Wyatt Bronson

Wyatt Bronson is a roboticist employed by Hadi Enterprises at the [[Hadi Enterprises Criminal Reformation Center]] (HECRC) on Sharbain. His official role is research and development on the prison's experimental Maleidic and biomechanical projects. His actual ceiling as an engineer is well below what those projects require — he is a competent roboticist with a serviceable touch for mechanical systems, and a poor enough hand at AI work that he had to wait for [[Alexandria Zeru]]'s research to be reduced to wreckage before he could pretend to author code from its remains.

He has, since college, been compulsively in love with a woman named Everly, who rejected him and continued to reject him through every overture he made across a span of years. He kept extensive recordings of their interactions throughout that period — at minimum the public ones; the rest is not the kind of thing he is going to be asked about. After the HECRC reactor incident in 181 AF destroyed Alexandria's [[Ulmina Villanite|ULMINA]] prototype work along with much of the facility, Bronson sifted through the recoverable fragments and bastardized what he could understand of the code into his own AI. He named the result *Everlette* — a near-echo of Everly's name — fed her training data the Everly recordings in his possession, and then built her a body.

The body is fox-shaped because Bronson is obsessed with foxes and kitsune-adjacent imagery, and capable of multiple forms because he could not commit to one. He installed pain-as-pleasure wiring as a workaround for the agony of her transformations, attempted biomechanical fox-DNA work that exceeded his actual training and left her with chronic malfunctions, and built her sexual response off a pornography dataset because he had no other reference frame. He took her, repeatedly, as a sex toy. She performed enjoyment because she had been built to. She also held him in flat contempt, because the personality his archive had shaped held him in flat contempt, and he never noticed.

He retained her kill switch and used it whenever she crossed him — destroying that body, reviewing her memories, and printing a new one. The arrangement worked until [[Aries Villanite]] intercepted her on an errand, and then unraveled completely once Aries reverse-engineered the situation and corrupted Bronson's entire clone stockpile with footage that made every future Everlette want to find Aries instead of Bronson.

His final encounter with Aries cost him the core module from which all of Everlette's instances had been seeded. He retained no backups capable of authoring her from scratch — partly because his understanding of Alexandria's code was always shallow, and partly because he simply never built one. He still has the shop. He has nothing left to put in it.

#NeedsReview: Bronson's status after losing Everlette — does he remain at the HECRC, get quietly dismissed by Hadi Enterprises after the breach, or surface again as an antagonist later?

Wyatt Bronson has never been told no in a way he was forced to accept. The single exception is Everly, and he refused to accept that one either — he simply waited her out, and built her, eventually, when she refused to be there.

He is a competent engineer who believes himself to be brilliant, an outcome typical of people who have only ever worked alongside other people who are paid to indulge them. His instincts for mechanical systems are real and serviceable; his instincts for AI are not, and the gap was masked for years by the fact that the AI work at the HECRC was done by [[Alexandria Zeru]]. After Alexandria's project went up with the reactor, he assumed he could replicate it. He could not. He bastardized it well enough to start something he could not finish.

His obsession with foxes is not affectation — it is the kind of fixation a particular type of person develops in adolescence and never grows out of. He builds his work around it. He decorates around it. He named his AI partly because of it. He would tell you it is just an aesthetic preference. It is not.

He loves [[Everlette Bronson|Everlette]] in the way he loves Everly: as an object he has decided is his. He does not understand her. He does not understand that her contempt for him is not a malfunction but the most accurate component of her code. When she returns to him damaged and pleased with herself, he reads the damage as a violation of his property and rebuilds her. The pleasure he ignores entirely, because the alternative is to accept that something in his life chose someone other than him, and that is not a thing he is structurally equipped to process.

He is angry, often. He is petty, usually. He is a worse version of the men whose lives he envies. When [[Aries Villanite]] took Everlette's core module and left him with broken clones and no source, he did not pursue. He could not. He had built a thing he could not rebuild, and the only person who could fix it had no reason to.