Although he’s famous now for becoming the world’s first trillionaire, Sunil Ramachandran’s beginnings were very humble. Born in 2128 to a mid-level government clerk father and a florist mother, Sunil’s father left the family when Sunil was only five years old. He would not see his father again until he was 9, and their relationship would be distant and strained until his father presumably died in the Collapse. 

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In primary school, Sunil was a brilliant but shy student, clearly insecure over being raised by a single mother and the limited financial resources that their small family had. Despite his shyness, teachers would remember him as somebody that the other children would listen to the rare times he decided to speak up.

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When Sunil was 10, his mother married Pramod Mishra, a professor in Computer Science at the University of Delhi. Although Pramod was a relatively reserved man who by all accounts never connected very well with Sunil, he did teach him about computers, and it wasn’t long before Sunil was programming his own simple apps and netting a small, if reliable revenue stream.

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When he was 16, Sunil grew almost five inches in the few months before he started pre-university education, transforming from a chubby, childlike boy into a thin, handsome young man. With this new height also came a new-found confidence. Determined not to make the same mistakes as his father and grandfather, both handsome men with ample charisma but limited ambition, Sunil dedicated himself to his studies, eventually earning admission to MIT, which he paid for using the proceeds of his various apps. At MIT, Sunil intended to major in computer science but quickly realized that he preferred business, leading him to switch majors his sophomore year. Following his time at MIT, he pursued his MBA at Harvard Business School. 

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After completing his MBA, Sunil moved to New York City to work as a financial analyst on Wall Street. In New York, he met a Literature PhD student named Laurie Ridgeway at a bar on MacDougal Street in the East Village. The two were married after a whirlwind romance of only three months. It was perhaps the first and last impulsive thing that Sunil ever did. 

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After a few years working on Wall Street, Sunil was restless. He was sick of helping other people make money – he wanted to create something, and he found himself missing India. Just before his 30th birthday, he and Laurie moved to Delhi so he could start his own technology company, the Ramachandran Group. Initially, they focused on creating new programs to help companies analyze super large consumer datasets, which eventually led to the development of a native advertising platform that, using algorithms they’d developed in house, quickly became the most profitable one on the internet. 

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Sunil was a man of bottomless ambition, and as his company raked in money, he used it to expand his empire, branching out into cloud computing, online retail, affordable smartphones, and medical technology, a pursuit that introduced him to Dr. Marcus Taylor. By Sunil’s 41st birthday, the Ramachandran Group was a major player in so many different areas of technology that some described it as a squid with its tentacles wrapped around the earth (or choking the earth, as more critical commentators noted). 

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Far from a benevolent businessman,  Sunil was absolutely cutthroat in his dealings. Competitors he couldn’t buy out, he hostilely took over. When politicians across the world tried to reign in his business activities, he used his limitless wealth to unseat them – even being accused of manufacturing scandals in rare cases, although there is no solid evidence proving this. These dealings did not go unnoticed by Lauire, who finally had enough of her husband’s behavior and divorced him just before his 43rd birthday. In the divorce, she would take their house, as well as enough money to become one of the wealthiest women on earth. Sunil would never actually own a home again, instead embracing a nomadic lifestyle of hopping between luxury hotels around the world as he maintained his vast business empire.

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When he was 52, Sunil became the first verified trillionaire in human history. It was not the happy milestone he had expected. He’d spent his entire life scaling the matterhorn of success, and when he finally achieved the pinnacle, he did it alone. No wife, no children, no real home or close friends to call his own. The hollowness he felt upon this historic achievement sent him into an intense spiral of melancholy. In the two years before the Collapse, he made no public appearances and the day-to-day operations of the business that he’d had such an iron grip on were outsourced to other advisors as Sunil hid from public view.

When the Collapse occurred, he was on a spiritual retreat in Bodh Gaya. Although he could have had his helicopters take him anywhere, he spent the next three weeks helping other pilgrims in the area before convening the Ark, which in stark contrast to his lifetime of greed is undeniably one of the most altruistic acts in human history. One wonders if this abrupt turn was the result of facing his own mortality or if there are other motives at play, but even in the apocalypse, one constant that was often uttered in the old world remains true – it’s Sunil Ramachandran’s world, and we’re just all living in it.