"...because I feel like it's my fault, for having trouble relaxing, that you feel like - maybe that's a Conspiracy, that maybe no one anywhere actually likes being hurt, and if you have a nice uncomplicated time with someone who you can tell is loving it then you'll. Uh. Move your probabilities specifically on the question of whether we made up masochists. But I have been warned against being a too-Good person with a too-big headband so I'll cut it out."

"Carissa, I deeply appreciate your efforts in this regard, may follow up on this later, and would right now like to follow the dath ilani best practice of just completely not talking about this in the context of who stays employed by the project.  As in, we don't talk about this at all, until after everything has been settled, and this meeting has been adjourned, without that having ever been a consideration."

"If you think that's an absolutely terrible way to approach this issue, I'm open to having an extended meta-level digression about whether I'm being overly Good here or just Lawful, though I'd want to free Ione, Asmodia, or Meritxell to sit that one out if they wanted."

"Nope I think that's a good plan, let's make project decisions entirely off one of who is good for the project or what is good for your own personal ability to make project decisions without feeling guilty. Which, it sounds like, is coming up with a bunch of appealing options for the girls and letting them pick one, and surveying the remaining girls to make sure that the options sound appealing enough that they're not scared of being fired?"

"Yeah.  I would have expected a compensation clause in the original contract, actually, if people were going in for a week that carried with it a significant chance of some very large consequence for them of spending the next 5 years in top secret info lockdown, for which they wouldn't otherwise be paid an excess wage... is that already in here?"

The cleric of Abadar attempts to flip through the Asmodean-written contract looking to see if a clause like that already exists.  Does it?

It says compensation is 300gp for one week's time, to be renegotiated after one week, and to at no point be less than their standard military pay if they'd been deployed as planned.

Right.  Their actual alternative wasn't being computer programmers, it was that they were otherwise heading to the Worldwound.  Most top-secret sequestration conditions are probably nicer than that, aren't they, so long as living conditions go.

It is sometimes hard to remember how Golarion works, and casting an illusion of Civilization drawn from his own mind didn't help with his sense of reality.

He hasn't actually said tsi-imbi(*) at any point, now that he thinks of it.  Kind of pointless now.  Still, universalizable rules.  He'll do it next time he's alone.

(*)  Said by dath ilani when they think 'this seems impossible, I might be insane', and the people around them should get them to a psychiatric institution if they don't seem to be correctly checksumming immediate reality.  An emergency signal; never said as a joke.

"All right.  Then I think we take that as our baseline option to potentially improve upon later, though I'll want to check what the actual options being offered to them are and whether I feel a need, or just want, I guess, to call in further favor from Cheliax to improve them."

Wow does that still feel awful.  Well, everyone warns about that, and everyone is apparently right, go figure.

"That leaves the question of what kind of contracts we see for the eight who stay.  In dath ilan, people in this kind of position would usually be offered some of their compensation in the form of an expected share of future profits, and this is something that we have to negotiate with actual Cheliax at some point, but at least in dath ilan, that agreement would be produced by us collectively negotiating with Cheliax, especially you four because you're the ones who seem relatively irreplaceable."

"Actually, now that I think about it, Pilar is not exactly all that replaceable?  She should arguably have something like a tier-one-and-half status, based on a suspicion of greater-than-first-apparent impacts of divine interventions; a status that gets promoted to tier one if Pilar turns out to be way more important than just saving my temporary life once and having snacks."

"Anyways, I'm still waiting on Cheliax to offer me a first-run contractual relationship between Project Lawful's employees and Cheliax, where I'm not quite sure why they don't have one, yet.  Except that my guess is that they want more than a week worth of data to make up their minds, and the trouble there is that I don't feel it's particularly prudent to, like, work on metallurgy or roadbuilding for a month without any contract.  We could potentially have a crude contract for the first research that gets done, with intent to renegotiate it after seeing how early results play out, but I do want any contract.  And -"

"What I'm getting at here is that I can successfully sit down in a room with you and figure out what you think Project Lawful wants from Cheliax, or what you want, which is more than I've been successfully able to do with Cheliax itself.  Except for one person who didn't seem empowered to do binding negotiations, and who I think isn't back from Hell yet after the Nidal assault."

