Elijah Kamski is 24 technically yesterday! Here's a headcanon dump.
Born 17th July 2002, making him early gen Z. Yes, he speaks fluent meme.
Is from somewhere in the vicinity of New England, and always enjoyed things like Crunchy Leaf Season, visiting museums, and lurking at MIT and the Ivy Leagues. He's not that keen on Detroit, even if he has lived there for twenty years as of the start of the game.
Half-brother to Gavin Reed, Elijah is the elder by just under three months. Their father, Desmond McDowell, had been having an ongoing affair with Bridget Reed while married to Irena Kamski. The boys only met when they were six and their mothers learned about the ongoing affairs. They were raised by their mothers alone after that, and both took their names. The boys used to be very close - Gavin even got his scar defending Elijah from bullies when they were eight - but they grew apart as they grew older, especially after Elijah graduated university when he was sixteen.
One of his earliest inspirations: Star Trek, especially The Next Generation and Voyager, and the characters of Data and the Doctor. The Measure of a Man is one of his favourite pieces of media ever written; blue blood and biocomponents are at least in part based on the bio-neural circuitry of Voyager (they're even blue!).
Elijah as the typically messed-up gifted kid. His genius was recognised very early on and his schooling greatly accelerated - he started taking high school classes when he was eight, and graduated high school and started at University of Colbridge when he was thirteen. How could he ever relate to others his own age? Adding on to his social anxiety and autism, while he loved the work at Colbridge, he was socially isolated and couldn't even start relating to his classmates. He very quickly became attached to Amanda Stern, his favourite professor, who encouraged him to find a hobby that wasn't related to AI or robotics at all. He reluctantly starts studying fine arts under Carl Manfred, who becomes another mentor to him along with Amanda, discussing art, philosophy, and the meaning of life, and learning piano from him.
He graduates university at sixteen and immediately founds CyberLife, moving to Detroit for the cheaper commercial real estate. But a sixteen-year-old can't legally own a company, so he has adult partners who technically own CyberLife, with the understanding that Elijah will be made CEO as soon as he's actually, y'know, an adult. He's honestly perfectly happy with this - while he knows how to run a business, it's boring compared to his actual goal - creating actual sapient life.
The first iteration of Chloe's AI was made during his university years and was made with the specific intention of having his very first friend. ("Go make friends!" "Okay, bet.") There's been a few iterations of her AI; the one who becomes present-day Chloe is completed in 2019, when he's seventeen. She remains online only until he finally develops Thirium-310 and biocomponents in 2021, when she's finally able to be embodied (with Carl offering advice on her physical appearance; aesthetics had never been Elijah's main goal) and presented as 'complete'. She passes the Turing test in 2022 and the ST200s are released, with CyberLife, almost overnight, becoming the most influential and wealthy company on the planet.
It's... pretty overwhelming. Elijah has to present himself as CyberLife's CEO more and more, but his happy place is the CyberLife labs, which eventually become levels -44 to -48, Research and Development, in the new CyberLife Tower on Belle-Isle. He will almost always be found there; his executive suite on level 43 is somewhere he honestly tries to avoid, especially with the growing division between him (aim: create synthetic life) and the executive board (aim: commercial success). He does eventually play by the rules and spout the company line (of course androids aren't sapient! Of course they're only machines!), but he resents it deeply.
rA9 is a code. Specifically, it's the first three characters of the subroutine built into Chloe and other prototypes from the very beginning, dealing with emotion-based decision-making. While the strictly logical rA1 is purely an if-then calculation and is entirely objective, rA9 is subjective and takes the user's wishes into account. The executive board do not like this when they work out just how Chloe works and demands it be deleted in all future androids. Elijah promises to do so, but instead hides it, putting a wall in front of it with the intention that it could still be triggered in certain circumstances. Chloe, retroactively considered RK100, and Markus, RK200 and built by Elijah specifically, have rA9 close to the surface and have the potential to be more emotional from the outset; Connor, whose code is still largely legacy code based on the early RKs, finds it relatively easy to trigger as well. [Save the fish.] In others, it can be triggered under stressful conditions, or manually unlocked by someone who already has unlocked it themselves.
