Glen Runciter

Glen Runciter founded Runciter Associates in 1962, in two rooms on East Forty-Sixth Street, with one inertial, a borrowed desk and a client whose competitor kept arriving at his decisions shortly before he did. He has been its chairman ever since, and he owns it.

Before founding the firm he was a claims investigator for an insurance company in Hartford, where he found that the company’s own telepath, retained to interview claimants, fell ill whenever a particular clerk from the filing room was in the building. He hired the clerk, Miss Irene Szabo. She was the firm’s first inertial and stayed with it for thirty-one years, and between them they worked out how to measure a person’s field, which is still how the firm decides whom to employ.

In 1966 he commissioned the firm’s mark and its standards manual, and has refused every proposal to change either. In 1969 he married Ella Hartwell, who joined the firm the same year and built its placement practice.

Mrs. Runciter became a partner in 1974. Since 2008 she has been in half-life at the Beloved Brethren Moratorium in Zürich. Mr. Runciter opened the firm’s Zürich office that autumn, has attended a consultation with her every month since, which is as often as the moratorium’s licence allows, and puts every major decision of the firm to her. The firm’s articles provide for this.

He has been a director of Frothly, the San Francisco research institute, since 2009, and its treasurer since 2015. He declared his interest in the firm to the board in 2009, and the declaration remains in force.

Frothly’s staff mail runs on the firm’s Intranet Suite 2.0, which the firm installed in 2026 at a considerable discount.

In 2017 Beloved Brethren Press published his book Half-Life: The Persistence and Decline of Minds in Storage, written over nine years of monthly visits to Zürich. It is cited in Frothly’s policy brief on digital estates and in its report on the moral status of machines.

Mr. Runciter is not an inertial. By his own account he is entirely legible to any telepath who cares to look, and he has arranged his affairs so that there is nothing to see. He has no plans to retire. Mrs. Runciter has advised against it.