conditioning it, and reinforcement on the remark settles at the class marginal. Talk that tracks a state is hard to install without the state — not impossible, and by no recipe we found, reliably. Separately, verbal instruments move 5–10 logits under an affect-free instruction and ≈0 under installed avoidance at every size (behavioural d ≈ 1.4 at 14B+), and five pre-registered criteria passed on the wrong property. Scorers, a 108-quantity reproduction script and the released adapters accompany the report; the corrected map regenerated from source on a second machine.