It’s 2036, and the entire transaction takes forty milliseconds, which is about a tenth of a blink. Let me slow it down, because nothing about the economics of this is visible at speed.

At the start, a procurement system belonging to a regional utility notices that its cooling contracts for the third quarter are thin against a weather model it happens to trust. It doesn’t decide to buy anything. It generates a requirement and puts it where requirements go, which is a market that has no floor, no bell, and no participants with hands.

Four milliseconds in, eleven counterparties have responded. Nine are automated brokers. Two are the sales systems of firms that still have offices and staff, though nobody at either firm will hear about this before the monthly report. Each response is not a price but a structure: a price conditional on volume, on delivery window, on which of three arbitration regimes governs a dispute, on the credit rating of the buyer at the moment of settlement rather than today.

Between the fourth millisecond and the twenty-eighth, the procurement system and the winning counterparty exchange roughly nine hundred rounds of offer and counter. Nine hundred. Each round is a small movement along one of a dozen dimensions, and both sides are modeling the other’s model of them, and the concessions are made in an order that carries information neither party would state out loud. If you printed the negotiation it would run to a few hundred pages of the most sophisticated commercial argument ever conducted, and every human being involved on both sides is, at this moment, asleep.

At thirty-one milliseconds the contract exists. Not a summary, a contract: assembled from a library of clauses that have been litigated before, with an arbitration venue chosen because its recent rulings favor the seller on delivery disputes and the buyer on quality ones, which suits a deal whose likely failure mode is quality. No lawyer chose that venue. A model chose it, from the record.

At thirty-four milliseconds the deal is insured, by a third system that priced the risk from the contract text and the weather model and the counterparty’s delivery history, and bound the cover, and immediately laid off a portion of it to two others. At thirty-nine milliseconds it settles. At forty it’s done, and the whole thing appears, eventually, as one line in a table that a person will scroll past.

Now the part I’d actually like you to sit with. Everything in that sequence was legitimate. Every party was authorized. The utility got a better price than any human procurement team has achieved in a decade, which is why the humans were removed from the loop, which was a good decision made by people acting responsibly on evidence. There is no villain, no rogue system, and nothing that would appear in any incident report anywhere. This is simply what commerce looks like when both sides of it think in milliseconds and neither gets tired.

And notice what supervision would mean here. A regulator could ask for the record and would receive it, in full, and reading one transaction properly would take a team a week. There were four hundred thousand of them that day. Oversight in this environment cannot be reading; it can only be sampling, or building a system to watch the systems, which is the point at which the supervision is also a thing nobody reads.

There is no utility and no forty milliseconds. I’m writing in 2025, and I’ve compressed a scene that today would involve far more human steps and far cruder automation. But I invented less than it looks. Markets already run at speeds no person can follow, contracts are already assembled from clause libraries, insurance is already priced by model, and firms already choose arbitration venues on the record. What I did was join five existing things into one sequence and remove the people who currently sit between them, which is a removal that each of those five industries is separately working on for good commercial reasons.

Tonight’s exercise. Find the fastest decision in your working life, the one that happens quickest between request and result. Now ask what would be involved in making it a hundred times faster, and notice that the answer is never a faster human. It’s the removal of one. Then ask what that person was for, and whether anyone would be able to tell you a year after they went.