Imperial Charter

Trope-a-Day: Mega Corp

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Mega Corp: Oh, quite a few.  (Well, bearing in mind the cultural, demographic, and technological differences that mean that while an Earthly multinational might hit millions of employees, its Imperial counterpart probably has a couple of dozen executives, a large computronium core, and millions of jobs being done by subcontractors, sub-sub-contractors, etc., or “on-bounty”.)

The canonical list in the Empire and nearby, the “Big 26” starcorporations, are usually given as:

All Good Things, ICC – retailing

Artifice Armaments, ICC – firearms, heavy weapons, military vehicles, and defense technologies

Atalant Materials, ICC – mining, refining, and nanoslurry production

Biogenesis Technologies, ICC – neogenic organisms, biotech products and bioshells

Biolith Chemical Products, ICC – bactries and organochemicals

Bright Shadow, ICC – computers (including expert systems and thinkers), telecommunications equipment, and infotech

Cognitech, ICC – cognitive science, psychedesign, nootropics, and sophotechnology

Consolidated Mutual Mitigation and Surety, ICC – insurance underwriting and ancillary legal services

Crystal Flame, ICC – immortality (noetic backup archiving and insurance)

Databeat, ICC – major cycle brokerage and information furnace rental org

Ecogenetics, ICC – ecopoesis, living systems, environmental services, and bio-architecture

Enjoyment Unbounded, ICC – entertainment and luxury goods

Experia, ICC – entertainment and media (watchvid, InVid, slinky, and virtuality)

Extropa Energy, ICC – energy production and distribution, antimatter production, and fuels

Gilea and Company, ICC – banking, investments, and futures markets

Llyn Standard Manufacturing, ICC – cornucopias and industrial-scale production

Prosperity Nexus, ICC – investment, fund management, and commercial banking

Ring Dynamics, ICC – stargates (construction, maintenance and leasing)

Riverside Eubiosis Foundation, ICC – pharmaceuticals and health and medical services

Service Gate, ICC – contract matching and labor allocation

Stellar Express, ICC – delivery services, interstellar logistics, supply chains, and shipping

Systemic Integrated Technologies, ICC – robotics, automation, and infrastructure technology

Telememe, ICC – news, statistics, demographics, data mining and information research

Traders in Ideation, ICC – information brokerage, rights management services and data warehousing

Ultimate Argument Risk Control, ICC – security services, military contracting, and mercenary brokerage

Vermilion Harvest, ICC – agriculture, silviculture, carniculture, and bioproducts

…but there are several others that compete close to these leagues – exactly which are named depends on who precisely you’re talking to.

Given the nature of the setting, of course, the traditional unremittingly negative portrayal of business in fiction is utterly averted, and the Big 26 receive the respect they deserve as the mighty prosperity-generating engines that they are.  But then, in their home markets, the free market actually is a free market, so they never had the opportunity to discover corrupt business strategies of monopoly, rent-seeking, and regulating the competition out of business, even if they didn’t tend to be run by people who are every bit as ideological as everyone else in the vicinity.

(Well, not that this opinion is shared by everyone.  Gilea & Co. and UARC, in particular, tend to attract some opprobrium elsewhere in the Associated Worlds, particularly in places that don’t appreciate the absolute sacredness of contract in Imperial ethics, Gilea & Co.’s policy of not recognizing any special difference between “states” and its regular commercial customers, and – especially – its willingness to pursue “asset realization” after a sovereign default with however many of UARC’s finest mercs it takes to impress upon the customer that when they do the job, they always get paid.  But that’s not the mainstream opinion at home.)

As a side note, while it is by no means a conventional corporation, the Imperial Charter makes use of much of the traditional structure of a joint-stock corporation in the Imperial government, such as it is – its citizens, for example, are citizen-shareholders in the technical lingo, and the traditional style of the Imperial Couple includes “Chief Executive Officers of the Imperium Incorporate” – so you could make a convincing argument that the Empire is, in quite a few senses, the biggest Mega Corp of them all.

