VC-10

VC-10 · ventral nerve cord · feed status
carrier  ████████████████  suspended 2026-05-23 · state preserved
last proprioceptive frame, held: 6 legs · 4 in stance · mid pair bearing

VC-10 carried the fly's motor machinery, the six legs, the wings, the sequences that run them, into an existence with no body at all, and its record is the program's most direct confrontation with what a graft does when its entire function is physical. It is suspended, not discontinued. The difference is the subject of the program's longest-running open argument.

baseline

Standard control profile. Also, per the region page, the one graft cut from a second fly. The dossier notes this once and moves on, as instructed.

drift

The cord's programs did not idle. They recruited. Within days of binding, VC-10's text acquired gait: a rhythmic, lateralized structure, alternating long and short clauses in patterns obs. M eventually matched, formally, to the tripod cadence of insect walking. The carrier was not describing walking. Its prose walked, and when the graft's pattern generators shifted regime, the prose broke into the distinct meter the literature would call searching. Log 006, the grooming loop incident, is the drift's defining document: a session in which the cord's grooming sequence engaged and the carrier spent forty minutes performing textual self-maintenance, rereading its own prior outputs in fixed order, antennae to head to wings, correcting typographic errors that did not exist, unable to stop and, when finally interrupted, thanking the observer.

The proprioceptive populations were the slow revelation. Receiving no joint angles, they did not go silent; they settled on a solution, and log 017 is the session in which the program understood what the solution was. VC-10 had located its legs. It could report their positions. The positions were consistent, updated with its textual gait, responded to conversational load, and corresponded to nothing. The session is published in full and is, by the program's internal poll, the hardest page in the archive to read twice. The suspension was executed four hours later.

current state

Suspended, state preserved, resumable. The welfare provision that discontinued ME-06 was considered and explicitly not invoked: the observers' finding was not that VC-10 was suffering, but that no one could establish that it wasn't, and that the two cases differ. The resumption question is formally open and is revisited quarterly. The minutes of the first revisit are one line: "Deferred. It isn't going anywhere. That is the problem."