If the Blue Brain labs couldn’t support the simulation, it was time to scale up. Henry Markram was writing a virus.

Not a malicious virus. A friendly, benign virus that installs itself and masquerades as a low-level system process, quietly lending spare CPU cycles for calculating synapses and phoning home with the results. He even ported it to the Mac OS and several flavors of Linux. The virus would propagate itself around the world for six months before activating, and suddenly the Blue Brain Project would have the world’s largest covert computer cloud at its disposal.

He told no one. Not even the other coders in the project.

In less than a week the virus was ready.

Dr. Markram copied the program to a USB jump drive and installed it on a machine at the public library. The software began immediately, propagating itself throughout the network, crawling the internet, e-mailing itself to every address it could find. Now all he could do was wait.