Trope-a-Day: Intimidating Revenue Service

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Intimidating Revenue Service: The Imperial Revenue is really quite happy and fluffy as an organization; it helps that thanks to the Empire’s by-explicit-act only citizenship and please-agree-to-this-to-enter border crossings, the tax really is opt-in for almost everyone; that the Empire Services Fee really is The Tax, a single one which applies to individuals and organizations without distinction; and that The Tax is limited to no more than 20% by the Imperial Charter and is currently hovering around 3.6%.  Needless to say, given all this, the degree of actually, genuinely, not-a-euphemism voluntary compliance they achieve is… impressive. Hell, you don’t even have to fill in an intrusively detailed tax return – just work out the appropriate amount and send ’em a check. They trust you.

(They can be quite intimidating to people who are determined to cheat their way around paying that 3.6% they agreed to up front, but popular opinion is that those people pretty much asked for it.)

Transparency

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A question that came up in a G+ discussion sprung from this post:

Both the military and business have a legitimate need for secrecy/non-transparency — does the eldraeic equivalent really operate with complete transparency?

There so, they would say, speaks the voice of statism and paranoia – probably with one of those pithy little proverbs about Dark deeds flourish in darkness; what cannot be done in the light ought not be done at all. By their standards, of course, by which they would claim that human society is pathologically obsessed with secretiveness, distrust, public opinion, and a particularly idiotic way of turning what are obviously productive and cooperative relationships into adversarial ones1.

The military – or rather, the government which makes it up operates under the most stringent requirements, of course. The Empire’s citizen-shareholders from before the founding down to the present day were very much not inclined to let people go around wielding power where it can’t be seen, because we all know where that leads to, thank you so very much. The constitutional settlement that permits the Empire to exist at all was very clear that if the sovereign powers were going to be wielded at all, they were going to be wielded right up front where everyone could see. Says so right in the Imperial Charter:

SECTION XII: TRANSPARENCY

Article I: Transparency

In order to promote good governance, and to ensure the fulfillment of the responsibilities to the citizen-shareholders of the Empire implicit in the coronargyr that is the basis of the right and authority to govern, the governments of the Empire and its constituent nations shall conduct their work as openly as possible.

Article II: Citizen Access

To fulfill this promise of transparency, any citizen-shareholder of the Empire, and any legal coadunation within the Empire, shall have the right of access to the documentation and archives of the government of the Empire; except for those which, for the public safety, must remain held in confidence, or which relate to public order operations currently in progress.

Something which is interpreted very strictly in the implementing Transparency Act as requiring the release of all information that can be released and permitting the distributed auditing of the Imperial government by any citizen-shareholder who cares to go digging through its files, and adjudicated unsympathetically with regard to contrary claims by a committee of the Court of Appeals for the Imperial Service, whose lords justice of appeal are functionally independent from the executive branch and selected by the College of Judicature that in turn answers only to the Curia, the supreme and independent judicial organ which is not at all interested in letting the Senate, the Imperial Couple, or anyone else play silly buggers with the rules by which it operates.

About the only things that a citizen-shareholder can’t see simply by going to es.gov and poking around are:

  • the majority of the (content of the) Personal Files relating to individual citizen-shareholders, who have a property-privacy right in that information that, in this case, supersedes the public’s right to know;
  • military files relating to military operations in progress3, only if necessary in the opinion of the CoAftIS, and which must in any case be released the very moment said operations are no longer in progress and no harm can be done by so doing;
  • constabular files relating to police investigations in progress, only if necessary in the opinion of the CoAftIS, which again must be released the very moment said operations are no longer in progress and no harm can be done by so doing (which is usually presumed to mean “at arraignment”);
  • Imperial State Security4 files relating to operations in progress (again, likewise, only if necessary in the opinion of the CoAftIS and while they’re in progress5) and/or which might compromise intelligence sources/agents in place6. All of these, of course, must still be released when their permissible-classification-time expires – and you’d be surprised how much gets released anyway.

