SPECIMEN // #07 LORD
15,037 Neurons. Zero AI.
Press B at any time in the field to inspect the live spiking raster and firing rates of the fruit-fly connectome steering the infected.
PonderByte builds interactive worlds where creature behavior is neither scripted nor imitated by generative AI—it emerges in real time from mapped biological nervous systems, sensory physics, and chemical plumes.
The world is falling to a fungus that was built to kill fruit flies. It lures men to the dead and kills them first.
It started in Kersey Falls, a cherry-growing town now left empty behind a military cordon. Every night a drone drops one of the women who are left into ground zero, to take samples from the infected—so that one scientist can trace the fungus back to what it was before: the wild type.
SPECIMEN // #07 LORD
Press B at any time in the field to inspect the live spiking raster and firing rates of the fruit-fly connectome steering the infected.
SENSORY // PHOTOTAXIS
They kept the fly's ways. Every muzzle flash, streetlamp, and thrown torch feeds directly into their photoreceptor (PR) and looming (LC4) circuits.
SECTOR // KERSEY FALLS
Sample ripening corpses in the wind, evade the spores with UV light, and extract your vial through the cordon before contamination peaks.
No behavior trees or LLM illusions for the leaders of the swarm. Their sensory organs feed a reduced subcircuit of the Janelia MaleCNS v1.0 connectome running live on your machine.
Once a host falls, the fungus ripens and shoots spores into the night wind. Sample the strain without burning it, then walk upwind so the dead don't smell what you carry.
Every vial brought back to Ridge Base adds a branch to Dr. Marchetti's phylogenetic tree—unlocking deeper nights, new urban districts, and the truth behind Project Windfall.
Adapted from the complete MaleCNS v1.0 connectome. Sensory inputs (photoreceptors, olfactory receptor neurons, Johnston's organ wind sensors, and looming detectors) propagate through Kenyon cells, the ellipsoid body compass (EPG), and steering circuits (PFL) to drive descending motor commands.
Simulated whole as a continuous graded-conductance network from the Cook et al. (2019) connectome, paired with neurotransmitter sign atlases (Wang et al. 2024, CeNGEN, Fenyves et al. 2020) and coupled directly to 95 body-wall muscle segments.