Henry Markram was a genius in the same way that Victor Frankenstein was a genius.

As director of the Blue Brain Project, he wanted nothing more than to create life, real intelligent artificial life, in a computer. Some might say it was an unhealthy obsession, but he would balk and say no, no, it’s just a passionate ambition. He was perfectly sane. His job was modern wizardry, he himself a near-God in his own right, and he relished every moment in the lab.

And so Dr. Markram was visibly upset when his project hit a roadblock.

The Blue Brain demanded scads of raw computational power, hundreds of rooms of the latest supercomputers, impossibly large RAID arrays for storing data, and a budget as high as the stars. Maybe in ten years it would be feasible, his financiers at IBM told him, but the project would have to idle until the technology was ready.

Ha! Ten years? He’d show them. Markram had a plan. The technology was available now and he would secure it by any means necessary. The Blue Brain must prevail.