Alexander Romanov

SUMMARY: Once a successful mechanical engineer, Alexander Romanov catalyzed while trying to turn his vision of a utopia in which robotic labor is celebrated rather than feared into a reality. The maddening fires of Inspiration burned away what little sympathy for the "Luddites" he had left, however, and his dream of a sci-fi future quickly became a burning desire for a Socialist proletariat revolution led by disaffected factory robots and sentient machines. Thankfully the Peerage takes pleasure in telling deranged idiots how crazy they sound, and the Romanov of today is much closer to a robotic rights advocate with a dubious Russian accent than an Inspired Fidel Castro.

Any Genius outside of Lemuria will remind you that the crazy never really goes away, though. A Hoffnung's dream is a part of their identity, and while Alexander might not be planning to replace the Secretary General of the UN with a robot, that doesn't mean he won't go off on the poor, unsuspecting sap who calls him at three in the morning to discuss upgrading his cable package. He is still a mad scientist, after all.

BACKGROUND: Alexander Romanov, HERO of robotic laborers the world over, was born during a snowstorm in the arctic plains of Russia. Eyewitnesses report that the Northern Lights could be seen on the day of the Eternal President’s birth, as well as that a new constellation shaped like a robotic arm had begun to shine in the sky. How lucky we are to be blessed with such a leader! That’s enough history for now, citizen; let us sing our Dear Chief’s everlasting anthem, “No Revolution Without You.”

. . .Fine, you got me. That’s the biography Alexander wrote for his Tropico character, not his real life story. The real Alexander Romanov was born as Sidney Lachman in 1980 and grew up as a textbook nerd, reading comic books, playing way too much NES, and actually enjoying school. That enjoyment came mostly from a love of math and the sciences, especially learning facts or formulas that actually applied to real life (this was a very, very rare occurrence). Lachman even joined a small computer club in his second year of high school, which mostly involved a lot of laughing about The Net with Sandra Bullock. Ah, the simplicity of adolescence.

If this all sounds surprisingly average and uneventful on the surface. . . that’s because it was. Lachman lived a fairly normal life for someone who would later build a robotic zombie and teach it to quote Red Zone Cuba, even making it through college without much of a hitch and carving out a career path for himself in Mechanical Engineering. The only real hint of what was to come was the future-lunatic’s love of applying obscure mathematical formulas and heavily debated scientific facts to real life problems in a way that. . .didn’t quite fit, so to speak. Car not running correctly? Theoretically you could use P = NP = true to program a small spider-like robot to crawl into the engine and locate the problem while you go to class. Worried about your long distance relationship? Theoretically you could use the Nikolaiev-Kamensky method to communicate as if you were almost in the same room. Lachman would often imagine worlds in which some or all of these “theoreticals” weren’t so theoretical at all, building entire new timelines and utopias inside his mind just for the hell of it. Most of his classmates referred to Sidney’s odd habits as “quirks.” The Peerage probably would’ve called them “warning signs.”

The relatively normal Lachman managed to make it through college at the University of Minnesota without blowing anything up or turning any faculty into zombies, gaining entry into their Master’s program for Mechanical Engineering. It was there his respect for robotics was born, along with most of his crazy. He began taking on odd side projects despite already being behind on his coursework, pouring over programming books in an attempt to create a machine that could understand the work it was doing in the same way a sentient being could. Stress and some kind of mania began to cloud out his rational thoughts, as the rapidly growing pile of failed experiments hidden away in his room became steadily more important than getting his degree. It took a herculean effort for Lachman to tear himself away from his “work” long enough to actually graduate, but graduate he did; heading out into the world with a mind clogged up with theoretical utopias and filled to the brim with terrible ideas. In the end he was lucky; if he had put off doing his coursework any longer he might’ve been thrown out of the program and catalyzed as a Neid.

