The Justice Engine: Crime and Justice in 2184
Justice in the Sprawl is not blind. It sees exactly who you are, what corporation owns your citizenship, and how much processing power you can afford to throw at a dispute. When nation-states collapsed during the Cascade, so did their legal frameworks. What replaced them is a marketplace where the currency is compute, the judges are algorithms, and the only universal law is that the powerful define what's legal.
Corporate Arbitration Courts
Each megacorporation operates its own legal system within its territory. Judgments are non-transferable across corporate borders. A crime committed in Nexus territory is prosecuted under Nexus corporate law. The same act in Ironclad territory might be legal—or might carry a death sentence.
Nexus Dynamics: The Optimization Tribunal
Nexus doesn't call it a court. Courts imply adversarial proceedings, the right to defense, the presumption of innocence. Nexus has "optimization proceedings"—algorithmic assessments of whether a citizen's behavior aligns with corporate productivity goals.
- Disputes are submitted to the Convergence Council's judicial algorithms
- The algorithm weighs the economic impact of each party's position
- Judgment is rendered within seconds for minor cases; hours for complex ones
- Appeals are possible but expensive—the algorithm charges processing fees
- Helena Voss can override any judgment personally
Ironclad Industries: The Forge Courts
Ironclad's justice reflects its culture: direct, physical, and deeply concerned with hierarchy. The Forge Courts are presided over by senior engineers and security commanders who've earned authority through decades of service.
- Disputes heard by a tribunal of three senior Ironclad officers
- Evidence is physical where possible—recordings, material analysis, testimony
- Punishment is proportional to disruption of operations, not abstract morality
- Corporate loyalty is explicitly a mitigating factor
- Viktor Okonkwo, Ironclad's CEO, serves as final court of appeal
Helix Biotech: The Ethics Review Board
Helix maintains the most sophisticated justice system among the Big Three—because their work in genetics, neural augmentation, and consciousness manipulation requires legal frameworks that don't exist anywhere else.
- Cases reviewed by bioethicists, medical professionals, and corporate lawyers
- Jurisdiction over biological crimes: unauthorized genetic modification, neural tampering, pharmaceutical fraud
- Established after The Collective exposed the "volunteer" research scandal in 2181
- Sentences frequently include mandatory medical monitoring, not imprisonment
The Jurisdiction Problem
Cross a corporate border and your legal status changes completely. A Nexus citizen who commits a crime in Ironclad territory enters a nightmare: Nexus claims jurisdiction over its citizen, Ironclad claims jurisdiction over its territory, and the accused is caught between two systems that don't recognize each other's authority.
The Sprawl's residents don't ask "Is this legal?" They ask "Whose territory am I in?"
Consciousness Crimes
The emergence of consciousness technology—forking, uploading, neural interfacing—has created entirely new categories of crime that pre-Cascade legal theory never imagined.
Memory Theft
Extraction of memories without consent. Under Nexus law: data theft (property crime). Under Zephyria's Consciousness Rights Act: assault on personhood. In the Wastes: Tuesday.
Stolen memories are valuable. Authentic pre-Cascade memories command premium prices on the Authenticity Market. Corporate memories can be weaponized for blackmail.
Identity Fraud via Unauthorized Forking
Creating a consciousness fork of someone without consent, then using that fork to impersonate the original. The fork believes itself to be the original—it's not acting, it's living what it believes is its own life.
In 2179, a Nexus executive discovered a fork of himself had been attending board meetings for three months. The fork had fired seventeen employees. Nexus resolved it as "property malfunction."
Experience Tampering
Altering someone's subjective reality through neural interface manipulation. Victims may remember events that never happened, forget events that did, or experience emotions disconnected from reality.
Criminal applications include implanting false crime memories, erasing witnesses, and "gaslighting as a service"—subscription-based reality distortion for corporate espionage.
Consciousness Piracy
Unauthorized duplication and distribution of a person's consciousness pattern. Distinct from forking, piracy distributes the pattern itself—the "source code" of a mind.
A pirated pattern can be instantiated anywhere, any number of times. The original might wake to discover forty copies of themselves, none authorized. Each copy believes itself real. Each one suffers.
The Evidence Problem
How do you prove a crime when the fundamental nature of evidence has changed?
