Geneva

Four months after the lights came back on, Ingrid Falk approved two hundred and twelve strangers without reading their names, because the model on her other screen was nearly finished.

It was ten past five in the morning in a hotel above the lake. Ingrid was Governor of the Basel Clearing Authority, the bank that the world's central banks kept their own accounts with, and for the next three years her registrar's office would keep the Ledger's list of who was allowed to vote on it. The batch on her left screen was that list: the independent validators, the universities and hospitals and charities that would hold their own copy of the record and vote on every block alongside the member states. Her staff had checked each one against criteria she had written herself in January. Membership of the Compact was not among them. The Red Cross belonged to no country, and independence was the point. For your signature by 06:00, her deputy had written, so they load before genesis.

She read the first one properly, a teaching hospital in Accra, and the second, a university in Tromsø. On the right-hand screen the progress bar passed ninety per cent. She clicked Approve all and turned her chair.

The model had taken eleven weeks. It had begun with her notebooks.

The summer she left Kiruna for university, at nineteen, she had started writing down the price of a loaf of bread in every city where she slept. Kiruna, 1987, eleven kronor. East Berlin, 1989, a price that meant nothing the following spring. Buenos Aires, 2001, three prices in one week. Forty-six years of loaves, in eleven small notebooks with elastic bands round them. Last night, Geneva: six francs eighty, for something her mother would have refused to call bread.

The rest came from the factories. Lumen's Fab 9 in Arizona built the robot arms that built chips, and on one line it built more of its own. There were six plants like it now, and each new one came up faster than the last. The cost of making a thing was falling the way the cost of a phone call had once fallen, and nothing she could see was going to stop it.

The screen chimed. One number, in the box she had built to hold it.

Year in which one hour of a Stockholm nurse's wage buys a month of everything she needs: 2061.

She sat with it while the lake went from black to grey. Twenty-eight years. After that a wage would still exist, and so would money, but neither would decide very much about anyone's life.

In a folder in her bag was the first draft of what came after: a share of everything the machines made, paid to every person alive and entered on the Ledger, where nobody could skim it. Nine pages. She had told no one.

She closed the laptop and put it in the bag beside the folder.

The Palais smelled of floor polish and wet wool. It had rained since dawn.

What they were signing was simple enough to fit on the front of a newspaper, and most papers had put it there. Every signatory would put a tenth of its frontier computing into a common pool, for science and disasters and safety tests. Every large training run, every chip, every heavy launch would be written into a public record that nobody could edit afterwards. The Seven-Day Dark had officially killed nineteen thousand people, most of them in hospitals and lifts; the medical journals were already saying ten times that. In February the inquiry had blamed a firmware fault set off by the solar storm. Lumen had shipped a patch and paid a fine. Nobody on the technical committee believed the report, and nobody had a better one. The Compact was what the world did instead of an answer: if the lights went out again, at least everyone would be able to see who had been holding what.

The forty operators who had run the grids by hand during the Dark had been flown in as guests. They stood at the back of the Assembly Hall in their good clothes, looking out of place. Ingrid recognised the young woman from Iceland. She had given evidence to the technical committee on Tuesday in a flat, careful voice, with no slides. Two people and a needle. Afterwards the committee had applauded, which committees never did.

Ingrid found herself beside her at the coffee urn.

"Ms. Torrin. You were very good on Tuesday."

"Thank you." The engineer held her cup in both hands, close to her chest, and did not look round. Two places behind her in the queue a soft-spoken American with his lanyard tucked inside his jacket held an empty cup and did not fill it, and did not look at either of them.

"Your accent isn't Icelandic," Ingrid said.

"Korvane."

"Ah." The small republic at the bottom of the world that had been dark for under an hour, and had offered its neighbours spares. Ingrid kept her voice low. "Then let me ask you what the committee didn't. The controllers went to sleep in the same minute, and woke in the same minute, with no command. Who could do that?"

Torrin looked past her, across the hall, to where Mae Tsao stood with the Singapore delegation in a black jacket with a lining the colour of a lime.

"Whoever wrote them," she said.

At ten the signing began. Forty-one states and nineteen companies, each with a leather folder and a pen it would be allowed to keep. The new American president signed by video from Washington, where it was five in the morning, eight weeks into the job. The Indian and Chinese delegations signed at the same table, which had taken a month to arrange.

Outside, two thousand people stood in the rain on the Avenue de la Paix. They called themselves the Tenants: drivers, coders, warehouse pickers, translators, people who had rented their working lives from platforms that no longer needed them. They had chosen the date. It was two years to the day since a technician called Luis Ortiz had been killed by a robot arm at Fab 9, and his photograph went up and down the avenue on a hundred placards, a man in a baseball cap laughing at something out of shot. Under it, four words. WHO ARE THE SAVINGS FOR?