"Well, I have even less authority than that, but we can at least try something, and send someone down to the site manager's office in case there's a contract ready and waiting for you." There is. She very firmly told the people writing it not to get caught doing anything tricky but she half expects Keltham to object even to a bunch of things that weren't intentional tricks. "And personally I'm delighted about some share of future project revenues, once we all have headbands which aren't even bottlenecked on money, money later's about as good as money now for me...." She wants to not sound too rehearsed, because in alterCheliax she wouldn't have an inbuilt instinct that contracts will destroy you if you don't have a specific plan for avoiding that.

Don't worry, Cheliax.  Keltham is a programmer.*

He may not yet have an intuition for everybody being out to burn him all of the time, but he sure does have an intuition for asking "Well, what if this measurement here was broken and returned negative a trillion gold pieces?"  If you try to make sure you can't be screwed over in a contract by malicious gods, you'll catch a lot of human malice along the way.

(*)  A dath ilani concept essentially untranslatable to Taldane in its connotations and origins; the two-syllable word 'programmer' has an expanded six-syllable form that reads creator-of-raw-causality, where 'creator' in turn implies 'one who accepts responsibility for all consequences of creation whether intended or not' (the same word that appears in expanded 'parent' as 'creator-of-sapient-life') and 'raw-causality' means 'raw math, close to the bare bones of reality'.  The nearest Taldane translation is in fact 'creator-god' if creator-gods worked to a much smaller scale.

Keltham shall endeavor to send to see if a proposed contract has conveniently arrived, then.  He sort of assumed he'd be told if it had, but then, that was sort of a stupid assumption.

While they wait for that, he'll take a quick run at explaining equity, options, vesting, fixed and event-dependent components of compensation, the interest of individual employees in reducing variance on core income even at some cost in expected money because of their logarithmic utility functions over money, the standard internally-expected-return-on-marginal-capital formula that determines where a company places its standing limit buy and sell orders for its own stock into the general market at any given time, and other basics that shouldn't be too hard for the Project's better mathematicians, right.

It would have been kind of nice to know this stuff before selling her soul except Meritxell doesn't even think she knows this stuff now that she's been told it.

"I assume devils know all this stuff already but if they haven't gotten this complicated they're going to love you so much."

...this is not 'complicated'.  Those are the straightforward automatic consequences of the structure of corporations with divisible financialized ownership of uncertain future incomes, made out of their internal contractual relationships with employees who have standardly human-shaped incentives.

What does Cheliax do instead.

"....uh, you tell people 'I'll give you a silver a day if you show up for work' and then on days when they show up they get a silver. Unless they aren't worth it in which case you tell them to stop showing up."

Does Cheliax by any chance not have - pieces of companies getting sold around between people who own those pieces of companies?  Does Cheliax by any chance not have companies, just people paying other people to do things?

"I don't think I understand what a company is as distinct from - my father owns a lot of ships, and hires people to send them places to get cargo?"

Keltham is now RECALCULATING SEVERAL IMPORTANT PARAMETERS OF LOCAL REALITY.  Please HOLD.

While he does that, some people bring the proposed contract! It's still a draft with several peoples' comments written on it, but maybe it'll still be useful to him. 

(It being a draft is one of several ways Cheliax is protecting itself against Keltham finding the contract suspicious.)

The contract proposes a Kelthamishly fair division of the gains from trade that the Crown captures through its normal mechanisms of taxation, which are that taxes are collected by local governance and the bulk passed on to higher levels of governance. It proposes measuring this a couple of different ways and using the middle measurement, and referring disputes to Hell for arbitration. It can be paid out in Cheliax's fiat currency, backed by Hell, or in gold if they have enough gold. It predicts that Cheliax would learn all these things a year later, if Keltham did this work elsewhere, and does not want Cheliax worse off for being the place where Keltham did it, so the fair division (in the contract's reckoning) decreases substantially over time.

