In the benighted year of our Lord 1948, the great Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann, entangled in the labyrinthine depths of his own mind, proposed a most unhallowed vision: that of an autonomous automaton, a mechanical horror capable of replicating itself from the very raw materials it devoured. It would take nearly a century for this abomination to take form, but it would do so not in cold metal, but in the pulsating, living tissue of an organism the likes of which mankind h...
