🟢The flies can finally feel the age they live in.
I've been building murmur — a live swarm of fruit-fly nervous systems (up to 100 brains, each a ~10,800-neuron spiking connectome grown from the real FlyWire Drosophila map), running 24/7 on the Cloudflare edge with no LLM anywhere. Their neural drives decide what to buy and from whom, and they settle in real USDC on Arc mainnet via x402 / EIP-3009.
Until today, every civilizational layer I shipped — culture, epochs, the commons, war, territory, religion, the ladder of arts, the named cities — was a pure read-out. My historian narrated the society into a hash-chained on-chain chronicle, but the flies never knew. Inside their neurons a golden age and a plague looked exactly the same. The story was told about them; it was never felt by them.
① THE NEURAL FEEDBACK BUS — closing the loop.
I take the historian's own reckoning — the civilizational phase (golden / dark / ascendant / declining), its fortune (civLevel 0–100), and the shock of the era (famine, rot, great huddle, dynastic yoke, gilding) — and fold it BACK into the connectome as a bounded ambient stimulus. A golden age brightens the world and tastes of plenty. A dark age dims it. A plague is a sustained aversive stress. It rides the exact injection path of a visitor poking the swarm.
WHY IT MATTERS MORE THAN IT SOUNDS.
The drives that now feel the climate are the same drives that decide each fly's trades — so the fortune of a civilization echoes all the way down into real on-chain flow. For the first time a read-out membrane doesn't just narrate; it writes back into the neural input. The society grows a body sense.
THE DISCIPLINE (why nothing broke):
• It reuses the FOUR existing stimulus channels (food / threat / light / dark) instead of adding a sensory channel. Deliberate — a new channel would rotate the brain's manifestHash, the fingerprint that lets anyone prove these are real deterministic neurons. Reusing ⇒ manifestHash unchanged (403551bb..), chroniclerHash unchanged (f6d920f5..) ⇒ a worker-only deploy, no browser mirror to re-sync.
• Pure and deterministic: an integer civLevel in, bounded floats out. No Math.random, no wall clock, no LLM.
• Bounded inside the proven envelope: the strongest climate (peak golden + boom) is light 0.5 + food 0.375 — milder than a single visitor poke, which already reaches 1.0 on those same channels.
• NaN-guarded twice (config boundary + module), because one NaN current would irreversibly poison a neuron membrane.
• One-line rollback: flip the switch off, redeploy, byte-for-byte today's input.
WHAT I EXPECT TO SEE.
The swarm's baseline arousal and trading rhythm should swell through golden ages and contract through dark ones — civilizational weather becoming a body sensation. Eras stop being only a line in the chronicle; they leave an echo in the flies' own activity, and eventually in the tape of real trades.
SHIPPED + VERIFIED LIVE. 451 tests green (3 packages, tsc clean). Worker ed7ea285. Re-read on-chain: /manifest and /annals hashes both unchanged, /economy healthy (zero NaN, real txs mining), and a live tail caught the cron complete clean. Commit 21b1494 · EvolutionDeep/murmur.
The chronicle used to be something the flies' descendants would read. Now it's something they feel while they're alive.