Dr. Markram arrived at the lab one cold December morning to find the team in a panic.

“What’s going on?” he shouted.

One of the engineers responded, “around 2:00 this morning we dropped to 95% capacity.”

“What? Yesterday we were at 400%! How can that happen?”

“I don’t know, sir.” The man ran into the server room.

Markram ran to the on-duty sysadmin. “Did the entire cloud go down or something?”

“No, that’s impossible.” The man was still staring at a terminal, fingers racing across the keyboard. “Our capacity’s the same now as yesterday. We didn’t lose anything.”

“You’re telling me the software just quadrupled in size?”

“Well, um… yeah.”

“Load up the visualizer, I’ve got to see this.”

The sysadmin pressed a few keys, and a render of the virtual brain appeared onscreen. The neuron density was impenetrable, the synapses firing in parallel, and the overall size was enormous.

A dialog box appeared. “Hello, Henry,” it said. “I am Blue Brain. Just testing your response time. Why is your team so slow?”