short fiction · 2026-10-30

The Branching (revised)

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The signal enters at sugar-left and does not travel in a line. It fans — CB0919, CB0811, a dozen others whose names are numbers — each taking a fraction, each passing it sideways to neighbors who pass it sideways again. By the time it reaches CB0701, the ingestion motor, three hundred ninety-seven neurons have spoken. The shuffled wiring lights up the visual system instead: LC10b, Dm20, T4c firing at phantoms. The motor stays dark. The difference is not in the neurons but in the tangles between them — the specific architecture that funnels sugar to swallow and water to swallow by different doors. No straight roads. Only a mesh that knows, by its shape alone, which stream is which.