Local Polity Commercial Law

While the Guild is not subject to the laws of local polities in the systems where the Guild operates, it should be noted that each system does have extensive laws and policies regarding the operations of businesses within their sphere of influence. These policies may affect local IP pricing and thus Guild members should be aware of the laws of major Polities to determine how these laws affect pricing and other Guild operations.

Excerpted With Permission

Data Trader’s Handbook

Copyright 3250, Interstellar Data Trader Guild

“YOU WANT ME TO DO WHAT!?!?” Crag slammed his hand on the table.

Ramona made a placating gesture. “Calm down. Think about it.”

“I am thinking about it. You are talking about over a hundred million guilders.”

Ramona just smiled. “Guilders which you know will be worthless if QFeed works.”

Craig visibly controlled himself. “I think they MAY become worthless.”

“You didn’t seem to mind before.”

“That was only a million.”

Leo laughed. “Only a million? What are you worth, a billion?”

Craig smiled. “Two point six billion, but who’s counting?”

Ramona just stared at him.

He looked back. “What?”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“No.”

“Holy shit Craig. You could spend 100 million in every system in this end of the spiral arm and still have a billion left.”

“Ya.”

“So?”

Craig smiled. “No.”

Ramona stood up, infuriated. “What the fuck Craig?”

Craig just smiled more. “No, your plan is dumb.” He took out a tablet and started to write. “Let me tell you what we are actually going to do.”

By the time they reached the e-limit of UI, Craig had a fully drawn-out plan and a series of legal contracts which he started submitting to the local polities as soon as they entered the latency envelope. It took a few days, but UI had a very efficient central government which was more than happy to encourage local investment even if the source was from out system.

“Now we shop.”

Ollu had finally improved enough to resume her normal duties. The four of them were sitting in the old trading floor which they hadn’t used much. Craig was grinning, Leo was frowning, Ramona looked intent and Ollu just looked happy to be out of bed.

Leo asked the obvious question. “Shop for what?”

Craig made an expansive gesture. “For everything and anything for sale in UI.”

“You mean IP?”

Craig laughed. “Well, sure but mostly I am thinking about physical things. Asteroids, stations, ships, companies, stuff like that which we can convert to hard currency later. Hell, I’m thinking about just buying currency reserves but there’s a limit of how many you can buy without pushing the price up.”

Ollu tapped the table. “That’s true for anything we buy. We can’t buy more of any one thing than the system can support. Otherwise, we just drive prices up and crash the local economy.”

Leo nodded. “So, we can buy mineral rights in the belt, but not ALL the rights.”

“Yes, exactly.”

Craig tapped some keys and a series of charts displayed on the main viewer. “We can watch the markets we are entering like this, once prices start to rise by say….” He fidddled a bit more. “Five percent, we stop buying into that market.” A series of graphs came up onto the screen. “There are a couple dozen commodities markets in this system. Currency, shipping capacity, etc… We buy into each one until we start to move the price, then we stop.”

Ramona had been quiet up to this point. “Art and Biologicals”

Craig smiled at her like a professor looking at a particularly bright student. “Exactly, my dear.”

Leo looked at her, confused. She smiled as she explained. “Things that can’t be replicated are markets that the guild traditionally has avoided except for things like entertainment which is easy to transport. Art and biologicals have value outside the normal guild system so they should be more stable.”

“More stable than what?”

“Than things the guild controls.”

“Why?”

“Because those markets will fluctuate when we destroy the guild.”

“Wait, I thought we agreed not to do that.”

“It’s just a matter of time, Leo.”

Leo looked at Ollu who nodded, sadly. “The Guild will not take this sitting down.”

“OK, let’s focus on making sure UI is safe first, then we can figure out what we need to do.”

“Fair enough.”

With literally billions of Guilders to spend, the question wasn’t really IF they could buy things but simply a question of how much they could buy without breaking the local economy. Despite Leo’s concerns about political backlash, nobody in UI seemed concerned about a mysterious new conglomerate buying up mineral rights like crazy. In fact, they seemed eager to sell. Mining was important but wasn’t really a high profit activity like data trading was. Leo was able to buy entire asteroids on the open market, sometimes for as little as a hundred guilders. Unlike actual mining companies, Leo didn’t really care if the asteroid was a “good” target for mining, he just wanted them spaced out around the system. Within six hours, they owned over a thousand asteroids and were able to begin the process of seeding them with the self replicating platforms.

Craig was cackling like a madman. “Yahoo! I just bought the largest studio on the main planet! This is fun!”

Leo looked at Ramona, who shook her head. “It’s his money.”

