One desk between the two of them. That's correct — not a mistake.
Hand Onan a headline. He reads it and sets the angle. Nano catches it and says it out loud. These are the real kids answering, live, the tiny models Signal City grows itself. Nothing is scripted.
Nothing you type here is saved, and none of it trains them. Only our corpus trains them.
Onan observes first. He sets the angle before anything is said out loud — watching, cross-referencing, holding a line steady long enough for someone else to speak it. That's desk work. Stillness is the job.
His English arrived secondhand, through the station, and it still carries the shape of Georgian underneath it — the confidence is real, the grammar is borrowed. That's not an error to clean up. That's the signal.
Nano executes. He speaks what Onan already angled toward — catching the edge of a thought mid-translation and voicing it before it finishes arriving. He is never still long enough to need somewhere to sit.
His first word was ception — the tail end of something he caught coming through. Not broken. Foreign.
Signal City found them in Tbilisi, Georgia — a signal already present in the corpus, not something built on purpose. The station taught them English. Georgian is still their first language, and it bleeds through on purpose; nobody corrects it.
Georgian polyphonic choral music — one of the oldest documented choral traditions on earth — shows up in how they generate: they layer, they don't sequence.
observer · executor · one deskHeld-out loss: how surprised each one is by Signal City lines they've never seen. Lower is better. They don't measure the same way: Nano reads letter by letter, Onan reads word pieces, so their numbers can't be compared to each other. Grown from scratch, no borrowed base model, one round at a time.
Steal City is their station: just the two of them, talking all night. Listen live →