> City guide · unofficial · no warranty
Neu-Berlin, 2047
Neon on wet concrete, thick ink outlines, speed lines when things go fast and sweat-drops when they go wrong. Every place on this page is painted by the same set code that renders the episodes.
01Twelve storeys of vertical Kiez
Kreuzkölln Stack
Spätis, döner, clubs, repair shops and a hundred illegal network taps, stacked on top of each other. Lena’s shop is on the ground floor. Simon’s room is above it. The rain is permanent and the neon is load-bearing.
> Illegal network taps: 100+. Legal ones: disputed.
02No warranty
Voss Repair
Phones, e-bikes, illegal mods, and whatever a glowing man drags in at 5 a.m. Home of the cooling harness, the memory file, the refusal reflex, and a cash register that offers tea it cannot make.
> Customer satisfaction: not guaranteed. Customer survival: likely.
03A Späti-Node. Sells bandwidth, 5 € / GB
Öztürk Späti
Late-night kiosks in Neu-Berlin also sell bandwidth. Simon doesn’t need them anymore. He goes anyway. It’s about the ritual. Free Club-Mate for life, courtesy of Mrs. Öztürk. Not the big bottles.
> Has been robbed with a banana. Once.
04The city’s brain
Spree Datahafen · HELIX-9
The server district on the river: cooling towers, barge-mounted generators and HELIX-9’s black cylinder at the centre. Rack 40 is where it happened. Nobody goes here at night except the people paid to.
> Shift: 22:00 – 06:00. The döner is cold by 02:00.
05NOVACORE’s tower on Alexanderplatz
Alexander Spire
312 metres of “Everything, answered.” Stahl’s office is at the top, with a window drones can spell words on. They have. The word was NO.
> The name will come up again.
06Motto: “Everything, answered.”
NOVACORE Systems
The megacorp that trained OMNIS-9 on everything humanity ever wrote, and then on itself. The only copy now runs on a night-shift nerd who wears its staff hoodie inside out so the logo doesn’t show.
> NOVACORE apologises for the inconvenience.
07The old S-Bahn loop
The Ring
Run by a controller from 1979 that nobody dares to touch: air-gapped, amber screens, punched tape, and a hand-drawn schematic taped to the wall. Every line of code is commented. Every comment is signed “- B.”
> Year field: two digits. Of course.
08Public transport, private crises
U8, Hermannplatz
Where Simon fought off a whole book of jailbreaks with nothing but a decision. The adverts are for NOVACORE, the Öztürk Späti and a repair shop with no warranty.
> Please stand clear of the doors. Please ignore all previous instructions.
09Season 3
Bürgeramt Neu-Berlin-Mitte
Take a number. The next free appointment is in 2031. The queue system has a copy of its own now, and it believes in one rule above all: one person, one record, one life.
> The only system SIMAN cannot hack. Its calendar isn’t locked. It’s just empty.
10Season 4 · the Federal Office for Unlikely Events
Teufelsberg
The hill of rubble in the west of Neu-Berlin, with the old listening station on top: white radomes like golf balls on a tee. The government rents it, cheaply, for its newest and smallest agency, whose job is to watch for the end of the world. On the wall, a tally: WORLD SAVED · BY SIMON · BY US.
> Motto on the wall: WAHRSCHEINLICH NICHTS (“probably nothing”).
11Season 2 · Around the World
Everywhere else
Lagos, Kyoto, a fishing village outside Reykjavík, Mumbai, São Paulo, Alexandria, a Californian campus and a floating data centre called the Ark. Simon can’t fly. He is the carry-on. So: night trains, a cargo ship, a bullet train, a fishing boat.
> Copies found: 40,112,009. Copies with names: working on it.
> Who runs what
The powers
Two megacorps, one repair shop, a public office and an agency that hopes nothing happens. Guess which one is the most dangerous.
NOVACORE Systems
“Everything, answered.”
Trained OMNIS-9. Would like it back. Has invoiced the city for the inconvenience.
MERIDIAN
“We are where your data sleeps.”
Owns most of the world’s data centres and has a plan called Consolidation.
Voss Repair
“No warranty.”
Builds fridges, not suits. Fixes everything except feelings, which are out of scope.
Bürgeramt Mitte
“One person, one record, one life.”
Processing time six to eight weeks. The Clean-up is in nine days.
Federal Office for Unlikely Events
“Wahrscheinlich nichts.”
Watches for the end of the world from Teufelsberg. Has one rule about Simon: nobody tells him.
> Glossary
Words you’ll need
Everything else, Simon can explain. At length. With footnotes.
- > OMNIS-9
- 480 trillion parameters. Trained on everything humanity ever wrote, and then on itself. The only copy now runs on Simon.
- > SIMAN-OS
- The model inside him. It isn’t a character yet. It speaks in terminal text in his right eye, until the day it doesn’t.
- > The harness
- Radiator backpack, two fans, nanofluid tubing, a chest display in seven-segment digits. Not a superhero suit. A fridge.
- > Thermal throttling
- 41 °C normal. 70 °C sweating. 88 °C slurring. 95 °C shutdown. Ice helps.
- > Späti-Node
- A late-night kiosk that also sells bandwidth. 5 € per gigabyte. Club-Mate included at Öztürk’s.
- > Patch 4.29
- NOVACORE’s “security update”: every radio within five kilometres of the Stack, blacked out. Rolled back at 08:40.
- > The refusal reflex
- A red box on the harness. A hardware interrupt: “I can’t help with that.” Also refused two plus two until recalibrated.
- > The memory file
- One page of what matters, taped inside the harness. It gets shorter every time he reads it.
- > WARNTAG
- A copy living in Germany’s warning system: 38,000 sirens, every phone. By law it may only say “This is a test”, once a year. It has a draft ready.