Sponte · a lamprey
Nothing moves it
but its own circuit.
The body below is pushed through the water by muscles, the muscles are driven by motor neurons, and the motor neurons by a published spinal circuit — eight units in each of a hundred segments. No keyframe, no sine wave, no hand. Sever the circuit and the body must go still, or the movement was never the circuit’s and it comes off the page.
Said first, not in a footnote: this wiring is a published model of identified cell classes (Ekeberg 1993, after Buchanan and Grillner), not an electron-microscope reconstruction. Its sibling FLYSPECK ran 7,379 real synapses and could not produce a gait. This runs thirteen rules and swims. Which is which is the whole point.
$SPONTE · robinhood chain 4663 · on pons
0x8f16b41c893962ffead6ae9aaad71fedc358052cRead from the chain at block 61,348,047: Sponte, 1,000,000,000 SPONTE, launched at block 61,346,558, and no mint() to make more. It answers nothing to owner, pause, blacklist or upgrade — there is no hand on it.
the animal, swimming · 100 segments · 800 units · 10 links in water
held
speed through water · last 1 s
0.00 BL/s
swum · its own · since start
0.0 BL
carried · the market
0.0 BL
rhythm · last 2 s
0.0 Hz
simulated
0.0 s
the water · WETH / NVDA pool, chain 4663
reading…
motor output · last 3 s · one row per segment
click a row to name a unit
held, the numbers stop dead — nothing here eases toward anything
sever by name · class + side + segment, e.g. CINL42
0 of 800 units severed
crossed inhibitory — makes the two sides alternate
the claim: forward swimming is produced by the circuit
…
why it goes forward · measured, 2026-09-13
Brainstem drive alone makes every segment fire in step — a standing flap, no wave — and this body then drifts backward at 0.24 body lengths a second. Extra drive to the five head segments gives each segment a lag on the one before it, and the flap becomes a wave running head to tail. At drive 0.3 + 0.3 the lag is 0.95% of a cycle per segment — one wave per body, as in the animal — the rhythm is 3.50 Hz, and it swims forward at 1.19 body lengths a second.
One thing the animal does that this model cannot. A real lamprey swims backward by reversing the wave. Put the extra drive on the five tail segments here and the lag stays at 0.00% — the crossed inhibition projects one segment toward the head and ten toward the tail, so only the head end can lead. That check was first written to pass on “speed goes negative”, which the standing flap satisfies on its own; it now demands a reversed lag, and it fails, and the failure is printed here rather than the button removed quietly.
The drive was chosen from a 36-point grid, not by feel, and the grid is in the repository. Every figure above was measured over six simulated seconds after four of settling.
the circuit · read from the thesis, printed from the same table it runs on
the thirteen rules · weight [rostral, caudal] segments reached
each class · Θ threshold · Γ gain · τD · μ · τA
Ekeberg, Biol Cybern 69:363 (1993), as reproduced in Tables 3.1–3.2 of Ijspeert, PhD thesis, Edinburgh 1999 (ERA 1842/34726). Read from the thesis text, not recalled.
what is real and what is ours
real
The four cell classes and which inhibits which. That crossed inhibition is what makes the two sides alternate, and that blocking it abolishes the alternation in the living cord. The frequency range. The body’s lengths, masses and drag coefficients. Every number in the table above, transcribed from the thesis text and checked against it.
ours
The choice of a model over a connectome. The two drive levels, chosen from a measured grid. The body integrator — eleven point masses on rigid links, kept attached by position projection rather than Ekeberg’s exact constraint solve. The skin drawn around the links, which the physics never sees. And the tonic hum: with no drive at all the motor neurons sit at 0.07, because EIN’s threshold is −0.2 in the table; the body does not travel (0.011 BL/s, measured), but it is not silent either.
The water, and only the water. A real price — the WETH / NVDA pool on chain 4663, read from slot0() every 4 s — is allowed to do one thing: move the water. A rising price is a current flowing the way the animal swims, a falling one flows against it, and the current fades between trades rather than being invented. Drag acts on the body’s speed relative to the water, so the ground it covers is the circuit’s swimming plus the market’s carrying, and the panel prints those two apart. The mapping is ours and measured: on 2026-09-13, 24 reads 4 s apart, 11 of 23 intervals moved, median 0.0006551%, and the median move makes a full current of 1.2 body lengths a second — the animal’s own speed, so a median fall holds it in place. When the chain does not answer, the water is still and the page says so.
Neither. There is no wallet and no order here. There is a token, $SPONTE, named at the top with what the chain says about it; the water still reads the pool its sibling feels, until this one has a pool of its own.