Company

The Company owns everything. It makes pretty damn sure it sees everything, or as much as it can. Which is a lot. It controls the economy and deals in the hardest of hard currencies - time and life, represented in its Dayscrip banknotes. It directly employs only the brightest and best - for every successful applicant there is a parsec-long queue of disappointed rejects - and indirectly controls the lives and livelihoods of anyone else.

Fortunately, the Company is a relatively benign totalitarianism and permits a degree of intellectual and cultural freedom where Kin Arad can, for instance, write and publish her best-seller Continuous Creation.

The strength and foundation of the Company is the Dayscrip system. So when Jago Jalo comes back from a strange place with a wad of perfect forgeries, it's time to get worried...