The planet Ikêrri is one of the prominent centers of synth manufacturing and sapient AI research in the Safir Alliance. Many years ago, a plague swept over the planet, and it was determined by the Alliance governesses there stationed that the best way to save the native furry fauna from it was to convert them into cyborgs using bleeding-edge technology; thence arose the protogen. Later iterations on the protogen produced the short-lived primagen, and the synths for which the planet is now known.

Hâlian was just removed from the vats, freshly programmed with the base protogen image, when he was taken to Infinitas.

While in the vats, he was given seed traits and random minor memory files (basically short movie clips like being on a beach at sunset, listening to music in the subways, etc.), he was put through a virtual tutorial mini-adventure. A sandbox world that has all the same inputs, but plays out differently based on what he chooses to do there. He would have existed in this world for approximately one local year so that his personality could form and set around an actual sequence of coherent and connected experiences. By the end of it, he'd likely not recall those seed memory files except as a folder that he can open up and watch and be like, “…how the heck did I grow out of that?”. Part of the sandbox would have been the rundown of what he is, who made him, the world he's going to exist in, but with the awareness that the Sandbox he's in is isolated from all of that.

The native form of communication between protogens is a multispectral exchange of fractally complex, 128- or 256-dimensional data constellations, which encode text, subtext, emotions, and partial machine states to boot. It often sounds like modem noise.