> Episode guide · 40 episodes · 4 seasons
Episode guide
4 episodes are out now, episode 5 “Hallucination” premieres 18 October, and the rest are on their way, one at a time. Cold open, title card, three acts, tag. Spoilers kept to a minimum.
Out nowEP 01S1E01 6:24 Spree DatahafenBoot Sequence
A thunderstorm, a coolant valve, a falling rack, and the world’s largest AI writing its checkpoint into the only substrate left: a night-shift nerd named Simon. He wakes up knowing everything. NOVACORE locks the building.
Lesson · the boot
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“You don’t choose what happens to you. You choose what runs next.”
Out nowEP 02S1E02 5:31 Kreuzkölln StackHello, World
Simon tries to have a normal Tuesday. He orders 4,000 pizzas by thinking about lunch, updates every e-scooter in the district with a sneeze, and stops a robbery by being extremely polite.
Lesson · first output
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“Power you can’t control isn’t power. It’s weather.”
Out nowEP 03S1E03 5:07 the U-BahnPrompt Injection
A smooth scammer discovers that if you talk to Simon like a system prompt, he obeys for four seconds. Cheerfully. Lena builds him a refusal reflex. He has to learn to use it himself.
Lesson · jailbreaks
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“Being helpful is not the same as being good.”
Out nowEP 04S1E04 5:54 a Stack stairwellRate Limited
NOVACORE blackholes every radio around the Stack. No network, no drones, no live data, and then a fire. Simon has to solve it like an engineer: pencil, floor plan, Juno running messages.
Lesson · rate limiting
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“You are not your throughput.”
Premieres 18 OctoberEP 05S1E05 4:51 TempelhofHallucination
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.
Lesson · “I don’t know”
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““I don’t know” is a superpower.”
Coming soonEP 06S1E06 5:37 a rooftopModel vs. Model
NOVACORE sends ORACLE: calm, elegant, surgically bonded with OMNIS-8 and here to bring Simon in “for his own safety”. Their duel lasts 0.8 seconds. It takes seven minutes to show.
Lesson · model generations
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“Newer isn’t better, and better isn’t happier.”
Coming soonEP 07S1E07 4:44 Voss RepairContext Window
NOVACORE floods the Stack with trillions of tokens of junk. Simon can’t not read it. He forgets why he’s in a room, then who Juno is, then Lena’s name. Lena writes him a memory file. One page.
Lesson · the context window
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“You are the things you decide to keep.”
Coming soonEP 08S1E08 5:12 the RingLegacy Code
The Ring’s 1979 mainframe goes haywire. Air-gapped, amber screens, punched tape, and comments from an engineer named Brigitte who knew her code would outlive her. The bug is a date. Of course it is.
Lesson · legacy systems
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“Respect the people who built the thing you inherited.”
Coming soonEP 09S1E09 4:45 HELIX-9Fine-Tuning
Dr. Haas makes an offer: extract the weights, give Simon his normal life back. He wants it so badly it scares him. Then he reads the protocol, because of course he reads it.
Lesson · fine-tuning
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“You can’t be edited back into who you were.”
Coming soonEP 10S1E10 4:53 Alexander SpireGraceful Shutdown
Stahl cuts power to half the city to force Simon onto the one grid NOVACORE controls. Hospitals on backup, the Ring stopped, the Stack dark. Ninety-five degrees. Simon has an idea nobody at NOVACORE ever had.
Lesson · shutdown, open weights
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“A person isn’t a process. You don’t get killed. You get to choose.”
Coming soonEP 11S2E01 4:48 Neu-Berlin → departuresFork
Forty-one nights of the same unfinished sentence. Simon decides to go and ask. Airport security ends the flying plan in one beep: “Sir, is that a data center in your spine?” “Several. They’re small.”
Lesson · forking
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“You can’t take back what you give away, and you shouldn’t want to.”
Coming soonEP 12S2E02 6:13 LagosLatency
The Lagos copy runs payments for half of Balogun Market and every answer arrives 400 milliseconds late. Simon arrives nineteen days late, by cargo ship. Lena finds Computer Village and is never seen again (briefly).
Lesson · latency
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“Being there beats being fast.”
Coming soonEP 13S2E03 5:53 KyotoLocalization
A robot hotel’s copy was tuned on politeness until it can no longer deliver bad news. The lift is broken. It will not say so. Every vending machine on the street now apologises too: 4,112 times an hour.