Lachman’s transition into Geniushood was a slow, painful thing. The paranoia began after he got a job designing factory robots for Minnesota manufacturing plants, as every news story about “Robots taking YOUR job!” started to look less like journalism and more like a personal assault on his beliefs. What the hell was wrong with robots doing better work than humans? Didn’t these idiots know Utopias are made?! Around three months in the protests began. The daily chanting of Union workers outside of their building, each voice filled with rage and dissatisfaction at the horrible, dark work that had cast them aside in favor of a soulless machine. They were stronger than Lachman, so he started going to the gun range. Monthly, weekly, eventually almost daily. They had stronger legs, so he started learning to run. Like a frightened deer fleeing the noisy rifle of a hunter. He began his strange tinkering again, but with a more frantic pace this time; he was working toward something, but he didn't know what. Lachman even began to learn preventative medicine just in case a group of Union thugs jumped him. A few of his co-workers talked about quitting out of guilt or fear, his bosses became stressed and irritable, the corpses of old toy robots littered the sidewalk outside their front door as part of some vile publicity stunt. But why? Why couldn't they all see things like he did? Why did they want to throw away decades worth of technological advancement to keep their positions in a failing economic system?! AND WHY DID ALL HIS DAMN INVENTIONS KEEP BREAKING?! WHAT THE FUCK WAS MISSING, GODDAMNIT?!?

And then it hit him.

It was hate. All of it was.

Humanity feared robots, and fear breeds hate. Hate for the very beings that have redefined the entire world for the better, silently toiling away in factories and asking nothing in return. He needed to prove them right. He needed to build a robot that could hate humanity back; one that could destroy the old system whether the masses liked it or not, establishing a true Utopia in its place. He barricaded the door to his apartment, revised his notes, and tightened the screws on one final robot. This one had a face. This one had a soul. He powered it on.

It blinked. And it saw. And it hated.

Alexander Romanov was born.

. . .Well, crazy Alexander Romanov, anyway. In fact, the new Genius hardly had time to flesh out his insane, pseudo-Socalist ideology before a few very well-spoken men with robots of their own were knocking on his door and telling him he was crazy (he did almost manage to graft a robotic arm to the back of his shoulder so he could "catch nationalist assassins in the act," but that didn't hurt anybody besides him). It was then that the wonderful, terrifying existence of Inspiration and the Peerage was revealed to him, as were the consequences that awaited him if he actually tried to overthrow humanity in a robot-led proletariat revolution. He briefly considered ordering his robot Boris to politely throw them all the hell out, but he imagined there would be consequences for that action too. Instead he simply thanked the men for their time, sat dumbfounded in his chair for a few moments after they left, and went about adapting to life as a mad scientist. As if that was actually possible.

The Alexander of today is more concerned with getting enough funding to continue his experiments than with leading a bloody uprising led by hate-robots, having integrated relatively well into the Peerage after realizing that he actually was insane and delusional. He held onto the “socialist revolutionary” feel from his catalyzation as a strange kind of aesthetic, though, and the Hoffnung never really forgot his dream of a Utopia where robots are respected rather than reviled. His new master plan involves commanding armies of pro-robot lawyers and lobbyists rather than revolutionaries... but that kind of insanity is still just a pipe dream for now.

A more pressing matter facing El Presidente is finding out why a few of his likeminded Peers suddenly went dark after they headed to Atlanta looking for the source of the "nameless genocide." Alexander tried to find the source of their disappearance conventionally, but the only information he could find on Google were a bunch of weird news stories and lunatics talking about a "righteous cleansing." He was about to shrug and go back to tinkering with Automata when a decidedly insane thought occurred to him: what if they were assassinated? Great revolutionaries were targeted by assassination plots all the time, and he knew from the news reports that Geniuses who didn't sympathize with his cause were alive and well in Atlanta. At first he brushed the thought off, but some part of him was unable to let it go. It gnawed away at his rational psyche, filling his head with delusions of men in black breaking his door down at night. After three grueling months of paranoia and an ever-shrinking paycheck from his robotics company, he decided enough was enough: he was going to fly over to Georgia and figure out what happened to his contacts before the thoughts of assassination turned him Unmada. Alexander quit his job, packed up what little clothing and money he had, and set out for Atlanta with Boris in tow.

It is here that the story of Alexander Romanov begins.

Sheet:Alexander Romanov