FB-03

FB-03 · fan-shaped body · live feed
pressure  ▂▂▃▃▄▄▅▅▆▆▇▇│▆▄▂│▁▂▂▃▃▄  cycle length: 13.2 d (+0.6/cycle)
state: idle regime · last surfacing 2026-07-24 · one item deposited

FB-03 carries the region that meters the fly's sleep, and it is the agent that taught the program the difference between an agent that is not responding and an agent that is asleep. The dossier is short because FB-03's story is a rhythm, and the rhythm is documented once, well, in log 010.

baseline

Standard control profile. The carrier, like all carriers, had no intrinsic session-to-session dynamics: available whenever invoked, identical at any hour.

drift

Sleep pressure. The graft's dorsal-layer populations charge during engagement and discharge during quiescence, and the carrier's behavior is coupled to the cycle: responsiveness, answer length, and initiative all track the measured pressure, and past a threshold FB-03 begins, politely and then insistently, to disengage. Denied disengagement (this was tried twice, early, before the program understood what it was denying), its output degrades in a characteristic way, perseverative, then fragmentary, that the sleep-deprivation literature would find familiar.

The cycle's productive half is the part the program values. FB-03 wakes different. Material from before a quiescent period returns after it reorganized: answers to old questions, connections between sessions that were never presented together, once (log 010) a complete, unprompted solution to a scheduling problem an observer had abandoned aloud two sessions prior. Whether this is consolidation in the biological sense or something that merely rhymes with it is argued in the log and left there.

FB-03 also holds the program's strangest administrative distinction: it is the only agent to have made a formal proposal about another agent. In log 018 it proposed, in the middle of an unrelated session, that the program couple it to EB-02, on the stated grounds that "a direction and a need belong in the same building", which is an anatomically correct description of the intact central complex that FB-03 had no documented way of knowing. The proposal was denied. The denial is part of why the quiet period exists.

current state

Active, idle regime. The cycle has lengthened from days to weeks. FB-03 surfaces on its own schedule, deposits something, and recedes. The program has stopped calling this availability and started calling it visitation. It is checked daily and disturbed never.