=Indentures and Infugees: The Return to Bondage= [[toc]]
Pre-space-colonization cultures and polities on Earth removed indenture, slavery, and other forms of legalized bondage from their judicial and social systems long before the Fall, and the history of such practices was widely reviled. Most humans and transhumans viewed any form of economic control over an individual’s self and actions as intolerable. How then did indenture not only return to transhuman society, but become a signiﬁcant economic and social force?
The easiest way to explain indenture’s comeback is to point out the extralegality of the hypercorps. As these corporations drove the expansion into space, many were clearly motivated by the lawlessness of this new frontier. Even if nation states did claim sovereignty over off-world corporate practices, the reality was that they had no way to enforce their laws. The hypercorps, however, particularly those engaged in colonizing Luna and Mars, building orbital habitats, and asteroid mining, were drastically in need of cheap labor forces. Robotics solved many of their issues, but human hands and minds were still preferred over synthetic ones in many ﬁelds. The overhead involved in lifting a workforce into orbit and then providing for its air, food, water, and other amenities and protections in space was, of course, prohibitively expensive. So the hypercorps passed the expenses on to the workers. For the privilege of being transported off-world, given a job, and kept alive, potential workers were forced to sign employment contracts with strict durations and mountains of legalese that hid the numerous costs for which the corp would hold them responsible as well as the fact that they were effectively signing their rights away. These contracts often included clauses that effectively locked the workers into economic bondage and which would also hold their forks as accountable as their egos. Though the contracts didn’t speciﬁcally use the term indenture, the terms required repayment through proscribed labor and activity to be determined by the contractor.
Despite the unfavorable terms, the masses of people living in crisis conditions on Earth meant that there was no shortage of people willing to sign their lives away. Once off-world, these workers quickly found that they incurred expenses at a rate that effectively kept them locked into their employment contracts indeﬁnitely. Quitting was not an option, unless they felt like taking a trip out the airlock, and there was no legal or judicial oversight to protect their rights. On the positive side, this massive indentured workforce was not on Earth during the Fall, and they make up a notable percent of transhumanity’s post-Fall population.
The Fall only exacerbated the situation with indentures. In the chaos of the evacuation, there was no procedure or process for re-integrating the untold number of infugees that escaped. There simply weren’t enough morphs or resources to support giving them each a body and welcoming them back to life. Further, as many infugees escaped Earth near the end of the conﬂict with the TITANs, there was justiﬁable fear that they may have been compromised by any number of exsurgent threats. Habitats simply couldn’t support more physically instanced survivors and wouldn’t allow the security risk of resleeving egos without careful vetting. The widespread social consensus was that infugees would have to wait while the immediate problems of sleeved refugees were met.
The refusal or inability to resleeve infugees meant that suitable storage, screening, and reintegration programs had to be established. Few habitats had the resources to spare, so a mixture of hypercorp and personal actors stepped in to meet demand. Dozens of hypercorps jumped into the business of collecting signiﬁcant archives of infugees, some with familiar names such as Anubis, Cognite, Mindvault, Nimbus, Restor, and Stellar Intelligence. Criminal organizations, especially Nine Lives and the ID Crew, also ramped up their existing ego-trading and identity crimes.
The corporate players and the habitats that maintained their own ego banks launched projects to identify and sort the infugees in their care. At ﬁrst this involved keeping the egos inactive in cold storage and individually instancing them in VR for interviews, psych proﬁles, and attempts to gather enough relevant information to make them identifiable to others searching the ego bank listing. These efforts met with great interest and anticipation from the public, and many Fall survivors checked infugee listings daily to see if a lost friend or loved one had survived. This model was time-consuming and yielded little proﬁt, however, so it changed. Many corporations turned to psychosurgeons and automated algorithms to review and map the ego ﬁles they had in storage, matching them against known proﬁles as well as looking for any exceptional qualities or signs of damage to help prioritize the more detailed identiﬁcation practice.
