Arthur Knipe possessed a head that bore an uncomfortable resemblance to a peeled boiled egg, and long, double-jointed fingers that twitched across his mechanical keyboard like a pair of dying albino spiders. He was the Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Synthetica Inc., a company that occupied a vast, sterile glass cube in the heart of Silicon Valley. Knipe was a genius, though you wouldn't know it to look at him, as he habitually wore a cardigan that smelled faintly of old soup.