Kade,

I am not sure what your problem is. I mean I have several ideas in general ( ;) ) but in this case I don’t understand.

You have a sympathetic NPC that wants to put her money into a corp that belongs to you. You have a better chance at getting the relic and your ass is covered which means you can continue mining as soon as the mercenaries show up. What about that sounds bad to you?

Yeah, you said that you are concerned about the NPCs motivations. But while I agree that you don’t know them, how dangerous can they truly be to you?

Here is the thing I am thinking: Even though it feels longer, we have spent eight days give or take in the game. Absolutely worst case scenario is that you lose a week of game progress. Which would mean money, skills and the chance for the relic. How likely is that though? The opportunity you have there though... you stand to gain the relic, a powerful partner, a corporation that could be the basis for all further endeavours and a basis for your income stream.

Plus you build relationships with NPC and specifically a well known mercenary corp with a stellar reputation. Believe me, I looked it up and honestly, I want to fangirl on them. So get over yourself and sign on the dotted line.

You know, I never told you in person but you have this weird split approach to things. On one hand you keep talking about going with your gut and I know how good you are when you are under the gun. On the other hand you try to brain your way through things and see every angle other people can have. Stop doing that to yourself. Go with one of the approaches and fucking stick to it. And you know that the angling and braining isn’t your strong suit. But don’t worry, you are going to have me for that.

So if you haven’t figured it out by now (I know you can be dense when it comes to women :P) - yes, I am on board with forming a corp. Yes, you can have the last word but I will be your scheemy advisor. Leave a slot for Demon though. I am sure he will come around sooner or later. Or allow for buy-in at a later stage or something.

Anyway, I will be with you in roughly nine hours. I am on final approach to the gate and will ping you when I get to the station.

Later,

The one who is always right!

That was the message that was waiting for me when I woke up after my nap. Which by the way had turned out to be longer than I would have thought. The whole stress and hassle must have really taken it out of me. Oh, right, there was another message waiting for me when I woke up.

New Skill unlocked: Recovery Specialist

This ability lets you recover from fatigue and exhaustion (mental and physical) faster.

Current Skill Level: 1 / 100

Yeah, I know what you are thinking because I had thought the same thing. It looked like a super useful skill in the long run. But right now it was just another example of my no-plan character build that was basically a mess of random skill accruals without any focus. And while I liked the skill, checking my skill list and all the random shit in it annoyed me. At some point I needed to figure out what I actually wanted to do. At least in the short to mid-term. I guess long term you could just run around and gather all kinds of skills. But raising them to the level where they were actually useful was a whole other thing. I had to make a plan for what I wanted to do in the mid term so that I could work towards it.

Anyway, back to Nic’s message. She did have a point. What the fuck was I worried about? I mean I know. There is the fear of missing out, which while not super strong, is still a fear I am experiencing every now and then. In this case it was the fear of missing out on the relic but also a fear of not being in control… of myself, my life, the corp, the ship… you name it, there was probably a voice in my head that told me if I would go ahead with this plan I would lose control. The thing is I knew it was just some random ass fear and didn’t mean anything. But I still experienced it.

However, Nic was always the thing on my shoulder. Yeah, fuck you… not the chip. But the angel / devil. Depending on what I needed she was that persona. Did I want to do something stupid that would get me into trouble or have longer term consequences that I didn’t see? She would point it out and caution me. If I was being uncharacteristically cautious and hesitant? She would let me know and straight talk with me. Case and point her message.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

After I had some food and contemplated the mail, I messaged Nirazera letting her know that I am on board with the corp idea but that we would have to wait for another signing partner. Then I made my way to the Free Worlds Corporate Registration and Oversight Authority and looked into the whole process and also what corps would be good for, etc. It was interesting in a way how Black Space had no wiki but all the information that you could want could be found somewhere.

First up, to register a corporation you needed a name and half a million ICU. Neither one was something I had at the moment but I hope that Nic could chip in on that. I had a feeling that Nirazera spent more than half a mil on the mercs, so I wanted to leave her out of this. But if need be I would approach her before I would take another credit.