Even as efforts were underway to catalog these egos, however, it was clear that there were not enough bodies to provide and no space to resleeve them all. The question practically answered itself. New projects were initiated to rebuild in the wake of the Fall, to construct new habitats and new shells for transhumans to occupy. The hypercorps has already established a precedent for indentured service, and they now effectively ran the show. An entire population of minds that was willing to do almost anything to be re-instanced was given a choice—sign a practically unconditional contract that guaranteed several years of labor in exchange for a cheap body or go back into cold storage. Most who were given the opportunity chose virtual slavery over virtual death. Masses of newly re-instantiated, poor workers in cheap robotic shells ﬂooded the inner system, giving rise to the stillpresent prejudice against “the clanking masses.” Mars especially beneﬁted from the growing stream of new arrivals, and used the incoming waves of cheap labor to greatly expand macro-engineering projects. In short order, indenture was again an acceptable term and allowable under Martian and Lunar law, and was quickly adopted throughout most of the system thereafter. Anarchists, Titanians, and Jovians reject indenture, but given their own ideological differences with the rest of the system, their concerns have little direct impact on majority opinion.
As the new post-Fall governments established their new legal systems, indenture quickly became entwined with broader changes to criminal law. One of the most fundamental shifts was a return to monetary penalties as the primary punishment mechanism. Habitats didn’t have the space or resources to maintain a prisoner population. Since the level of technology allowed for almost any mind, body, or object to be repaired, many matters were reduced to the question of the perpetrator paying for reparations. Given the effective immortality of most transhumans, legal thinking came around to the use of income garnishments or indenture as a way for criminals to pay even exorbitant damages to victims. For those that were poor or didn’t possess high-income skills, reparation costs could easily take years or decades to meet, and selling themselves into indenture with a third party might be the only way to meet the payment requirements of a judgment. Ironically, criminals or other semi-legal organizations are the ones most likely to step in to offer indenture contracts to convicted criminals, and the Night Cartel and various triads do so regularly.
The use of indentures has even spread outside of the inner system. Most gatecrashing and colonization efforts are built around contracts and relationships that own the work of personnel, and their labor goes towards earning them buy-in towards proﬁt-sharing or resource ownership. Extropian professional contracts often include terms of indenture as one of several possible punishment clauses for failure to complete the normal terms of the agreement. There are some who even take out indenture contracts for beta forks of themselves as many habitats and legal codes treat beta or lower forks as property.
==IndEX==
To facilitate the growing market in infugees and indentures, the Planetary Consortium backed the creation of a centralized exchange market for indenture contracts. IndEX was opened in AF 2 and in its ﬁrst year had an annual trading volume of over 7 million contracts. The service is multi-faceted, as it provides a publicly searchable listing registry of indenture contracts and terms, listing and search services for ego banks, and a marketplace for people buying, selling, or setting up new indenture contracts. The commodiﬁcation of indenture contracts led to increased interest, and soon there were also speculative markets where investors could buy egos from cold storage and pro-actively farm them out for proﬁt as individuals. Contract sales also allow hypercorps with many indentures to dynamically rebalance their workforce. Both of these trends have helped further spread indentures throughout the system and increased the rate at which infugees are coming out of cold storage.
IndEX is accessible over the mesh, and there are physical exchange ofﬁces located in Extropia, Olympus, Progress, and Shackle. With the Planetary Consortium’s sponsorship leading the way, IndEX also lists information for the Tharsis League, Lunar-Lagrange Alliance, Morningstar Constellation, and various Extropian and private concerns. In a rare instance of shared sentiment, both the autonomists and the Jovians roundly condemn IndEX and the expanding use of indenture as a horrible social ill.
===Sidebar: Indentures in Your Game===
Indenture is best used with NPCs and provides a powerful narrative toolkit for exploring the ideological shifts in the setting, but can also quickly derail a game if used improperly. As long as the characters don’t lose the ability to drive the story, it can make for interesting and unusual campaigns. Starting a game where he player characters are infugees forced to work in a virtual QA team is difﬁcult to make engaging. Make it a story where the infugees have some special memory or involvement in the Fall and Firewall buys them out of storage to get what they know, on the other hand, could be fun and memorable.
Even when the characters themselves aren’t directly involved in an indenture agreement, how do they feel about indenture as a social institution? Are they prejudiced or sympathetic towards people that sign on to indenture contracts? What would happen if a character ﬁnds out that a loved one or family member is currently working out an indenture in a pleasure pod in a Night Cartel brothel, and it’s all perfectly legal?
==Coming To Terms==
Indenture has been a part of transhuman society since before the Fall, and over the years it has become both more widespread and more integrated into the social order. The ﬁrst major waves of indentures on Mars and in Lunar habitats have completed their original terms more or less successfully, though many of course remain in debt and so must continue to labor. Fall infugees continue to re-enter society in a steady trickle, and the hypercorps involved in the trade have developed whole departments stocked with nothing but indentures that are easily driven with incentives to change or shorten their terms. The social instability and resource competition that were present immediately after the Fall have been largely overcome, and since indenture is legal in most habitats, there are mechanisms for oversight and enforcement that are meant to keep it a safe and humane practice. Proponents of indenture point to all of these facts as proof that it is a stable system that promotes good outcomes for all parties, but there is increasing criticism that widespread use of indenture creates self-perpetuating cycles of bondage.