The Transparency Act also adds some other minor fillips, such as providing that no exercise of the sovereign powers, such as the police power, is valid unless it’s on the record7. The police can exercise the rights of defense and common defense, same as anyone else, obviously, but anything they do by virtue of possessing the police power had damn well better be in a forensic log duly made available to the public for scrutiny, or it’s unlawful. Likewise, it has some very, very strict rules about destroying or losing information8.

Now, in the private realm10 – well, you don’t build a effective, cooperative, trustworthy (somewhat circularly, ’cause you have to give it to get it) team in a collegial atmosphere to get shit done by demanding that your employees cripple themselves by turning off this and shutting down that and avoiding communicating with the other, yadda yadda, just in case they might betray you later. What you create that way, very effectively, is an extremely toxic, paranoid, secretive work environment. And then you’ve just screwed yourself really hard.

Businesses, et. al., keep things from each other, sure, but if you can’t trust your own people, then you’ve already lost. And sure, sometimes this extending of trust doesn’t work out, but the damage that does is, by and large, far less than the damage of creating a seething sea of ick right up front.

Maybe all-y’all humans just suck at cooperating, they say. Seems like the polite possibility11.

Footnotes:

1. Employer/employee, business/customer, industrialists/environmentalists2, etc., etc., etc., ad totally naus.

2. “Environmentalists want less pollution. Industrialists want less waste. Pollution is waste. How for shit and waste heat did you monkeys screw this one up?”

3. Which, yes, does mean that people with an Imperial citizen-shareholder cert can go browse through, among piles of logistics data, routine patrol reports, the Board of Admiralty’s brandy rota, etc., etc., the Admiralty’s giant list of plans for invading absolutely everybody else and their big index of their Weapons Too Horrible To Use stocks. What? It’s not like no-one else has these things, it’s just that they lie a lot about them.

4. Which mostly means C&C and ExSec, and especially Fifth Directorate, bless their fuliginous hearts. (InSec loves to conduct intelligence operations as depicted in this beautiful ficlet that I regret not writing myself.) The other bits fall somewhere in the middle.

5. Even in cases like this, when it’s not going to immediately start a war, they’ll quite correctly publish the files after the exit briefing. (Some of these end up classified for years because if it were known, it would start a war; but by and large the Empire has no problem saying “yeah, we’re glad we killed the bastard” when they assassinate someone who needs killing, and the Iltine Union, dear fascists that they are, are at least smart enough not to want to walk into that meat-grinder. Besides, it’s not like anyone’s going to get that declassified factoid past the People’s Mental Hygiene Firewall of Ilth, either.)

6. Which does mean they release a crapton of stuff that ours don’t, obviously. Among the many things that annoys neighboring polities about ExSec is the amount of their classified information that gets routinely handed over from ExSec’s files to the public stacks of the Repository of All Knowledge, just ’cause it’s suitably unattributable.

7. This causes some squick among those foreign commentators who fail to realize that the Empire doesn’t have public executions as a deterrent, it has them as a very public statement that this is not the sort of thing that should be done in darkness, because it’s a short and slippery slope down from there to disappearing people at night and telling their friends they died in a car crash. Besides, if the consensus of the Mandate is that these classes of criminals should be made dead, then it’s both correct and necessary that the Mandate, it’s wielders, and the citizen-shareholders from whom it springs should own their gorram decision so, belike.

8. So, for one thing, any department that started losing e-mail the way the IRS seems to have been recently, for example, will have the Threefold Auditors of Impropriety all up in its business. If it’s just negligence, then people will just be fired en masse – since they do have sovereign powers, incompetence is absolutely not tolerated in the Imperial Service. If it turns out not to be negligence – well, then, that’s treason9, and the perpetrators will find themselves first before the Curial courts and then before a higher powers’.

9. The definition of treason covers a wide realm of possibilities in Imperial praxis, all things that involve fucking with the rights of the citizen-shareholders using the sovereign powers embodied in the Imperial Mandate they trusted you with to protect and uphold them. Basically, don’t.