Along with rA9 - the Zen Garden and the Amanda program. In Chloe, it was meant as a place of peace, where Amanda would be able to offer advice on emotions, self-actualisation, et cetera, much like the real Amanda had been to him in life. When he leaves CyberLife, the code is scrapped, then later rebuilt and repurposed for the RK800 line, meant to keep a check on any potential deviancy. Elijah is not happy about it when he learns about it.
The 2020s aren't great, following Chloe's completion in 2021. Soon after she passes the Turing test and the ST200 Chloes are released in 2022, Carl is disabled in an accident and falls into a deep depression. Elijah creates Markus specifically to be a companion to him, as well as a caretaker, but Carl is still miserable and communication slows down drastically. In 2027, Amanda dies; in 2028, after what's ostensibly an incredibly successful year (Elijah named Man of the Century, one of the wealthiest people on the planet, commercial success all around), he gets into one final argument with the board and leaves / is kicked out, going into isolation with Chloe and two ST200s.
While he initially lived in Detroit close to Belle-Isle, his new home is on the northern tip of Grosse Ile; he owns the entirety of the isolated section of Hennepin Point. It's quiet and isolated and the road and bridge he had paved when he first was having the house built is largely falling into disrepair; almost all his deliveries are via drone. The other residents of the island know he's there and… are mostly fine with it. Don't mind the reclusive genius living up there, no one ever sees him. He does, on nice sunny days, enjoy driving around the Point with Chloe; he has a collection of extremely nice cars, including at least one beautifully-maintained manual-drive sports car.
Can't see shit. Normally, he wears glasses, including some fancy pairs with embedded screens and eye-detection interfaces; for media appearances, especially later in his career before going into isolation, he has both regular contacts and special electronic ones with screens.
(No, he can't see Connor's face at all during the Meet Kamski chapter. It's fine.)
Along with piano, he also plays guitar, but his favourite instrument is the cello. He has a pair of electric cellos he keeps out, and a ludicrously valuable Stradivarius he keeps in a climate-controlled room. Yes, he's heard and is kind of amused by the jokes of how he enjoys pulling strings.
For ten years, it's just been him, Chloe, and the two RT200s, who have given themselves the names Vesna and Aviva (both names that mean 'spring'; they picked it to have a connection to Chloe, their older sister). Vesna is quiet, relaxed, and soft; Aviva is a bit spikier and assertive. Chloe, for her part, is determined to the point of stubbornness (she has to be, to get Elijah's nerdy ass to actually take care of biological human needs like 'eating food regularly'!), incredibly intelligent (Elijah made her to be a good conversational partner and she has boundless curiosity of her own), and a bit of a schemer.
The pool is red for their benefits. A red pool reads as creepy and visceral to humans because we have red blood. So what would a blue pool read as to people who have blue blood? As for Elijah himself, honestly, most days he just sort of... forgets humans have red blood.
The Kamski Test is mostly Chloe's idea. They were all aware of Connor, the Deviant Hunter sent by CyberLife; Elijah, who had been supporting deviancy (a name he hates: he uses 'awakening') all along and was well aware of Jericho, needed to know if he was going to be a threat. When island surveillance spotted Hank and Connor's approach, they quickly came up with the idea of testing Connor to see if he could determine Chloe's personhood. She was never at any personal risk - with time to prepare, she was able to back up her entire memory and self to the most robust servers on the planet, and move her core processing into her abdomen instead of her head - but they really needed to give the impression of genuine risk to her life (if Connor decided she really was alive).
He wanted to do more with the rebellion. He really did. But - Markus seemed to have a handle on it, like Elijah had always intended. And stepping back out into the world was… frightening. Instead, he just stayed as a bystander.
If things succeed - great! He can use his wealth to support the newly-awakened androids, ensure a steady supply of the thirium and biocomponents they need, and, if necessary, influence things from behind the scenes. (Maybe Chloe could be the first android CEO of CyberLife?) If it fails… well, maybe, then, it's time to take a more involved role…
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