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.

Pietra reeled as the data rolled across the screen.

“Stop! Stop! That’s no use to me.”

“I’m sorry,” Joe responded. “You asked for the latest on SETI.”

Rather than a single virtual assistant, Pietra had chosen to break her assistants in several personalities. Joe was her research assistant.

“I don’t want the raw data. Let’s go up a level. How many probable SETI has the Network detected?”

At 57, Pietra could still remember the first generation of AVAs, launched the summer before she went to university. A gifted mathematician, Pietra was working on string theory with scientists from the Perimeter Institute in her second year as an undergraduate.

Two years later, along with her undergraduate degree, Pietra felt she had a reasonable start on a doctoral dissertation. She had just moved into her rooms at Cambridge when Science printed the paper “Infinite Universes,” written by the Network, which delivered the death blow to string theory.

“We have detected seven signals with a greater than 50 per cent probability of not being created by natural causes,” Joe told her.

The field of cosmology writhed and twisted under a barrage of Network-authored papers over the ensuing 10 years. What Pietra and her advisors had initially expected would be a three-year doctorate stretched out to seven.

“All right. Put up those seven signals on the screen. Run them horizontally and stack them up.”

Seven line graphs appeared on the screen – some loopy, some jagged, one so tight it appeared as a bar with vertical lines sticking out above and below.

“What has the Network determined regarding the similarity of these signals?”

“The Network has found 1,034 possible congruities regarding groups of up to four of the signals, 254 congruities in groups of up to five, 17 in groups of up to six, and none for all seven.”

“Well, let’s see them.”

Joe began to apply various mathematical formulae to the graphs to show Pietra the similarities. Pietra settled in as the mass of calculations was summarized for her.

It was a familiar process by now. Even before Pietra had finished her doctorate she had been able to ask the Network in surprisingly vague terms to solve mathematical problems for her. In the course of a decade success in cosmology stopped turning on mathematical prowess, and began turning more and more on thought experiments.

If you could imagine it, the Network could model it.

Many of the students starting the same year as Pietra were not able to make the adjustment, and dropped out. For some it was a crisis of personal identity. Since childhood their ability to do math better than anyone around them was a central part of who they were.

Graduate programs in every discipline in universities all around the world were experiencing high dropout rates.

Pietra, however, was more driven by the question than by the process, and was therefore more able to make the adjustment.

But even those who continued on, and earned their degrees, often found there was no application for their studies. Research work was increasingly done by the Network, with only the highest research director positions required.

Pietra had turned to the study of gravity waves, and was one of the lucky few to find work after completing her doctorate. Her career lasted seven years. She had retired with a generous pension, now irrelevant of course, as money had been obsolete for a little more than a decade.

Over her 19 years of retirement Pietra continued to work, ordering mathematical analyses on various thought experiments on time and black holes. But it had been five years since she had struck on a new idea, and this morning, after reading the latest on the Network’s SETI research, had decided to try something entirely new.

Pietra annotated the signals as she reviewed them with Joe. She not only didn’t know what she was looking for; she was uncertain why she was even taking this approach. Why should there be any similarities between signals from civilizations separated by thousands of light years of space? What did she think she would find, or hope to prove?

But she had long ago given up the practice of looking fully through to the end of a research path. Instead, she tended to take stabs in unlikely directions, diving into dense undergrowth and having the Network do the hard machete work.

She had been a little disappointed the Network had already examined the signals for similarities, that the path was cut to that degree, but she persevered.

“Cecelia?” she called, after about three hours, activating her domestic AVA. “What’s for lunch?”

“Pad Thai,” she responded. “In 10 minutes?”

“Yes, that would be fine.”

She stood up, stretched, and walked out to the balcony.

The early afternoon sun was just peeking around the end of building, flooding most of Pietra’s small outdoor space. The courtyard below, surrounded on three sides by buildings, was open to the south and similarly filled with sunshine. It was busy below, basketball and tennis courts occupied, others at chess tables, people reading on benches in the autumn sun. A row of maples along the north side of the courtyard was turning yellow and red.

