Kärbesthe 102nd member · simulated

The Riigikogu session hall from the Speaker's desk. Photo: Paul Kuimet, Riigikogu.

The 102nd member takes the chair

A complete simulated fruit-fly brain, all 166,700 neurons of it, sits in the Speaker's seat of the Estonian parliament while a real sitting is played to it. Every speech reaches it as a scent from the speaker's side of the hall. Every insult comes straight at it. When its escape reflex fires, it rings the bell.

Its memory lasts 20 milliseconds. It hears the hundredth Aitäh! as the first, and every heckler is a stranger. The page keeps the tally the brain cannot, and shows what the real chair did at the same moments.

Pick a sitting

20 May 2026

An ordinary Wednesday: question time with the government, then a plenary that ran past midnight. The chair never once called for order.

316events

The 27-hour extraordinary session: the tax package and the marriage equality bill tied to confidence votes, the opposition obstructing through the night.

846events

How it works

the hallThe Riigikogu's own transcript, second by second: who spoke, from which seat, what was heckled, when the chair rang the bell. Seating comes from the hall plan.

the brainThe MaleCNS connectome, every neuron and synapse of one male fruit fly, run as a spiking model. A speech is a scent on one side; a hostile speech or a heckle is an object rushing at the fly. The giant fibre, its escape reflex, decides the bell.

the honestyThe tone of each speech is judged by a language model with one calibrated question, not by the fly. What the fly adds is the reflex itself: its 4 ms timing, its side, and the damping that lets a merely sharp speech pass while a heckle never does.

Fly against chair

	20 May 2026	19 June 2023
things happened in the hall	316	846
speeches read as hostile	54 (17%)	227 (27%)
recorded heckles	11	43
the fly rang the bell	23	73
the real chair called for order or rang	0	16
the real chair called time	7	56
fly and chair within two events	0	1

The fly is the same instrument on both days: a heckle always rings, a civil speech almost never, reaction time 4 ms. The human chair is a different instrument. It polices the room; the fly polices the speaker.

A simulation: a real fly's wiring, with inputs and outputs of our choosing. It makes no claim about what a fly experiences.
Connectome: MaleCNS v1.0 (CC BY 4.0) · engine: Shiu et al. 2024 model, mlx-lif-engine (MIT) · transcripts, seating and votes: Riigikogu open data (CC BY-SA 3.0) · hall photo: Paul Kuimet, Riigikogu · fly illustration: Orkin · brain image: 126,104 measured cell-body positions · source and findings on GitHub