Prologue

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When you think about it, all the homicidal abominations and whimsical duels to the death sort of started with Cyril Cunningham. So it’s worth taking a minute to talk about the guy.

Cunningham was one of the people who set Silicon Valley on the path to becoming Silicon Valley, way back when. The word “luminary” was used more than once by the press. Unfortunately, his Jobsian rise to fame and fortune took a sudden turn after his time in the old mental hospital.

After co-founding Goliath Games in 1984, he'd become restless. That’s when he’d disappeared from the grid for several months. He’d later be discovered on a Zuni Indian reservation in New Mexico, where he’d been on a “spiritual journey” culminating in an endless, self-proliferating pile of gibberish code he’d unleashed on the souped-up TRS-80 he lugged everywhere he went.

Reportedly, he himself didn’t understand the gibberish, and most of his attempts to do so by recreating the fugue state in which he’d written or discovered it were unsuccessful. The sole exception was a “bad trip” which left him screaming in terror and babbling about “an intersection between code and creation.” The medical consensus was that he’d literally been scared out of his mind.

His two partners and the board hoped a few months of being pumped full of Thorazine and locked in a rubber room would make him his old self again. But surprisingly, no.

Of course, despite his crack-up, his contribution to the company’s success couldn’t be denied. So, to keep the PR people happy, the board let him down easy with a massive pay out of cash and stock (contingent on a non-disclosure/non-compete agreement) and sent him off to his happily ever after.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Alas, his happily ever after turned out to be a hermetic existence spent mostly in the attic of his San Jose mansion, mumbling to himself amidst a pile of obsolete, networked computers. Family and friends who continued to visit him reported that he rarely spoke of anything aside from his coveted programming breakthrough that no one understood, including him.

On those rare occasions that he did bring up another subject, it was always how he’d been “drummed out of the company by that son of a bitch, Merrick.” Ridley Merrick was the chairman of the board, and the only member of Goliath Enterprises’ nobility who regularly checked in on Cunningham after his departure. The details of their relationship were muddied by conflicting accounts, but the prevailing view was that his persistent presence had made Merrick a lightning rod for Cunningham’s paranoia and delusion.

Anyway, it was nearly thirty-five years after his departure from Goliath that Cunningham’s body was found, keeled over in his attic, after his phone went unanswered for several days. There was little doubt that the cause of death was a massive coronary.

They removed his corpse, but left everything else in his home untouched, in accordance with his last will and testament. Of course, left unattended, it wouldn’t be long before the museum of eighties-era computing equipment humming away in the Victorian attic broke down. But his will had accounted for that as well, naming his favorite niece as his only heir, under the condition that she maintain the equipment—doing whatever was necessary to keep it running with minimal downtime.

So that’s Cyril Cunningham in a nutshell. But even though everything that happened started with him (sort of), I’m the one who barely survived it.

My name’s Henry Hubble. And all you people owe me, big time.