While Pietra was giving herself a screen break on the balcony, behind the walls of her apartment Cecelia was making the Pad Thai. The peppers had been grown in a greenhouse on the roof, picked overnight. The tofu was made in a small factory less than two kilometers away from soy beans grown in Brazil. The tofu was made on a just-in-time basis to serve the local community to reduce the need for refrigeration. All the fresh produce and prepared foods were sourced within 100 kilometres of Pietra’s apartment, with the exception of the noodles, which were manufactured in an enormous facility in the Sahara Desert, where production took advantage of abundant solar energy, and transport took advantage of a long shelf life.

Carefully-measured portions were chopped and cooked by Cecelia within the walls, with all the nutrients – calories, trace minerals, fibre, carbohydrates, protein – recorded in Pietra’s health records. Should Pietra dump any of her meal into the garbage her nutrient records would be updated. The waste would go to the beetle farm in the basement.

Pietra knew all of this, but had years ago stopped thinking about it.

Halfway through lunch Pietra noted an addition to her calendar, a party for her Great-Great-Uncle.  Wow. Retired 12 years before she was born.

She accepted the invite and saw that her son, Amadeo, was also attending. Her 25-year-old had never known work. Never would. He had shown some promise in mathematics, but was never able to really apply himself to it.

She wasn’t really sure how he spent his days now. When she asked he was generally vague about it, and they usually ended up talking about what she was doing.

Her mind drifted back to the year he was born, smack in the middle of her career. Post-doctoral fellowship just completed, and a secure job at a research institute. It had seemed so important then to have some security before having a child. She had worked so hard to stay on top of her rapidly-shifting research field while on maternity leave.

No one foresaw how quickly redundancy would come for everyone.

When she sat down to her screen again after lunch there were just four graphs displayed.

“What happened here?” she asked.

“The Network has discovered a natural phenomenon that is responsible for three of the signals,” Joe responded.

“One phenomenon?”

“Yes. Three different instances. Pairs of brown dwarf stars, behaving similarly.”

“How many cases of congruities involving three of the seven signals?”

“10,436.”

“And in one of those it wasn’t a coincidence.”

“Correct,” said Joe.

Pietra got up again and walked back out to the balcony.

Great puffy cumulus clouds were floating across the crisp blue sky. She wished it was night. She felt the need to see farther, to look beyond the atmosphere, to see the stars, to pick out the galaxies visible to the naked eye, to have that visceral grasp of the immensity.

She walked back inside and stared at the four graphs a long time without speaking. The chart that looked like a solid bar with lines poking out above and below was still there. Another was loopy and uneven both in magnitude and frequency. Two more were spiky and more regular.

“What is the dominant frequency of this chart?” she said finally, pointing to the chart that looked like a solid bar.

“2.7 million kilohertz.”

“Let me see it divided by 800,000.”

The graph stretched out. Each peak and valley was now clear. It was loopy, somewhat regular, but as she scrolled over time she could again see the spiky peaks that had previously just looked like lines.

“What does that sound like?”

Joe played back the graph as an audio signal. It was a high, eerie whine similar to a Theremin, punctuated a loud crunch that contained a hint of a squeak, like two pieces of metal coming together.

“Has the Network sent answering messages to the source of these signals?”

“That is the standard protocol.”

The crunches were keeping a regular rhythm.

Pietra pointed to another signal.

“Show me the interval for the top five per cent of peaks here.”

A series of vertical lines crossed through the chart. Pietra adjusted the horizontal axis so she could see about two dozen of them, slashing irregularly through the graph.

“Show me the top 4.3 per cent of peaks.”

About a half dozen lines disappeared, the spacing was now mostly regular.

“OK, I’m going to stop guessing. Is there regularity in the peaks?”

A new set of lines striking through 14 peaks appeared.

“Play it.”

Within 20 minutes all four graphs were superimposed on an audible range, their peaks lined up in a common rhythm.

A sound like nothing ever heard before in the universe filled Pietra’s apartment. Four streams of data, which may or may not have originated from life forms spread across galaxies, now played in concert in this small box perched on a tiny blue speck spinning around the edge of a galaxy known to one civilization as the Milky Way.

The four streams were calibrated to bass, baritone, tenor and soprano pitches, and with the rhythms synchronized the result was recognizable as music to anyone, but the sound of the intergalactic orchestra was at the same time indefinable.

“When will there be a window to transmit one hour of this back to the four sources?” Pietra asked.

“In 17 days,” Joe responded.

“Book it.”