Soul Contracts

are a form of unbreakable agreement and binding legal document which guarantee compliance by way of the signatory's soul. They are principally a tool of the god Valdos, the Lord of Contracts. The Bank of Valdos and other Valdosian institutions are built around the binding force of soul contracts, and the existence of contracts is thus a major underpinning of the modern era's international economy.
== History ==
=== Valdosian Free State ===
The Valdosian Free State made use of soul contracts to bind its citizens into virtual slavery. Horace Guilen, a refugee from VFS, described the situation as follows:
"The major difference between a soul contract and old Fialta slavery is supposedly that children don't inherit their parents' enslavement. My parents were given the choice of VFS or an open-ether mining operation to repay their debts, so I was born in the VFS barrack hospital. When I came of age, I had no choice but to sign the boilerplate contract if I wanted to hold any steady job, and once I signed, everything was designed to drive me deeper into debt."
=== 531 Soul Contract Security Crisis ===
In , news broke that around 10,000 residents of the Valdosian Free State had been inexplicably emancipated from their soul contracts, which led to fears of widespread soul contract vulnerabilities and consequently caused a crash in the international economy. The breaking of the soul contracts was revealed to have been the work of the Free Souls Society on Saldan (which was in turn revealed to be backed by Reagan Lawe of the Sermaye News Network), which had developed a method for computationally detecting contract vulnerabilities using a combination of Elder Script and soul computers. This debacle led to something of an arms race in the development of soul computer technology.
Category:Economics