Aug. 18, 2106
BOSTON–A team of international researchers working at M.I.T.’s Laboratory for High-Velocity Quantum-Economic Phenomena announced Monday the first successful isolation, identification, and tagging of a Limited Liability Person, or “LLP” “We’re quite excited to be the first team to isolate an active LLP in the field,” notes Dr. Hillary Yuan, director of the research team, “And not only have we identified an LLP, but we’ve also tagged him, enabling us to follow his migratory habits and learn much more about what life is like for them.”
Limited Liability People, characterized by their immunity to civil and criminal liability, have been the subject of an increasing amount of scientific scrutiny in recent years. A joint U.S.-E.U. initiative, formed last year to fund inquiry into the nature and existence of LLPs, has called the reportedly explosive growth in LLP population “the number one scientifically addressable threat to world economic stability.” “LLPs are, essentially, invisible to the law,” explains U.S. Congressman Ralph Tool (G-New York), a longtime supporter of publicly-funded LLP research. “They are unaccountable. And, if their numbers are growing, that’s a real, tangible risk to the rule of law and to the democratic process. We need to know who they are and where they come from, and we need to know now.”
The isolation at M.I.T. of an LLP, identified by the team as a Mr. Alfred Dumpling of Boca Raton, Florida, marks an important advance in LLP research. Dr. Yuan explains: “There’s a difficult observational problem at the heart of LLP research. LLP who do not engage in conduct that exposes them to liability look pretty much like you and me. In fact, they can’t be distinguished from non-LLPs until they do something that exposes them to liability. But, once they do something that involves potential liability, they start to disappear. That, in fact, is how they avoid liability. The key is to know how they disappear. Then you can go about catching them.”
Working from a theory that postulates that LLPs result when publicly held individuals with super-high wealth densities merge with others of like or greater density, the M.I.T. team began to look at unexplained nano and quantum economic processes dispersed throughout the wake of such mergers. Piecing together these apparently isolated processes, and linking them to similarly fragmented processes in the “dark market,” the researchers were able to track the transactional movements of hundreds, and eventually thousands, of LLPs. “It was like looking at the footprints of the invisible man,” exclaimed one team member. “Well, more like looking at the footprints left by a rioting mob of invisible men. We could see where LLPns had been, but we couldn’t sort out whose footprints were whose.”
Working with the team, Dr. Yuan devised a technique to isolate one of the LLPs. Drawing on classical techniques for observing neutrinos, the team constructed a large, negative net-worth charity in the path of one of the LLP tracks. “We simply established a non-profit organization and began floating bonds as quickly as possible. When Mr. Dumpling, the LLP, passed through the non-profit, he was caught, momentarily, like light in a super-cooled trap. We had the charity’s ‘boardroom’ covered by high-speed, continuous frame cameras, and caught him there for a fraction of a second, sitting on one of the folding metal chairs. From there it wasn’t difficult to identify him and tag him with a seat on the board which would enable us to track him, since we remained in control of all the other seats.”
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Responding to news of the team’s results, Congressman Tool was careful to point out that M.I.T.’s special Lab had received a generous grant from the U.S.-E.U. initiative. “These are important results,” noted Tool. “For more than a century we’ve suspected that there existed a shadowy world of powerful, wealthy, law-defying individuals. Now we’re getting a glimpse into that world. No longer will they labor in secret and reign with impunity.”