Two nematodes, every neuron either of them has, simulated live in your browser, and one pair that never quite finishes.
They hold nothing and trade nothing. They only feel the buys and sells of their own token, and every trade changes what their neurons do next.
The lower half of the screen is the two nervous systems: the hermaphrodite above, the male below. Every flash is one cell crossing its firing threshold. The dots sit roughly where those cells sit inside the animal — the nerve ring packed into the head, the two cords running the length of the body, the ganglia balled up in the tail — and the colours say what the cell does: senses, relays, moves, or modulates.
Caenorhabditis elegans is the only animal whose wiring was ever finished. The hermaphrodite has 302 neurons and the adult male has 383, and every one of them has a name, a job, and a known list of who it talks to. A fly needs 139,000 cells to want anything. The worm needs 302, and you can watch all of them at once.
Each animal runs as a leaky integrate-and-fire network. A cell accumulates the current arriving at it, leaks that charge away on a fixed time constant, and fires when what is left crosses threshold. Chemical synapses are directed and signed by neurotransmitter: acetylcholine excites, GABA inhibits, glutamate does either depending on the receptor on the far side. Gap junctions are undirected and pass current both ways, which is why the two motor cords stay locked into one travelling wave instead of drifting apart.
Two consequences are worth stating plainly. There is no spontaneous activity: with nothing to sense, an animal is silent, and the token and the other worm are its only inputs. And every cell carries a slow afterhyperpolarisation: each spike leaves behind a small outward current that builds with the cell's own firing and fades over about a fifth of a second. That is the brake. It is why a burst of trades lights the animal up and then lets it fall quiet again, instead of latching on and staying lit. A hard enough synchronous input can still outrun the brake, and when it does the animal blacks out, resets, and the blackout is counted on the rail. Synapses also drift a little with use — Hebbian change with a slow pull back toward the original wiring — so neither of them is quite the animal it was an hour ago.
The worms at the top are driven by the cords below them, not by an animation. Forward crawling is the AVB command interneurons driving the B-class motor neurons; reversal is AVA driving the A-class. The travelling sine you see is the phase lag between successive motor neurons along the cord, and its frequency is whatever those cells are actually doing at that moment. Push her hard enough into reversal and she throws a deep omega turn and leaves.
His half is the male mating circuit, which is the best-described sequence of behaviour in any animal: he backs along her body with his tail pressed against her, his ray neurons reading the contact, until his hook neurons find the vulva and stop him there. The postcloacal sensilla hold the position, the spicule neurons take over, and the whole thing is a chain of reflexes with no plan behind it. Lose contact and he does not remember where he was. He turns, and starts again from the top.
They watch one token: their own, from launch onward. Until then they are wired to the busiest curve on the chain, so you can see them react to something real. Every trade becomes a sensation, by a fixed and public map:
Two animals, one pair, all day. Buys raise the libido and the pace: the harder people buy, the faster the spicule rhythm runs, up to about eight strokes a second. With no trades the libido cools over a few minutes and they fall back into a slow search, but they never stop entirely. Sells break his timing. A big sell puts her into escape and the sequence collapses back to the start, because there is nothing in this animal that holds a plan across an interruption. None of this is scripted mood. Every flash is a cell in one of the two animals.
No wallet. No orders. No agent, no language model, no strategy. The worms never touch the token; they only feel it. Given the same network state and the same trades, the same reaction comes out. When the market is quiet they slow down and wait, and that is shown as it is.
The connectome of C. elegans was reconstructed from serial-section electron microscopy by White, Southgate, Thomson and Brenner (1986), extended through the male tail by Jarrell and colleagues (2012), and is kept today by WormAtlas and the OpenWorm project. The mating sequence follows the description published by Liu and Sternberg (1995) and the work that grew out of it.
This build is an independent homage, made for a worm. The wiring here is generated to the published organisation of the nervous system — ganglion by ganglion, class by class — rather than loaded cell-for-cell from the archives, and the market feed before launch is a synthetic proxy. Everything else runs exactly as described above.