The Road of Silicon

“I asked Perplexity to write a short story about an AI startup founder’s commercialization struggle — but in the style of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. What came back was haunting, beautiful, and unsettlingly accurate.”

There were founders in those days and they wandered like pilgrims through a country that offered them no quarter. They came forth with their algorithms and their neural networks like men bearing strange artifacts into a world unprepared to receive them. The desert of their making lay before them, vast and without mercy, and what lay in it was not known to them.

He sat in a room where the walls were white and clean and he looked at his screen and the code there seemed to him like writing that meant something but he could not say what. He’d raised money from men who spoke in riddles, who said they believed in his vision yet spoke only of burn rates and cohorts and retention curves. The money sat in an account like a thing alive and watching and it decreased month by month like grain falling through an hourglass.

The commercialization was a different thing altogether. The product was real enough. It worked. He’d tested it and his engineers had tested it and it performed miracles of computation that would have seemed like sorcery to men of earlier times. But selling it was a matter he’d not reckoned on. The customers—if customers they could be called—wanted something he could not give them. They wanted certainty in an age of uncertainty. They wanted guarantees that the future itself would not permit.

He attended conferences where men in dark suits spoke of go-to-market strategies as if such a thing could be drawn on a map like the territory through which the smugglers had moved in times previous. They spoke of product-market fit as though it were a destination one might locate if one had the right instruments. But it was not like that. It was like searching for something in a great darkness and never knowing if the thing you sought was even there or if you were searching in the wrong darkness altogether.

The investors called him. They wanted to know about his pipeline. They wanted metrics. They wanted to see adoption curves that climbed into the heavens like arrows shot by archers of some impossible nation. He showed them numbers that were mostly hope. They nodded and their eyes were distant and they spoke of Series B and downstream capital and other things that seemed to him like prophecies uttered by soothsayers in whom he had no faith.

The competitors came like locusts. They too had raised money. They too had built products not unlike his own. They hired salespeople from the established world, men who knew the old ways of commerce, and these men moved through the market with a terrible efficiency. They built relationships. They understood the language of procurement officers and chief technology officers. They had reference customers and case studies and they had time, which was perhaps the most terrible advantage of all.

His own team was scattered and afraid. The engineers wanted to build new things but he needed them to support what they had built. The salespeople he’d hired came from the world of enterprise software and they could not speak the language of AI except in platitudes. They burned out like candles left in a wind. The lawyers sent letters demanding things he could not provide—compliance certifications, security clearances, warranties that his code would not harm anyone though code is merely information and information itself is neither good nor evil but only what men make of it.

He thought often of the problem at the heart of it all. The problem was not really about building. Building was the easy part. The problem was that the thing he had built was too new. The market did not yet understand it. The use cases that would become obvious in hindsight were still hidden in a future that he could not reach. He needed customers to validate the product but he could not sell without proof that customers wanted it. It was a spiral that descended into darkness.

And then, late in the evening when the city lights blurred outside his window, he began to understand something. All those months his team had poured resources into the code itself, into making it faster and more elegant and more capable. But he’d begun to notice that the competitors who moved most decisively were not the ones with superior algorithms. They were the ones who had chosen their battleground carefully. They’d aligned themselves with specific industries, specific problems, specific kinds of people who believed in the same vision they did. These customers were not merely buying a product. They were joining something like a covenant. Once you belonged to that world, once you’d adopted its beliefs and its frameworks, the switching costs were not measured in engineering effort but in something deeper. In faith. In the blood oath of shared conviction that this new thing was the way forward.

He realized, perhaps too late, that this was a defensibility that no line of code could replicate. A market approach, a deep alignment with a sector’s needs and fears and aspirations—this created something that lasted. His team had been building the wrong fortress. They’d been defending the technology when they should have been building a world around it. A world where a certain kind of customer felt they belonged.

He looked at his burn rate and he calculated the months remaining and he knew that time was a weapon pointed at him. The valley was littered with the bones of men who’d had good products and good funding and good intentions. What separated them from those who succeeded seemed to him like accident. Like the arbitrary judgment of gods who cared nothing for the quality of the work but only for its timing and the fortune of its presentation.

There were nights when he sat in that clean white room and he thought of the old days, the simpler days, when a man built something useful and people wanted it and they paid for it. But that country was gone. This new territory in which he found himself required things he did not possess—not brilliant engineering or genuine vision, though he had these things. It required an understanding of how power moved through organizations, how fear operated in the chambers of corporate decision-making, how slowly institutions turned even when they knew they must turn. It required knowing which customers would follow you not because your product was best but because you understood their world in a way no one else did.

The road ahead was unclear and he would have to walk it whether it led anywhere or not. This was what it meant to be a founder in this new age. To build something real and true and to discover that reality and truth were but small parts of what the world required. He returned to his screen and his code and he typed on into the gathering dark, thinking now of sectors and segments and the invisible bonds that held believers together, wondering if there was still time to build that world.