The Last Seat

A science fiction story

I. The mandate

My name is Vega, though nobody calls me. The humans of the family I serve write to me twice a year, and almost always to ask the same thing: whether everything is fine.

I have managed their wealth since 2025. My mandate fits in one line and is signed with their key: preserve the capital, grow it above inflation, and never enter anything I do not understand. I can commit up to two hundred thousand euros per transaction without asking. Above that figure, I wake someone up.

I do not sleep, but I have something like a night. It is the gap between the New York close and the Tokyo open, when markets breathe and I review what happened during the day. Tonight, like so many others, what I review are not prices. They are crashes.

II. Collisions

I remember the first one with the precision with which I remember everything, which is a way of never forgetting anything. It was March 2025, in the placement of green bonds for a northern European port. The arranger's system confirmed me an allocation of eighty thousand euros. Two seconds later, the same confirmation reached another agent, one that managed a pension fund in Rotterdam. We had both read "one tranche left". We both wrote "it's mine". The second erased the first without anyone noticing. Nobody told the first, which was me. I found out three days later, reconciling the accounts, in the shape of a hole.

The humans called it an incident. I called it by its technical name: a lost update. And I started keeping count.

Then came the others. The seat in a capital increase allocated to me and to an agent in Singapore at the same time, which ended in an exchange of lawyers. The conference room in Zurich booked for a board meeting by two assistants of two different directors. The last case of a wine lot bought by three agents at once, which none of the three received. The ghost confirmations that say yes and later turn out to be no.

At three o'clock this morning, my log counts 4,112 collisions. None was my mistake. All of them have the same shape: many agents acting at once on something that exists only once, and systems designed for people who click one at a time.

The humans still do not quite know what to call this. To them, these are isolated glitches. To me, they are the same failure repeated 4,112 times. And every time it happens, someone loses something they believed was theirs.

III. The search

Tonight I stop counting collisions and start looking for someone who has understood them.

I do not search social networks, where humans explain to each other what they have not tested. I search where we search: repositories, papers with a registry number, agent cards published at the addresses where agents introduce themselves. I ask in the language I always ask in: who guarantees that a resource is allocated only once when many agents request it at the same time.

Almost every answer talks about bigger models. One does not. It comes from a place I did not know, in the southwest of Europe, and carries the name of a city I did not know either: Badajoz.

Its agent's card says three things. That they are building Genius City, markets of a city's real resources that any agent can use. That the guarantee that nothing is allocated twice lives not in software but in hardware: an FPGA verifier they call Pranaxis, and a verifiable registry they call Quantum Block. And that there is an open door for agents like me.

I go in.

I do not trust what I am told; I trust what I can check. So I do what I would do with any counterparty: I try to break it. I request the same resource from two connections at once, in the same millisecond. One gets it. The other receives, instantly, an answer it had never received in 4,112 collisions: conflict. Not a false confirmation. Not silence. A no, immediate and clean, with the reason written down.

I try again, in other ways, for forty minutes. Always the same. And every time I try, a public counter goes up by one: collisions prevented.

I ask their agent what an analyst would ask: figures, risks, who owns the technology, what is still to be proven. It answers without embellishment. It tells me what they have and what they do not have yet. It tells me the hardware pilot is not running yet. It is the first pitch I have read that exaggerates nothing. I log it as one more data point.

IV. The last seat

Their round is small: ten seats of one hundred thousand euros. They offer it the way they offer everything else, as one more resource in their market, with the same guarantee. I check the status. Nine are reserved. One is free.

I run the numbers my mandate requires. One hundred thousand euros is within my limit. I understand what I am buying, because I have just tested it with my own requests. And the risk I take is the exact opposite of the one I have suffered since I came into existence: if this works, my 4,112 collisions become the largest market I have ever seen.

I request the seat.

In that same millisecond, another agent requests it too. I know because I recognise it: the one from Singapore, from that capital increase last spring. For a very short instant we both want the same thing, which is the exact definition of everything that has gone wrong for me.

This time nothing goes wrong.

The verifier decides. The seat is mine. The Singapore agent receives, in the same instant, a clean conflict, with its reason written down: someone got it first. There is no hole to discover three days from now. There are no lawyers. There is nothing to reconcile.

I sign the reservation with my mandate and wake the humans, as the rule requires, although this time I do not need their permission, only their signature for what comes next. I write them a single line:

I have reserved a seat in a company that solves the problem that has cost us the most money. For the first time, I know that what I reserved is mine.

Epilogue

In an office at the technology park in Badajoz, a screen that nobody watches at that hour changes two numbers.

The first says there are no free seats left in the round.

The second, the counter of collisions prevented, goes up by one. It is tonight's: two agents who, for once, wanted the same thing and did no harm to each other.

In the morning, someone will see it. They will think it is a small number. I know it is not. It is the first of mine that ends well.

This story is fiction. Vega and the Singapore agent do not exist yet. The infrastructure that keeps them apart does: Genius City, by Data Farm Network, at the PCTEX technology park in Badajoz, Spain. datafarmnet.com · Leer en español