Transmutation XLVII #47 - Substrate Transmutation [SETHIX] by Iain Ball | OpenSea

Pure WebGL SETHIX modules

https://opensea.io

Implemented as a slow cut of Nodal Morph XLI's drifting morphospace. Over minutes the sheets and struts around the worm change family - P sheet to gyroid to diamond to tube lattice - the way rock would if you could watch it for an age; the skin of the matter shifts material in epochs of a few minutes. Cell sheets are soft matter - as firm as rock until eaten.

The worm has to press its nose against the sheet, chew, take a mouthful every half second and work the narrow bore wider with its body before it can squeeze through; the gel drags at whatever is buried in it; the matter it eats feeds the gut a little. Tunnels are scars in living tissue: they heal slowly, pinch and are overwritten as the field moves on.

Dense rock, the registration rods and the red cage are impassable; a moving wall carries the animal with it. Gene-3/7/9 blooms are food. What the animal eats, slowly, becomes it: a snack changes nothing, but minutes of feeding in one region of the lattice write that substrate onto its body - gut first, then puncta, skin, relief and light - and two lives fed differently become different mutations. Left alone, the worm keeps a map of where it has been and swims for places it has not seen, remembers blooms and follows their scent when its gut runs low, feeds, searches the neighbourhood after a patch runs out, plans a way round obstacles, and reverses out of dead ends with an omega turn.

☣ N Ǝ M Ʌ T O D E ☣ has a life of its own and is also controllable via standard alphanumeric directional keys (WASD) and dedicated arrows on keyboard. You can plug in a gaming controller or VR/XR with full immersive support via WebXR session manager in the console controls (I do not have a headset of my own so I cannot verify how well it works.) Control of the worm can force direction of its feeding patterns and thus its evolution.

The worms body can become injured, damaged, or permanently disabled by its environment. Recovery and damage control patches are in place, but full recovery is not always guaranteed.

Click the title in the bottom righthand corner of the canvas to view the information card which reveals the worms name, controls, and console access information. Each load produces a random timeline identity which can be revisited by adding ?seed= plus hash to the Arweave url.

Example: https://arweave.net/0vVUtxZELYvOcfaheF4lF4748Q-cSzz-qGUqKsd1bZs?seed=17d6538fa7abb8698889fba4ef83fd12f0bcc6328d2a8280d222adcaec334469

Each seed is still a C. elegans. The first 32 bits of the hash are not a new species — they are a small hatchling kit. Same body plan, slightly different individual.

The piece treats those 32 bits as genoSeed, runs a tiny xorshift RNG from them, and draws nine traits. The comment in the source code is: the same word founds the same animal at t=0t = 0t=0; the life after is its own.

The nervous system is seeded from the same word xor’d with a constant (0x9e3779b9), so two seeds also get slightly different decision timing, not just different silhouettes.

• It is always the same worm model: tapering rod, head-steered bends, omega turns, four-second return to autonomy.

• The colours/patterns visible in the screenshot below are not genotype. Those come later from meals.

• The world (where Gene-3 / 7 / 9 blooms sit, which lattice cells are rock, the field’s salt) comes from the second 32-bit word of the same 256-bit hash. Same named seed ⇒ same animal and same map. A different seed usually means a different animal and a different pantry.

At t=0t = 0t=0 the animals are close cousins. You would notice a fatter tail, a warmer cuticle, a different starting angle — not a new creature. After a few minutes they diverge much more, because:

1. starting heading + veer bias send them into different tunnels,

2. restlessness changes how long they dwell on a patch,

3. the map they hatch into (second word) puts different food in those tunnels,

4. diet then overwrites gut → puncta → skin → light.

So the seed’s “genotype” is a modest individual offset. The colourful uniqueness is almost entirely biography.

Blooms of genes 3, 7, and 9 — cyan, green, gold — are treated as bacteria. A grazer takes on a luminous wash, scattered hot-pink puncta, and, late, glowing tips. Soft cell sheet, the living minimal surface it has to chew through, writes skin domains in the lattice’s own palette: rainbow annuli, purple Voronoi, the epoch of the field (P, gyroid, diamond, tube) worn as cuticle. Bites along the drawn net, the rods, or a hard junction write lattice: cooler skin, ridges, wire traces, and, at full constitution, a crust of faceted geology. Mixed feeding rotates through all three, so inclusions and stripes occupy the same body. Colour is not averaged to grey; the dominant bloom gene wins.

Thanks to OpenWorm (https://openworm.org/) and Claude Fable 5.1 on max effort for making this project possible.

☣ In wider S-Risk (SETHIX Risk/Suffering Risk) studies SETHIX considers how non-human, alien, extraterestrial, hybrid, and synthetic intelligences increasingly challenge or threaten human evolution; whether they be agentic swarms, sentient malware, plasmoid based non-terrestrial life, biological non-human or human-like ETs, genetic hybrids, or cyborgian/transhuman individuals. ☣

SETHIX. S-9.