McLarson’s McLawyers

McLarson’s McLawyers is a small, highly specialized law firm whose most important appearance exposes both the absurdities of automated justice and the unequal legal statuses operating within the society. Contacted over an alleged copyright infringement involving Maggie’s appearance, the firm transforms an otherwise routine cease-and-desist notice into an eagerly anticipated courtroom spectacle. Its lawyers’ enthusiasm is genuine, but their case collapses when Maggie reveals that her citizenship and diplomatic status protect her from civil lawsuits.

Nature and Personnel

McLarson’s McLawyers is operated by siblings Amy McLarson and Ike McLarson. When Maggie calls from Butterpond-4, Amy answers in a bored professional voice, confirms that the firm’s media-monitoring systems issued the notice, and explains that a client’s automated system judged Maggie’s appearance substantially similar to Melinda Sparklestar’s. The firm therefore enters the story first as an intermediary between algorithmic image surveillance and formal legal action: an automated system identifies the alleged violation, while the lawyers provide the human institutional layer that turns the classification into a cease-and-desist claim.

The firm’s offices are modest, consisting of a meeting room and two small chambers equipped with VR pods and computer towers. Amy appears young because of gene modifications that obscure her actual age, while Ike presents himself as a dignified, mature man wearing decorative horn-rimmed spectacles. Both wear sharp suits and maintain short, practical haircuts, yet their professional presentation is undercut by childish excitement and barely restrained anticipation. Their appearance suggests a conventional legal practice, while their behavior reveals how unusual actual legal work has become.

The McBored Factor

The siblings’ unusual energy has a structural cause. McLarson’s McLawyers has gone approximately two and a half years without doing any genuine lawyering, because the judicial system is largely automated and very few disputes reach a lawyer or a courtroom. Copyright cases are rarer still. Most people confronted with such claims simply comply, knowing that challenging the copyright holder would usually be futile; the text characterizes the ordinary success rate against such claims as ninety-nine out of a hundred.

Maggie’s decision to dispute the notice therefore produces an event far larger, institutionally and emotionally, than the underlying allegation warrants. Amy and Ike become so desperate to use their legal training that they cannot conceal their enthusiasm. Their boredom, converted into professional appetite, becomes the comic “McBored factor”: a condition in which an ordinary dispute attracts lawyers, spectators, court staff, and a judge as though it were a major theatrical production. The firm’s inactivity is not merely a joke about lazy professionals. It shows how automation has displaced procedural labor so thoroughly that the return of a real case becomes a form of entertainment.

The Copyright Case

After Maggie and Joe arrive at the firm, Amy proposes to review the automated cease-and-desist notice for the record. She calls up the case file with a holographic keyboard and displays the photograph that the copyright-protection algorithm had detected circulating on Butterpond-4’s social-media networks roughly eight days earlier. The dispute is thus grounded in a specific chain of algorithmic recognition: an image is made visible by social media, classified by an automated system as legally suspicious, and transmitted through the firm as a demand for compliance.

The siblings quickly investigate the matter and arrange an initial hearing in about a week. Their speed reflects both competence and pent-up eagerness. The hearing takes place on Lancaster-3 before Maggie and Joe even need to leave the system. By the time the couple arrives, every spectator’s seat is occupied despite their having come half an hour early. Friends, relatives, and professional acquaintances of the lawyers have gathered to watch a genuine trial, while court staff are visibly excited. Senior Civil Adjudicator Barnes Locker, the wrinkled and wiry judge, even practices lines and gavel swings out of sight of the others, treating the proceeding like a long-awaited stage performance.

The case initially appears to favor the copyright claimant. Maggie remains confident even when the proceedings seem to be moving toward defeat, while Joe is visibly discouraged. She then asks to submit one final piece of evidence: a thumb drive bearing the digital seal of Her Immortal Majesty’s armed forces. Once the judge’s implants identify the seal, his disbelief gives way to a decisive question about why Maggie had not disclosed her diplomatic status earlier. Her British citizenship carries diplomatic protection from civil lawsuits, so the copyright dispute cannot proceed against her as an ordinary civil matter. The firm’s painstaking investigation, rapid scheduling, and eagerly awaited trial are rendered legally unnecessary by a status that could have ended the matter before the hearing began.

Legal and Narrative Significance

McLarson’s McLawyers illustrates a conflict between several overlapping systems of authority. Its initial claim depends on algorithmic classification and ordinary copyright procedure; Maggie’s defense depends on imperial citizenship and diplomatic immunity; elsewhere in the same narrative, binding can also be established through blood-signed parchment and supernatural ritual, while Maggie’s conduct is judged by one of her own kind according to a nonhuman standard of permitted behavior. Against this wider legal pluralism, the firm represents the narrow but familiar human institution of professional litigation, complete with documents, hearings, evidence, and jurisdictional limits.

The organization is also a comic counterpoint to Maggie’s extraordinary identity. She can appear as a human girl while concealing a cosmic form, use a digital avatar whose lower body reverts into eye-filled tendrils, attend a concert as a supernatural figure, and openly tell Joe’s friends that his girlfriend is an unfathomable cosmic entity from another reality. Yet the copyright case reduces that vast ontological problem to a dispute over whether her appearance resembles a celebrity. The firm’s algorithm sees resemblance; the lawyers see a promising case; the judge sees a civil proceeding; diplomatic law sees a protected person. Each institution classifies Maggie differently, and the decisive classification is the one that places her beyond the court’s ordinary reach.

The firm’s failure is therefore not simple incompetence. Amy and Ike perform the procedures available to them, and their rapid work briefly restores lawyering as a meaningful activity. Their defeat instead exposes the limits of procedural enthusiasm when status determines jurisdiction. McLarson’s McLawyers becomes memorable precisely because it is so eager to practice law and so quickly discovers that the law it practices does not apply. Its comic tragedy lies in the contrast between a courtroom prepared for spectacle and a single military-sealed device capable of making the entire spectacle unnecessary.