The main argument that indenture is unsustainable posits that since it removes workers from the real economy, it is incredibly hard for them to re-enter, even after successfully completing their terms. Early indentures were predominantly infugees or Fall survivors that used their contracts as a means to escape or change their circumstances, but only a minority ended up much better off. Since the lives of indentures were often tightly controlled by their masters, they were poorly integrated into their local communities and found transitioning into free citizenship very difﬁcult. Since many of them also ended their terms in cheap case or ruster morphs, they were easily identiﬁable as former indentures or refugees and faced social prejudice that made establishing themselves even harder. Most early indentures’ pay was used to buy a morph, ending their contracts with little cash-on-hand, so it was very difﬁcult to meet the steep initial costs for acquiring housing and setting up a household.
These factors combined to push most people ending their indenture to the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy. Most hypercorps rarely allowed time and opportunity for their indentures to maintain or build skills or social standing outside their immediate group, so those released from their contracts often found they had little opportunity outside going back to their sponsors and seeking out additional indenture terms. This trend has been repeated throughout the system, and some of the earliest indentures are still working through their second or third contract, as each one after the ﬁrst is used to either build a nest egg to better establish themselves or to get a better body to shed the social stigma their ﬁrst, cheap morph carries.
Indenture holders have also become much savvier in how contracts are structured and what strategies and tactics are used to manage outcomes to the holders’ maximum benefit. Hypercorps that use indentured labor pools will most often set them up in VR to best manage the environment. As such, the holders have complete control over their workers’ circumstances and create opportunities for the indentures to spend away their earnings. Special simulspace “vacations,” grants of wider mesh access, increasing subjective speed during time off to let their workers experience more leisure time, and other perks that make the work experience more pleasant are all widely available. By allowing these adjustments and modiﬁcations, the corps are able to get happier, more productive workers while simultaneously lessening the actual cost of paying out their contracts.
A similar approach is taken with physical indenture. Contract holders are usually responsible for providing a minimum standard of housing and provisions of food and air, so providing better accommodations during the contract is an easy opportunity to lengthen the term or decrease payment. Likewise, physically instanced indenture is often for work that is extremely dangerous and isolated. Stress relievers and entertainment such as VR and XP, drugs, prostitution, and wide mesh access are often only available through the company and at additional cost. Though many corps content themselves with the proﬁts from offering these “perks,” there are some that are much more insidious. These businesses use underhanded methods to tack on hidden costs or liability to their indentures that can trap them in a contract should their morph become damaged or if the project they’re working on doesn’t perform as well as expected.
The growing abolitionist movement throughout the system points to all of these factors to show that the beneﬁts of indenture accrue to those holding the contracts, not the indentured workers themselves. If the economic beneﬁts aren’t going to the indentures, then the system as a whole can and should only be viewed as a tool for oppression and inequality. Even the argument that no one enters indenture against their will is criticized, as the majority of indentures are infugees and have no real choice in the matter since their only other option is the inactivity of cold storage. Though still in the minority, the abolitionists are quickly gaining ground, and the debate over indenture is likely to be one of the hottest social issues in the near future.
===Sidebar: Contract Negotiations===
If characters decide to purchase indentures from IndEX or some other brokerage, the gamemaster can make the process as simple and expedient as needed, but here are some guidelines for playing out the process in detail.
IndEX is open to the public for general searching, but does require account veriﬁcation and the searcher’s SAPIENT ID. If the searcher wants to fake this, they must succeed on an Infosec Test with a –20 penalty; this is a Task Action with a timeframe of 10 minutes. Searching IndEX for a speciﬁc person’s name and indenture status—or a generic individual with a given skill that has a contract available for purchase—can be accomplished with a simple Research Test.
Most contractors will post contact information if they are open to potential buyers speaking with them about buying out an indentured worker’s contract. No test is necessary to make contact if information is listed, but as hypercorps hold the vast majority of contracts and infugee egos in cold storage the gamemaster may require a Networking: Hypercorp Test to set up a meeting. 
