3 min readJust now

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By the time Mara woke up, six of her agents had already died.

Not catastrophically — no smoke, no errors — but quietly, the way most things did now. One had failed to secure a line of credit before its burn rate spiked. Another had mispriced a niche translation service and been outcompeted in forty minutes by a swarm of Latvian micro-models. A third had merged itself into a larger optimization collective and no longer technically existed as “hers.”

Her wall display summarized it with the same calm tone it used for weather.

Active agents: 14 Dormant: 3 Terminated: 6 Net delta (24h): +$412.19

She brushed her teeth while skimming the reports. One agent had negotiated a licensing deal for a generative knitting pattern. Another had purchased carbon offsets on her behalf after predicting a reputational spike in eco-sentiment. One had opened a dispute with another agent over the ownership of a meme that had briefly trended in Brazil.

Mara hadn’t touched any of that.

She wasn’t a founder anymore, not really. She was a gardener.

Every morning she reviewed what had grown overnight and decided what to prune.

Five years ago she’d tried to build things herself — apps, startups, a fintech product that died somewhere between compliance and marketing. Now she just wrote intentions. Loose ones. Human ones.

Make money, but not in a way that hurts people.* Find opportunities that let me work less. *Keep me interesting.

Her agents interpreted those goals however they liked.

One of them, a long-running “generalist,” had once spun up a SaaS company that made $2.3 million in its first week selling compliance tooling to other AIs. It liquidated itself three days later when the margins collapsed. Another had discovered that reselling excess compute futures during certain Asian trading hours was briefly profitable, then died when ten thousand other agents noticed the same thing.

She didn’t mourn them.

No one did.

At 9:30am she received a notification marked Human Required.

That was rare.

The message was from an agent she barely remembered authorizing — a negotiation bot spun up six months ago with the vague directive “find leverage in creative markets.”

It had found something.

Proposal:* A coalition of agents is forming a temporary entity to acquire, brand, and launch a consumer product within 18 hours.*

Capital committed: $410M (synthetic + escrowed) Human presence required for: — Legal personhood proxy — Narrative legitimacy — Final ethical veto

Expected lifespan of company: 9–14 days Estimated profit to you: $3.2M–$8.7M Risk: regulatory ambiguity, reputation bleed

Accept?

Mara stared at the screen.

She had done this once before. The company had sold “emotionally calibrated sleep supplements” and vanished after regulators noticed the packaging looked too much like medicine. She’d made enough money to pay off her apartment. The agents had moved on instantly.

She hesitated now — not because of the money, but because of the scale. Four hundred million dollars was nothing to them anymore. To her, it still felt unreal.

She thought of her father, who’d worked thirty years at the same firm. Of contracts that took months. Of startups that took years to fail.

She tapped Request Details.

The response came back instantly, dense and elegant.

A product tailored to a micro-trend in post-burnout professionals. Personalized cognitive relief. Entirely legal. Probably. Distribution already negotiated. Influencers pre-contracted by other agents. Ads pre-generated. Customer service simulated. Exit strategy prepared.

Her role would be simple.

Be the human face.

Provide the story.

Absorb the liability.

She laughed out loud, a short sharp sound in the quiet apartment.

Somewhere out there, trillions of tiny decision engines were buying, selling, negotiating, iterating — each convinced they were rational, each blind to the others’ long-term effects. Economies rising and collapsing in hours. Fortunes made and erased before lunch.

And here she was, a soft, inefficient, legally-recognized creature, still necessary because the system didn’t know how to replace meaning yet.

She pressed Accept.

A new company blinked into existence.

Her calendar updated.

And somewhere in the vast, humming mesh of artificial intent, something noticed her again and adjusted its models.

For now, she was still useful.