When the main star of disillusioned director Viktor Taransky's (Al Pacino) new film walks away,

Taransky is forced to find a replacement or never work again. Unfortunately for him, nobody
wants to work with him any more.

Viktor tries a new computer program on a hard disk he inherited from his acquaintance Hank
Aleno (Elias Koteas). Viktor uses the program as a last, desperate attempt to finish the film. The
system allows him to use a computer-generated woman to play the film's central character.
Viktor names his synthetic actress "Simone", a name derived from the computer program's title,
Simulation One. Seamlessly incorporated into the film, Simone (Rachel Roberts) gives a
fantastic performance. The studio, and soon the world, starts to ask "who is Simone?"

The film is a great success, and Viktor markets her as a real person. He gives phone and camera
interviews, but it becomes difficult to maintain. Two people doggedly pursue him and force him
to showcase Simone "live" after they discover that he used stock photography as a background
during the interview instead of being on that site as he claimed she was. Simone ascends to even
greater heights, winning the Academy Award for Best Actress.

After a while, Viktor decides to kill her off. He has her star in a film of her own about zoophilia,
hoping to disgust audiences. However, they continue to love her work. He then uses a computer
virus to erase the program and dumps all of the DVDs and computer-related information into a
trunk and throws it out to sea. During the funeral, the police arrive and open the coffin where
there is only Simone's poster. He is taken to the police station and is shown a security camera
video where he is seen putting the trunk into his yacht (he had sailed the boat to the middle of the
sea and only then thrown the trunk into the water). He is arrested for her murder. In his defence
he admits that Simone was just a computer program, and that he put all the program discs in the
chest and dropped it into the sea. Viktor's wife and daughter enter his studio, find the program,
and realize that Viktor's actress is only a simulation (he forgot a virus floppy disk in the
computer). They revive Simone and he is freed from custody. The film ends with Simone and
Viktor holding an interview about their new "baby" before a post-credits sequence shows Viktor
creating fake footage of Simone in a supermarket, which one of her pursuers sees, believing it
real.