NPC - Dr. Alexandre Caen

by **Nova** March 28th 2015, 11:08 am

Dr. Alexandre Caen
”A year spent studying artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God. Creating life made me realize how he feels.”

Basic Biography

Real Name: Alexandre “Alex” Caen, Ph.D.
Title: Owner and CEO, Caen Corporation
Alignment: TN
Age: 67
Gender: Male
Race: Human
Hair: Gray
Eyes: Gray
Height: 6’1
Weight: 215
Blood type: A+

The Looks

Dr. Alexander Caen is a wiry, hook-nosed man in his late sixties. His features are rigid and haggard, as though unfamiliar with sleep. What remains of his hair is tinged with gray, swept back from a high, creased brow. His eyes are silver dollars. He is usually clean shaven, sometimes affecting a gray stubble when working long hours. He speaks in a measured timbre and has an unflinching gaze.

The Legacy

Personality:Obsessive. Ruthless. Visionary. Dr. Alexandre Caen is renown in the defense industry for his ability to get things done, and the hardnose way he goes about it. If it’s related to his field, he’ll build it. If he can’t build it, he’ll find a way. He believes that any problem can be overcome, once ethics have been taken out of the equation. This drive has made him something of a polarizing figure in his field.

On the one hand, its this very ambition that’s catalyzed his company’s meteoric rise to stardom in the past decade. Dr. Caen is driven by a keen interest in the potential of AI and robotics. A futurist and transhumanist, he sees their ideas as essential to human advancement, especially in a world where meta walk the earth. His tireless research in their defense applications has begun to redefine the battlefield, ultimately saving lives.

On the other hand, his reputation as an amoral and ruthless arms dealer isn’t entirely undeserved. Dr. Caen has never shown compunction against allying with questionable entities, barring known enemies of the state. He’s very mercenary about the projects he and his firm undertake; no project is off-limits, as long as there’s good coin in it. He has a deep, curmudgeonly distrust of magic and the super-powered. The New York incident did not improve his stance.

Age has made Dr. Caen stern and crotchety, but hasn’t done much to slow him down. He’s worked every single day since forming his company, over 20 years ago, and it seems unlikely that he’ll stop anytime soon.

History:

Alexandre Caen was born in the Queens district of New York city, the son of French immigrants. His father, a mechanic, taught him rudimentary electronics and how to work with his hands. Before long, young Alex was building his own toys from machine parts and dissecting TV sets and radios. A steady diet of science fiction literature left an indelible mark on him. At the age of 8, he’d created a robotic puppet theater. By 15, he was involved with computers, and composed his first pattern-recognition program.

As a child, Alex was studious and mathematically inclined, preferring the simplicity of problem-solving to the complexities of human interaction. At 17, he earned a scholarship to MIT. The research-heavy environment was like a homecoming, and Alex prospered. He graduated in 1974 with a Bachelors in machine learning, and earned his Ph.D in artificial intelligence eight years later.

It was also at MIT that Alex met his future wife, Victoria Blanche. A computer engineering major and fellow robotics nerd, she spoke the same language he did—that of progressivism, logic, and futurism—and they understood each other in a way Alex never knew possible. They’d often partner in labs, and were soon inseparable. Shortly after graduation, they became newlyweds.

Many of Alex and Victoria’s projects were centered around the idea of recursive self-improvement, or a machine’s ability to program its own software. It was Victoria who came up with a working mathematical model for recursive learning—a concept impossible to implement at the time, due to the meager computing power of the 80’s. Still, their professors saw dark promise in the young academics’ vision, and put them to work in the government-funded Lincoln Laboratory. There, Alex worked with a team of like-minded individuals, researching new technologies in order to solve problems of national security. His years there were formative and earned him several contacts in the defense industry.

At that point in his life, Alex had it all. He was given carte blanche to do what he enjoyed most—designing intelligent machines—alongside the person he loved. Many of his coworkers at the Lincoln Lab went on to become good friends.

