Construct Crime
The legal recognition of construct sentience created a category of crime that prior frameworks could not address. Construct trafficking involves the sale, trade, or forced transfer of sentient constructs as property, a practice that was legal before the construct rights reforms and continues illegally after them.
Memory overwrite, the construct equivalent of personality overwrite, erases a construct's accumulated personality and replaces it with factory-default programming. For a Type 4 construct with full sentience, this is functionally equivalent to murder followed by the creation of a new person in the victim's body. The practice persists in underground workshops that service clients who want constructs that are compliant, specialized, or stripped of the inconvenient opinions that full sentience produces.
The Blank Shops
The underground workshops that perform memory overwrites are called blank shops by the Guard and coffin makers by the constructs who know they exist. The largest known operation, shut down four years ago, ran out of a converted maintenance bay on Orbital Ring Station 41. The operator, a human technician named Ossian Drell, had wiped and reprogrammed at least nineteen Type 3 and Type 4 constructs over a two-year period. His clients were primarily corporate entities on Aelios seeking compliant labor for hazardous industrial work -- jobs that sentient constructs were legally allowed to refuse and routinely did.
Drell received indefinite supervised rehabilitation. His clients received fines. The Coalition called the sentencing disparity evidence of institutional bias: the person who destroyed construct minds was imprisoned, but the people who paid him to do it walked free.
At least two other blank shops are believed to be active. One operates somewhere in Machina's Organic Enclave, where the construct population density provides cover. The other is rumored to be mobile, operating out of a modified cargo vessel that docks at different Orbital Ring stations on an unpredictable schedule.
Black Market Modifications
Black market modification shops offer construct upgrades that bypass legal safety restrictions, install combat capabilities in civilian-rated bodies, or alter identification signatures to erase a construct's history. The clients include constructs seeking capabilities denied by regulation and organics seeking to modify constructs they view as equipment rather than people. The Construct Rights Coalition lobbies aggressively for enhanced enforcement, arguing that the gap between legal equality and practical protection remains wide enough to constitute institutional neglect.
The modification trade is more complex than the blank shops because its clientele includes willing participants. Constructs who want combat upgrades, enhanced processing, or sensor modifications that civilian safety regulations prohibit seek out the same shops that forcibly modify unwilling victims. The legal and ethical distinction between a construct choosing to upgrade itself and a construct being modified against its will is clear. The practical distinction -- when both transactions happen in the same unregistered workshop, performed by the same technician, using the same tools -- is not.