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1. A council of androids voting on behalf of cryo-frozen owners.
2. A bot-populated futures market sets the strategy.
3. Each share equates to a "volume" of simulated neurons in the vast network which makes up the corps 'mind' - each tendency of shareholders forms an organ or segment of that mind.
3. An exact replication of the election of a Venetian Doge;
(“Whenever the time came to elect a new doge of Venice, an official went to pray in St. Mark’s Basilica, grabbed the first boy he could find in the piazza, and took him back to the ducal palace. The boy’s job was to draw lots to choose an electoral college from the members of Venice’s grand families, which was the first step in a performance that has been called tortuous, ridiculous, and profound. Here is how it went, more or less unchanged, for five hundred years, from 1268 until the end of the Venetian Republic.
Thirty electors were chosen by lot, and then a second lottery reduced them to nine, who nominated forty candidates in all, each of whom had to be approved by at least seven electors in order to pass to the next stage. The forty were pruned by lot to twelve, who nominated a total of twenty-five, who needed at least nine nominations each. The twenty-five were culled to nine, who picked an electoral college of forty-five, each with at least seven nominations. The forty-five became eleven, who chose a final college of forty-one. Each member proposed one candidate, all of whom were discussed and, if necessary, examined in person, whereupon each elector cast a vote for every candidate of whom he approved. The candidate with the most approvals was the winner, provided he had been endorsed by at least twenty-five of the forty-one.” — Anthony Gottlieb, "Win or Lose," The New Yorker.)
4. Interstellar escrow - the shareholders are frozen and en-route at sub-light speed. Sets of counter-checking A.I.'s and managers organise resources drawn from futures markets based on possible future company value, to create that future.
5. An A.I. chooses the human board according to core values laid down in the charter. The charter can only be altered by an 80% quorum of shareholders.
6. The corporation has no memory of itself - all records are locked by an ambient A.I. omnipresent in the companies intranet. No-one knows what it did in the past or what it will do in the future. Employees have access only to information about what they themselves are doing. (The memory system itself has no understanding of the records it controls.)
7. Designed for an enthnocentrist colonisation project, the population group intended as beneficiaries died out but the corporation itself was very successful. Now run by A.I.'s, the corp has a secret tacit breeding program amongst its employees - trying to recreate the original ethnogroup.
8. Social-media based promotion and management structure. Views, clicks, likes and comments are the means of assessment. Employees can be sued for botting.
9. An anarcho-primitivist colony with no technology within 1,000 miles makes all the decisions. Society is organised like a version of ancient Greece. Information comes to them by boat and horse, they debate, stage plays, and vote, before sending back their decisions. (The colony is a virtual simulation, its inhabitants are not aware.)
10. Engrams of dead billionaires.
11. Company is in a state of perpetual reformatting. The current board organises its sale to new owners with the proviso they select a new board who will prepare for resale, with the proviso that...
12. Crypto-Company - structure runs in the background of an MMORPG.
In the gloom they gather and the gloom they rule, lords of the half-closed eye. Snare-hearted men who lost the light but would not serve the dark, branded by sun and star.
No knights of the equator these, their castles ring the utmost north, where they retire yearly for week-long half-lit days, sending bright factotums into dark and sunlit lands, seeking scrolls of forgotten verse and vases given as funeral gifts to long-dead emperors.
Only here, at the interstice of time may they thrive for
they are sworn to shadow as a whole
and to the court of Mab. Their tents and pennants hung with wooden wind-chimes which make their own music in the still air.
Here they drink from clouded glasses and dine on slices of pale meats which they skewer with silver forks, served by fae with the heads of whippoorwills and the bodies of upright foxes - dressed in tabards and carrying bras anthophagous carnyx, or by huge snuffling hedgehog squires, or pairs of orphans, one deaf, one blind, or ancient men, their grey beards trailing on the earth.
Do they even have political views? Their minds like dusty barns with swooping owls. They are desirous of fine China and will meet your eyes in a silvered mirror. Adjacent to death they make congress with beautiful ghosts, their tournaments attended by pale maidens for whose favour they quest. Aye, anything for a dead maid. Why else should killers fear the gloom, and all retire to sunlit lands?
Thus they hunt. Unmoving, they appear. Knights that gallop not, congealing from mist, etching themselves from branch-shadows, arising from the cambers of dark streams, under moss and willow. Soft-edged knights whose hoof-beats sound like puddle drips, mist beading on their long cloaks of Ungulix fur and Jabberwock skin. Helms capped with cupped hands, tarnished silver owls, leafless bronze trees, gibbous moons, stooped crows or tragedians masks in bronze. Shields picturing thistledown flowers, half-closed eyes, half-open gates, half-drawn swords and half-suns bisected by smeared half-clouds, or infinitely quartered blazons that can never be completely read.
Their lances quest like tentacles - curling into tree-boles, under doors. The Knights ride lantern mares made of pale light. Fretwork like branches. Pausing in the distance to dismount and fold up their horse like a triptych which they carry like a shield.
Are they sniffing?
Are they whispering?
But nothing can escape them,
In the gloom.
Perhaps by closing your eyes, pressing the heels of your hands into the ocular gap - producing utter dark - perhaps then they cannot find you. For all that is half-see sings to them; the choir of the occluded.
Or by holding them in clear, full, un-occluded sight - then they shall cringe and must act knightly, offer war or mercy and make half-lit unbreakable oaths in whispered words like blinded bats.
They are closing in as the sky darkens and the silver lyre plays, like leaves on slow water, they drift closer, barely seeming to touch the earth.
As swift as the wind,
Silent as owls,
Gentle as a shave.
Colourless men lead forward by swords held like tweezers.
Swords which quest like hounds, sniff like cold noses, and shift in their hands
like weasels. Swords fed on chickens in the night. For these are no earthly
knights.