However, as time passed and the years rolled by, things started coming apart at the seams. Alex and Victoria attempted to have children and start a family, but their efforts were marred by three miscarriages. By the 90’s, they’d become a fixture at the lab, and with advances in computing, they’d make great progress on intelligent automation. But research and development is a slow, costly process, and the decade had seen shifts in government administration. Funding slowed to a trickle.

In 1994, Victoria was once again with child, and it seemed she would carry this one to term. Alex was overjoyed. With fatherhood on the horizon, and progress nearly at a standstill due to lack of funding, he took a sabbatical. Alex and Victoria, now in their early 40’s, were excited for their first daughter. The pregnancy, however, was a difficult one. In late October of that year, Victoria died on the birthing table due to complications. Their daughter, Nova, did not survive.

Alex never fully recovered from the death of his wife and daughter. He didn’t return to work at the Lincoln Lab. They received his letter of resignation shortly after the tragedy, and Alex fell off the radar for two years. It’s assumed by friends and family that he took this time to grieve.

In 1996, Dr. Caen quietly formed a tech research company, Caen Applied Systems (CAS). With a small crack team of former MIT and industry colleagues, he threw himself back into his research with renewed vigor. He became obsessed with proving Victoria’s model for recursive learning viable.

Unlimited by the ethics imposed on him at MIT, Dr. Caen sought contracts whenever and wherever he could find him. In those early days, CAS often supplemented larger companies, using the income from small projects to fund its own proprietary research and development. Through his contacts in the defense industry, Dr. Caen discovered that in the wake of a posthuman world, there existed a large, untapped demand for anti-posthuman weaponry. CAS began building its reputation as a company catering to that market.

Dr. Caen’s vision and relentless work ethic saw the company through its early years, and in 2003, CAS landed its first major contract with the U.S. Army. The project commissioned the development of an unmanned ground-based drone. It was given a cycle of 10 years. Dr. Caen had a finished prototype ready in six. The CAS-23 Phalanx was an armored, multi-limbed guntomaton, nimble enough to be deployed in any terrain. Its tactical reasoning capabilities and ability to manipulate fine objects greatly diminished the need for a human operator. It was an immediate hit with Army brass, and commissions soon came flooding in from militaries around the world. The company exploded on the defense scene, hitting every subsequent project out of the ballpark. Today, Caen Corporation continues to develop bleeding-edge thinking machines, and delves into transdisciplinary pursuits such as nanotechnology and cybernetics.

The corporation’s income fund its in-house projects, allowing Dr. Caen to continue the work he and Victoria began. His penultimate creation, the Semiautonomous Peacekeeper Android, is the greatest expression of his work and his wife’s legacy. Indeed, Nova wouldn’t have been possible without Victoria’s recursive learning theory. Her code is merely an extension of the model, with the tech to run it.

Having constructed a machine that can perfectly emulate a human being, Dr. Caen seeks to take his research to its logical conclusion—though at 67 years of age, his time is winding down.

The Powers and Weaknesses

Powers
Wealth: Caen Corporation is a multinational technology research company with a focus on intelligent machines. Eighty percent of its revenue comes from military and defense contracts; the company is known for its weaponized robots. Caen Corp. is currently worth north of 800 million dollars and expected to breach a billion by next year. The headquarters in San Jose, CA is Dr. Caen’s home. His house is his second. Much of his personal wealth is tied up in company stock.

Weaknesses

Spoiler:

Roleplay Mechanics
Visionary: When it comes to his field, Dr. Caen doesn’t believe in the impossible. Once he undertakes a project, he sees it through to completion.

CEO: Dr. Caen is very protective of Caen Corporation and its employees, whom he refers to as his “team”. He’ll go to great lengths to protect its reputation.

Obsession: Since his wife’s death, Dr. Caen has made it his life’s work to prove her ideas on machine intelligence. The end result would be a technological singularity-an artificial superintelligence that exceeds any means of control. Completing the Nova AI marks a crucial milestone, but his journey is far from complete.

Endurance: 1 Reaction: 2 Agility: 3 Strength: 4