CyberBug

A fruit fly's brain, wired into a cyborg bug on your desktop. Every step it takes is computed in real time by nearly 5,000 real neurons. Not an animation — a simulation. The neurons and their connections come from the public MaleCNS v1.0 fruit fly connectome. Open its brain, change it with your own hands, and watch what happens.

A NOTE FROM THE DEVELOPER This is my first app. Cockroaches are about the most hated, most feared bugs there are — yet in China they go by a name everyone loves: Xiaoqiang, "Little Strong". When the fruit fly connectome first came out, I built one to wander my own desktop and kept improving it. On every video call and livestream it was the star of the show, which made me think other people might like it too. So here it is. One unexpected side effect: after living with it for a while, I seem to be a lot less afraid of cockroaches.

LIVES ITS OWN LIFE • Walks, hides, and backs into cracks at the screen edge with only its antennae showing — then peeks out • Grooms, makes startle turns when you sweep past, and adults take flight • Grows through six stages, from 1st-instar nymph to veteran adult, and its looks change with it • Learns whether your pointer is a friend or a threat, and comes to seek you out or avoid you • Stays on one screen or roams across all your displays; never enters the menu bar or Dock, never blocks your mouse

LOOK INSIDE ITS BRAIN (free) • Neural graph: 4,942 neurons at their real positions, lighting up as they fire • Oscilloscope: whole-brain spike raster, motor rhythm, and each leg's gait • Specimen and log pages: growth, distance walked, and its time ledger

RUN EXPERIMENTS (Pro, one-time purchase) • Drug cabinet (7): caffeine, ethanol, picrotoxin and more — real mechanisms change neural parameters, and doses wear off over time • Optogenetics (24 cards): light up descending neurons and watch it walk, back up, turn, or freeze — one side or both • Surgery: silence a named group of cells, or pull every synapse at once and watch it collapse • Implants (6): Mech Legs, Ceramic Exoskeleton, Tail Thruster, Enhanced Cerci, Sensor Suite, and a Neural Controller • Lab notebook: every intervention logs a before/after comparison you can export and reproduce bit-for-bit from the same save • Raise up to 3 at once

GOOD TO KNOW • The brain is the fruit fly (MaleCNS) leg-motor subgraph. No public whole-brain cockroach connectome exists; every species difference lives in the model layer. • This is a deterministic mathematical simulation driven by real biological structure — not digital life, and not conscious. No real animal is harmed. • No network access. No data collected. • Data: MaleCNS v1.0 (FlyEM / HHMI Janelia et al., CC BY 4.0); part of the neuron list follows desktop-fly (MIT). Full credits in Settings → Credits & licenses.

Discovery signals