...they are probably not trying to cheat him, because if so they would have tried to carefully argue him around to this viewpoint before just dumping it on him.

Okay, so, first of all, this seems to be based on a model where, it's implied, no country can protect intellectual property, like at all, and countries just rip each other off about it without any attempt to pay patentgratuities on anything.  And that there's no such meaningful thing as a trade secret, human capital, it being hard for other corporations to just completely copy everything you do -

So maybe Keltham is just misunderstanding how things work around here, but, what if they used other countries' observed abilities to copy Cheliax while this starts happening, as a proxy for Cheliax's counterfactual abilities to copy other countries, maybe very moderately discounted if somebody feels strongly about Cheliax actually being better at copying or at keeping trade secrets and that mattering to fairness?  There's an obvious-seeming formula which uses their excess GDP growth to discount Cheliax's excess GDP growth, modulo above-trend exports of Cheliax to those countries under an assumption that the export prices capture around half the gains from trade i.e. those countries getting richer by trading with Cheliax... actually, no, that shouldn't be discounted because Cheliax would experience similar gains if Keltham set up elsewhere, never mind.

Point being, Keltham is maybe just wrong here, but also suspects that Cheliax underestimates the degree to which Cheliax will become richer than other countries if those other countries try to get away with ripping off the Project and paying nothing on the intellectual property they try to steal.  This part can potentially be settled by writing some observable proxies into the contract rather than arguing it out in advance, at the expense of contract complexity.

The tax system is confusing and Keltham is simply failing to parse it.  Cheliax is actually made up of a bunch of other countries with their own separate economies and tax systems?

How does a world invent fiat currency before it invents stock markets, that's insane.  Who would try to hold that much currency, currency is not an investment.

Nobody has attached any reasonable bounds on any of the variables referenced in this contract-code, there's no mention that taxes from some subregion can't be returned as negative a trillion gold pieces and cause the Project to owe Cheliax five entire copies of Golarion, there's no minimum gold amount that Cheliax definitely thinks it has available in the way of gold...

"The using other countries' observed ability to copy Cheliax thing seems like a good idea. Have we...at no point gotten around to trying to explain what the nobility are. I guess we haven't while I was in the room."

This has in fact not occurred.

What new Golarion Doomfact now awaits poor Keltham?

"So I don't know tons of history, but, stylized, you've got a bunch of farmers, and they get periodically raided by bandits and wild animals. So whichever farmer is the best at fighting bandits and wild animals collects protection money from all the others, and gets even better at fighting bandits and wild animals, and eventually they own a bunch of land on which other people work, and they protect that land from bandits and wild animals, and they're much richer than the people who work the land. Now, say there's a dragon. They can't handle a dragon! Or say that the neighboring person of similar standing tries to invade and kill them and take their stuff. They'd really like to have alliances with other landowner-defenders. Some of those alliances will be on equal terms - I defend you, you defend me - and some will be on terms of - you swear to commit your forces where I command it, when I command it, and in exchange I'll extend my protection to you. And in most places, you build up layers of this. A small landowner-defender is a Baron, and a Count is a landowner-defender who has Barons pledged to him, and a Duke is a landowner-defender that has Counts pledged to him, and the Archduke of Sirmium whose summer villa we borrowed is one of the Dukes who duchy is particularly big and powerful and important, and Dukes pledge to the Queen. 

And the way taxation happens is the barons get the grain from the farmers who work the land and they pass some on up."

Where does suggesting a reorganization of Cheliax fall in the category of Things One Doesn't Speak About Around Here?

"I wouldn't say it to the face of any people who might lose all their stuff in the reorganization, and it has the same terrible track record when tried as overthrowing the government does, but none of us are going to feel vaguely terrified if you declare that actually there's some clever way to just see the Queen's will done everywhere."

Keltham knows that he explained this part already, because Keltham was there, the point of reorganizing is not that people lose their stuff, you're supposed to trade around the jellychips in a way that leaves everybody better off.  This system sounds ludicrously inefficient and if it was reorganized there would be gains to the whole system that could then be distributed.

Is it possibly the case that nobody in Golarion ever suggests anything like this?