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are arguing intensely in German: The translation stream in his glasses tells him they’re arguing over whether the Turing Test is a Jim Crow law that violates European corpus juris standards on human rights. The beer arrives, and Bob slides the wrong one across to Manfred. “Here, try this. You’ll like it.”
    â€œOkay.” It’s some kind of smoked doppelbock, chock-full of yummy superoxides: Just inhaling over it makes Manfred feel like there’s a fire alarm in his nose, screaming, Danger, Will Robinson! Cancer! Cancer! “Yeah, right. Did I say I nearly got mugged on my way here?”
    â€œMugged? Hey, that’s heavy. I thought the police hereabouts had stopped—did they sell you anything?”
    â€œNo, but they weren’t your usual marketing type. You know anyone who can use a Warpac surplus espionage bot? Recent model, one careful owner, slightly paranoid but basically sound—I mean, claims to be a general-purpose AI?”
    â€œNo. Oh boy! The NSA wouldn’t like that.”
    â€œWhat I thought. Poor thing’s probably unemployable, anyway.”
    â€œThe space biz.”
    â€œAh, yeah. The space biz. Depressing, isn’t it? Hasn’t been the same since Rotary Rocket went bust for the second time. And NASA, mustn’t forget NASA.”
    â€œTo NASA.” Annette grins broadly for her own reasons, raises a glass in toast. Ivan the extreme concrete geek has an arm round hershoulders, and she leans against him; he raises his glass, too. “Lots more launchpads to rubberize!”
    â€œTo NASA,” Bob echoes. They drink. “Hey, Manfred. To NASA?”
    â€œNASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!” Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table. “Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn’t even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-term, it’s the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now—dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isn’t thinking, it isn’t working. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!”
    Annette is watching him with interest, but Bob looks wary. “Sounds kind of long-term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?”
    â€œVery long-term—at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget governments for this market, Bob; if they can’t tax it, they won’t understand it. But see, there’s an angle on the self-replicating robotics market coming up that’s going to set the cheap launch market doubling every fifteen months for the foreseeable future, starting in, oh, about two years. It’s your leg up, and my keystone for the Dyson sphere project. It works like this—”

    It’s night in Amsterdam, morning in Silicon Valley. Today, fifty thousand human babies are being born around the world. Meanwhile automated factories in Indonesia and Mexico have produced another quarter of a million motherboards with processors rated at more than ten petaflops—about an order of magnitude below the lower bound on the computational capacity of a human brain. Another fourteen months and the larger part of the cumulative conscious processing power of the human species will be arriving in silicon. And the first meat the new AIs get to know will be the uploaded lobsters.
    Manfred stumbles back to his hotel, bone-weary and jet-lagged; his