In the Courts of the Sun by Brian D’Amato

the windowless cinder-block walls. Four genderless perpetual graduate students huddled at workstations in the corners of the room, tapping and mumbling to themselves in HLASM.

“We replaced most of the silicon chips with doped germanium,” Taro was saying. “But the thermal dissipation is still nearly three hundred watts. So for now we are refrigerating him like an antique Cray. The coolant is the same type of plasma they use for synthetic blood transfusions.”

He led me over to the tank like I was a tourist at the Big Chunk of Rock National Monument. I squinted into it. Up close you could see that the black thing wasn’t solid, but rather a tall stack of paper-thin black circuit boards, each about three feet square and a quarter-inch apart. Whorls of heat distortion spewed out of different layers through the clear liquid like diffraction waves over a summer highway.

“Huh. Nifty,” I said. Demonio, this really was a cold room. About sixty f-ing degrees. I’m going to need a damn baby blanket, I thought. Or like, two shots of Tres Años. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

“Of course this is just the CPU,” he said. “The drives are in another building. And the storage is . . . well, I do not know where all the storage is. Much of it is in Korea.”

“How fast is it?” I asked.

“Right now he is close to six petaflops.”

“Wow.” Sounds expensive, I thought.

“At the moment LEON is running two hundred and fifty-six simulated worlds about ten minutes ahead of the real one. And for each of those he is playing through more than five million branches of the Sacrifice Game tree simultaneously. Each one is a three-stone game.”

“How many simulated trades do you run?” I asked.

“Around twenty thousand a day,” he said. “I don’t know about the actual trades.”

“Huh,” I said. That’s one of the great things about Taro, I thought. Most other people would have gotten all cagey and said something like “Where’d you hear we were running any trades?” But he just didn’t have it in him.

“Would you like to play a game against him?” Taro asked.

I said I’d love to.

“Have you played with three stones?”

I said I had. As I think I said, this means that you use three runners, that is, the stone that represents what actually happens and that runs away from the hunting stones, which represent different potentials. The thing is, it wasn’t three times harder than playing with one stone. It was 3 3 times, that is, twenty-seven times harder. It’s sort of like how a mate-in-three chess problem is many, many times harder than a mate-in-two. So anyway, usually I used two stones. But I’d been working on playing with three. I figured I could handle it, against a machine, anyway. Really, computers still can’t play the Game for shit.

Taro got a wobbly shop stool and I sat down in front of an old NEC 3-D monitor. He hoisted himself onto the Formica work surface and started tapping on a touchpad.

“You know how the average human brain runs about two billion operations per second?” he said, over the tappitty-tap-tap-taps.

“Well, it takes a lot of work to be average,” I said.

“And then after that we should budget in another six or eight billion of our own operations just to compile out the parallelism.” I nodded, as though I could easily have worked that out myself. “Then we must double that for record keeping and fail-safe. And then we have got about twenty billion ops per second. So as long as it goes through at normal speed and we do not have to store anything in LEON himself, that should be just enough.”

“Great,” I said. Enough for what? I wondered. To create a new master race of all-knowing nonorganic superbeings? Well, at least then I’ll have someone to talk to. Yep, in the final showdown between man and machine, I know which side I’ll be on—

“But I do not think it will ever surpass a human player,” he said. “Even if LEON becomes as large, computationally, as a