Another possibility, strongly hinted at in the episode … is memory erasure. No one in that palace has all their memories, not even Day, Dawn and Dusk. The only one, made perfectly clear in the episode is Demerzel. It seems pretty clear that she’s running the shop, and the implication from the conversation with the image of Cleon I is that this is by design from the beginning.

Honestly, I’m now kinda excited to see what do with the whole Demerzel and Empire thing. At first I was worried it was going to be a normal AI versus humanity thing. But there could easily be something more subtle going on. Maybe they’re pulling inspiration from some of the Asimov Robot stories (I’m actually not familiar with them, unfortunately).