They touch, exchanging vCards and instant-messaging handles. After a moment's hesitation, Manfred extends a fingertip of his own. Understand? Say yes, Manfred if you leave your mouth open like that, a bird will nest on your tongue.” 'But I don't need you anymore, and if you do this one thing for me, you're going to be free. That goes for all of you.' Aineko looks around at them in mild contempt. Get it? One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience, it just depends on which one's god module is overactive at the time. Your memories of experiences are accurate, but your emotional responses to those experiences were manipulated. That doesn't mean you remember it because it actually happened, just that you remember it because you experienced it internally. Listen, girl, everything you remember is true. 'You're as stupid as it's possible for an intelligent species to be - there being no evolutionary pressure to be any smarter - but you still don't internalize that and act accordingly around your superiors. “Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness,' Aineko says with a theatrical sigh. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!” Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. 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. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. The solar system is a dead loss right now – dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. 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.

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