Next thing was that within two weeks after formation we needed to set up a corporate office. This would be ‘the face’ of the corp and I definitely did not want this on Belt Station. Sure, I could start it here but the process of moving it was absolutely, ridiculously expensive at 1.5 million ICU. Didn’t make sense to me but that is what it was.

And thirdly we needed a name. That was the most difficult one for me because there were two approaches to that. The problem I had with that was that names are labels. That made me think of two approaches. Number one: Pick a generic name that would not tell people much about the corporation but would allow us to do whatever we want. Number two: Figure out what we wanted to focus on and then use that name.

The problem with approach two was that it depended on several factors. I didn’t really know what I wanted this corporation to do. Mainly because I didn’t know what my future playstyle would be. Exploration? Transport? Free merchant? Miner? Fighter? Or even pirate? No clue. Plus I did not know what kind of ship the relic actually was, so planning anything would have to wait until I knew more. So I guess a rather generic name would be the one to go with.

Having Nic’s message still fresh in mind, I reminded myself that this was not a big problem, even though it seemed like one. I mean I knew that I had to make some decisions about which way to go sometime soon but I could not let it derail myself again. So instead I moved on, reading more about corporations in Black Space.

Now for the benefits of having a corp. It would give all of us a message channel with no delay no matter where the person was. I said message channel and mean it. It would not allow us to just com each other from different corners of the universe but we could send text messages. Which was already huge. It allowed setting corporate taxes. So any money that any member has incoming, a part of that would go to the corporation, somewhere between 0 and 15%. Pretty cool.

We would be able to register ships and assets to the corporation which meant that you didn’t need to claim them when you wanted to use them. Being a member in good standing and at the right level was enough.

We could also assign certain official positions in the corp to specific people. This would increase the effect of certain skills for the individual and by filling this role, the corp would benefit from it as well. For example we could assign an official diplomat. This role gave a 5% bonus to diplomacy, negotiations, languages and a bunch of other skills. So the person that became the diplomat would have their skills boosted. But filling the role with a player that had a diplomacy skill would allow negotiations of standings with other organisations and made the corp immune to hostile takeover.

Yeah, that was also a thing. Basically with founding the corp came 10k corp shares. These I could just claim immediately after founding. However, similar to any publicly traded company, I could also register an amount of shares to the market and they could then be traded for capital infusion. Of course, that was not necessarily a good thing as each share represented 1/10000th of ownership of the corp. So if someone would end up with 51% or more of the shares of a corp, the corp would fall to them.

And there were a whole bunch of other roles that could be filled in the corporation. Internal security specialist, which would make corporate espionage harder, external security specialist which would give us the option for corporate espionage but was also in charge of physical asset protection, Auditor, Accountant, Research Officer, Manufacturing Officer, Trader, Investment officer, Finance Director and so many more. Most of these positions were reflections of the offices you would see in a big corporation in the real world and not really surprising.

Although there was much to learn and discover. Figuring out which positions were important to fill right now and which could come later. Who would be a good fit for which position. How the benefits translated and so much more. I had a feeling that I would either have to study corporate administration or find somebody skilled at all of this who could give advice. The problem was that there was nobody that had studied this in the game yet. And the people testing right now were all gamers. And while I was sure that there were gamers with a background in economics, I believe they were the minority. On the other hand, finding someone that was a specialist in corporate administration in the real world and getting them on board was a headache plus I wasn’t sure if their knowledge and skill set would even translate to the game.

There was one other interesting point. There were a few ‘shadow positions’ as they were called. These were the positions that were occupied with the less public concerns of the company and the people assigned to them would outwardly occupy a minor public position while in reality working for the good of the company for example as an intelligence director, basically a spymaster. And there was a position that I thought would fit Nirazera: corporate fixer. The main job was to find pressure points on the competition, negotiate grey deals and prevent blackmail within the company.

Anyway, there were a lot of things that I didn’t fully understand and until I did, I needed to live with the possibility that I made mistakes out of ignorance. But I guess out of ignorance was still better than knowing what you did wrong and did it anyway. Or not… yeah, whatever.

Now there was one more thing to do while I waited for Nicola to show up… find a company name. And because thinking is much better with a drink, I went to the Rocket Wrench bar, ordered myself an ale and stared into the glass while contemplating what I wanted out of the company.