Ok, I've got the perfect way to segue into the lights shutting off and stopping Poe from wrecking Mr. Zero.
Before I post: Unknowable, you describe Mr. Zero as reading Poe's lips for the purposes of understanding him, but from terminals in the games Autophonetic Recorders are usually specialized software packages - I.E., robots, even sapient ones, typically don't have the capacity to read lips.
It doesn't affect the outcome of my post either way, and I don't actually mind that he's attempting to prevent future hacking. You could just say he has an Autophonetic Recorder and that's that, but it might be more likely that he's simply extrapolating lip movement to a programmed lexicon in his memory banks, which means he might have trouble understanding what people are saying at first until he's obtained sufficient field analysis to have perfected his heuristically acquired lip-reading talent.
Either way works (and I suppose there are other ways he could have such a skill as well) - just thought I would bring up the possibility, either way.
