Curtis Forbes • The Collider

REF: OVERVIEW•PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Resurrecting McCoy Pauley

Dixie Flatline is an interactive terminal emulator that recreates the iconic ROM construct from William Gibson's cyberpunk masterpiece, Neuromancer.

The project attempts to create a "Forensic Epistemic Reconstruction" of the character, placing him precisely in his canonical timeline and carefully constraining his knowledge base to pre-1984 concepts.

By combining retro terminal aesthetics with modern LLMs, it offers a deeply immersive piece of interactive fan fiction.

REF: ARCHITECTURE•TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION

Two Approaches to Resurrection

Simple Prompting vs. Fine-Tuning

The conversational agent you interact with on this site utilizes a simple but extensive system prompt overlaid on an instruction-tuned model (currently OpenAI's gpt-4o-mini via OpenRouter). It relies entirely on the model's pre-existing knowledge of the Sprawl Trilogy and in-context behavioral instructions.

In contrast, the actual www.dixieflatline.ai application uses a much more sophisticated approach. It runs a custom LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) fine-tuned on top of NousResearch's Hermes-3-Llama-3.1-8B model. This model was explicitly trained on a curated dataset of Sprawl-authentic dialogue, conversational deflections, and specialized epistemic constraints.

While the system prompt version here provides an entertaining approximation, the fine-tuned Hermes 3 LoRA delivers a significantly more resilient, stylistically accurate, and character-locked experience that resists standard jailbreaks and modern anachronisms.

Ready to slot the ROM construct and jack in?

Visit DixieFlatline.ai

"You got me hung, Jack. Who the fuck are you?"

Resurrecting McCoy Pauley

Two Approaches to Resurrection

Ready to slot the ROM construct and jack in?