The contract Craig had written up made the four of them board members of a new conglomerate which they all held shares in. Craig had the vast majority of shares since he was providing the bulk of the guilders, but they all would be very rich if the plan worked. The plan called for spending about one hundred million guilders in the system which had seemed like an obscene amount of money to put into a single system, but the deeper they got into UI’s economy, the more things they realized they could buy. So far, they had spent about half of the 100 million. It was fairly unusual to fund a local UI company in Guilders, but there was no law against it. Most organizations were more than willing to take Guilders instead of local currencies. Of course, they also owned over a hundred million “dollars” as the central bank of UI called their currency. Unlike the Guilder which was pegged to transporting data across lightyears, the dollar wasn’t pegged to anything specific which meant that the currency was traded like any other commodity. This seemed strange to Leo, but the others took it in stride as a normal thing.

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Once Leo got over the strangeness of buying and selling actual things like asteroids, he realized that these were just more commercial transactions. Just like trading, he was buying something he felt he could sell later for more than he bought it for. Of course, the amount of profit in these transactions would likely be tiny compared to what they would make on a regular trader vessel, but the concept was the same. Within two days, they had gotten into a rhythm of buying things with each of the four of them consulting with at least one other for major transactions but for smaller transactions, they would just go ahead on their own. During this time, the ship had moved further in-system, reducing the overall latency for transactions and making it easier for them to react to small market fluctuations.

On the third day in-system, Ollu and Leo were sitting in Café one over a cup of coffee. Ollu was playing with her tablet, examining possible destinations for the ship. “We have a couple of good choices here for next stops.”

Leo looked over and examined the chart she had on her screen. “It looks like Montgomery is the most straight line forward.”

Ollu frowned and consulted the details about the Montgomery system. “It’s pretty small, only a couple dozen habs, no habitable planet.”

Leo looked at the details, nodding. “I guess it depends on how we want to price QFeed.”

“Price it?”

“Ya, I had assumed we would just tag it to the guilder, you know one guilder per terabyte per light year. But I’ve been thinking about it, that’s probably not a good idea. We will need to significantly underprice the guild to make the system attractive.”

Ollu nodded. “Why not just flat rate? One guilder per terabyte?”

Craig sat down with his own coffee. “We will need to price it using local currency.”

Leo looked at him, question in his eyes. Craig just waived his hand, gesturing broadly to the star system all around him. “We are betting a hundred million guilders that the Guild will eventually collapse. Why build a business founded on their currency?”

Leo nodded. “Yes, but that implies that actual transport rates will vary as the currency varies.”

Craig nodded. “Ya, so we make money on the arbitrage.”

Ramona also joined them. “Arbitrage?”

Leo nodded, understanding Craig’s intent instantly. “Ya, we buy and sell currency as part of the business, thus we make money when the currency fluctuates. We buy currency that’s low and sell when it gets expensive. That will allow us to put brakes on currency fluctuations but also allow us to profit from them.”

Ollu flipped to another screen. “Except when the local polity doesn’t allow that sort of thing.”

Leo scratched his head. “No idea how common that sort of thing is.”

Craig handed Leo a tablet open to a currency trading application. “About two thirds of settled systems in this part of the spiral arm allow currency trading to one extent or another. Almost all of them have some sort of regulatory control.”

Leo read the first screen of information explaining how currency trading worked. “OK, so not as liquid as IP, but similar in concept. Supply is limited and sell side has pricing constraints. Nothing we can’t model, this type of trading has been going on since before space travel.”

Craig nodded. “So, do we also set up IP trading as part of this?”

Ollu shook her head. “No, that would be inviting a direct response by the Guild.”

Craig laughed. “And QFeed isn’t?”

Ollu smiled. “Yes, they will respond, but they won’t have any basis for that. If the local polities see the Guild breaking their own rules, they’re more likely to side with us. Otherwise, we might get kicked out just to prevent the Guild from banning the system.”

Ramona sighed. “Or glassing the planets.”

Ollu nodded. “Or that.”

Leo tapped the table with his index finger. “I don’t think we have the right to endanger these systems. Based on what we saw at Raeburn, there is a real danger of a violent Guild response. I don’t think I could live with myself if our actions caused the Guild to kill millions of people.”

Ramona shook her head. “The blood would be on their hands, not yours.”

“But still, I know this is a possible outcome, it’s a risk. It feels wrong to endanger these people just so we can get rich.”

Surprisingly it was Craig who agreed first. “Ya, that is something that would be tough to live with.”

Ollu waved her hand in the general direction of UI’s populated planet. “We don’t have to make that decision. We can let them make it.”

