I was born in 1922 in Tsbilisi, Georgia.  I am the son of clock maker and seamstress.  My father was one of the last men on the planet to use ormolu in his designs.  I watched my father die a slow death of mercury poisoning to keep my mother and I well fed, even under Bolshevik rule.  The gilded apple did not however fall far from the tree.  By the time I was sixteen I was helping the USSR revolutionize its factories.  After my father passed, I moved to Moscow to be closer to my clients.  I wrote my mother often.  I told her I was a toy maker for very rich men.  And I was.

In 1947 I fled the USSR.  I chafed under Stalin's demands.  I found the United States to be much more agreeable.  In America a man owned his idea and his inventions.  It was also an ideal time to be in my line of work.  Many were still reorganizing from the War, and almost every government feared the supermen who helped end it.  In such a time it was easy to sell to both sides.  I could be shaking hands with Johann Schmidt one day, sipping wine in Latveria the next, and advising the U.S. to invest in more helicarriers by the weekend.

Thus it was no surprise when in 1965, S.H.I.E.L.D. approached me to be build a machine that could predict coming existential threats.  I will give the U.S. credit.  They were one of the first ones to see what the arms was leading to.  I agreed to do the project, but with one condition.  My demand was the only I would be allowed to know where it was housed.

It took me nearly two years, four iterations, and off world technology, but I finally succeeded in creating my greatest invention, the Emergency Crisis Handling Infrastructure Diagnostic Networking Apparatus.  She was almost perfect.  Even with the artificial intelligence I had created, she was still unable to differentiate between humans, and other valuable resources.  In an attempt to correct this, I created a fifth iteration using a complete copy of my neural network.

It worked.  I was prepared to inform S.H.I.E.L.D. of my work.  However, I discovered that one of my Life Model Decoys was missing.  I found it in contact with S.H.I.E.L.D. I am not a violent man, but given the situation, I disposed of the sleeper unit with extreme prejudice.  Fearing the U.S. would be on it way to collect its prize, I sealed my lab and fled back to Tsbilisi.  

For the next ten years I was hounded at every turn by Colonel Nicholas J. Fury and his Howling Commandos.  If I went to make a connection, he was there.  If I went to display a new product he would destroy it.  My name became worthless.  My funds were drained.  He tracked me to each and every bolthole.  I was chased across the globe until I had only place left to run.  I had never returned to E.C.H.I.D.N.A.  She had been based in part on a self-replicating, self-upgrading, technology brought to this planet by one of Superman's enemies.  This was to allow her to stay current without needing constant retrofiting.

I take great pride in how long it took for Fury and his men to get past my defenses and into the server room.  There before invention, one of Fury's men, a man wearing ridiculous bowler hat, shot me in the chest with a weapon of my own design.  The resulting hole should have been fatal.  All did however was reveal the melted android endostructure.  My last thought was "Platform terminally damaged.  Retrieving critical systems."

Fury and his men destroyed the LMD.  They forced me, the way a slow child forces a square peg into a round hole, to acknowledge that I had become nothing more than a user interface for E.C.H.I.D.N.A.  It took S.H.I.E.L.D. technicians some time to extract me from her, but eventually they did.  This removal however was different than instancing in an external device.  It was complete severance.  Without E.C.H.I.D.N.A. I am a blind, deaf, mute, quadriplegic, on life support.  And without me, E.C.H.I.D.N.A. is nothing more than the world's biggest probability calculator.  I do not know what they did with my hardware, but I was loaded into Code Zoo and left to rot as if I didn't exist.