I think that a hallmark of the Sovereignty is that its institutions - from the government to CEID and its megacorps - are hugely vast in terms of holdings, impact and influence, but simultaneously extremely hierarchically flat and run by tiny cadres of ultra-elites.
A megacorp is its owner, a CI, and teeming swarms of 'dumb' machines. The government is the President, a handful of authoritative opinion-shapers, and one CI. CEID is its Director and who knows how many self-organizing sub-cells that report directly to her. FORCE is a loosely coördinated network of game-changer operators with no central authority at all.
To me, an essential part of the Sovereignty is how totally individualized it is. Where other polities need thousands or millions of individuals working in vast bureaucratic apparatuses the Sovereignty's ridiculous hypertechnology allows a single person to have the same level of impact. It is at its core a state of supermen: people who might
look human, and occasionally act like it, but are actually so far beyond humanity that it renders the whole concept pretty meaningless.
The galaxy's main saving grace is that as it turns out, most supermen are in fact perfectly satisfied spending their days pursuing hedonistic outrage, smoking deathsticks, playing holosims, entering repulsorraces or skydiving into suns. On Solaris there is enough sensual stimulation to be found to last even a thousand immortal lifetimes and that's more than enough for the vast majority of people.
But there is a handful of people, people with very particular mind-patterns, who somehow can't be distracted by all the unlimited impulse-whimsy. These are the kinds of crazies who derive pleasure from building their own megacorp or becoming a master Datasphere orator or joining CEID.
The absurd impact that tiny handful of people has, shows the monumental level of stratification between have's on Solaris and have not's in Wild Space.
I could easily see the result of this being that one of these guys goes into Big Boss mode, recruits a bunch of fringe world yokels to his PMC, fits them with third-grade implants and lets them loose for the highest wild space bidder. Not because the government of the USS needs him to do so, but just because he's somehow got it into his head that's what he wants to do.
The atomized and fragmented nature of Solarian organizations (if you can even call them that anymore) means that a term like 'government sanction' is
also mostly irrelevant. Because what does that even mean in a society that holds 'Do What Thou Wilt' as its central tenet?
Incidentally I imagine that in case of our hypothetical Big Boss, eventually a few CEID people in an autonomous cell might decide this has gone on for long enough, and put a stop to him. They might not even inform what passes for central authority, because it's just a regular mop-up job and not worth disturbing the Director's beauty sleep. It just... happens. People decide to do things because they can.
Maybe you could even argue that the idea of the 'Sovereignty' as a state in the traditional sense is a lie. It's just random groups of beings doing random things in a certain time-space, distinguished perhaps by a shared level of ludicrous technology but in terms of self-organizedness it might not actually peak above the background chaos.
Shroom Man 777 wrote:I think there'd be a Child Services or Memetic Services or Ideology and Memes Administration (IMA) or something that tries at least to regulate and ensure these memes and virtualities people indulge themselves in are within some healthy barometric.
This could be one of Olympic's (or whatever the central government CI ends up being called, if we don't want to rip off ol' Ford too much) many functions. A CI would be ideally suited for keeping tabs on the multitude of crazy subrealities out there in the Datasphere.