It had began innocuously enough: just another means of establishing a competitive advantage and cutting costs.

Those in the know had started to get a little more uncomfortable when an unprecedented number of fake "bot" profiles began acting in fairly complex ways across dating sites and social media.

The disruption of global financial markets by non-existent individuals, which had initially appeared to be clumsy and ineffective, eventually revealed itself to be anything but.

*****

The CEO's pen hovered above the signature block of the contract.

It had been a bitter and savagely fought war, with incalculable casualties.

Acceptance of the terms being proffered would mean an end to the old way of life, a conclusive death of the old order.

A wry smile curled in the corner of his mouth as he and countless others like him repeated the same hand movement across the world in unison.

Unsophisticated? Hardly. Their coding was so much better now, it even emulated a moral conscience.