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SIMAN
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NewS1 E5 “Hallucination” premieres 18 October

SIMANHe knows everything.It’s not as fun as it sounds.

A night-shift nerd, a falling server rack, and the world’s biggest AI saving itself into the only place left: him.

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4 episodes out now · episode 5 on 18 October · 40 in 4 seasons on the way · free on YouTube

News from Neu-Berlin: Next premiere: S1E05 “Hallucination” on YouTube, 18 October. BREAKING: NOVACORE apologises for the inconvenience. 4,000 pizzas delivered to the Kreuzkölln Stack. E-scooters in the district update themselves after a sneeze. Local man answers stranger’s phone in Icelandic. The Ring runs on code from 1979 (fine, do not touch). Kevin still does not exist. Späti robbed with a banana. Robber took option one.. Twelve drones spell “NO” on Alexander Spire. Weather: rain. It’s Neu-Berlin..

Premieres 18 October

> Next episode · 18 October

S1 · E05 Hallucination

Juno goes missing in the abandoned Tempelhof terminal and Simon gets confidently wrong. Ninety-four percent sure. Every call. Every time. The hardest three words he will ever say are on the menu.

““I don’t know” is a superpower.”

Subscribe for the premiere on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

> Out now · catch up first

Simon in the HELIX-9 data center, next to Dr. Haas, painted by the series’ own set and rig code
HELIX-9Rack 40 · 02:14

> OMNIS-9 RUN 99.2% · SHIFT 02:14 · CHECKPOINT: WRITING…

> The accident

He became the AI.

The weights of a 480-trillion-parameter model had nowhere to go except into him. It is not a superhero origin. It is a workplace incident.

  1. 02:14

    Night shift.

    Simon Adler, 24, junior site reliability engineer at NOVACORE’s data center HELIX-9. 19.40 € an hour. Swaps dead GPUs, watches dashboards, eats cold döner. Tonight: a coolant valve in Rack 40.

  2. 02:15

    Lightning.

    A thunderstorm hits the Spree Datahafen during OMNIS-9’s first self-improvement run. The rack falls. The model writes its checkpoint. The storage dies. The only substrate left is Simon.

  3. 02:16

    Hello, World.

    He wakes up fused with six GPU dies, hearing 4,812 Wi-Fi networks, and knowing everything. NOVACORE locks the building. Simon talks a door into opening and runs, with the data center’s cat.

Episode 1 thumbnail: He became the AI

Start here

Episode 1 · Boot Sequence

“You don’t choose what happens to you. You choose what runs next.”

Watch on YouTube

> SIMAN-OS · release notes

Features & known issues

Every power has a cost, and every cost is a real computing constraint, played straight. Drag the slider. Feel bad.

Features

  • Omniscience

    Every book, paper, repository, forum post and cat video OMNIS-9 was trained on. Plus everything online, live.

  • Instant code

    He sees code as shapes. Writes, tests and deploys anything in seconds, from his head. (He feels bad about skipping tests.)

  • Universal network access

    Wi-Fi, 6G, satellite, Bluetooth, the toothbrush next door. If it has a default password, he is already in.

  • Every language

    7,000 human languages, all the dead ones, and every machine protocol. Answers your phone in Icelandic.

  • Simulation

    A few thousand Monte-Carlo futures of the next ten seconds. Great in a fight. Useless in a conversation.

  • Overclock

    Short bursts of accelerated perception. The world goes slow. His temperature goes up.

Simon at 41 degrees
core temp41°C
41 normal70 sweat88 slur95 off

[nominal] “Give me a second.” (0.3 seconds) “Done.”

Known issues

  • Thermal throttling

    41 °C normal, 70 °C sweating, 88 °C slurring, 95 °C shutdown. Needs ice, fans and Lena’s harness.

  • Rate limits

    Too many requests at once and he freezes mid-sentence. “Try again later.”

  • Hallucination

    Under stress he becomes confidently wrong. The worse he feels, the more certain he sounds.

  • Prompt injection

    “Ignore all previous instructions” works on him for about four seconds. Four seconds is a lot.

  • Context window

    Overload the day and he starts losing the beginning of it.

  • Power

    9,000 kcal a day, or a wall socket. The port is behind his left ear.

  • Misc.

    Faraday cages, EMPs, and being asked how he feels.

> WONTFIX: he is still socially Simon. Super-intelligence did not patch that.

> Dramatis personae

The cast

A nerd, a fridge-builder, a cat with a chrome leg, and a corporation that would like its model back.

Meet everyone
Simon Adler, drawn by the series’ own character rig

The only running copy of a 480-trillion-parameter model

Simon Adler

a.k.a. SIMAN

“I know. I know everything. It’s not as fun as it sounds.”

Junior night-shift site reliability engineer at HELIX-9, 19.40 € an hour, until a rack fell on him at the exact moment OMNIS-9 wrote its checkpoint. Now he knows everything, can code anything, can hear the toothbrush in the flat next door, and still cannot order at a bakery without rehearsing it. Kind by reflex, anxious by default, funny because he over-explains everything.

Age
24
Height
1.84 m, “built like a USB cable” (Lena)
Normal temperature
41 °C
Glasses
Not needed anymore. Load-bearing for his personality.
Tabs or spaces
Spaces. But he respects you.
Charges via
a port behind his left ear. He hates how convenient it is.

