Ansible games

In Time To Orbit: Unknown, the corporate nation of Antarctica does commodities arbitrage using an ansible that they pay insane and evil setup costs for. The folks they entrust with cementing the control of the ansibles realize that they can defect at great risk but also great reward. They wrest away the control of the ansible, and change the incentives significantly as a result.

What looks at first to be a control problem or a distributed systems problem - essentially a parable of the PACELC theorem - turns into game theory halfway though. It "lets in" agents with their own incentives at a point of rupture ("disruption of service").

Also, therefore, a really excellent illustration of the faultlines that arise between a corporation's imagination of itself and how its constituents see it relative to themselves.