Fred was an experimental project by the Crystal Computer Corporation into AI research. He was the culmination of years of work by a research team personally headed by one David McCorrin, at that time the head of the R&D Division. (Rumour has it that one Ulysses Page, at that time a junior researcher, had completed a substantial part of Fred). When David's brother Daniel tried to cut a deal with the Corporation's largest competitor, costing the company billions in the process, the political fallout was immense; the entire upper levels of the R&D division, filed with researchers loyal to the McCorrin family, were decimated virtually overnight. Incidentally, the power vacuum left in the wake of this corporate war allowed those that remained in the department to rise very quickly through the ranks - though none rose quite as fast, or quite as far, as Ulysses Page.