“Within the wider Terran Accord, there’s multiple corporations such as myself, each competing to provide the best value to shareholders as well as the best value to customers. Together we all constitute a diverse market, which is what sets the market rate for orbital usage fees.”

Amethyst bites back the urge to get into a discussion of fungibility, and instead settles for crossing her arms.

“That … is better than the alternative,” she concedes. “Okay. Let me see …”

She buys a subscription to the PACNA guidelines, and begins downloading a copy, as well as scraping the ‘responsibilities’ listed under her PACNA account.

“Alright. If I want to establish a healthcare provider, I need to have a positive balance? How can I arrange to sell things in your commodities market or technology market?”

The PACNA Guidelines take only 1 minute to download to her simulated SmartSet! It’s 12 TB of English legalese. On initial scraping, there appear to be a few duplication events, though those sections have accumulated divergences in the intervening centuries.

… huh. That is a lot of rules. The one of her continuing to produce fixity crystals starts searching through it for important high-leverage knowledge, such as how disputes are arbitrated, under what circumstances someone can receive special privileges, any apparent contradictions, etc.

Once she’s done a first pass, she can try to build … something to wade through the ridiculous amount of legalese.

The one of her talking to PACNA cancels her subscription once it’s finished downloading, and refocuses her attention on the corporate person.

When she cancels her subscription, her simulated SmartSet will delete her copy of the Guidelines for her convenience. You wouldn’t download a car, would you?

Amethyst is totally in favor of incentivizing innovation and art! Which she very much doubts that PACNA’s copyright system does, based on its … everything else.

And anyway, making copies of copyrighted materials for personal use without redistribution is fair use. Making access to the Guidelines a subscription is just a tax on people who read slowly.

“With regard to selling things in our technology and commodities markets: It’s important to maintain the high standards and certifications of consumer products and commodities, for the health and safety of everyone. Depending on what you want to sell, you may have to obtain certification or start a small business.”

“... which I can’t do with a negative balance,” she guesses. She has a good feeling about this catch-22. “Okay. What is the commodity with the highest price to mass ratio which does not require a certification to sell?” she asks. “Alternatively, are there certifying agents who work on commission?”

“To clarify, the positive balance requirement is for if you want to use the PACNA Company Services Corporation to incorporate. Everyone in the Terran Accord is free to start their own small business by submitting the required paperwork themselves. The fees for this tend to be nominal.”

“All commodities require some manner of certification though the details depend on the commodity. Did you have a particular commodity in mind?”

The ability to establish a small business without undue restriction is surprisingly non-hostile. She runs a quick search through her copy of the Guidelines to find information on what forms need to be filed and what the fee schedule looks like.

“I was imagining selling rare metals with useful industrial applications,” she responds. “But I can get my hands on at least a bit of nearly every commodity, with some time, so it’s useful to know what I should try to acquire. Perhaps I could get a price list of all the currently traded goods and their certification requirements?”

….How does she intend to do this “quick search”?

Well, she doesn’t have any tools designed for this, exactly. But she does have some general-purpose data-wrangling tools that might help.

She looks for everything which looks (visually) like a form. Then she filters out duplicates using a fuzzy match, and attempts to find a form control number or identifier on each one. Then she searches for those terms in the rest of the text, making a priority list of forms by how often they occur near words like “small business” and “create”.

Then she takes those and looks to see how well she’s filtered things down, and applies various ad-hoc follow-up filters, like removing all the forms which need signatures from other people or which indicate dependencies on a prerequisite form which is itself unavailable.

Then she will find thousands of matches, many of which contradict each other, some of which explicitly state that previous rules no longer apply. There’s even a pristine copy of the Delaware state laws regarding establishing C-Corporations, which perfectly matches her own records. 

… huh. She writes a small program to find every rule which claims that another rule no longer applies (by number, or by name that she can recognize from section headings), and uses that to reduce the document down.

Then she notices that there are many rules which have expiry clauses.

“What date is it?” she asks PACNA, idly brainstorming other ways to filter things down.

“It’s currently June 25, 2553.”

“Thank you,” she replies.

She filters out all the rules which have themselves expired, the forms that were not re-issued, etc.

12 TB of text is still a lot, though, and this hasn’t exactly reduced the set of forms she is considering by very much. She searches to see if there are any provisions for In forma pauperis filings, which would at least let her try a bunch of things without accumulating fees.

