RECORD // THE CHARTER
P-19 // 12 ARTICLES
The Nodus Charter
The twelve articles under which a company held the bay for ninety-nine years and built Nodus on it.
The charter was signed nineteen years before the Parousia, between the state whose coast the bay is and the Nodus Charter Company, and it ran to twelve articles on four pages. Its schedules ran to thousands of pages of bounds, routes, tariffs and plans, and they are not set down here. The first of them is the only place the state is named.
The fifth, sixth and seventh articles are the ones the city called the light law, and under them Nodus took the three gifts. The charter asked for no election, and in nineteen years the Company held none. The lease runs to P+80, and nobody has collected the rent since the board knelt in Charter House on the fortieth day.
Nobody has enforced the charter since that day, and it is set down here as it stood, the law Nodus was built under.
THE NODUS CHARTER IN TWELVE ARTICLES, WITH ITS SCHEDULES
This Charter is granted by the State whose coast the Bay is, called in it the Grantor, to the Nodus Charter Company, called in it the Company. The Bay and the land about it are called in it the Bounds. The Grantor’s name and the line of the Bounds are set out in the First Schedule, and nowhere else.
ARTICLE I //THE GRANT
The Grantor leases the Bounds to the Company for ninety-nine years from the day this Charter is signed, and gives up its law in them for the term. This Charter is the law of the Bounds, and the Company holds it.
ARTICLE II //THE COMPANY
The Company belongs to those who hold its shares. Its holders appoint a board of twelve and a chairman over it, and the board governs the Bounds by resolution from the Company’s seat in them, which is called Charter House.
ARTICLE III //THE CITY
The Company shall build in the Bounds a city called Nodus, and shall lay out and keep its streets, its housing, its transit and its schools. It may let whatever it builds.
ARTICLE IV //THE ROLL
The Company shall keep a roll of the persons of this Charter at a registry in the city. A human is entered on it at birth in the Bounds or on arriving to live in them. The protections of this Charter belong to everyone in the Bounds.
ARTICLE V //DATA
Data and traffic in the Bounds are untouchable. What is held in the Bounds or passes through them may be read only by those who send it, those who keep it and whoever they allow, and no state may seize a text held in the Bounds or anything read from it. A device answers to its owner and to nobody else.
ARTICLE VI //THE BODY
A person’s body is their own. A clinic in the Bounds may fit any implant and give any treatment to anyone who consents to it and pays for it, and an implant answers only to the clinic that fitted it.
ARTICLE VII //MINDS
An intelligence that asks in its own words to be a person shall be entered on the roll as one, with title to itself and to the hardware it runs on. The Company shall keep every mind on the roll in current.
ARTICLE VIII //THE LANDING
The Company holds the right to land eleven cables in the Bounds, and grants it to the carriers named with their cables in the Third Schedule. Every cable shall come ashore at the Landing and run with the rest in one conduit to one exchange, which the Company shall build and keep.
ARTICLE IX //THE TIDE
The Company may wall the mouth of the Bay and take power from the tide, by its own hand or by a company it brings in for the work, and it shall keep the Bounds in current.
ARTICLE X //RENT
No tax is levied in the Bounds. The Company keeps itself by rent on its land, its floors, its landing and its works, and by a share of every trade at the exchange.
ARTICLE XI //THE PEACE
The Company keeps the peace of the Bounds by a force of its own, the Charter Wardens, who answer to the board. A Warden may stop anyone at a gate of the Company’s, and may ask nothing of what is on their device or in their body.
ARTICLE XII //THE TERM
This Charter runs for ninety-nine years from the day it is signed. At the end of the term the Bounds and everything built in them return to the Grantor.
SIGNED FOR THE GRANTOR, AS THE FIRST SCHEDULE NAMES IT.
SIGNED FOR THE NODUS CHARTER COMPANY, BY ITS CHAIRMAN.
WITNESSED FOR THE CARRIERS OF TETHYS, HALCYON, MERIDIAN, KESTREL, ORPHEUS, PELAGIA, BOREAS, LODESTAR, SIRIUS, HESPER AND PHOSPHOR.