“Come on, man.” The Bengali might as well have said Jesus or James Bond of Lal Darfan. Chakraborty turns to Vishram.
“What is it about my answer that you do no believe?”
“Generation Three aeis, that’s science fiction.”
“I assure you my employer is quite actual. Odeco is indeed a venture capital holding company, it just happens that the venture capitalist is an artificial intelligence.”
“The Hamilton Acts, the Krishna Cops…”
“There are spaces where an aeai may live. Especially in something like the international financial markets which demand loose regulation to exploit their so-called market freedoms. These aeais are not like our kind of intelligence at all; they are distributed, in many places at once.”
“You’re telling me that this … Brahma … is the stock market, come to life?”
“The international financial markets have used low-level aeais to buy and sell since the last century. As the complexity of the financial transactions spiraled, so did that of the aeais.”
“But who would design something like that?”
“Brahma is not designed, no more than you, Mr. Ray. It evolved”.
[…]
“Brahma?” he says weakly.
“A name. A title. It means nothing. Identity is a much larger and looser construct in CyberEarth. Brahma is a geographically dispersed entity across many nodes and many subcomponents, lower-level aeais, that may not realize they are part of a larger sentience.”
“And this … Generation Three … is more than happy to give me one hundred million US dollars.”
“Or more. You must understand, Mr. Ray, to an entity such as Brahma, making money is the easiest thing there is. It is no harder than breathing is for you.”

-Ian McDonald River of the Gods p.385. (Set in 2047).