Eventually this guy from the original team gets Death to let him bring Deep Blue to a chess match. He wins. People rage about the technocracy and preferential treatment, etcetera, but it turns out you can beat him with a MacBook running Rybka.

In fact, most of the the time all you need is one of those hand-cranked laptops, and soon deathless child armies rule the third world. They march the old warlords off to candy factories; the diamond business collapses. It’s a strange kind of paradise.

Death buys his own laptop but he can’t get the touchpad to work.