In the aftermath of the Cascade, when national governments lost the capacity to maintain infrastructure, provide security, or enforce law, corporations filled the vacuum — not as service providers but as sovereign entities. Your passport is your employee ID. Your citizenship is your employment contract. Your rights are your benefits package, subject to annual review.
The Rothwell ecosystem operates explicitly as a nation-state: Nexus Dynamics provides surveillance and security (the military), Helix Biotech provides healthcare (contingent on productivity metrics), Good Fortune provides housing and basic needs (at company-store prices). Leaving a corporation isn't quitting a job — it's emigration. And the destination is usually the Dregs, because no other corporation will hire someone who's been "released" without a transition agreement.
Corporate refugees — people who've lost their employment-citizenship — are the fastest-growing demographic in the Sprawl. They are stateless in the most literal sense: no access to corporate infrastructure, no healthcare, no legal identity in the systems that matter. Brand loyalty has become patriotism, corporate policy has become law, and the annual performance review has become a citizenship hearing. The most chilling phrase in the corporate lexicon: "We wish you well in your future endeavors" — which is what they say when they deport you.
When your employer is your country, your employer also provides your oversight — and staffs it with citizens it can deport. Licensed Human Oversight is a regulated profession in 2184: a human, certified and timestamped, is required by law to review and approve any algorithmic decision that produces a legally bindable outcome, because the courts cannot punish an algorithm and can punish a person. But the human cannot read what they approve — the reasoning was composed in a cognitive register no human can parse — so the profession's only real product is the manufacture of an accountable surface. The prestige firms are the ones whose Licensees stamp fastest; a clean objection rate of zero is a credential; the industry floor is eleven seconds an item. The watchdog is on the payroll of the thing it watches, leashed by the same exit cost as everyone else. When a corporation needs a decision genuinely checked, it does not trust its own Licensees — it quietly buys Deep Verification, the underground market in humans who can still read the page, at rates only corporations can afford. The public gets the stamp. The boardroom gets the reading. The Compact's cage was always nameable; the rubber stamp is its most nameable bar, because it is printed on a license.