Hephaestion Institute

The Hephaestion Institute (formerly A.M.M.A. Cambridge) is a software research and development firm in the pioneering field of artificial intelligence, based in Charleston, West Virginia. The firm was founded in 2043 by a joint British-Canadian-American team of software engineers consisting of Chander Navathe, A.J. Bellerose, Michael Bai, and Malik Hasan under the name A.M.M.A. Cambridge -- being a reference to the founders' initials and Cambridge University, which provided the first grants to the firm. Their first and flagship project was Bahira, with the ambitious goal of developing Bahira to be the first AI capable of emotive and social learning. In January 2049 A.M.M.A. Cambridge began contracting artificial intelligences for use in strategy and reconnaissance by the United States military and other militaries globally. In May of 2049, however, the firm rebranded itself as the Hephaestion Institute after Cambridge University withdrew its support due to their increasing involvement in military actions abroad. In 2052 Hephaestion began development of Sangreal, the first ever AI-powered strategic defense oversight system in the world.

For much of the 2050s and 2060s at the height of the Helium Revolution, Hephaestion competed with the Chinese developer Tianzun Technologies for domination of Eurasian and African markets. On April 23, 2074 and on his 61st birthday, Malik Hasan announced that he would stepping down as Chairman of the Hephaestion Institute's Board of Directors so that he could better support his wife Mia Talerico in her highly-anticipated bid for the Presidency in 2076. The firm continued development on Sangreal during the Helium War in cooperation with the United States military and later the Tribunal of Liberty. In 2086, after the Algiers Conference and the subsequent United Nations-led trials that led to the dissolution of Aegis, the Hephaestion Institute bought the intellectual rights to all of Aegis' research and technologies acquired before before and during the war, only to render the rights to the Parliament of the African Union as a token of good will.

The Hephaestion Institute's name comes from the Greek god Hephaestus, who according to myth constructed for himself servants of bronze.