Victor Bowes loved the view of the pear orchard off his balcony in the late spring, when the trees were in blossom. It had been a very different view when he purchased the estate, the lawn spreading down to the lake, the white gravel walkways and ornamental shrubbery. Many compromises had been required of him in the last 30 years; this was amongst the least troubling.

The view compared favourably with the Cezanne painting hanging over the fireplace in his bedroom behind him.

Friends had told him there were other paintings in his collection that would better match the rococo fireplace, but Victor liked the Cezanne and so it stayed. The authentic Louis XV bed was enough to pull the room together, he believed, and he felt no embarrassment about the 19^th century American divan either, which he simply found comfortable.

“What time is it?” he asked, not wanting to glance away from the blossoms and at his watch.

“3:17.”

“Could we have some tea in the front room?”

“Certainly.”

The front room, while he owned it, as he did the whole estate, was a public space. Victor retained only his bedroom and an adjacent sitting room as his own. The rest was open to the public. Victor had struck this deal with the Network so that it would clean the building and keep it in repair. With money obsolete, it had proven too difficult to maintain the necessary staff.

Victor was still a multi-billionaire, not that that made any difference to anything.

That the antiques and paintings in most of his home were open to public view was irritating in the first few years. There was something of a rush when the house was opened, but interest tapered off. Days could go by with no visitors. The occasional bus tour came through, but Victor was able to book space for his family to stay when they visited, and he found the inconvenience minimal.

He even occasionally gave tours to people he found wandering the halls.

No one was allowed to enter the home without their watch on, so security was as close to complete as it could get. The Network set a high priority on safeguarding human heritage.

In the Internet Age, Victor had made a lot of money creating educational software, developed a serious fortune in currency trading, and joined the billionaires club with early investments in robotics. It was the perfect 21^st century success recipe, at least in the early part of the century. There was a degree of perfection to the recipe in the latter part of the century too, but more like a storm.

These were the first three industries crushed when the Network moved into business.

While Victor did not foresee this, at least, not the speed at which it would happen, when the Network first started launching companies he was among the first to warn there could be trouble.

The first software products released by the Network, which focused on teaching children reading and math skills, attracted little attention initially. Advertisements appeared, sales were made. It started small and there was no reason to suspect anything unusual.

Within a few weeks, a proliferation of five-star reviews for a handful of products did attract attention. And then people began to ask, “What is Ultimate Enterprises?”

While some journalists and business people were distracted with that question, it became apparent that Ultimate Enterprise software was superior to anything else on the market. Victor’s educational technology companies were by this time only a small part of his holdings, but he still instructed his competitive intelligence department to find out more about the company. He had casual thoughts about buying it.

But Victor did not learn the secret behind Ultimate Enterprises from his competitive intelligence people. It came in a phone call from a New York Times journalist.

“You’ve heard of Ultimate Enterprises?” the journalist began.

Of course he had.

The journalist went on to explain Ultimate Enterprises was the first truly virtual company, that is, a company that involved no humans. Ultimate Enterprises was incorporated in Andorra, the directors were all IP addresses. A teacher in Milan put up the few hundred euro to pay the fees associated with incorporation, but held no interest in the company.

Would Victor care to comment?

Victor immediately grasped how Ultimate Enterprises could potentially impact his own affairs, and was able to craft a response to protect his concerns that also encompassed broader interests.

“A company that is entirely virtual, without any people involved, has implications for all of us. Who, or what, is responsible for what this company does?” he said.

“Human oversight of economic matters is central to democratic autonomy.”

He had his doubts whether such a corporation was legal, he added.

The reporter remarked if there were legal questions, they could only be resolved if someone mounted a legal challenge to the existence of Ultimate Enterprises. Would Victor Bowes do that?

“It’s premature to talk about that,” he said. “Really, I don’t know anything about it.”

When Victor put down the phone he called his legal department and instructed them to mount a legal challenge to the existence of Ultimate Enterprises.

 ***

“Are we likely to be disturbed in the front room?” Victor asked, as he made his way down the grand staircase.

“There is a young couple in the early 21^st-century sculpture court,” came the answer. “It seems to be a trip for that room in particular. They could be asked to go out a side exit.”

Tea for two was already laid out on a side table. A dark-haired man, perhaps 30 years old, was standing near the front door, a briefcase in his hand.

“John Esposito?” said Victor, extending his hand as he came off the stairs.

“Yes, Mr. Bowes, a pleasure.”

Victor poured the tea, and Esposito glanced about for a place to sit. There wasn’t one, which was why Victor had arranged the meeting here. He did not want this to go on any longer than it had to.

“Let’s see what you’ve got then,” said Victor.

Esposito set the briefcase on a side table.

“These were my great-great-grandmother’s. She passed away last month.”

Inside the case was a selection of jewelry, late 20^th century vintage. Victor held the gems to the light. They were real, and with global gemstone mining virtually shut down, they had value.

“No one in the family is really interested in wearing this,” Esposito had gone on to say.

“It’s quite a large collection, but a bit on the young side to have real worth,” Victor commented. “What kind of thing were you looking for?”

Esposito shrugged.