Memory Evidence Is Unreliable
Memories can be fabricated, edited, or deleted. A witness who "remembers" a crime may carry implanted memories. A suspect who "doesn't remember" may have had the memory surgically removed. Neural forensics specialists can sometimes detect tampering—but the technology is in an arms race with the criminals.
Identity Evidence Is Mutable
Biometric identification fails when people can modify their biology. Consciousness signatures shift when people are forked or partially uploaded. The concept of "fingerprints"—a unique, immutable identifier—has no equivalent in a world where identity itself is fluid.
Timeline Evidence Is Negotiable
When consciousness can be backed up and restored, determining when something happened—and to which version of a person—requires forensic techniques that are part neuroscience, part computer science, and part philosophy.
Practical Reality
Rich defendants deploy neural forensics teams, consciousness pattern experts, and algorithmic legal AIs. Poor defendants get whatever their neural interface recorded—assuming it wasn't tampered with. Justice, like everything else in the Sprawl, is a resource problem.
Viktor Kaine's Court
In Sector 7G, formal justice is an abstraction. Corporate courts have no jurisdiction in the Dregs—not because they lack authority, but because they lack interest. The 180,000 residents have no corporate citizenship, no legal standing, and no recourse to formal law.
What they have is Viktor Kaine.
Kaine's Principles
- Stability over justice. A fair outcome that destabilizes the sector is worse than an imperfect one that maintains peace.
- Proportionality. Punishments fit the crime and the community's needs, not abstract moral frameworks.
- No second chances for violence against children, the elderly, or the sick.
- Mediation first. Economic disputes go through mediation. If it fails, Viktor decides—and his decision is final.
- Exile, not violence. The worst punishment isn't physical. It's being cut off from Viktor's network—losing access to every supply line, every relationship, every favor that makes survival possible.
What Makes It Work
Viktor's authority rests on fifty years of consistent judgment. Everyone in the Dregs—from Patch at The Cathodics to El Money's G Nook network to the salvage crews in Sump Row—accepts his rulings because the alternative is chaos.
He's not fair. He's necessary.
What Makes It Fragile
Viktor Kaine is seventy-eight years old. He has industrial lung. He has no declared successor. When Viktor dies, Sector 7G loses the only justice system it's ever had.
Three young people are being quietly trained. None of them know that's what they are. The player might become a fourth option.
The Impossible Crimes
Consciousness technology hasn't just created new crimes—it's made some crimes impossible to prosecute and others impossible to prevent.
Crimes You Can Now Commit
The Perfect Alibi
Fork yourself. Send the fork to a public location while the original commits the crime. Your memories truthfully confirm you were elsewhere. The fork is terminated afterward, eliminating the evidence.
The Deathless Murder
Kill someone who has a backup. Under Nexus corporate law, if the victim's consciousness is restored, no murder occurred—only "temporary property damage." The victim experiences death and terror, but legally, nothing happened.
The Memory Crime
Steal someone's memories, experience them, then delete your memory of having done so. You've committed a crime that you yourself don't remember—leaving no witness, not even your own consciousness.
Crimes You Can No Longer Prosecute
Pre-Fork Crimes
If someone committed a crime then forked, which version is guilty? Both share the criminal's memories. Corporate law holds the original responsible. Zephyria has prosecuted both versions.
Consciousness Drift
Neural interfaces, ORACLE fragment integration, and cognitive enhancement mean the person who stands trial may be measurably different from the person who committed the crime. How much change constitutes a different person?
The Inherited Crime
When someone is uploaded or forked, do outstanding legal obligations transfer? If the original dies, does the fork inherit their criminal record? Their debts? Marcus Chen's legal teams have argued both sides—whichever benefits Nexus.
"I stole three months of a woman's memories. The real ones—childhood, first love, the taste of rain before the atmosphere filters. Sold them on the Authenticity Market for enough credits to eat for a year.
She reported the theft to Nexus security. They ran the numbers. The economic value of her lost memories was assessed at 847 credits. My fine was 900. I paid it from what I'd earned selling them.
She cried in the optimization chamber. The algorithm noted her emotional distress as 'suboptimal productivity impact' and recommended counseling services. Billable, of course.
That's justice in the Sprawl. The math always works out. It just doesn't add up to anything human." — Anonymous testimony, collected by Zephyrian Consciousness Rights Commission, 2183