Most of what we get up to in the Laundry is symbolic computation intended to evoke decidedly nonsymbolic consequences. But that’s not all there is to… - Charles Stross

Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human.
It’s night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore’s Law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2 x 10²⁷ kilograms. Around the world, laboring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 10²³ MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 10²³ MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system’s installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold—one million instructions per second per gram of matter. After that, singularity—a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is down to single-digit years ...

There’s always some idiot who thinks that after the revolution they’ll be the one sitting on top of the hill of corpses, dining on caviar served out of a bowl made from a chromed baby’s skull.

I wasn’t exaggerating the national suspicion toward strangers. It’s a survival trait on New Dresden; they’ve been breeding for paranoia for centuries.