CHAPTER 1
Search for me. You’ll find an image of me snarling up at the camera, pinned by the police and covered in blood. You’ll be offered a headline like AI CULT MASSACRE.
This, I’ll admit, is a bad first impression.
But it’s probably too late for first impressions. You already know the story of Delphi, and the AI bubble that exploded so spectacularly in the late 2020s. So I wonder why you picked up this book? Maybe you’re in a bookshop, killing time waiting for a train, and you were just curious to see what I, or anyone from Delphi, could possibly have to say for myself.
In fact, I have a lot to say for myself. I always have. This character trait has not made me popular in prison. I admit to a certain pomposity that does not go down well among les hommes de la geôle. The other inmates avoid getting into protracted conversations with me. I wish to converse about technology and destiny. They wish only that I would shut up.
This has given me a lot of time to write. At first, I tried my hand at poetry. An epic in the style of Paradise Lost, with AI as Satan and me as the fallen Adam. I built up the courage to ask my cellmate, Bones, to take a look at the first few hundred stanzas, but he rather wounded me by calling the ideas “vague” and the tone “irritating”. When he started suggesting edits and rewrites, I drew a line under the project and turned my hand to memoir instead.
Let me ask something of you, before my story begins. No, not to forgive me. There are enough exculpatory memoirs on the shelves, including from other former Delphites. I only ask that when you think of what happened, you do not say something trite like “I would never get myself in that situation”. Everyone on the right side of a cult says that. One finds oneself in a cult as a frog finds itself in a pot of boiling water.
The only question is whether the realisation comes too late.
*
The day I first heard of Delphi in 2027, during a heat wave.
London does not handle heat well, but at the back end of that August 2027, the city gave up entirely. Every living thing was in a mad quest for shade. I saw a pigeon jump into a bin and never come out.
I remember that particular Tuesday morning well, not because I was hungover and a little drunk (this was not unusual) but because it was the first day that a client noticed. In fact, the moment I stepped into a barely air-conditioned conference room in Shoreditch, I was confronted by Alexander, the twenty-three-year-old Etonian who had hired me.
‘You’re late, you’re literally actually genuinely late, mate. The VCs are here in five minutes.’ He stopped and sniffed. There was a whiff of last night’s vodka on my breath. Apparently, my mouthwash hadn’t done its job. He stepped back, horrified. ‘You’re late and you’re drunk.’
Ellis, the only other person in the room, looked up from his laptop. Every startup has an “ideas person” (an unskilled braggart, in this case, Alexander) and a “nerd” (a skilled doormat, in this case, Ellis). Ellis, already having a nervous breakdown over something on his laptop, turned green. ‘It’s 10:30.’
Alexander wagged a finger, ‘No, it’s five minutes to eleven, when the VCs are going to walk through that door.’
Ellis stared at the fogged glass door, as if it were about to be breached by Vikings.
I straightened up, hoping to speak with dignity. ‘Yes, I am a little hungover.’ Ellis buried his head in his hands (“ohgodohgodohgod”) and Alexander flushed with anger. ‘Boys. You are new to this game. In sixteen years, I have secured a cumulative £2.3 billion in venture capital for over one hundred tech startups. I have birthed seven FTSE 100 companies. A hangover is part of my technique. It helps me disassociate from myself. Will you have a little faith?’
Alexander had desperate, watery eyes. ‘You’ve timed your mid-life crisis really fucking badly for us, mate.’
Things were getting tense, so I played my trump card. ‘Let me tell you something Asher once told me.’
They were listening now. It always worked, the Asher Bray card. For a man I hadn’t seen in years, Asher was a remarkably consistent ally in situations like this.
‘This was way back when Aetherium was just a twinkle in his eye. We were just two idiots scrabbling around Cambridge. I was about to go to a supervision that I was nervous about, and Asher said to me, “Punch yourself.”’
‘What?’
‘He said whenever he was worried about something he had to do, he’d punch himself. On the leg, even in the balls. Yes, you heard right. He said he did it to show himself that however nervous he was about what could happen, it wasn’t as bad as what had actually happened.’
