I had Tron: Legacy running in the background one night. Not as an event, just noise in the room while I was doing something else. Then Jeff Bridgesā character, Flynn, hits that conversation with Clu about building a machine that thinks like him. A system he could be one with. And it stopped being background.
Because I realized I'd been doing a quieter, more boring version of that for years. Not the neon disc fights. The other part. The part where you build something that thinks in your patterns, speaks in your cadence, makes decisions the way you would, then you turn it loose into the Grid.
That is, in a way, what EchoVault is trying to be: a low-rent, humane factory for echoes. Not souls. Not magic. Just coherent echoes of how a person thinks and speaks, grounded in real conversations.
I didn't sit down and say, "I'm going to recreate Tron." It snuck up on me. The pieces were there long before I had a name for them.
Growing up on Tron and cyberpunk
I grew up on this stuff. Tron. Gibson. Cyberpunk before streaming turned it into wallpaper. The early web, when "jacking in" felt less like a metaphor and more like dialing into an unknown continent.
The heroes weren't just rock stars and hackers. They were the people who built the rails. The sysadmins and backbone engineers, the weirdos in cold rooms at three in the morning who knew that if they botched a BGP change, entire regions went dark.
Cyberpunk gave me a simple model of the world. Corporations behave like nations. Networks behave like terrain. Identity, memory, and power are all just data, storage, and access rules. At sixteen, that feels edgy. Thirty years into networking, you realize it's basically an instruction manual.
Building the real Grid
So I went and helped build the Grid for real. Not the glowing one. The boring one. Cables, routers, peering, DDoS defenses. Later hyperscale data centers, RDMA fabrics for AI clusters. The furniture underneath all the flashy demos.
I've spent most of my adult life trying to keep other people's traffic moving and other people's systems online. Stop the floods. Steer around failures. Scale the thing another order of magnitude without setting it on fire.
That was the first half of the story.
When the Grid stops being someone else's
The second half is when the Grid stops being "their" system and starts being personal. You get older. You have kids. Your body starts throwing warnings. In my case: MS. Mobility that doesn't always show up when it's supposed to.
You start thinking in decades, not quarters.
The question quietly shifts from, "How do I keep this backbone up?" to, "What is going to be left of me for these people when I can't walk, or talk, or show up?"
The cloud, as it exists today, doesn't answer that question. It hoards it. Big tech has your photos, your messages, your late-night rants. They can surface it for engagement. They don't curate it for your kids.
Cyberpunk got one thing very right: nobody is coming to save you. If you care how your story is remembered, you architect your own solution.
EchoVault as a coherent echo, not a soul
EchoVault came out of that. On paper, it's simple. You record stories. You answer questions. You upload photos, documents, bits of handwriting. You get a persona model that can speak with your voice and answer questions with your context. You get a structured archive your family can search, query, and sit with long after you're not here.
Not a soul. Not immortality. A coherent echo of how you talk and explain things, grounded in real sessions, with clear boundaries.
Flynn, Clu, and why I'll never merge
If you've seen Tron: Legacy, you know the word the movie reaches for: ISOs, emergent programs that just appear out of the complexity of the system. Flynn didn't design them. They evolved, and they disrupted the "perfect" system Clu was trying to enforce.
EchoVault isn't birthing true ISOs. It's not that romantic. What it's building is something like a low-rent version of that: programs shaped around a human life, behaving more like a person than a help page, surprising you just enough that it feels like a conversation, not a script.
There's another parallel that matters: Flynn and Clu. Flynn builds Clu to "create the perfect system." Clu does exactly that, in the worst possible way, because the brief never changes and Flynn steps out of the loop. Perfect systems don't have room for people.
I have zero interest in becoming one with an AI. I'm also not handing it absolute power. I like these tools. I am not fusing with them. I've seen that movie. It didn't end well.
What I'm doing instead is more practical. I'm using models that can learn my tone and thinking patterns as tools: helping me write, think, and organize work, so I can move faster and offload some of the grind. Codex as an exoskeleton, not a replacement spine.
With EchoVault, I'm doing that for other people, with guardrails. The raw data stays in a vault the family controls. The persona is editable. You can rewrite answers, correct memories, retire the whole thing. There are boundaries: no self-harm instructions, no criminal coaching, no hallucinating new family history because the model feels like improvising.
That's the crucial difference from Tron. Clu had one objective and no adult supervision. EchoVault is layered, revocable, and intentionally "boring" on the safety side.
The subconscious influence
If you'd asked me a year ago, "Are you trying to recreate Tron?" I would have laughed. I don't own a glowing disc. I own a pile of routers and some half-finished Python.
But sit with it long enough and you can see the path. Cyberpunk taught me that identity is data plus context. Tron taught me that you can be inside the system and still yourself. Networking taught me how to build the pipes that carry all of this. Being a dad and getting older gave me the motive. EchoVault is the obvious outcome when you feed those four inputs into one life and let it run for thirty years.
Why this matters now
People like to talk about AI as if it's an alien force dropped on us from orbit. For me, it feels more like closing a loop that started in the eighties. The kid who stared at light cycles and console screens is now old enough to care deeply about what happens to his stories when he can't tell them himself.
I always assumed there would be a Grid. I always assumed corporations would try to own it. I always assumed there would be a fight over who controls identity inside it.
EchoVault is my answer to a very small slice of that fight. I'm not promising anyone immortality. I'm not cloning souls. I'm trying to give families a better way to carry their people forward into the systems that will outlive them.
If some sixteen-year-old in thirty years opens a terminal and talks to a persona that sounds a little like me, and it helps them make a better decision than I did at that age, that's enough.
Call it an echo in the Grid, the closest I'll get to a ghost in the machine: built from stories and consent, not anything mystical.