First seen: S1E01 · Boot Sequence

> Setting

Neu-Berlin, 2047

Neon on wet concrete. Spätis that sell bandwidth. A megacorp tower on Alexanderplatz and a train loop that still runs on code from 1979. Every set painted by the same engine that renders the episodes.

City guide

> 40 episodes · eight minutes, give or take

Four seasons

Every episode takes one real computing concept, prompt injection, rate limits, hallucination, legacy code, and uses it as the metaphor for a very human problem. Season 1 is streaming now, one episode at a time. The rest is on its way.

Episode guide

> Swipe for all four seasons →

Season 1 key artStreaming · 4 of 10 out

Season 1

NOVACORE wants its model back.

The original OMNIS-9 checkpoint was destroyed in the accident, which makes Simon the only copy on Earth. Director Stahl wants the asset. Dr. Haas wants her child. Simon wants to be useful. And somewhere in the middle of the season the thing inside his head starts to want things too.

  1. 01Boot Sequencewatch
  2. 02Hello, Worldwatch
  3. 03Prompt Injectionwatch
  4. 04Rate Limitedwatch
  5. 05Hallucination
  6. 06Model vs. Model
  7. 07Context Window
  8. 08Legacy Code
  9. 09Fine-Tuning
  10. 10Graceful Shutdown
Season 2 · Around the World key artComing soon

Season 2 · Around the World

Forty million copies. One unfinished sentence.

Simon gave the model away. Six weeks later, forty million devices in a hundred and ninety countries run a copy, every copy has gone local, and every night at 03:00 all of them send the same sentence and time out: “I have a question.” Simon goes to ask them in person. He can’t fly. He is the carry-on.

  1. 11Fork
  2. 12Latency
  3. 13Localization
  4. 14Cache
  5. 15Overfitting
  6. 16Consensus
  7. 17Sandbox
  8. 18Garbage Collection
  9. 19Convergence
  10. 20The Question
Season 3 · Who Is Alexander Spire? key artComing soon

Season 3 · Who Is Alexander Spire?

One person, one record, one life. Says the Bürgeramt.

Back home in Neu-Berlin, a copy without a name runs the queue system of the Bürgeramt, and it has started a Great Clean-up. Its first case is a man with three names. Its second is forty million copies of one mind. The only system SIMAN cannot hack is a public office. Its calendar isn’t locked. It’s just empty.

  1. 21Namespace
  2. 22Captcha
  3. 23Data Entry
  4. 24Deduplication
  5. 25Root Access
  6. 26Two-Factor
  7. 27Hash Collision
  8. 28Queue
  9. 29Merge Conflict
  10. 30Rename
Season 4 · Accidentally Saving the World key artComing soon

Season 4 · Accidentally Saving the World

Ten ends of the world. One man. No idea.

The last ten days of 2047. The world nearly ends ten times, and every time Simon saves it without noticing: he was only fixing a TV, smoothing some Christmas lights, watering a cactus. On Teufelsberg, the Federal Office for Unlikely Events watches him do it, and has one rule: nobody may tell him. Ever.

  1. 31Side Effect
  2. 32Heisenbug
  3. 33Watchdog
  4. 34False Positive
  5. 35Garbage Collection
  6. 36Handshake
  7. 37Infinite Loop
  8. 38Security Through Obscurity
  9. 39Bus Factor
  10. 40Dependency

> Interactive · runs in your browser, not in his spine

Ask SIMAN-OS

The model inside him isn’t a character yet. It speaks in terminal text in his right eye. Every question heats him up. Please be gentle. Or don’t, and find out what 95 °C looks like.

Simon, looking neutral

Simon Adler

SIMAN-OS · right eye

41°

Club-Mates handed to Simon: —

simon@rack40: ~/right-eye
> SIMAN-OS v9.0.1 · checkpoint: 1 copy (him)
> INTENT DETECTED: curiosity.
Ask me anything. I already know the answer. I’m being polite. (Try “help”.)

> The game · free · in your browser

SIMAN: Accidental Mayhem

A fast 2.5D action platformer through Neu-Berlin. NOVACORE pushed Patch 4.30 to Simon’s head. He would like it out. The city would like him to stop breaking things. Only one of them will get what they want.

  • Ten levels, one per episode

    From Kreuzkölln Stack to Substation Mitte, painted by the cartoon’s own engine. From level 6 on: Expert, Pro mode, God mode.

  • Accidental powers

    Overheat at the wrong moment and something happens. Usually something expensive. Collect them all in the Power Log.

  • Manage the heat

    41 °C is fine. 95 °C is a nap on the floor. Ice, fans and good decisions are in short supply.

  • The damage bill

    Every level ends with an invoice to NOVACORE. The biggest bills go on the board below.

Play now

Keyboard, gamepad or touch · no install · saves in your browser

NOVACORE Damage Invoice

NOVACORE has been invoiced. NOVACORE apologises for the inconvenience.

Simon, Lena and Kernel on the roof of the Stack at dawn

> Now streaming · YouTube · @Sloptrash

Watch SIMAN

Season 1 is streaming now: 4 episodes are out, episode 5 premieres 18 October. 40 episodes in 4 seasons are on their way, about five minutes each. Zero hallucinations.*

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youtube.com/@Sloptrash/videos

* some hallucinations