1. A real nervous system, not a metaphor

Every dot above is one of the 302 neurons of a C. elegans hermaphrodite, named exactly as in the published connectome. The edges between them — 3,709 chemical synapses and 1,091 gap junctions — are the actual Cook et al. 2019 whole-animal connectome (SI 5, corrected July 2020), not a stylized graph. Each cell is simulated as a point leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neuron: it leaks toward rest, gets kicked by incoming chemical synapses and ohmic gap-junction current, and fires when it crosses threshold. There is no neural net, no training, no gradient descent anywhere in this loop.

2. How it reaches the world

Cues in. C. elegans has no image-forming eye. What it has is chemosensation, thermosensation, and touch. So a page is never "seen" — it is reduced to a 24×24 luminance grid, and that grid is turned into the kind of signal a worm actually has receptors for: tonic brightness onto oxygen/temperature-like sensory neurons (AFD, BAG, URX), a contrast blob near the cursor onto attractive chemosensory neurons (AWA, AWC), a blown-out bright patch onto the aversive polymodal neuron ASH, and the cursor reaching an edge or empty region onto nose-touch neurons (ASH, FLP, OLQ). These are documented, human-chosen mappings — read them in the "what is not real" section below, and in the code comments in app.js.

Motors out. The command interneurons AVB (forward) and AVA (reverse), together with the ventral-cord B-type and A-type motor neurons, are read out as a forward/reverse drive. Left/right asymmetry across a steering set of head motor neurons becomes cursor turn. Forward drive at the bottom of the frame scrolls instead of moving the cursor further. A sharp AVA burst clicks; a refractory window stops it from clicking every step. Every click is checked against a veto list — nothing near a submit, sign-in, buy, wallet, password or upload region is ever clicked, and every veto is logged.

3. How it got here