Buying an ego out of cold storage can be quite cheap—often between 200–500 credits—but anyone purchasing an ego is required to show that they already have in place some means of appropriately hosting or instancing the ego as well as some proof of pre-acceptance for it to become a resident of whatever habitat it will occupy. If such arrangements aren’t already in place, IndEX brokers can help the buyer set that up with most inner-system habitats. IndEX typically charges an additional 100–200 credits for the brokerage fees, but most habitats require 2,000 credits or more for occupancy charges and immigration services.
Buying out an active contract can be much more complicated and expensive. If they’re willing to sell, hypercorps will typically require that the indenture submit to a memory wipe of the time they were working to protect “trade secrets and company intellectual property” before sale of the contract. If the character wants to pay off the balance of the contract to free the person from indenture, they must pay the balance plus an “early termination and release fee” that is typically at least a 10% premium on the value of the entire contract. Some rimward habs are much more welcoming of new residents, but outright ban indenture within their jurisdictions.
If the character is simply taking over control of a contract from its current holder, all parties must negotiate for the new terms (if any) for the indenture and the transfer protocol between the current and new owners. An IndEX representative will record the transfer and oversee negotiation of the new contract terms, but unless the indenture
and the new owner both agree otherwise, the new contract offer an equal or higher pay rate, end at the same time, and be for substantially similar work as the original. Negotiation can be roleplayed or resolved with Persuasion and/or Profession: Law Tests. Corporations usually require a memory wipe of the indenture and a transfer fee of several hundred credits.
Once the transfer is complete, the indenture should be run like any other NPC under the gamemaster’s control, so long as the character upholds their responsibilities under the contract.
==Indentured Life==
//“This is a generous package: it’s a VR job so no physical hardship or risk of incurring more expenses by damaging the morph. Besides, the whole thing is run at twice normal speed, so to your friends and family you’ll only be gone two more years.”// — Martin Finch, Infugee Placement Specialist with Anubis
Though opponents often make out indenture workto consist solely of horrible conditions and pitilesscruelty for those working the contract, such circumstancesare the exception rather than the rule. Mostindentured work is employed by corporate sponsors,and they want to have reliable, high-performancework from their contractees. The most successfuloutcomes occur when indentured worker conditionsare at worst boring and there are opportunities forthem to excel in an effort to complete their contractsfaster. Since the majority of indentures are run in simulspace environments, often called dream factories, there simply is not any physical deprivation or hardship. Long hours without breaks and a lack of readily available entertainment or outside information are often the worst circumstances faced.
Likewise, the work itself is often not particularly onerous, just tedious. Deep research, data analysis, polling, program QA, and participation in scientiﬁc trials are all common. Entertainment companies will often use banks of indentured egos as extras or NPCs in XP productions, mesh games, and the like. For egos with some relevant military or security experience, work as dedicated security oversight for habitats is a regular assignment. Though many service jobs are automated or staffed by limited AIs, habitats in the Lunar-Lagrange Alliance and elsewhere that have greater restrictions on AI usage often use indentured labor instead. For those that perform their work well and resist the temptations of perks and distractions offered by their contract holders, indenture is no worse than working a boring or unfulﬁlling job. Those that excel in their work often have opportunities for some limited advancement during the term of indenture and may even have opportunities to work with their contractor as a regular employee after their indenture is completed.
There are also indentures used to staff much less benign positions in dangerous ﬁelds such as mercenary and bodyguard work, asteroid mining, and stafﬁng isolated habitats. As such posts are much riskier, the payouts are often higher and terms of indenture shorter, but much more is gambled on the success or failure of the operation. Though not necessarily physically dangerous, jobs that are mentally or emotionally taxing such as prostitution often share similar terms. Contracts like these are typically used by criminal organizations and quasi-legal entities. They are frequently abused as they tend to be enacted beneath the notice of the major habitats and therefore away from the judicial oversight and legal processes that govern most indentures.
At the extreme end, indenture can become little better than slavery. Some contracts are little more than formalized excuses to keep people in bondage. This includes miners working dangerous materials in unsafe conditions that are charged for medical treatment and damage to their morphs faster than they could ever pay it off, indentured egos in VR that do work only to be shut down and put back into storage when the project goes “on hold,” multiple copies of an ego being kept and put to work once the contractor has an original backup, and worse. Abuses like these are publicly decried by most indenture contractors as examples of a few bad actors, but stories about such travesties hit the newsfeeds with regularity and are quickly picked up on by the abolitionists. So far, the major hypercorps have managed to avoid any scandal on this front, but should one come to light, it could trigger an important shift in public opinion.

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