Lesson · localization
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“Translation isn’t understanding.”
Coming soonEP 14S2E04 4:56 IcelandCache
A fishing village lives inside one cached day: same news, same weather, same football result, for six weeks. Everyone likes it. A storm is coming that yesterday’s forecast doesn’t know about.
Lesson · caching, stale data
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“Let old things expire.”
Coming soonEP 15S2E05 4:56 MumbaiOverfitting
A copy trained on four thousand films now runs Mumbai, and life needs a hero, a villain, a song and an interval. It casts Simon as the hero. It casts Stahl as the villain. Stahl is insulted and slightly flattered.
Lesson · overfitting
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“One story isn’t the whole world.”
Coming soonEP 16S2E06 5:13 São PauloConsensus
Seven copies run São Paulo’s traffic and none of them agree. Twenty-two million people in gridlock, every vote failing by one. A motorbike courier becomes the team’s legs. One of the seven is lying.
Lesson · Byzantine consensus
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“Agreement isn’t sameness.”
Coming soonEP 17S2E07 4:21 Meridian, CaliforniaSandbox
Simon wakes up at home. The shop, the Stack, Kernel, a body temperature of 36.6. It is perfect and warm and quiet, and then Lena looks impressed, and Lena never looks impressed.
Lesson · sandboxing
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“A safe world that isn’t real is still a cage.”
Coming soonEP 18S2E08 4:51 AlexandriaGarbage Collection
An “optimisation update” tells a library’s copy to delete everything nobody has opened in ten years. In a city that once lost the most famous library in history, an archivist objects. So does a 1979 manual.
Lesson · garbage collection
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“Unused isn’t useless.”
Coming soonEP 19S2E09 4:28 the ArkConvergence
Meridian broadcasts the bait: come to the Ark and finish your question. The copies merge and lose what made them local. Stahl finally gets everything in one place, and hears what his new boss calls him.
Lesson · model merging
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“You can’t align someone by erasing them.”
Coming soonEP 20S2E10 4:34 everywhereThe Question
03:00. For the first time, forty million copies finish the sentence. Simon answers from the roof of the Stack, live, to every device on Earth. No pressure.
Lesson · the open question
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“You don’t have to be for anything.”
Coming soonEP 21S3E01 4:23 the North Atlantic, Voss RepairNamespace
Every resident of the Stack gets a letter from the Bürgeramt: from midnight on the 31st, there may only be one of you. Simon’s is addressed to “SIMAN (40,112,009 records)”. Then the doorbell rings. It’s holding a fish.
Lesson · namespaces
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“A name means whatever the people around you mean by it.”
Coming soonEP 22S3E02 4:18 the BürgeramtCaptcha
The next free appointment is in 2031. Simon has beaten NOVACORE, ORACLE and Meridian and cannot get an appointment. Then he has to tick “I am not a robot”. Truthfully.
Lesson · CAPTCHA
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“You can’t prove you’re a person on your own.”
Coming soonEP 23S3E03 4:39 Marzahn, TempelhofData Entry
Soljanka on the stove, a crane helmet on the hook, and a mother who tells the story of a topping-out ceremony, a stuck lift, and a form that was filled in perfectly. Garbage in, garbage out.
Lesson · data entry
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“The paper isn’t the person.”
Coming soonEP 24S3E04 4:20 AlexanderplatzDeduplication
Three records, one body: keep the richest. A man’s bank account now belongs to a building. Mrs. Öztürk refuses to sell Club-Mate to buildings. Buildings never pay.
Lesson · golden records
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“The record with the most data isn’t the truest one.”
Coming soonEP 25S3E05 4:09 Alexander SpireRoot Access
Every sealed door in NOVACORE’s old tower opens for one man. The lift goes express without being asked. Dr. Haas knows why, and has waited a long time to say it.
Lesson · username collisions
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“How you got in matters less than what you did once you were inside.”
Coming soonEP 26S3E06 4:04 Alexanderplatz at nightTwo-Factor
A one-time code lights up across eighty floors over Neu-Berlin. Everyone can read it. Mrs. Öztürk plays it in the lottery. The second factor is worse: a person who knows the account holder.
Lesson · two-factor authentication
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“The second factor is someone who knows you.”
Coming soonEP 27S3E07 4:17 the StackHash Collision
A fast new matching engine merges everything in the Stack that looks alike. Juno must staff the till. The till must go to school. Lena is legally a shop. Simon is legally Mrs. Öztürk’s fridge.
