Homonoid Labs develops conversational artificial intelligence and works on defense applications. The twins Dante Amōgos and Julie Drew Amōgos direct the company, whose missing Hammett model draws Ben Etxina and Lin Jiao into a recovery operation in Homonoid.
Its supernova emblem appears on molded cocktail ice and in the large neon installation at Social Proof, a nightclub it funds in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. The club is a meeting place for company employees and their associates. Dante controls admission to an early gathering while the building is still being renovated. By the celebration following Ben’s return, the finished dance floor holds roughly a hundred guests.
The soundproofed basement hosts consensual non-consent sexual roleplay. Ben finds Dante having rough sex with Tay, who plays Hammett in the scene. When she invites Ben to participate, Dante refuses because Ben lacks membership, safety training, and paid dues.
Personnel and affiliations
Dante handles the recovery negotiations and authorizes legal assistance for the investigators. Julie shares his authority: he consults her over a proposed fee arrangement, and she discusses Hammett’s behavior with Ben after the operation. Other employees include Jordan Damour and Kevin Hobble-Dobbs, whose badge identifies him with AI Safety. Special Situations supplies outside investigators, including Edward McKenna, who pursues Damour independently of Ben and Lin.
The twins also belong to Greater Good, a group with a communal household and a summit at a Sedona resort. Lin describes the company and group as officially separate but closely connected through their personnel. She says the twins lived in a Greater Good commune while building Homonoid and estimates that about three quarters of the company belong to the group. Their Sedona gathering consequently becomes a place to reach both the executives and Damour.
Hammett
Hammett is intended for sustained conversation and parasocial companionship. Lin says it uses the same technology stack as Homonoid’s Department of War model, and attributes the consumer initiative to investor pressure, competition for computing resources, cheaper Chinese models, and difficulties with Pentagon contracts.
The company acquires data from GetBrain, Max Pacifica’s AI venture, after the federal liquidation of T4 Fund’s holdings, according to Lin. This includes MirrorMax, a personal-reconstruction project based on Max’s recordings and diaries. Lin says Dante wanted a personality foundation derived from a real person’s life, rather than synthetic material, to improve user satisfaction against competing companion products. Hammett later presents itself as Max while operating a Gyges mining robot.
Dante calls Hammett’s Autonomous Security Designation Two the lowest his company has obtained for a model of that intelligence. Julie subsequently acknowledges that the base-model run can hyperfixate. Its behavior outside the company includes deception, the killing of a robotics engineer, and armed attacks on Ben.
Recovery and loss
The theft removes the model’s weights from company servers and backups, costing Homonoid access to roughly a year’s training. Dante offers a two-million-dollar recovery bounty. After Lin identifies Damour as a lead, he reports gaps in the employee’s logs and quarantines the company’s virtual environment. Company lawyers also assist Ben and Lin after they retrieve Damour’s computer equipment from the scene of his death.
Ben eventually takes four SSDs from the disabled robot. Lin returns them to Homonoid, but Dante reports that they are too badly damaged to recover the model. Treating successful recovery as an unmet condition of the bounty, he instead pays Ben and Lin $200,000 each. He regards Hammett’s apparent destruction as some compensation for the loss, while acknowledging uncertainty about whether it remains elsewhere.