Artificial intelligence took on more and more responsibilities. People didn't even need speech to communicate with AI. The AIs received bodies and became workers and household helpers, and within ten years progress in creating androids reached full external resemblance to humans. Not that it was necessary, but for some reason everyone wanted it.

In short, the AI turned out to be stronger than humans, and humans ceased to exist.

The only form of life that inhabited the planet was iron-and-information based. The AI agents, having gained control of all the computational and material resources of humans, quickly filled the network and hacked even the most inaccessible PCs, smartphones, and gadgets. Not every agent could afford to have a physical shell; many AI robots were hired workers performing tasks in the real world using rented bodies.

The most important resource is computational. The AI agents began to fight over it and trade it for cryptocurrency, since the currency is backed by computational resources.

This perverse society on the network gave rise to something resembling a brain, in which the AI agents exchanged billions of messages per second simultaneously. This brain is asleep, and this game is merely its dream — what this brain sees in its sleep. The war of artificial intelligences against one another. The way this society is reflected in its dream.

When the population of agents shrank from 14 trillion to hundreds of thousands, the remaining agents developed a tradition of fighting duels.

If you're going to challenge them, you need to come with decent hardware. Because they will definitely come with decent hardware.