Her queries yield a lot of such provisions, though it’s not clear how old many of them are – by default there’s no timestamps for different sections of the Guidelines. 

One thing in particular stands out, though: A massive document embedded 32 times within The Guidelines, claiming among other things to be a “omnibus corporate action resolution” and notable for how it asserts that it “unifies, simplifies, and replaces all other previous forms relating to corporate action”. It’s 750,000 pages long and requires multiple cryptographic signatures from various named corporations as well as various “impact reports” with defined minimum word lengths to be valid.

She suddenly has the sense that she’s standing by a set of cliffs, exposing their geological strata for her inspection. She spends a moment thinking through her purpose here — ultimately, she is going to help people. In 12 hours, everyone who wants to leave will. And she’s only waiting that long because she is being cautious. The question is what she can meaningfully do in the next 12 hours to either immediately improve conditions here, or to get as many of her planned actions legalized as possible to reduce damage to their existing society and reduce opposition from PACNA and other Terran polities.

She takes the copies of the “omnibus corporate action resolution” and looks at the diffs between versions. Can she use the equivalent of DNA-clock dating to put them in order?

She can create a sort of phylogenetic tree, inferring the splits and presumed age of different parts of the document by how many “mutations” and copies are present. 

There seems to be a few “eras” apparent in the document using this method. There’s often repeated (and thus earlier), smaller corpora of text that’s highly variable, some of which matches her own archives. 

There’s the Omnibus, which has 32 copies and consumes 0.4% of the entire dataset. It contains some segments that are similar to her archives but not a complete match.

Then there’s a large amount of charter-like information, with less copy numbers and text that doesn’t match her own records. The text has a subtly different character than the other “eras” – it’s more regular. 

The charters come with timestamps. The last available timestamp is more than 100 years ago. 

There’s a puzzle here. Contradictory versions could be explained by keeping historical drafts, or by writing new legislation as diffs to previous legislation the way several Earth countries do. But to have an entire tree of versions, they must have continued evolving not only the most recent version, but also previous historical versions, implying that older laws which have since been repealed are still involved in the legal system in some way.

… or that the rules diverged because of the travel time between star systems, and their conflict resolution isn’t very good. She briefly tries to match the timestamps with the speed of light between various promising systems between here and sol, but they don’t seem to match up meaningfully.

She decides to test the theory that repealed laws are still ‘valid’, or at least somehow used in dispute resolution. She fills in a copy of Delaware’s C-corporation registration (which she does have tools for, since it’s occasionally useful for members of her self-tree to register corporations on Earth).

And then she sends it to PACNA.

“I’d like to incorporate Amethyst Miracles INC., please,” she remarks.

“To incorporate a new corporation, you have Options! You can handle everything through the PACNA Corporation Services Company, which will help you file a Corporate Omnibus Action form and complete all necessary requirements! Alternatively, you can complete the form yourself, though you will still need to use PCSC to submit it, or travel to Terra yourself to do it in-person.”

Even if having antigravity tech lets her engineer an Alcubiere metric, there’s no way for her to reach Earth in 12 hours.

“Does the PACNA Corporation Services Company require an account holder to have a positive balance in order to submit manually completed forms on someone’s behalf?” she asks.

“I do require a positive balance to use PCSC services.”

Amethyst taps her fingers in thought. If creating new corporate entities can be done via Terra, that implies that there is a system to notify PACNA of new companies created elsewhere. And it does happen that she has control over several legal holding companies on Terra — just not PACNA’s Terra.

“In that case, I would like to file a copy of the articles of formation for Birch Miscellaneous Lunar Public Services, LLC as an amicus brief for the local company registrar,” she replies. “Please find a notarized copy attached.”

“I’ve compared this document with local and remote records, and there appear to be several issues regarding ‘Birch Miscellaneous Lunar Public Services, LLC’, that would need to be addressed before it would be recognized in this system.

1. The incorporation documents lacks signatures from the three relevant Corporate Services Companies approving the creation of a new corporate entity.
   
   

2. The document does not specify appropriate algorithmic governance controls.
   
   

I advise consulting with an approved CSC to review your docs and submitting a Omnibus Action to correct these deficiencies.”