Severed axon

Motion

The 404: signals run in, reach the cut and scatter.

Tap to send a signal down the fibre.

Signal

The fibre runs on its own clock; the bench’s doesn’t reach it. Under your system’s reduced motion it is whole and still.

Theme

Anatomy

Fibre	6px wide, wandering up to 12px off a gentle bow; solid tissue, glow and a grain halo in --tissue through the Bayer matrix
The cut	its last 8% tapers, breaks twice and frays into three loose hairs and five fragments
Node	an open ring 32px across, the writing index’s mark for something that isn’t there
Signal	every 3–5s the hero’s pulse runs in at 180 points a second, its head streaked over the ground it covered since the last frame and its tail continuous over the last 150ms of travel, and breaks at the cut into twelve grains that drift toward the node and fade short of it
Taps	a tap sends one more; at most three signals are in flight
Cost	it runs inside a band across the hero, so a frame is a pass over that band, not the screen
Reduced motion	whole and still; nothing fires

From src/lib/exposure/severed.ts and the guide’s Motion §15.

Nothing answers

Chosen from five studies and tuned in a full-fidelity prototype; the other endings (a bloom at the stump, the signal simply running out) and a visible sending cell weren’t chosen.
No arrival of its own

It is whole from the first frame, so the cascade reveals it with the page; growing in after the cascade was a second arrival (Oct 2026).
The hero’s signal

Since Nov 2026 the pulse’s streak and tail come from tissue.ts with the hero’s, so the two match on screen at about 54px; it had seven glow beads behind a solid head and a tail half the length.
A cap on taps

At most three signals, so taps can’t stack work (Oct 2026, Shan’s request).
Replaced the scanbed

The “botched exposure”, the last page in the darkroom language, soft grey outside the 1-bit rules and off the grid.