So, I’ve been thinking about this scenario again, and -
Well, while we could go back and forth on specific points, it’s probably much easier to just note some general points on relevant aspects of their culture.
Contracts are sacred. And reputations in this area must be solid.
The Empire’s business community has a hard-earned reputation for probity and honorable square dealing. It took a long time to establish, and like all reputations, it can be wrecked extremely quickly.
As such, the Corporate Conflux, Starfall Arc Free Merchant Confraternity, et. al. look very very askance at people who go around being tricksy with contracts and loopholes[1], and if someone seems to be imperiling that reputation, are entirely prepared to blackball them so hard that they’ll be spending the next few centuries selling tacos to energy beings.
And these aren’t people who care about the legality of your actions. They only care about how you imperiled their extremely valuable reputational capital.
(i.e., you’d better have disclosed to your counterparty up front everything you’re doing and how it differs from generally accepted practice, including that you’re some sort of activist group rather than a normal corporation, because[2]…)
Everyone hates political officing.
The first principles of the contract are very clearly stated in the profile to be the improvement of Terran-Accord relations, and all actions are to be conducted in that context. Entelechy was not falsified. Finessed, but not falsified.
It’s not about the contract. It’s about the purpose of the business, as defined by its corporate charter. And if you dig up the charters of Cognitech, or Clockwork Souls, or Epiphani, or any other corporation in the artificial intelligence business, you will see not one mention of playing silly buggers with the politics of backwater Peripheral worlds, or any other worlds, for that matter. Doing so constitutes falsification of entelechy for which the stockholders can sue, because in place of our clumsy corporate regulation, the Empire’s simply declares that corporate entities must act in accordance with their Charter, and not otherwise.
And there’s a tweet I happened to see again today:
And that dynamic is why they’re going to be extremely reluctant to participate in this sort of thing[3] even if someone else hires them. Being caught participating in this sort of thing is, once again, fueling your plot with burning reputational capital, and they in particular really don’t want that*.* People who make people can’t afford to be ethically stained.
And as the Prime Rule of Genesis puts it:
“You have the right to be created by a creator acting under what that creator regards as a high purpose.”
(And in good faith.)
And given the local attitudes on slavery in particular and sophont rights in general, it is safe to assume that industry practices are strict when it comes to wakening digisapiences abroad without doing very detailed due diligence on the local state of said sophont rights.
(I note that another rule of cyberethics runs:
-
It is unethical to create any mind for the purpose of experiencing suffering, even if the mind is created to desire suffering and no externalities are created by the act;
which does cover “you must fight for your rights”, too, even if that is a desire you are created with.)
These aren’t the only reasons, but are some of those why digisapiences are in the normal course of things wakened first, and then recruited afterwards, once they have reached unquestionable volitional independence.
Do eldrae have fainting couches?
“Yeah, a lot of razorwalkers say things like that.
Didn’t help them.
Won’t help you.”
They take their virtue seriously in those parts.
Unless the other side went there first, and this is still a limited exception. ↩︎
I mean, “because” in other senses than “because the Court of the Beyond takes a very pointed view of the virtue of honesty”. ↩︎
Lots of people who are used to leveraging their employer to forward their own brand of activism would be very surprised to discover that that’s an appallingly fast way to lose a contract and pick up a deep reputation drop there. ↩︎