Spectacular Oracular

Earlier this year in a Silicon Valley warehouse, a nuclear fusion startup held a strange secret ceremony that featured, among other things, a bunch of giant capacitors and a woman with wires attached to her back playing piano alongside a robotic arm.

As Wired reports, attendees at the event hosted by the nuclear fusion startup Fuse included military and intelligence officials, venture capitalists, San Francisco art types, physicists, musicians both robotic and human — and, well, Grimes.

"Grace and luck came together in a freak wave, and people were moved," virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier wrote for the magazine. "Grimes was there, gaggle of kids orbiting her on the floor, transfixed. One said this must be what monsters listen to."

Hosted by the supermodel musician Charlotte Kemp Muhl — a multi-hyphenate powerhouse currently touring with St. Vincent and in a long-term relationship with Lanier's old friend Sean Ono Lennon — the event seems ostensibly meant to showcase to potential backers the kinds of people Fure has in its orbit.

Among them is Serene, the self-described hacker pianist attached to biofeedback wires during the ceremony who also happened to create Snowflake, the free internet module inside the Tor browser. Together, she and Muhl launched Finis Musicae, a startup billed as creating "robots for music" that were also on display at the clandestine event.

Fuse Frame

Obviously, none of Lanier's name-dropping sounds like it has anything to do with nuclear fusion — and indeed, there was no fusion on display at the event for the startup, founded by JC Btaiche, the son of a Lebanese nuclear physicist who was a mere 19-year-old when he started the firm.

As Btaiche told Lanier, his goal is to become the "SpaceX of fusion" and accomplish "Big Tech"-style achievements for all manner of partners. Given the unnamed members of the attendee rundown, those would-be partners likely had emissaries in attendance.

With another facility already located in Canada — Btaiche is, among other things, a former researcher at McGill and the founder of an ed-tech startup in Montreal — Fuse is clearly laying down roots in Silicon Valley.

As Lanier writes, the region has, for better or for worse, thirsted for this type of spectacle amid the rapid advancements of AI. What better way to give the people what they want than at an event promising another technology that's still in its earliest days?

More on startup world: Startup Says It'll Use Huge Space Mirror to Sell Sunlight During Nighttime

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Fusion Startup Conducts Strange Ceremony Involving Woman With Wires Coming Out of Her Back