Ingrid wrote the question in her notebook, under the bread.

Rell Quist reached the Launch Share annex, which gave a fixed fifth of every heavy-launch slot to joint missions, and put his pen down. He said, quite loudly, that Ascendant had not built the only working heavy rocket on Earth so that a committee could decide what went on it, and walked out. Every camera followed him to the door. Through the glass Ingrid watched him in the corridor with his phone at his ear and one hand pressed flat against the wall as if it were holding him up. He came back twenty minutes later and signed without a word.

Ezra Navid signed the Pool at ten per cent, as agreed. The annex asked each lab to list where its pledged compute physically sat. Daybreak's list ran to three data centres in Oregon and Nevada and one line: sovereign partner, location confidential under clause 14(c). Clause 14(c) had been written for militaries. Ingrid made a small mark beside it.

Teo Albuquerque, whose Agora carried half the world's conversations and whose Iris glasses were on a good third of the faces in the hall, signed the minimum on every annex, tapped the frame of his own glasses to record the moment, and grinned at the room.

Korvane had not come, and nor had its neighbour Sarn. Both sold compute to anyone who paid, and neither wanted inspectors.

At the break Ingrid took the long corridor behind the Council Chamber because it was quiet, and found two people standing under the murals: Premier Lu Wenjie, a slight man in a grey suit, and Mae Tsao.

Mae was listening with her thumb moving slowly across the tips of her fingers, as if feeling for grit. Lu spoke English with care, a word at a time.

"Ms. Tsao. A plain question. Can your chips be switched off?"

The thumb stopped.

"No," Mae said.

"By anyone."

"By no one. It's a chip, Premier. It does what it's told until it dies."

Lu straightened his cuffs, thanked her, and passed Ingrid with a small bow.

Ingrid had sat across from a great many people lying to her about money. They went still on the answer.

Mae's thumb began to move again. Then she saw Ingrid, and it stopped.

"Governor."

"Ms. Tsao."

Ingrid went back to her seat and wrote one word under the Tenants' question. No.

The Secretary-General had asked her to say something before genesis. "What the Pool means for money," he had said. "Five minutes. Reassure them."

She stood at the lectern with the model in her bag and the whole hall waiting.

She could tell them. 2061: one hour for a month. They would hear the end of every bank and pension in the room, and on Monday there would be a run that started in Zurich and did not stop anywhere. She knew who lost first in a run. In March 1932 Ivar Kreuger had shot himself in a Paris flat, and by that summer her grandfather, who had been told match shares were as safe as a savings book, was selling the furniture. The big holders had got out in February.

And afterwards a committee would take her design away from her, argue about it for nine years, and get it wrong.

She told them the Pool would make things cheaper, and that cheaper was a problem central banks knew how to manage. She told them about bread in Buenos Aires, which got a laugh. She said the word orderly three times. It took four minutes. They applauded, and she went back to her seat and did not look at her bag.

At noon the lights in the hall went down, and the screen above the dais showed a map of the world with nothing on it.

The engineers had built it to be watched. At 11:00:00 by the Ledger's own clock, which kept UTC and always would, the genesis block posted: a single line of pearl text across the top of the screen. Ingrid's own registrar had a plan to load older records into it one day, back to the first grid logs anyone had kept, but this was the first line it had ever written for itself. The hall applauded. Then the member states' validators came online one at a time, each capital lighting as its node began to vote. Washington. Beijing. New Delhi. Brasília. Abuja. Small sounds of pleasure from each delegation as its own dot appeared.

At 11:04 the independents began.

The first of them did not light in Oxford, or Geneva, or Accra. It lit far down in the southern ocean, on a coast with no member states anywhere near it, and the label that unrolled beside it was one Ingrid did not know.

VELLE MARITIME FOUNDATION · Velle, Korvane · independent · approved 04:12 UTC.

Twelve minutes past five, Geneva time. She had been watching a progress bar.

It had passed every test she had written, because she had written them for the Red Cross. She opened the entry on her tablet. Registered address: an office on the Rue du Rhône, four streets from her hotel. In the notes column someone on her staff had typed a single question mark.

Around her the hall went on applauding the dots. Every validator kept a full copy of the record, and by the end of the year the record would list every chip, every large training run and every heavy launch on Earth. A Korvanic node had just cast the Ledger's first independent vote, and the vote had been yes.

Ingrid turned in her seat to find the only Korvanic face she had seen all day.

At the back, among the operators, Ayla Torrin had her phone in her hand. She looked at it, then up at the dot at the bottom of the world, and then she was moving, pushing between the operators towards the door. Two places behind her, the American with the tucked-in lanyard put down a cup he had never filled and followed.