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Zaibatsu backstory

They shipped Lindsay into exile in the cheapest kind of drogue. For two days he was blind and deaf, stunned with drugs, his body packed in a thick matrix of deceleration paste. Launched from the Republic's cargo arm, the drogue had drifted with cybernetic precision into the polar orbit of another cicumlunar.

There were ten of these worlds, named for the lunar mares and craters that had provided their raw materials. They'd been the first nation-states to break off all relations with Earth. For a century their lunar alliance had been the nexus of civilization, but since those glory days, progress in deeper space had eclipsed them, and the lunar neighborhood had become a backwater. The circumlunars had fallen from grace.

Ejected from the drogue's docking port, he floated naked in the free-fall customs chamber of the Mare Tranquillitatis People's Circumlunar Zaibatsu. The chamber was of dull lunar steel, with strips of ragged epoxy where paneling had been ripped free. He shared the room with a camera drone. The camera spoke.

"You are Abelard Malcolm Tyler Lindsay? From the Mare Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic? You are seeking political asylum? You have no biologically active materials in your baggage or implanted on your person? You are not carrying explosives or software attack systems? Your intestinal flora has been sterilized and replaced with Zaibatsu standard microbes?"

"Yes, that's correct," Lindsay said, in the camera's own Japanese.

"You will soon be released into an area that has been ideologically decriminalized. Before you leave customs, there are certain limits to your activities that must be understood. Are you familiar with the concept of civil rights?"

Lindsay was cautious. "In what context?"

"The Zaibatsu recognizes one civil right: the right to death. You may claim your right at any time, under any circumstances. All you need do is request it. Our audio monitors are spread throughout the Zaibatsu. If you claim your right, you will be immediately and painlessly terminated. Do you understand?"

"I understand," Lindsay said.

"Termination is also enforced for certain other behaviors," the camera said. "If you physically threaten the habitat, you will be killed. If you interfere with our monitoring devices, you will be killed. If you cross the sterilized zone, you will be killed. You will also be killed for crimes against humanity."

"Crimes against humanity?" Lindsay said. "How are those defined?"

"These are biological and prosthetic efforts that we declare to be aberrant. The technical information concerning the limits of our tolerance must remain classified."

"I see," Lindsay said. This was, he realized, carte blanche to kill him at any time, for almost any reason. He had expected as much. This world was a haven for sundogs: defectors, traitors, exiles, outlaws. Lindsay doubted that a world full of sundogs could be run any other way. There were simply too many strange technologies at large in circumsolar space.

(from first chapter of Bruce Stirling's "Schismatrix Plus", ISBN 0441003702, with minor editing for brevity)