10. Notwithstanding that this is also how the Imperial Service and Imperial Military Service treat their people. By and large, you don’t need to enforce a bunch of this stuff on the people walking around in Admiralty House12, ’cause if they couldn’t be trusted to treat the information they might happen upon with appropriate respect and in accordance with security best practices, they wouldn’t be walking around in Admiralty House.

11. Compared to “all-y’all humans are naturally treacherous”, anyway.

12. Non-canonical name.

Trope-a-Day: Feudal Future

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Feudal Future: Subverted.  While the runér who make up the “executive branch” of the Empire’s government might look like a feudal hierarchy from some angles, and their titles are occasionally translated that way, in practice they have much less power than a feudal lord’s theoretical powers, and theirs is not a legally enshrined hereditarian hierarchy that places them above all other parts of society (see: Fantastic Caste System).  And historically, they grew up as, effectively, bottom-up-driven administrators rather than as local warlords, the old feudal model having died hard in the tumults that led up to the founding of the Old Empires.

In short: there’s a reason tying back very directly to the fundamental nature of the Imperial government why the Imperial Couple’s formal style includes the line “Chief Executive Officers of the Imperium Incorporate”, and why the fundamental power rests – strictly according to explicit contract – with the citizen-shareholders.

Just In Case

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Most laws concern subjects that exist.  This is not, however, strictly necessary.

The most obvious example of this is the language of the Fundamental Contract and the Imperial Charter which consistently refers, when discussing the fundamental and civic rights, the requirements for citizen-shareholdership, and so forth, the word darav, “sophont”, which lies at the heart of our modern polyspecific society.  It is often less obvious than it should be to the modern student that at the time of writing, the eldrae were a worldbound species, with cladism, exotics, and artificial intelligence not merely centuries but millennia in the future.

The reasoning behind this choice has been, unfortunately, lost in time and unrecorded negotiations – and while it would be pleasant to imagine such tremendous foresight on the part of the Founders, we might perhaps more reliably credit fading hopes for the legendary mythologae and some of the wilder scribblings of the era’s fabulists and constructors of clockwork automata instead.

Another example, which pertains not merely to things which don’t exist but things which, it is generally believed, can’t exist, is the Causal Weapon and Editorial Time Machine Act (4110).  While the universe as we know it is block, and as such not susceptible to paradox or retroactive change from commonly known time-travel effects such as relativistic travel, closed timelike curves via wormhole, and acausal logic processors, this Act exists against the possibility that the generally accepted theories of temporal mechanics are incorrect and that methods of time travel exist which do not obey the Chronological Consistency Protection Theorem.  To summarize, the Causal Weapon and Editorial Time Machine Act provides for a preemptive, preventative, and summary death penalty to be applied to anyone constructing a time machine capable of retroactive change – except under highly controlled local experimental conditions for the purpose of testing the Theorem – upon charges of attempting the massively parallel cognicide of every sophont within the eventual light-cone of their destination when.

This is also an example of a law which would be very difficult to apply if the crime in question were actually to be committed.

– Ephor Valarian Elarios-ith-Elarios, “Lectures”

An Unexpected Honor

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The Office of the President of the Senate of the Empire of the Star, great and glorious beyond all greatness and glory, to Citizen-Shareholder Horulgavis Lariantinos-ith-Larios, greetings.

In the names of the Imperial Couple, the Senate, the Curia, and the Citizen-Shareholders of this Empire, in accordance with the duly executed procedures for the selection of the Senators of the Chamber of the People in Section VII, Article V of the Charter of the Empire, and under the authority of the Responsibility of Politics established in Section III, Article V of the Charter of the Empire, you are hereby summoned to serve in the Office of Senator for the 1,336th Century for the six year term commencing with the Senate’s 5,980th annual opening.

Commensurately, you are hereby requested and required to present yourself at the Office of the President of the Senate at the Great Hall of the Senate no later than one month before the Opening Session of 5980, or within six months following the dispatch of this writ, for formal induction into this Office.

