Thesis Team

Antonin Clemens is certainly a real person. But he is a notorious luddite, to the point where after THESIS ended, he refused to even have any computers of any kind in his house. Those that believe he was part of the THESIS team suggest that this was paranoia in the aftermath of the Factory Incident. Others point out that he was always a luddite and, indeed always very eccentric and paranoid.

Like Crane, Clemens has been missing for ten years.

The mystery of Shu Lee lends itself to the conspiracy theories about THESIS being a fictitious team. He was listed with payroll as “Dr. Shu Lee, developmental psychologist.”

His job title alone has generated much speculation about the nature of THESIS’ AI. It suggests that they were created not as the fully developed, adult-like intelligences we saw, but as something more childlike, allowed to grow as a human’s mind would (perhaps more quickly).

That aside, the bigger mystery is around the lack of evidence that there is any such person. There are at least a dozen people named Shu Lee, and one of them in New Alexandria, but none of them are psychologists. New Alexandria’s Shu Lee is a high school math teacher who was very confused to find members of the press knocking on his door asking about artificial intelligence.

Dr. Eleanor Frey, on the other hand, definitely exists and likely did work with Crane, though in what capacity is unclear. She is a cognitive neurologist and a lifelong researcher in that field, meaning she studied the brain as a means of understanding the physical mechanisms of thought.

It’s possible, then, that she had a role in designing the physical aspects of the constructs’ brains, by somehow reverse-engineering the cerebral cortex.

Others have written about a possible less than professional relationship between Crane and Frey, although this is pure speculation.

Despite twenty years of an apparently strong marriage, Crane had no children. Perhaps they didn’t want children, but an equally likely possibility is that they could not have children. Crane’s obsession with creating artificial life could be seen, then, as a way to create a child of his own, since he could not have one with his wife. Others have commented that, it would be understandable for Crane to develop feelings for Frey as the woman who in a significant sense created a child with him.

Even if this wasn’t the case and Crane was entirely faithful to his wife, one could still see how his obsession with creating “his child” may have led to the deterioration of their relationship.

This deterioration in something we have some evidence for. It’s seen not in any records of Dr. Crane or THESIS, but in his wife’s emails to her younger sister:

He’s never home anymore. I know he’s doing important work. But I think it’s not even about the success of the company anymore. I think he just cares about making his precious “daughter.” he always says it’s just something he has to do. I wonder if I’m losing him to this project.