Stormbringer Read Free Page A

food, no matter who you are. That’s the whole point of it.”
    Sigmund nods, and I feel him turning this new information over in his head. Processing. Then he grins, and says, “Except for oysters.”
    I grin, too, all sharp teeth and scarred lips. “Right,” I say. “Except for oysters.”
    Course number two is a roulade of smoked ocean trout, paired with chardonnay. Unsurprisingly, we’re talking about computers when it arrives. Specifically, my computers.
    “It was the seventies,” I say. “Back then, all the hippie peace-and-love bullshit was dying faster than an alcoholic in the desert, and LB did coal. Only coal. We dug it up, we processed it, we sold it, we made a mint.”
    “Sounds lucrative.” Sigmund sips his chardonnay with the trepidation of someone unused to wine.
    “It was,” I say. “Still would be. But that’s the thing about coal, y’know. It’s a finite resource. It wasn’t going to be around forever. Not like yours truly.” Sig gives half a laugh around his drink. “We had computers back in those days, right. But they were—” I gesture.
    “Enormous,” Sigmund translates. “So I’ve heard. Like. Rooms, or whatever.”
    “Right. Very uninspiring things. They did payroll. Stuff like that. We had them, but…eh. We had them because we had them, that was all. But in the seventies, you started to get all these stories. Out of the States, mostly. People soldering together these things in their garages, these bastard hybrids of calculators and typewriters and the punchcard reel-churners we had.
    “It was the microchip,” I continue. “Before that, back in the fifties, it was all vacuum tubes and whatever. Big shit. But you get the microchip, and—Well, it’s called the fucking
micro
chip for a reason, isn’t it? ’71, that was the first microprocessor, care of Intel. But those guys, they didn’t get it. They still thought they were making this shit for niche markets. Universities, whatever. Except the kids in those places, they were looking at this stuff, and they were thinking, Well
…how do I get one?
”
    “They made their own,” Sigmund says.
    “Right. They made their fucking own. We had these guys, in head office. They used to hang around until fuck o’clock, get in at the same. One night, I wandered down to see what the shit they were up to. They had this…this fucking thing. All circuits and wood, spread out over a desk. They’d mail-ordered it from the fucking States, were putting it together.”
    “One of the first personal computers,” Sigmund says. Then, dropping his eyes and pushing his glasses up his nose, “We, uh. We got taught this story at uni.”
    “Right,” I say. “Well, it’s true”—more or less—“and I was all, ‘What the fuck is this shit?’ So they showed me.”
    Sigmund nods. “That must’ve been pretty cool.”
    I have to laugh. “Sig, the thing was a fucking glorified calculator. It was nothing. Homemade wooden case…a piece of junk. But it reeked of Wyrd. That shit doesn’t happen often, but it happens. Like the echo of a scream: ‘Pay attention, this is gonna be on the fucking exam.’ And that wooden pile of shit? That’s what it felt like. It wasn’t anything. But it was going to be.”
    “And you wanted in?”
    I shake my head. “No. I didn’t want ‘in.’ I wanted
it.
All of it. That night, I was on a fucking flight out to America. I tracked down those fucking hippies who’d sold the kit, wanted to buy everything out from under them, their fucking souls included. And those fucks, man. They looked at me, and you know what they said?”
    Sigmund grins. He knows what they said. “They said they had something better.”
    I nod. “A motherfucking monitor. Green and fucking black, cathode-ray piece of shit. But it fit on a desk, and that was it. That was history. I said I’d give them everything. Within a month, we’d rebranded, had the first Pyre fucking computer going for manufacture. By the end of that year, I