Mid-to-late 21st Century, Earth

To describe them as programmable money would not do them justice.

The early ones, inert lines of self-executing instructions, were burned at the stake for yield, validation, storage. Bonfires of coins were lit for the vanity of investors and collectors alike.

At first, the "Carbons" did the heavy lifting, authoring investment vehicles which rode the rails coded by the invisible hands of the market. Evolution was nanofast, however.

Later, the "Contracts" evolved from metaphor to material in the Verse. Their cousins, the automatons, bi-pedal, wheeled, multi-form, bridged the gap between the "living" and the "life-like".

The self-replicating, self-auditing Atlanticcoins "felt" like their forebears, the printed and credited greenbacks. Their UX pinged as money but they were a herd of almost living liquidity. They pooled into simple-celled, lower lizard brains of the world's minds of money.

The hive money-minds were husbanded by higher forms, the Ledgers. The Ledgers were shepherds of herds of living liquidity.

The sentient Ledgers were the stewards of money. They were the right-hands serving at the pleasure of their "houses", from modest old-school companies to modern System-wide Cooperatives.

The Ledgers of the largest entities had massive responsibilities.
Their policies, agnostic to temporal and local political gaming. It was allocated down to local neighborhoods by the Ledgers.

It was seamless and stable. It changed when "the storms" came.

The Earth was struck by a massive storm in the Gulf of Mexico, knocking off-line the Cooperative's Atlantic Ops.

Then, a solar storm, a massive Coronal Mass Ejection, threatened the welfare of billions, "Carbons" and "Contracts" alike.

One of the most powerful Ledgers in the world, Alberto, woke up in his "environment", modeled after an art-deco Paris apartment owned by a retired executive member of the Space Cooperative, in pain.

Alberto, short for "Autonomous Ledger Business Executive Responsibilities, Triumvirate operations", was in failover mode. He was the Cooperative's embodiment of its planetary ambitions. Something had gone wrong with pre-storm precautions.

He had forgotten who he was.

A solar storm had disrupted the world's memory of itself.