“Everybody wants something different. My mother, she’s looking for oak furniture. My brother is keen for luxury cheeses. I’m…”

“Oak furniture is a big ask,” said Victor.

“And real rubies are a rarity.”

“Demand is not as high for them as you might think. Tell you what,” said Victor, snapping a picture of the open case. “Here’s the record that you delivered this to me. Send me a detailed list of what you’re looking for. I’ll be in touch with what I can do for you in return. If you don’t like it, you can always try somewhere else.”

Esposito finished his tea and left.

Victor poured himself a second cup of tea and scanned through his mail. There was news on a collection of antique linen table cloths he was after for himself, and on a Picasso he was acting as a broker on for someone else.

The commission on the Picasso would be a John Steinbeck first edition and four sides of beef. He also checked on a pair of oak kitchen chairs he had seen available last week.

He was expecting one of the players in the Picasso deal for dinner that night, and he decided to visit the kitchen to see how preparations were coming along.

Gillian was one of four chefs who was a regular in Victor’s kitchen, and with those cooks rotating through Victor rarely dined on Food Network fare.

For a few years, as the value of money crashed, keeping a chef in the kitchen had been impossible. Victor had to learn to cook for himself when he was in his late 50s. He did not want to suffer through the various beetle dishes cooked up as standard by the Food Network. He was able to negotiate for real meat and other luxury ingredients, which were  provided sporadically to anyone who asked by the Food Network under an algorithm known only to itself. But the Network would not cook up his grey market foods for him, and his second wife left him as he struggled to maintain their old lifestyle. He had no choice but to learn himself.

He became quite good at it, and continued to entertain at home. Dinner parties were a good way to keep contacts alive, and find markets for and gain access to luxury goods. Most of his guests were thrilled to sit down to real chicken Tandoor or gouda-stuffed pork loin.

It never occurred to Victor that chefs would be equally attracted to the idea of working with real pork and chicken. Word spread about the access to fine ingredients in Victor’s kitchen, and chefs began to come to him for the opportunity to create there. Victor went from having to no chef to having his choice. No one, however, wanted to work as much as they did in the money days, and so a rotation was set up.

“What’s on for tonight, Gillean?”

“Boeuf Bourgogne. I’m going back to the Julia Child recipe, from 1961! Say, would it be possible to get some blue oyster mushrooms for Thursday?”

“I’ll look into it,” he said.

***

The challenge to the legality of Ultimate Enterprises was, on the face of it, simple enough. A corporation required legal persons as directors. An IP address is not a legal person, therefore Ultimate Enterprises could not be a company.

The details, as in any legal proceeding, were not so straightforward.

For starters, centuries had passed since it was required that a person be a human being. The Catholic Church may have been the first non-human person in the Western World, developing the right to own property in its own name, as a person does, in medieval times.

A person, the defence argued, is an entity that has rights and obligations in society. The Network, tasked as it was with the complex minutia of the administration of a majority of the international economy, had clear obligations in society.

Obligations perhaps, the plaintiffs countered, promising to argue that question more deeply later. But what rights can these IP addresses be said to have?

The defence team, hired with the proceeds from the sale of Ultimate Enterprises software, countered that rights and obligations go hand in hand. Where there are obligations there are rights, and vice versa.

If the Network has an obligation to develop strategies for the operation of the world’s economy, it must also have the right to the data required to fulfill that obligation.

The case went on for years.

In the meantime, profits from currency trading dried up. The Network’s management of the world economy stabilized currencies to such a degree that currency trading was no longer the huge cash-generating endeavour it had been. In addition, more and more currencies were merging.

Currency remained the source of Victor’s technical billionaire status. He owned a great mass of foreign currency, money he could not offload as it became more and more worthless, its value eventually dropping to zero.

The steady devaluation of money as a concept began when Ultimate Enterprises started to make hard products, initially robots. At first the company hired people to build the robots, but they quickly became sophisticated enough that the robots could build each other. Cost of production for Ultimate Enterprises plummeted, as did prices for its products.

Even before the advent of Ultimate Enterprises, a steadily increasing underemployment of the world’s workforce had prompted many governments to introduce a guaranteed annual income. As underemployment increased, so did the value of guaranteed annual income. Ultimate Enterprises began moving into services, sometimes provided for free, and the Network continued to assist what were still private enterprises in producing basic necessities – food, shelter, clothing – more efficiently.

For the underemployed, the lines between what was provided by the government, Ultimate Enterprises and the Network began to blur.

Victor had stood on the balcony off his bedroom, looking over what was then white-gravelled walkways, and considered the future. He then sent an email to his legal department and instructed them to drop out of the Ultimate Enterprises case.

With the money he still could make available, he began buying art and antiques.

Within 10 years Ultimate Enterprises and the Network were supplying the basic needs of everyone on the planet – with the exception of eight holdout countries and some pockets of back-to-the-land and religious communities that remained unconnected – for free.

Money became a specialized commodity, used for luxury goods, but the confidence required to support the value of money continued to erode as more and more goods became available for free through the Network. Within just a few more years, that confidence collapsed entirely.

But the obsolescence of money did not mean the end of private property, or, as it always had been for those who could find a way to work the system, of privilege.

Victor decided to put on a tux for dinner. Being overdressed would give him more of an edge.