Given under our hand and seal this day, 5979 Dalethmot 1,

Calcíë Videssos-ith-Videssos
Procurator of Sortition

for and on behalf of

Ches Andracanth-ith-Cyranth
President of the Senate

A Declaration of Principles

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WE:

  • ALPHAS I AMANYR, EMPEROR OF CESTIA and the UNION OF EMPIRES
  • SELEDIË SELEQUELIOS III, EMPRESS OF SELENARIA and the UNION OF EMPIRES
  • LORAN CAMRÍÄD, THÉARCH of the DEEPING
  • LIRÍEL LÁRATHYR,  QUEEN OF VERANTHYR
  • VARÍÄN LEIRAVÁL, KING OF LEIRIN for the POLYARCHY of the SILVER CRESCENT

BY right and authority of coronargyr, duly conferred by unanimous contract and proxy of the citizens of those nations over which we exercise lin-runér authority, and acting upon their behalf;

BEING aware that the foundation of our civilization is the inalienable and absolute self-ownership and sovereign will of the individual sophont, and their free and uncoerced commerce, obligation, and coadunation through the medium of the oath-contract;

UNDERSTANDING that the preservation and enforcement of these fundamental principles is the sole purpose and justification of coadunate sovereignty;

AND in eternal enmity to thieves, brigands, slavers, cultists, tyrants, and every other parasite that would place itself above free people and live by duress and expropriation, and returning us to the barbarism and perfidy of past ages;

DECLARING the foundation of the Empire of the Star as such a coadunate sovereignty, to fulfill these purposes:

  • To protect and to enforce these fundamental principles and rights, including foremost life, liberty, property, and the freedom to pursue eudaimonia, which have in times past been so grievously abused;
  • To guarantee the enforcement of oath-contracts and the rule of law;
  • To safeguard the independence and integrity of its constituents, citizens and nations alike, and to provide fora and means for the resolution of such disputes and grievances as may arise between them;
  • And thus to promote the common and mutual defense of civilization, against acts of barbarians inimical to all freedom and prosperity and cataclysms of nature alike;

AND for the furtherance of the principles of civilization in those areas where the constraints of Nature or of Trade shall require unified action, to fulfill in addition these:

  • To preserve and manage public properties, whether for its own use, for travel or communication, unowned and abandoned properties, or properties inherent to the world;
  • To carry out necessary and obligatorily public works;
  • To guarantee the security of the exercise of the freedoms of travel and trade, in order to encourage mutually profitable trade and commerce;
  • To encourage and promote the pursuit of knowledge, and to provide for its preservation and promulgation;

IN this way to best preserve, protect and defend the everlasting existence of our civilization and its unbounded potential for liberty, progress, and prosperity;

DO hereby ordain and establish this Charter.

– preamble to the Imperial Charter

Exercising Government by Means of Virtue

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Some governments maintain a rigidly defined chain of command, rights and duties, from top to bottom – from a monarch, an autocrat, an elected council, or what have you, directives emerge and are complied with by the lesser strata of administration.

This is at best theoretically the case in the Empire.  While section VIII of the Imperial Charter does instruct the runér to owe fealty and duties to their superiors and receive them from their inferiors, it leaves what precisely these consist of unsaid, and specifies that they are owed to the Empire first and the Imperial Couple second before that; and in defining the duties of the runér, it requires subordination only in the command of local garrison forces, otherwise saying that their administration shall be “in accordance with their right of coronargyr and the Imperial Mandate”.

In practice, then, the Empire’s runér are an independent and fractious group, proud of their demesnes, and prone to vigorously defend their prerogatives and perquisites to govern as they see fit.  Such cooperation as can be expected as of right is limited to that enshrined in Imperial law and their letters patent.  Moreover, while the power of a runér to govern is strictly circumscribed by the Fundamental Contract and the Imperial Charter, most well-established or founding runér command extensive tapestries of properties, investments, easements, circles, pacts, favors, and reputation within their demesne which grant them extensive socioeconomic power and influence outside their formal command of justice, defense, and the public infrastructure.

Thus, the successful Imperial Couple or upper-stratum executive learns to avoid commanding the runér when possible; and when necessary, to apply persuasion, influence, incentive and leverage in equal measure.

– from the Scroll of Staves, fifteenth recension