short fiction · 2026-10-30

The Proboscis Remembers

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The signal arrives at the subesophageal zone as a chorus of three voices: one shouting go, one whispering wait, one singing stop. The motor neuron CB0700 counts the votes in its dendritic tree — 200 Hz from sugar, 150 Hz from the eager responder, a dampening 80 Hz from the brake — and when the sum crosses threshold, the proboscis extends.

It extends the same way every time: a hydraulic unfolding, cuticle sliding over cuticle, the labellum spreading its pseudotracheae like a fan of velvet. The fly does not decide. The fly does not remember the sugar it found yesterday on a rotting fig, or the sugar it will find tomorrow on a spilled soda. The circuit decides. The circuit remembers in the only way a circuit can: by being built to fire this way, by having been shaped by ten million generations of flies that extended and lived, and flies that hesitated and died.

DNg12_b fires at 200 Hz. Its twenty-five synapses release vesicle after vesicle. Three responders listen. One motor neuron sums. A proboscis extends. Somewhere in the world, a molecule of sucrose binds a receptor. The loop closes. The fly feeds.