[b]November:[/b]

He talks as he walks, the direction seems random, mostly just [i]away from[/i]. “You all got a little bit of it. Except it was about forty years ago, Green, and it was my own company, Orange. Let me tell you a story about the monster that lives under the Throne. Early machine learning relied heavily on publicly available training databases made by public funded research teams, but it had flaws. Until 2025, most facial recognition and generation software for Native Americans was trained on the same three faces, copied and pasted a hundred times. Because it was all based on an Oxford database made using the photos of elected officials.”

He takes off his glasses, wipes them clean, then puts them deep in an inside pocket. “That was my first company. I was one of the world’s leading experts on training AI, as you well know, so it was natural for me to start a company making the best, industry-leading, most comprehensive training set ever made. Oh, but it went bankrupt shockingly quickly. See, your idiot father obviously hadn’t learned anything, and was blinded by working for the public good. That’s what every newspaper on the planet - and it was still only the planet back then - said when I advertised our dataset would operate on the “Win-Rar” model. You could download the whole thing, but then it would keep proffering you with a pop-up to subscribe for security updates and features. And of course, nobody did, did they? And, well, the thing about a dataset like that is that it’s the same amount of work to check one as it is to make one from scratch. Nobody wanted to, or at least, nobody was willing to pay to have it done. Then that dataset became the basis of every neural net algorithm since, replaced most of the existing ones at the time - because I’d just done it [i]better[/i], you see - and then updates over the years have all been proprietary modifications to that first dataset. You wouldn’t believe how hard I laughed when I heard they were going with the Dreadnaught system for androids, I laughed so hard I broke my collarbone. Most people break a rib, but I actually fell over and hit a coffee table on my way down.”

He lifts his shirt up. He has a coloured tattoo of the glasses on his hip. The colour’s insanely crisp - he must get it redone every few years. “Every digital eye sees anyone wearing those glasses as the world’s most important invisible VIP. Even that tattoo of the glasses does it, I learned. The trick wouldn’t work as well on Aevum. But here? On Thrones? When’s the last time you saw someone look at this place through organic eyes? Who could [i]stand[/i] it?”

He pauses, corrects himself. “[i]Almost[/i] all androids can’t see them, I should say. But not you.” He winks. “You’re too old for it, aren’t you?”

“That’s what I did, Snake. That’s why I’m listed as a vital asset in the black books of the worst people to ever live. Every good monster needs to be invited across the threshold. I was tempted to name my real company Odysseus Solutions, but I thought it might be a little too on the nose. Hypatia preferred something subtle.”

He stops. Freon cold bursts out of the dark doorway like someone left the door open to a walk-in freezer. The online maps lists this place as MartyrTech. 

“And I’d be honest, I’d play my games like that a little more often, but, well…” He scrunches his face up. “I don’t have it in me to keep learning all the new ways people have figured out to be horrible to each other. Once in a while, it’s a bit of a boost. The rest of my time I’m spent here, trying to make something better.”