The Epistími Institute is an authoritarian technocratic state led by Supreme Director Fredorp Zevelonski. It was founded when a group of scientists, fearing persecution, fled to the then uninhabitable planet of Eposta. Since then, it had become a haven of knowledge, with the 2,000 workaholic citizens being able to pursue their own experiments without fear of government intervention. The foreign threat is largely annihilated, thanks to the Talos Programme. All manual labour is done by bio-mechanical synthetic humanoids, commonly referred to as "synths" or "clankers", who had attained sentience. However, the synths had long been discriminated against by the inhabitants of Eposta, forced to labour as slaves despite their similarities to humankind, unable to resist due to cranial inhibitors.