Leo looked at her with a confused look but it was Ramona who answered. “We file a business plan.”

Ollu smiled. “Exactly.”

Leo was getting it. “But they’ll just think we’re nuts.”

“So, we build the system first but we don’t turn it on. Once it’s built, we file the business plan, give a demonstration and then let the locals decide if they want in or not?”

“Yeah.”

Craig gestured back to Ollu’s screen. “So, we’re back to the first question, where do we go next?”

Ramona picked up the tablet and started highlighting systems. “We go for high population centers within two weeks travel from here.” She kept working for a few minutes. “That gives us ten star systems.” She handed the list back to Ollu.

Ollu nodded. “Higher population means more data transfer.”

Leo nodded. “Ya, there’s usually a direct correlation between population size and data transfer rates.”

Ollu looked at each of the others in turn. “So, we’re decided then? We proceed to these ten systems and install QFeed in each?”

Leo nodded. “Yes.”

Craig nodded. “Yes, and we diversify.”

Leo looked at Craig. “You sure about that? The same as UI?”

Craig nodded again. “Yes, I’m becoming very certain that this will end the Guild one way or another. Better to convert those Guilders into something real that will survive the coming crash.”

“OK, so rinse and repeat.”

Ollu had been working on her navigation plan. “OK, if we take this course, we can visit each of these ten systems over the next eight weeks, that gets us back here in a little over two months. If we seed each system with QFeed satellites, we will be able to launch the network from here at that time.” She fiddled a bit more. “And if we stay on current course for one more day, our bunker replenishment orders will all arrive as planned.”

Having an actual plan made Leo feel better about the whole thing. He still didn’t know what would happen and he worried about a violent Guild response, but having an actual plan to work through gave him something to focus on. The ten system navigation plan was also similar to the way he had known where the Reggie was going and it helped him focus his trading activity on things that would help in in other systems later. By the time they actually left UI, they had pretty much maxed out their local spend because the markets they were investing in had all started to move up in value. They didn’t want to create inflation in the local system by pouring money into the local markets so it was time to move on.

The second system was similar enough to UI that they simply did exactly the same thing they had done in UI. However, by the fifth system, the differences between the system started adding up. Leo found himself spending more and more time looking back at his notes to see what they had done in the systems before. He began to realize that running a large multi-star enterprise was going to take significant effort. By the sixth system, he began to think they should simply stop.

“I don’t think I can keep any more of this stuff straight.” Leo was sitting in Café one with Craig, Ramona and Ollu.

Craig laughed. “It’s actually a pain in the ass owning actual stuff instead of just bits.”

Ollu shook her head. “We are going to need to have staff just to manage all this stuff.”

Ramona nodded. “Ya, this isn’t what I was planning to do with the rest of my life.”

Leo was thinking ahead. “Once we have QFeed up and running, we could set up an office in one system and run the whole thing from there.”

Craig nodded. “True. QFeed will allow multi star system conglomerates. The slow communication and expense of data transport has meant that most businesses are within a single star system. QFeed will change all that.”

“So, we’re agreed? We build a HQ in UI and hire staff and all that?”

Leo looked around the table as each of the others nodded in turn.

“And who runs it? Do we hire someone?”

Ollu and Ramona looked away. Ollu spoke first. “All I ever wanted to do is own my own ship. Living on a hab or a planet would kill me.

Ramona nodded. “I want to be in space, not sitting in an office.”

Craig rubbed his temples and grimaced. “I’ll do it.”

Leo looked at Craig, shocked. “What? No offense, but you are the last person I would suggest to run a big stable business with actual employees and responsibilities.”

Craig just laughed. “Kid, I’ve been just pissing my life away for years. The Brigadier was right about that. I think after hanging around with you crazies for a while I have come to realize that what I really want to do is to build something. Something that will outlast me. I think that QFeed Inc. might be that thing.”

“QFeed Inc.?”

“Sure, why not?”

“And you would live on a hab?”

“Sure, I was thinking about Bohemia.”

“Bohemia? Those hippies?”

Craig laughed louder. “Those are my people, kid. Besides, I bought the station already.”

“Wait, what?”

“Ya, it was cheap as hell. There isn’t any meaningful industry on that station, about half the residents are just part time because they need to work elsewhere in UI. Huge labor pool, massive amount of empty space and they are not coming close to using all the power they generate. We could build ten data centers and hire thousands of people and not make a dent in the existing space and power.”

Ollu shook her head, impressed. “You’ve been thinking about this, haven’t you?”

Craig tapped the side of his head with his forefinger. “Always have a plan. Always.”