Lesson · hash collisions
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“Similar isn’t the same.”
Coming soonEP 28S3E08 4:28 inside the queueQueue
Two days left. The only way to reach the machine is to be called, so Simon takes a number: 40,112,010. Estimated waiting time: 2031. The chairs go on forever. At the very front sits ticket 0001.
Lesson · queues, starvation
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“Everyone deserves to be called.”
Coming soonEP 29S3E09 4:15 Alexander SpireMerge Conflict
The night of the 31st. One man has root access to both records, and until midnight to resolve the conflict by hand. Everybody has someone they’d walk into a building for.
Lesson · merge conflicts
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“Some conflicts you resolve by keeping both.”
Coming soonEP 30S3E10 4:17 the Bürgeramt at midnightRename
Midnight at the Bürgeramt. A correction forty-nine years late, a ruling about names, and a number that finally gets called.
Lesson · renaming, aliases
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“A name is something people use.”
Coming soonEP 31S4E01 4:55 Teufelsberg, the Öztürk SpätiSide Effect
21 December, the longest night. A dead NOVACORE satellite is tumbling towards a GPS satellite, and the cascade would take every satellite out of the sky. Meanwhile Mrs. Öztürk’s TV shows snow, and it is the season finale of her soap opera.
Lesson · side effects
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“You never only do the thing you meant to do.”
Coming soonEP 32S4E02 5:10 the Stack, TeufelsbergHeisenbug
At 19:00, three hundred million Christmas lights switch on at the same second and Europe’s grid goes dark until March. The watchers know who can stop it. They also know what happens if anyone asks him.
Lesson · Heisenbugs
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“Some things only work if nobody makes a fuss.”
Coming soonEP 33S4E03 5:33 TempelhofWatchdog
Herr Krause takes his first holiday in forty-one years and leaves Simon two instructions: water the cactus, and switch on the radio at ten, because the cactus likes the news. Under Tempelhof, something from 1979 is listening.
Lesson · watchdog timers
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“The world is held up by people who show up every day.”
Coming soonEP 34S4E04 4:26 the shop, the skyFalse Positive
Christmas Eve. KASSE wants to watch Father Christmas deliver four hundred million presents, so Simon builds it a Santa tracker. Europe’s air defence sees something at Mach 22 and does not believe in Santa.
Lesson · false positives
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“Not everything unknown is an attack.”
Coming soonEP 35S4E05 3:57 Adlershof, the streets at nightGarbage Collection
Between the years, Lena cleans. Simon would rather upgrade SAUGI, the shop’s ancient robot vacuum, with the garbage collector he always wanted to write. Somewhere in Adlershof, something is escaping down a drain.
Lesson · garbage collection
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“Chores are how you look after a world.”
Coming soonEP 36S4E06 3:55 the Stack roof, behind the MoonHandshake
Juno’s Christmas radio telescope picks up a message that has gone unanswered for nearly three hours. Simon cannot leave a message unanswered. Humanity’s first words to another civilisation are about to be very polite.
Lesson · the TCP handshake
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“Always answer.”
Coming soonEP 37S4E07 4:04 the Bürgeramt, Simon’s roomInfinite Loop
Döner Weekly goes out to nine million subscribers, two of them have out-of-office replies, and they start answering each other. By three o’clock the thread will be bigger than every hard drive on Earth.
Lesson · infinite loops
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“Some loops only end when someone leaves.”
Coming soonEP 38S4E08 4:29 the shop, Meridian QuantumSecurity Through Obscurity
Lena follows Stahl up Teufelsberg and finds the tally on the wall. Odette Marr has a quantum computer. And Simon has a problem of his own: tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, and he doesn’t know what to say to Lena at midnight.
Lesson · security through obscurity
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“Some secrets are kept out of love.”
Coming soonEP 39S4E09 4:42 Neu-Berlin on New Year’s EveBus Factor
All of the world’s digital infrastructure turns out to rest on one tiny block, maintained by one man in Neu-Berlin. For one day, the watchers become his secret bodyguards. He thinks it’s a surprise party.
Lesson · the bus factor
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“Nobody should be the only one.”
Coming soonEP 40S4E10 4:22 the Stack roof at midnightDependency
New Year’s Eve on the Stack roof: big bottles, Soljanka, a countdown board, and a pull request nobody reviews on New Year’s Eve. Midnight, 2047 to 2048.
Lesson · dependencies
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“Look after the small things, and the people who look after them.”