If there's one thing the "Nia" series excels at, it's painstakingly observing every detail for hidden secrets. This is still the case in the animated adaptation of "Nia Automata Ver. 1.1a," which aired on Crunchyroll earlier this month. In typical Yokoo Tarou fashion, the first two episodes already have strange clues and cryptic messages embedded in them, which, of course, fans are already working to decipher.

As Kotaku (opens in new tab) discovered, secret and seemingly nonsensical messages are hidden in the episode's eye catchers. If you've seen the anime episodes, you're probably familiar with the eye catches - the little interlude-like images and clips that are inserted between episodes. At first glance, Nia Automata Ver. 1.1a's eye catches are very basic, until you pause them at the right moment.

It is the very "blink and you'll miss it" moment, but for a moment, a jumbled line of code appears. You may not notice it to the casual observer, but Nia fans are in for a truly unusual creation. Several Reddit users took notice of the code, and user Lifedealer999 (open in new tab) managed to decipher parts of it. Now, Google Docs (opens in new tab) has also recorded the meaning of each secret message.

When the messages are run through a tool that converts them from hexadecimal to text, the output is a Japanese sentence, which is then roughly machine-translated into English by fans. In the first episode, phrases such as "androids are beings of life and death" and words such as "resistance" and "YoRHa" are repeated. In the second episode, phrases such as "mechanical life forms have pseudo-intelligence" and "What difference does this make to human intelligence?"

More complete sentences appear, such as.

It will be interesting to piece these together as the episode progresses, and fans will be hoping for additional Easter eggs in the process. One Reddit user (opens in new tab) theorizes that the pods belonging to 2B and 9S are communicating with each other, as each message begins with "report." It's a pretty solid theory so far, and I'm sure we'll discover more as new episodes come out.