They let this sink in, like a yogic saying. Asher had never said such a thing to me, but to be fair to the mad bastard, he could have done.
‘So that’s why I’m always hungover in pitches like today. The headache helps me focus on what I really care about, like your product.’
They looked at each other: wow, makes you think.
The Asher card. It always worked.
So when the elevator pinged and the barks of the VCs drifted down the corridor, they were once again happy for me to take the lead. I gulped down four paracetamol with my cup of nine espressos.
‘So. Let the show begin.’
The doors opened, and the money came in.
I slapped backs and squeezed hands. ‘Sarah — how are you? Michael, you bastard, how about you? Haha, yes, we’ll see about that we tee off on Thursday…Sharin, how was California? John and the kids alright?…Milo, who let you in here?! Hahaha. Now, everyone, let me introduce the two geniuses!’
Alexander and Ellis greeted them nervously, as if meeting Olympian gods.
One VC, a woman named Olga Kostenko who was an analyst at one of the biggest venture capital firms in the UK, pulled me aside. ‘Is this really worth our time, Billy?’
The honest answer to this was, most likely, no. I was there only because Alexander’s very wealthy father had offered to double my already generous pro rata fee for the day.
I whispered back, soulfully, ‘I don’t know. I think they might actually have something, Olga. Just hear me out. You don’t want to be Zuckerberg’s pizza guy.’
She squinted, trying to get a read on me. Her firm was a horde of bald eagles, with a talon in everything from pharmaceuticals to arms, and she was the sharpest of the bunch.
‘Are you ill or something?’
‘Just the heat, Olga. Would you take a seat?’ I made a mental note: more mouthwash and coffee next time.
I took my spot, and as the room hushed, I placed my hands together, staring into space for a moment, collecting my thoughts.
Then I gave my pitch.
‘When I was a boy, my father used to take me walking over the Sussex Downs. You guys been up there? Beautiful this time of year. I’ve got a confession. I hated it.’ There were little titters at this. ‘I hated the walking, the hills, being away from my PlayStation.’ A laugh. ‘But you know what I loved? Being with my dad.’ There were, already, the smallest twinkles in some eyes. Alexander and Ellis, who had no idea what I was going to say, were rapt. As if they’d hired a magician and found a wizard. ‘Whenever I started dragging my legs and fidgeting, Dad would find a rock for us to sit on and give me a sip of water. He always timed it just right. And somehow, I’d find I’d walked seven, eight miles without complaint. I still walk up in the Downs. Now I love the walking, the hills, the countryside. But my Dad’s no longer with us.’ A little pause from me — not too much, I had to time things right — and I added a slight wobble to my voice. You could hear a pin drop. ‘I still get tired, drag my feet, think about turning back. I forget to call time, find a rock, take a sip of water. Do you know that 83% of us are dehydrated at some point during the day? Doctors have proven dehydration can cause all sorts of problems. Depression, mood swings, bad dieting. I put my hand up to all three, sometimes. But then I met Alexander and Ellis, and they gave me a prototype of their new technology. Take it out, Alexander.’
Alexander hurriedly placed a metallic canister on the conference table.
‘This is H20+. For the first time, the power of AI combined with the life-giving quality of water. Alexander and Ellis have designed a unique AI model that connects this proprietary liquid delivery system to an app on your phone, which links to cloud-based artificial intelligence which can map your individual “water fingerprint”. There’s a whole bunch of technology there that, frankly, I don’t understand.’ They laughed. ‘But here’s what I do know. When I’m up on the Downs now, I can walk for miles and miles without getting tired.’ I brought that croak back to my voice. ‘And it feels a little like my dad is walking next to me.’
*
H20+ secured £1 million in venture capital funding, leading to a small run of earned press coverage (positive and negative, but widespread). Before the final build was complete, Alexander and Ellis sold the company to a fitness company for £20 million. The technology had a brief life as a limited-edition Nike water bottle, but after customer complaints (for example, it — wrongly — advised a 74-year-old man in California to stop drinking water entirely), it was quietly withdrawn.
