Her jaw moves slightly as she thinks.

"So I'm going to focus on the legalities of the situation, and that is that not having a verifiable source for your products is going to be suspicious as fuck to everyone with the power to audit things. Everyone is going to assume you're a money-laundering front, or a fence of some sort. Or possibly a competitor fucking with the market by dumping. You're going to want business advisors and bodyguards well as lawyers. In terms of actual incorporation, that's easy, we don't even need a real name or citizenship and we can get you a faceless bank account. You might have to worry about being sued if you sell electronics or other complex finished products- cloned organs, nanites, spikes- But I don't think that'll be a concern if you sell fuel, monocrystalline silicon, bulk copper, that sort of thing. You'll be theoretically based out of New York, with no additional work needed to sell anywhere in North America, except for NCR. We partner with a tax firm that can handle all your taxes. Here in Cincinnati, Tower Group Security or Touchstone Security, if you use the airport, will have the right to inspect cargo and almost always press for bribes to 'smooth the process along'. The same is true in a lot of major cities in the region."

"I don't need bodyguards because I am indestructible but business advice would be good, can you recommend people?"

"Mmm... Let me think on that. Your people will need bodyguards, then. And your cargos. Maybe if you get the recipient to provide transport and security, but actually getting things to the place they're meant to be without falling out of the truck is- Most of the service that distribution companies provide. One person is not a company- And I don't imagine you want to drive around talking to individual electronics fabricators personally."

"I'd rather not, yeah."

"How much graft are you going to tolerate and how well are you going to pay?"

"I have no personal needs and no materials costs, but I'm not sure how much that will leave in the budget even if I put absolutely all of it toward salary. I would rather not have corruption in the enterprise, I think it can be stamped out of a culture with swift and certain enforcement and there's no time to start like the present before I start a Venus colony."

"It's going to be a matter of presentation, the rules for your enterprise, your 'crew', being enforced with swiftness and certainty would certainly allow you to set ones that amount to 'no corruption', however you define corruption. Depending on what you mean by 'in the enterprise'. To get an idea of the space: Someone pays an employee to pass information about you to them despite a non-disclosure rule. Someone pays an employee extra outside the corporation to process their requests first. Same situation but it gets termed a 'rush order' and the company gets most of the money. One of your employees bribes Tower Group's gate guards to get their shipments through faster. Some of your employees pay gangs protection money. Some of your employees try to exclude certain people from the company's services. Someone threatens your employees for kickbacks, and the employee provides them instead of reporting it."

"Bribing someone outside the company doesn't, I think, present quite the same problem, and I don't mind people, like, getting bonuses for processing rush orders. I don't really want the employees compromising their personal safety if paying out to gangs and extortionists is called for, and that suggests I'm going to want to spend a lot on security to make sure it's not."

"Well, you're paying for legal advice, not business advice, so I'll return to the matter at hand. I do recommend you retain a criminal lawyer and security services as one method of attack against a perceived new competitor would be... Motivated investigations and seizures and detention of people by security companies, let's say."

"Good thought. Can you recommend someone?"

"I don't often found companies with no structural backing and a miraculous source of infinite free materials. In terms of criminal defense, I'm obligated to mention my own firm but we don't specialize in it."

She is making some kind of face. It's hard to tell what kind of face, but definitely some kind.

"And it seems like you would do well with colleagues that closely align with your viewpoints. So in that frame of view I can recommend one Mrs. Amber Bacon, of Cook and Bacon Legal- Yes, the name's an inside joke. We went to school together and Mrs. Bacon struck me as idealistic to the point of naivete at times. Though she grew out of it enough to function as a lawyer. She's a public defender and very good at it. And for security services your options are basically Touchstone, Tower, rent-a-cop outfits, or building your own security team."

"What should I know about Touchstone and Tower?"

"Tower Group are in charge of the perimeter between Cincinnati and the Badlands, as well as keeping order outside the Policed Zone in downtown. They often face combat with anarchist cells that attack the walls or use car bombs, and sometimes fight gangs inside the city. Touchstone is in charge of security for the airport and other long range travel depots, and often acts as an anti-smuggling force against the various cartels. They're owned by the same parent company, share information and resources often, and are widely considered fairly brutal and corrupt, considered necessary by some and overbearing by others. Though Tower Group is overall worse than Touchstone. Technically neither company has the power to convict people of crimes worse than misdemeanor. Merely to gather evidence, make arrests, and detain for up to thirty days for misdemeanors. The Cincinnati Police Department or Ohio State Police have to gather evidence and prosecute for crimes worse than misdemeanors, though they cooperate with Touchstone and Tower Group sometimes."

"Man, this timeline is sure in a state and by state I mean corporate oligarchy. How doomed is rolling my own security?"

"It's not... Entirely hopeless. Legally speaking, you'd need to get approval from the State of Ohio to act as a security company. There's trainings, certifications, inspections... We could help with most of that, but it's still something you'd hire someone to manage any prospective guards for. Depending on what exactly you can make, superior equipment and pay might attract a lot of semi-professionals, disciplined types who will follow your rules of engagement. I'm not sure. Keeping it limited at first, to just guarding shipments or a warehouse, would help on that front. If you want to go with informal, unofficial security - that is, not an official state-certified security force but rather, effectively, a gang you build up protecting you - you just have to avoid giving them explosive weapons with a yield of more than four ounces of TNT, guns of a caliber above zero point three inches, drones carrying weapons, or any chemical or biological agents. Armor and smaller weapons and other equipment are covered under the inherited second amendment. It doesn't give you any serious protection from investigations, but the reality is that even just a show of force will prevent the bulk of trouble that might come your way."

"I can make most things, but don't want to counterfeit money specifically, that way lies problems."

"Hence the commodities. I foresee some potential copyright issues too..."

"How seriously do people take IP law here?"

"Oh, it's violated constantly at the low level, but SensPerience spikes in particular have robust copy protection nobody understands, that has held up for over a decade. So I'm sure they can and will kill over it and convict the corpse of felonies, if they think someone can. It'd be in your interest to be unable to."

"Huh. My own anti-hacking protocols rely on my brain chip and the chip is safe for humans but this won't help if they're going to complain about duplicated, say, technology."

"If a duplicated skill spike works normally, they will freak the fuck out about that news. I have a neural port and could test that... But if a duplicated spike works abnormally instead of just not working, it could cause issues."

"I would expect it to work normally or to not work at all but I suppose it's possible they're, I don't know, sinisterly uploading people into the spikes to make them work and if the upload is disabled the spike will attempt to put malware in your head, is that the kind of thing that's remotely plausible? I can't make minds."

"Doesn't sound plausible. It's just that it interacts with brains, so the downside is high impact even if low probability. I'd try it out and cover this attempt in our confidentiality for two kilograms of gold."

"You're lowballing, unless that's all you want to fit in your bag on the way home or something. Is it safe to use one in a Faraday cage, another way it could fail would be if it has an authentication protocol and I wind up with a dupe serial number or something."

"Yes exactly and also I want to maintain a working relationship here and also gold is easily fungible unlike, say, osmium or prescription drugs. They don't require a network connection, you can use them in faraday cages."