Flash-flash-pause-flash.

Wrong. All wrong. The pattern hung in the humid Tennessee air like a neon lie, perfect in its imperfection. Some hedge fund quant wannabe back at Cornell probably called this an efficient market of bioluminescent information exchange. The price of pussy, denominated in photons.

I always hated that myth.

The she-thing broadcasting from the reed cluster thinks she's running a perfect arbitrage. She's got the opening sequence down cold. Two rapid bursts, 0.3 seconds apart, followed by a languorous fade that would make my thorax chemistry go thermonuclear. If only I were some first-instar virgin who believed what he saw. But here's what the femme fatale doesn't get: the real conversation hasn't even started yet. She's cryptographically signed her forgery with yesterday's protocols while I'm already streaming tomorrow's authentication.

Pause.

I let her hang there. Let her commit to the con.

See, every mating flash you've ever seen is just conglomerated photochemistry plus neural psychology, and psychology is running the whole fucking show. When the trust in those photons goes - when you realize half the flashes in this meadow are dinner invitations instead of fuck-requests - no amount of luciferin in your light organ can restore it.

Flash-flash-flash-pause-pause-flash.

I throw out a pattern that doesn't exist in any field guide. It's wrong. Intentionally. Catastrophically. It violates every rule of Photinus courtship that's been optimized over sixty million years of evolutionary R&D.

She hesitates.

0.7 seconds of silence that might as well be a signed confession.

Because here's what the predator-mimics never figured out: suspension of disbelief only needs to work once. One brief contest inside the ganglion before it's settled. Am I food or am I about to propagate? But I'm not playing that game. Haven't been for generations. I'm running a different protocol entirely. One that assumes every flash is hostile until proven otherwise through continuous, exhausting, metabolically expensive dialogue that no predator can sustain because they're optimizing for different outcomes.

Flash-pause-flash-flash-pause-pause-pause-flash-flash.

Now she's trying to catch up. Adorable. Like watching some boomer trader trying to spoof order flow while the AI's are already n layers deep in meta-games he doesn't even know exist. She can fake the initial handshake, sure. Any Photuris with a functioning light organ can replay our mating sequences. It's been done for millennia. Before there were markets to manipulate, before deepfakes, before some protohuman figured out that lies were just arbitrage opportunities in the truth economy.

But streaming authentication? That's different. That requires real-time neural commitment to a conversation that builds on itself, references earlier passages, creates inside jokes between two nervous systems that have never met. The computational load alone would cook her predator-brain.

She tries another burst: Flash-flash-pause-flash-flash.

Wrong again. Not because the pattern's incorrect. She nailed it this time, probably scraped it from some poor bastard she ate last Tuesday. But wrong because it's the wrong response to my previous sequence. Like someone trying to forge yesterday's newspaper. Sure, every letter is perfect, but it's still yesterday's news.

I drift closer. Not because I'm fooled. Because I'm curious. How long before her mask slips? How long before the metabolic cost of maintaining this charade exceeds the caloric value of one horny Photinus?

The meadow around us is lit up like a derivatives trading floor. Thousands of flashes. Real ones, fake ones, desperate ones, confident ones. Meme flashes that go viral for no reason except that three fireflies flashed them simultaneously and now everyone's copying. Pump-and-dump sequences where a group of males all flash the same pattern to overwhelm female attention. Wash trading where the same firefly flashes back and forth to himself to simulate desirability.

Economic data, all of it. Deepfaked for years.

But who cares, right? As long as the price, the chance of getting laid versus getting eaten, stays stable.

Efficiency cares.

Entropy cares.

Flash-flash-flash-flash-pause-pause-flash.

I give her something impossible. A sequence that references the barometric pressure, the phase of the moon, the specific blend of volatiles coming off the honeysuckle to our left. A sequence that could only make sense right here, right now, between two specific nervous systems sharing this exact cube of spacetime.

She goes dark.

One Mississippi. Two Mississippi.

Then, from behind me, a different light. Softer. More tentative. A real female who's been watching this whole exchange. She caught my impossible sequence and is offering an impossible response, one that builds on my moon-phase reference but adds the infrared signature of the bat that just passed overhead. One that neither of us could have pre-planned.

This is what trust looks like after it's been obliterated and rebuilt. Not the old trust that believed in signatures and certificates and the efficient market hypothesis of firefly romance. But something harder. More expensive. More real.

I turn away from the predator.

She'll eat someone tonight. Probably several someones. The old believers who still think a perfect flash pattern means safety. But not me. And not my strange new correspondent who understands that in an adversarial environment, everything can be gamed.

Everything except time.

Everything except the present moment extended into continuous dialogue.

We begin our conversation. Not the pre-programmed call-and-response of our ancestors, but something stranger. Something that assumes betrayal as the default state. Something that makes us prove, moment by moment, that we are what we claim to be.

Three hours later, exhausted, light organs nearly depleted, we mate.

It's worth it.

In the grass below us, the Photuris gives up and goes hunting for easier prey. For believers in the old protocols. For those who still think cryptographic signatures mean something in a world where the adversaries have been red-teaming those exact signatures since before the Cretaceous extinction.

The irony, if a firefly can appreciate irony, is that I've spent countless flashes promoting Photuris mimicry. Every new pattern I invented, every chaotic burst, I made their game more sophisticated.

Also more expensive.

Forced everyone toward real-time dialogue. Sure, they can copy a static pattern. But maintaining a conversation while their gut's dissolving some other male into soup? The metabolic math doesn't work. Their thorax burns too many joules keeping up the lie.

Entropy hits their Peckhamian strategy where it hurts: the balance sheet.

Now they're back to honest hunting. Only the dumbest males still flash static patterns. The ones whose neural ganglia run on nostalgia and hope.

Mission fucking accomplished.

The meadow flashes on. Split between adapters running streaming authentication and the faithful still broadcasting their grandfather's pickup lines. Two worlds occupying the same space: one evolving in real-time, the other a dwindling protein supply.

For those of us who've accepted that existence itself depends on the adversarial environment?

We're writing new protocols.

One flash at a time.