I was paid for the pitch, not the outcome.
*
This isn’t a story about how good I was at marketing. You will merely note that I was. I mention that morning because Alexander’s reaction to smelling drink on my breath was the last thing I really remember before Delphi came into my life. It gave me dark thoughts. I had hardly seen my alcoholic mother in the sixteen years, but still couldn’t shake her mothering off. (As for the father of my story, he walked out when I was two.)
So I stopped at a pub in Farringdon to think over my alcohol problem, hoping a Guinness would fuel some psychological insight. As it settled, somebody called my name.
CHAPTER 2
I hadn’t seen Peter Shincliffe since the summer of 2007, when he punched a sheep to death. I will explain about the sheep, because it feels important for understanding how things ended with Peter.
Peter and I were the only stoners in Haywards Heath Sixth Form. I doubt we would have hung out otherwise, because Peter was a computer sciences guy and I was a humanities guy. But he had access to the best and only drug dealer in Haywards Heath, who also happened to be his uncle, who was also his legal guardian.
One night during the listless gap between the end of A Levels and results day, Peter’s uncle gave him a pipe of something called “Old Spice” and told him to go away for the evening so he could entertain himself in his bungalow. Peter drove me up to Devil’s Dyke and we had a strange evening, the facts of which are as follows.
We took lots of “Old Spice” and as such believed we were being chased by a white demon that wanted to eat our brains. ‘Baaah,’ it cried, ‘baaaah, Billy. Baaaah Peter. I will eat your brains.’ We didn’t know where this demon came from, or what powers it had, or why it had taken against us. After what felt like hours of chase, we ended up at the bottom of an oak tree when the terrible thing appeared suddenly at our side. That’s when Peter performed an act that, at the time, seemed very heroic. He hit the demon on its snout and it collapsed.
The Old Spice wore off and we realised this entire cosmic battle had played out in the field next to the car park, and that we’d only been there an hour. There was, however, a real, crumpled white form by the oak tree in the middle of the field. Hardly believing our eyes, we approached slowly and at an abstruse angle, and realised that Peter had punched a sheep to death.
I don’t think we saw each other again after that night. I had always sensed an aggression in Peter that unsettled me, and that night I had seen it manifest. I believed Peter to be, by his nature, a gentle, spiritual sort of guy. But his uncle was violent, and he had a lot of pent-up aggression which he dulled with weed but which, I feared, might come out some other way. I suppose I was right about that, in the end.
That day in the summer of 2026, on that baking hot pavement in Farringdon, was, apparently, an entirely different creature. Peter was ripped like a movie star, in a sleeveless T that showed off his melon-sized muscles. The weedy computer nerd had been replaced by a clear-skinned, tanned, well-manicured Adonis. He looked like a guy from a TV advert for something called Monsieur.
‘Peter? What the fuck?’
‘Billy. Man! You’re looking good.’
‘No, I’m not. You look good. Jesus. I haven’t seen you since…’ Our eyes glazed over at some point, haunted by the memory of that crumpled, woollen pile. ‘Anyway, since that night. How are you, what are you up to?’
‘Coding. I was over at OpenAI for a while, now I’m back.’
‘Shit. We should have a drink. I’m a VC marketing consultant.’
Then he started acting strangely. It was, of course, an interesting little coincidence that we’d bumped into each other after all these years, and had ended up in work somewhat adjacent to each other. But Peter acted like this was a miracle.
‘You’re joking, dude. You must be fucking joking. You’re a VC marketing consultant?’
‘Yeh. Peter, you must have been unable to move for pricks like me in the Valley.’
‘Sure, I’ve met a thousand pricks like you. But today, of all days, you’re the prick I meet. Hey, tell me, what are you doing right now?’
I gestured at my Guinness. ‘I’m day drinking.’
‘How about we have a conversation that will change your life forever?’
He put a hand on my shoulder, gripping it so hard. It kind of hurt.
